Should You Pause Your Marketing on Holidays?| Bathroom Break #109

0:07Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and subjectline.com. each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. The bathroom break is back.

0:41This is Jay Schwedelson from Do This, Not That. I'm here with Daniel Murray, the marketing millennial himself. So, Daniel, before we get into, should you be doing your marketing, your regular marketing during holidays, like this episode being released on Memorial Day? I got a question for you. You were just recently at a, like an industry event or whatever, and there was networking parties and stuff. I absolutely can't stand going at networking parties. I do them. Do you get hyped for them? Do you love walking around and interacting with people? And is it like the night before, can you just not sleep because you're so excited about them?

1:12No, I want to go back to the hotel room. That's my, I do not like networking events. And it's even worse when you're hosting it because then you have to totally be on the whole time. So I I don't like, it's a mixed bag. It depends on what conference to and what type of people are there. If you're going to a networking event and you're not like, it's not your networking event, you're going to somebody else's networking event. Like, what would you say the average amount of time that you'll try to spend there before you kind of do the, you leave without anybody knowing? Yeah, 30 minutes max, I and Irish goodbye.

1:50Because some people want to like, you've said this before, but some people you just want to show face. So they see that you were there. I did that at inbound. Someone had like a meetup and they said, come. And I went for like three minutes, said hi, and then Irish goodbye. Do you think anybody likes going to networking events or does everybody there? I think some people just go to conference for the parties, not the conference. So you and I are just horrible people that are antisocial. Yeah, pretty much. Okay, good. All right. Listen, this thing is coming out on Memorial Day. And so there's a lot of debate.

2:28Should you keep doing your marketing on a holiday or a Sunday or any of these off hours? Or should you kind of freeze it? Because it's not going to do as well as the regular days of the week. Whether you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, whatever you are. Should you be treating kind of the holiday days differently than regular marketing days? I always think that if you have something consistent going on, a consistent newsletter, a consistent webinar series, a consistent event, consistent anything or consistent posting on social, I wouldn't break consistency for a holiday. I think that's ridiculous to do that.

3:10I think you keep it as business as usual. I think there are maybe some religious holidays that are exceptions to the rule. But most holidays, I don't think businesses, I think business as usual, people expect you to show up on that day. And also people, a lot of marketers have more time or more business providers have more time during those days. So they're opening emails or it's in their inbox and they see it and they want to read it because a lot of them don't have time during the week to just open a normal marketing email. Yeah, and I'll give you two kind of tactical things you could do related to around holidays.

3:51One is if you send out your email to your database, let's say on Memorial Day, right, to your FireFull database, what you can do with that information is you're going to get back a lot of auto replies. people saying, I'm out, contact blah, blah, blah, I'm on vacation. Because a lot of people go on vacation, they tie it to a three-day weekend. And what you can do is you can take all of that data, unless you're in Europe, because EMEA has GDPR, so you can't do that there. But you take all the auto-replies, and you could do something simple. You could use an AI tool to strip out all the email addresses in the auto-replies that you get.

4:25And then you could take that data and use it for retargeting and remarketing, because those contacts that are in those auto-replies from your database are very likely the exact right people that you should be marketing to anyway. So those auto replies are gold and you can get those during those holiday weekend or weeks or whatever. And I know there was a, you can't do that. Well, you can do that. I'm not telling you to take the data and make them your newsletter subscribers, but you could absolutely do that to target them and remarket to them for your programmatic stuff. And another thing you could do too is what we used to do back in the day when I, with auto replies is you send it to the crm so like sales knows is an extra contact so so you instead of you don't have the market but you give it as a an additional lead in the crm to a sales person or something like maybe they're getting trying to get in contact with this this person's not reaching out like reach out to this person um so you can auto not ai you could do it way easier and you can strip it out and say, hey, match it with a target account and say, this is another person at the company that belongs to this person.

5:36So that's another thing you could do with those auto replies. A hundred percent. And the other thing is you should talk about the moment. So for example, we did whatever the last holiday was that had a big barbecue or whatever tied to the holiday. Our emails on that day that we send out promoting stuff, literally the subject line says, the barbecue's boring, but dot, dot, dot. And you open it up and it says, you're at a boring barbecue, but check this out since you're bored. And actually trying to talk to the moment that people are in, right, I think can get you a lot. It had an incredible performance that email, because the more that you could be of the moment and speak to the moment, the more people like, oh yeah, I'm going to check this out.

