Today in Digital Marketing - Do You Like This Podcast 0%, 15%, or 22%?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, 15, 20, or 25%. Be protected. Be Zen. platform launches with millions of targetable consumers, why a beer company is apologizing for a holiday tweet that was anything but family-friendly, and on the Premium podcast, which you can learn about at todayindigital.com slash premium, the top trends that will influence your brand's marketing strategy in 2022. It's Tuesday, January 4th, 2022. Happy New Year and happy World Braille Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 533.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Most of you listen to this podcast because you sell things, many of you via e-commerce, some also in stores. And so you're managing the point of sale system, making decisions like, do I add a default tip screen to the payment flow? And if so, what options should I give the buyer? 10, 20, and 30%? 0, 15, and 20? To answer that, we tap into the world of science. Nathan Warren is an assistant professor at marketing at BI, the Norwegian business school. He recently co-authored a scientific study of just that, and his team released their results in a paper called Who's in Control? How Default Tip Levels

Starting point is 00:01:50 Influence Customer Response. Dr. Warren joins me from Oslo, Norway. Hello. Hello, Todd. Why did you call it Who's in Control? So what we looked at in this paper is default sets that are either higher or lower. So a lower default set might be 5, 10, 15 percent higher might, you know, we see Grubhub has default sets starting at 20 or 22 percent sometimes. We wanted to find out how that would affect customers. And what we find is that when people are presented one of these high default sets, they feel like they're being forced or they don't have the control to pick what they want.

Starting point is 00:02:27 They're being forced to pick higher defaults than they would otherwise feel comfortable with picking. And what does that result in, them just not tipping at all? That makes them feel pretty bad about the whole interaction. So we just have a wide range of kind of emotional measures. We were trying to see if there was one particular emotion that really popped out and there wasn't. It was just kind of negative. People feel more negative and less positive. People just generally felt shitty about the whole process. Right. I wasn't sure if cussing was allowed, but yeah, that's the basic gist of it. And what that leads

Starting point is 00:03:00 to is that people are going to leave lower ratings of the business. They're not going to want to come back to the business. They're not going to want to tell their friends good things about the business. And so you get this weird kind of scenario where people are tipping higher amounts, but actually less satisfied with the service. And that goes against kind of a lot of our lay understandings of what tipping is, right? We think a tip is a reflection of good service, right? If I get good service, I'll tip more. And here what we're finding is people are tipping more and actually thinking the service is worse. Is there a default level where you have kind of met the perfect medium, where it's not too high, it's still high enough to be somewhat profitable or good, and doesn't negatively impact the user

Starting point is 00:03:51 experience. Right. And so that's something we've been kind of trying to figure out. And we're looking at this idea of customer familiarity with tipping norms. And so the more familiar that we're finding customers are with these different default sets, the more familiar they are with norms in a given context, right? Because if you think of this, you might be asked, some people are asked now for tips when they're making a political donation. Or you might be asked for a tip when you're ordering from an online retailer. And that's very unfamiliar to people. And so there you're going to see a pretty strong backlash against high defaults. But in more familiar situations, those effects are a lot less pronounced. I won't say that they're gone, but they're certainly less

Starting point is 00:04:40 pronounced. And I think that it's a lot safer to use higher defaults. You just really want to be sure that you provide customers with options that are both lower than normal and normal. By the way, he's looking for more data and you might be able to help here. He's looking for small businesses to run controlled experiments with to look through their old data to find out what the best defaults seem to be. They're also looking at the observability of tips. So if other people see when customers are typing in their tip amounts, how does that affect what people tip? If you'd like to chat with him to collaborate on that,

Starting point is 00:05:15 you can email him at nathan.warren at bi.no. Our full conversation went into a lot more detail, including whether you should or should not have a 0% tip option. Plus, if you're going to, whether you should call it 0% or use the phrase no tip. Also, what three specific percentages Dr. Warren recommends you use and whether you should ask for the tip before or after the customer has received something. The full conversation is available right now on the premium podcast feed, which you can subscribe to at todayindigital.com slash premium feed. 57% of your brand's newsletter subscribers think the emails you send them are manipulative. The results come from a survey conducted by StoryDoc among some 1,173 U.S. respondents.

Starting point is 00:06:05 Here's what else the report found. 55% said they know automated email campaigns are designed to trick them into spending more money. However, 55% also believe newsletters are a good way for brands to communicate with their customers. Millennials, by the way, are most likely to agree with that, and boomers the least likely to agree. Interestingly, a third of respondents said they have a dedicated email account solely for newsletters. In terms of email personalization, does it matter? Well, 56% of millennials said that they will open an email if it has their name in the subject line. But personalization doesn't go as far with boomers. Only 36% would open that email.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And why do people unsubscribe from newsletters? The usual 52% said because they're getting too many emails. And you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. So I had an interesting experience over the holiday. I was popping around some Twitter spaces, stumbled into one that was just titled EO. And at first I thought it was maybe Entrepreneurs Online or something.

