Today in Digital Marketing - This Episode is 7.38% More Awesome Than Yesterday's

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, 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 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. It is Tuesday, November 21st. Today, science has discovered the discounting mistake you're making that's costing you sales.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Meta reveals how to get more engagement on threads, what consumers really want in product delivery, and Facebook is killing off its OG source of interests data. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. So you're putting your holiday marketing plans together, deciding on price points for some of your products. You drop one of them by $50, which ends up being a reduction of exactly 15.3% of the regular price. Well, you think that's a mouthful. Better just say 15%. Well, not so fast. New research in the Journal of Consumer Psychology has found that rounding off your discounts could cost you sales. The scientists behind the study did four experiments. One example was a hard drive that was priced at 7% for some people and 6.8% for others.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Those who saw the latter and lower discount, remember, said that they were 13% more likely to buy it. And let's not forget, 13% is often in the make or break range for profitability. So why does this happen? Here's what the researchers think is going on, quoting from the RE newsletter, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:21 we consider precise ideas and concepts, for example, a specific price of $4.87 versus $5 to be more likely to change over time. On the other hand, round numbers seem more stable and signal that they're likely to last for a longer time. For example, a permanent student discount policy. So when we come across a precise discount, we have an increased fear of missing out on a deal. This increased sense of urgency makes us more likely to buy right away, unquote. But don't load up on all the tricks. If you also try to throw in some time pressure, like today only, the effect on sales is actually weaker.

Starting point is 00:03:06 There are some catches. The study only looked at products that were bought for their function and utility, not products bought for enjoyment or to satisfy emotion. Some previous research has found that people prefer round prices when buying hedonic products. Plus, they only tested percentages, not dollar amounts. So it's not clear whether saying $8.13 off is better than rounding to $8. Finally, the study looked at relatively small discounts in the 10% range, so you may want to consider testing your own discounting if you plan to have an offer stronger than those. The study notes that most companies aren't doing it this way. Most round off their discounts. When they do use a precise number, it tends to be for cheaper products. The higher the price point, the more likely they are to start rounding. The paper is in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. It's called

Starting point is 00:03:54 Can Rounding Up Price Discounts Reduce Sales? We have a direct link for it in today's email newsletter, which is free, and you can sign up to by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. With Elon Musk's X imploding, some brands are turning to Threads, that's Meta's challenger, to what was once Twitter. Threads usage is on the rise, and to that end, the company recently revealed

Starting point is 00:04:21 what so far is driving the most engagement. A Meta marketing director told attendees at the Creator IQ Connect conference in Los Angeles that if you want your brand's threads content to be picked up more reliably by their algorithm, make an effort in each of your posts to start some kind of conversation with your fans. This is, of course, advice from the ages, but it's easy to forget when social media content managers also field requests from product teams, putting out corporate news, trying to jump on memes of the hour, let alone the craziness around Black Friday. After a while, you can sometimes forget to use the post to ask for some kind of reply. At our agency, we found that using the green checkmark emoji and the words TELL US, all in caps, followed by a conversation prompt,

Starting point is 00:05:07 seems to work really well. So what doesn't work? Well, Threads is a new app, even if it is riding on Instagram's code foundations. So there's a lot we don't know about how its content discovery algorithm works. We do know that reposts don't get the same level of amplification

Starting point is 00:05:23 that they do on other platforms. And maybe you've seen those deer algorithm posts where people list their interests in an attempt to get content about those topics flowing to their feed. Meta says those don't work either. Threads is also testing out topic tags, which are sort of like hashtags, but rather than you being able to link any words as a tag, you'll pick from a predetermined list of topics provided by the app. That is a bummer for brands who use branded hashtags or write alongside some obscure topics. Topic tags are being tested right now in Australia. A recent survey highlights the top delivery priorities for holiday shoppers,