6:17So you don't just want to like pump out your regular garbage. The other thing that Daniel, I know you're into this is long form content, during a weekend or during a holiday can do particularly well because of the time somebody has. I believe in marketing at less, like when people think it's a best practice, because you will go into these blog posts for years and say, here's the perfect time to like send an email. And people only follow the perfect time to send an email and they'll ignore holidays, they'll ignore weekends and stuff like that. And you said this, You said this before the podcast, and I know you're going to bring it up, but it doesn't really matter if 40 % instead of 50 % opened it.

7:02It's still people opening your emails and digesting that email. And you could also resend it to non-openers. You could do a lot of things that are happening. So if you have something consistent, stick to the consistency. And also market on these holidays. I don't think it's something you should turn it off because people say it's the wrong thing to do. So let me ask a question. Beyond email, though, let's talk about social. I mean, it's Memorial Day. Are you going to post on LinkedIn? And are you okay with the fact that you might get a fraction of your normal engagement? Or are you like, no, no, no, certain things I wouldn't do on a holiday?

7:39I think the best, the most important thing on social is consistency and habit for me. So you should always build that muscle because you can skip when you skip one day, then you're like, maybe I'll skip another day. And it becomes this cycle of skipping, skipping, skipping. So if you post every day on a Monday and then a holiday falls on a Monday, it doesn't mean skip that Monday because just post something and know it might get less engagement. Or it might be more engagement because now the LinkedIn feed has this 24 to 48-hour window. So it might show up the next day or the following day in other people's feeds because it got fed.

8:19And you were competing against less posts on a business network. So I think you should try it at least or keep that muscle moving during those days. By the way, it's so interesting you say that about LinkedIn because I've been seeing that too. It's like it used to be whatever the engagement you got in that first half an hour, hour, you'd be able to say, oh, this thing is going to rip or it's not going to rip. Now it's like I wake up in the morning and I have a post that was doing okay and then I wake up in the morning. By the time I wake up, this thing is like went bonkers or whatever. And I'm like, how the hell did that happen?

8:54I had a post yesterday that had probably like 90 likes in two hours. And then by the time the day ended, it ended up like at 400 or 500. But normally I would say this is a flop post. But now LinkedIn's serving it to new people. But I think it's this new interest based of like, okay, this now a marketer sees it. And now another marketer sees it. Now another marketer sees it. And it's this cycle of more and more wants to show to actual people who want to view it versus people before just showed it to everybody and if it got likes, it got likes. And then if people had pods, it worked. So I think it's actually a better algorithm than it used to.

9:39Yeah, yeah. I agree with you. All right, so one last thing, back to the original topic. So we don't like going to network events, but now it's Memorial Day. You get invited to a barbecue. Are you like, yes, I really like going to barbecues. I like doing it in a social setting. Or do you feel the same way about like barbecues and stuff as you do networking events at business stuff? There's two sides to this coin. One is, do you need your kid to get in and be friends with that other kid and start? So there's that strategic play of it. And I love why we're calling this a strategic of going to a memorial.

10:15But also, I think that if you don't go to things, you stop getting invited to things. And if you're like - Which I'm looks at. Yeah, well, yeah. But when you're making new friends, it's hard to say yeah but i think yeah um jay's the type of person who's like i don't want to do any i don't want to hang out with anybody i don't want to see anybody i i only want to do my own thing and can i tell everybody how bad i am this is the truth okay daniel and i live relatively close to each other okay and um and he moved into a new home i would say what'd you move in that home like six months ago or something like that and so me and my wife got daniel and aria house swimming gift.

10:55It's been sitting on our counter in our house since the day that you guys moved in. And I'm talking about Daniel lives within like, I don't know, five, 10 miles of where I live. And we just haven't brought it over because we're really weird people. No, it's not even five to 10 miles. It's like five to 10 minutes. But also the funny part is too, is that I used to live like 100 miles probably from Jay. And I probably saw him more in the 100 miles than I saw him in the 10 minutes. That's right. Yeah, he doesn't like seeing people. And even when they get closer, he has one of his best friends that move near too.

11:37And he's like, no, I don't want to see you. No, 100 % right. I don't know what the hell's wrong with me. I am in therapy. I'll admit it. I'm fully in therapy. and I talk about this and I'm trying to work through it. And so far, I've not had a breakthrough. Well, you're probably never going to have a breakthrough. I don't think so. I don't even know if this episode is going to break through, but we've covered a lot as usual. Listen, everybody go to Daniel's feed. Leave him a Spotify comment. Leave him an Apple review. The guy loves that stuff. Also, everybody go buy Jay's new book. It's on Amazon.

12:11done it's it's actually releasing in um next month i have i have two books coming um so it's gonna be really good uh jay's gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna make jay sign one of them for me yeah he's gonna love to do that yeah thank you i appreciate you all right we'll see you all the next one daniel come on man i gotta get back to work get out of there all right while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break.

12:50This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject client to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.