Starting point is 00:08:08 It turned out to be a very busy space with probably 30, 32, 33 people in there chatting, all women. What does EO stand for, you ask? Why, Elliot and Olivia, of course, the two main characters in the long-running Law & Order SVU TV series. The show's been running for 22 years now, meaning the show is older than some of the people in the space. Anyway, somehow I got into the discussion, and now it's a space I hang out in pretty regularly, even though I've only actually seen one episode and was not actually really that much of a fan.

Starting point is 00:08:40 But there is something about spaces in clubhouse rooms that is compelling, at least for audio nerds like me. And a new feature being tested with Twitter Spaces might allow for more private chat sessions in the app. Twitter is testing new options that would enable Spaces hosts to restrict who can join their audio discussions. Users will be able to choose people to specifically invite or tweets only, which are your followers. With this feature, there is potential for brands to host exclusive audio chat sessions for followers and have more private discussions with your audience. There has not been an official announcement from Twitter about when this update will be rolled out. Technology retailer Best Buy has announced its own in-house media ad sales operation called Best Buy Ads.

Starting point is 00:09:27 Despite joining a crowded market of retailers launching their own ad operations, the company believes its relationships with its customer base and first-party data will make Best Buy Ads stand out from its competitors. The company claims it interacts with 3 billion customers each year and has a deeper level of insight into those transactions than other retailers might. The new platform aims to help brands that sell Best Buy products and businesses that offer complementary products and solutions to their customers with ads on Best Buy's own channels and external sites.

Starting point is 00:10:02 The popular SEO plugin Yoast is expanding beyond WordPress. Shopify merchants will have access to Yoast SEO beginning on January 18th. The company announced the new partnership today. It will cost merchants $29 per month. Yoast's SEO functionality will be similar to its WordPress cousin. The free version exists there, though. It will help you optimize your content by providing feedback on the findability

Starting point is 00:10:27 and readability of your shopping pages. With Yoast SEO for Shopify, you can control your titles and descriptions in Google Search and social media, get feedback on readability, use the schema graph, and more. And finally, brands trying to be edgy for free exposure is nothing new.

Starting point is 00:10:50 But one company has crossed the line from edgy to outright raunchy. Pabst Blue Ribbon kicked off the new year with an apology after the company's Twitter account posted a series of, let's call them questionable tweets, criticizing dry January. You know, January, everyone swears off alcohol. And parents, by the way, I'm going all in on reading one of these. So now is your chance to skip 60 seconds forward. The tweets have since been deleted. They were part of PBR's Wet January campaign that began on January 1st. The tweets featured a variety of content,

Starting point is 00:11:25 including a post of beer-carrying people in a rain jacket with the caption, What if January wasn't dry? And another viral post that was a little, no, not a little, a lot more vulgar. It read, and parents, here we go, Not drinking this January?

Starting point is 00:11:45 Try eating ass. How did the brand handle its marketing strategy? While PBR Twitter has not addressed the posts directly, the VP of Marketing emailed a statement to Forbes apologizing for the language and content of the tweets, explaining, quote, the tweets in question were written in poor judgment by one of our associates, unquote. But really, was it? Or was this on page 17 of the marketing plan developed a year ago?

Starting point is 00:12:15 My money's on the ladder. So I hope you had a wonderful new year and wonderful holiday. I have heard the feedback from you folks. Yes, next year we will have more stuff in between. We took two weeks off, which is the longest holiday, by the way, I've had in eight years. You know, when they say own your own business, you'll get all the time. It's a lie. It's a complete lie.

Starting point is 00:12:38 So next holiday, we will not be taking that much time off. Well, we will, but we will have some stuff lined up in the middle, some deep dive interviews and stuff for you over the holidays. Also, tomorrow, now this has nothing to do with any of you, but I'm very excited we are getting a cat tomorrow. A derpy orange cat. We used to have two cats, but they

Starting point is 00:12:55 have since passed on to the great catnip fields in the sky of old age. I'm definitely a cat person, so it's a big deal for me. I'm looking forward to it. Anyway, welcome to 2022. I hope things are well where you are, and we will see you tomorrow. Now the time just ticking You wasted something that's missing When my heart was up in prison Nah, I do not care what for that change Heart was locked up in chains My love continued to drain

Starting point is 00:13:31 You tried to ruin me Had to find the new in me Asking for another you and me Man, that's foolery

Today in Digital Marketing - Do You Like This Podcast 0%, 15%, or 22%?

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