Starting point is 00:06:02 with on-time delivery of gifts, of course, being the most critical aspect, 86% of respondents saying that. In addition to that obvious finding, it also found that 73% of shoppers consider it important for bricks and mortar stores to also offer delivery options. If traveling for the holidays, 40% said they want their online purchases delivered to their destination, and almost 3 in 10 said they'll have most or all of their gifts delivered. It should be noted that the survey was conducted by the delivery service Shipt. So, of course, they have, as we say here, a dog in the race. The survey polled 3,000 U.S. adults who celebrate a winter holiday. Another recent study found that almost two-thirds of consumers expect brands to use sustainable materials for shipping. And 30% said they will procrastinate their

Starting point is 00:06:50 holiday shopping this year into either early December or even the week before Christmas. When Mark Zuckerberg first launched Facebook, it had a whole bunch of fields you could fill out to describe yourself. Birthday, gender, relationships, hometown, you know these. In 2019, they added hobbies. That became a pretty good source of targeting data for ads. Specify that you like shoes and you'd start seeing a lot of shoe ads. Those listed hobbies were one of the early sources of interest data used for ad campaigns on the platform. But as ad technology has matured, it's much more about signals interpreted by machine learning.

Starting point is 00:07:31 And now, Meta confirmed this week, it will be removing hobbies on user profiles in mid-December. All part of an effort to scale back how much information is on user profiles. In the early days, the hobbies section was actually kind of useful in that you could even click them to find other people interested in the same hobby, something that was helpful then and maybe a little creepy when viewed in today's environment. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It's the season for new styles 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. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca.

Starting point is 00:08:57 R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. YouTube confirms that it is artificially throttling the video load times for people who use an ad blocker on their site. This is the latest in a slow push toward getting people off ad blockers and pointing people to YouTube's premium subscription. One I pay for only because that's the only way to get picture in picture on my phone. And no, I'm not happy about it. These new load time delays are five seconds or more. In a statement to media, YouTube said, quote, To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing regardless of the browser they're using, unquote. That last sentence apparently a reference to the fact that some people noticed the slowdown wasn't quite as slow if you were using Google's Chrome browser. According to research by Tenuity, almost one in three American adults use browser-based ad blockers. And that number is steadily growing. And finally, you may have been following all of the drama around the ouster of OpenAI's CEO. I won't catch you up here. It's all over everywhere else. But here is a genius exploitation of the moment by a smart mattress company that sells a mattress topper that can analyze your sleep. The company's CEO posting this yesterday on social media, quote, breaking news.

Starting point is 00:10:33 The open AI drama is real. We checked our data and last night San Francisco saw a spike in low quality sleep. There was a 27% decrease in people getting under five hours of sleep. We need to fix this, unquote. But as 404 Media pointed out, quote, Eight Sleeps data does not and cannot actually show that San Francisco had a spike in low quality sleep. What it shows is that people in San Francisco who have purchased a $2,295 smart mattress topper and have not successfully opted out of Eight Sleeps Analytics, a group that surely over-indexes on tech workers, that group slept less on Sunday night. We're working with this really cool developer that is setting up an advertising platform

Starting point is 00:11:31 for email newsletters, podcasts, small sites like ours. The site is grizzlyads.com. Really cool site, actually, and building out stuff really fast. So A, if you have a newsletter or a podcast and you're looking for a way to monetize it, we found this to be a very solid platform, even though it's quite early. And B, we are beta testing it and we have opened up classified ads

Starting point is 00:11:54 at a ridiculously cheap price of five bucks. That will show up in our daily email newsletter that reaches more than 2,200 people now. So pretty damn good CPM, if you ask me. Just look for the link that says Advertising in the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. They said he was a killer with a price on his head 500 bucks alive, another thousand dollars dead but if they ever find him

Starting point is 00:12:28 he's going out inside because they'll never take that out of their life

Today in Digital Marketing - This Episode is 7.38% More Awesome Than Yesterday's

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