This Episode is 7.38% More Awesome Than Yesterday's

[00:00:00] Do you want someone who understands you like no other? Someone who can be your true wish and wants to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life with you? The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide.

[00:00:15] With Shopify you only focus on your online shop, without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient education and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can sell and sell through Instagram, eBay and Co. It was never easy to reach new target groups.

[00:00:34] Shopify offers on a single secure platform all tools to build up your online business. Test without cost and present your business to the world. www.shopify.de.try Simply enter shopify.de.try and start. Made for Germany, powered by Shopify. It is Tuesday, November 21st.

[00:00:58] Today, science has discovered the discounting mistake you're making that's costing you sales. 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 Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing.

[00:01:22] 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.

[00:01:41] 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.

[00:01:58] 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.

[00:02:17] 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.

[00:02:39] 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. But don't load up on all the tricks.

[00:02:54] If you also try to throw in some time pressure, like today only, the effect on sales is actually weaker. 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.

[00:03:09] 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.

[00:03:29] 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.

[00:03:43] 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 Ken Rounding Up Price Discounts Reduce Sales. We have a direct link for it in today's email newsletter which is free.

[00:03:55] And you can sign up too 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. Thread usage is on the rise and to that end,

[00:04:16] the company recently revealed 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,

[00:04:30] 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,

[00:04:44] 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 check mark emoji

[00:04:58] and the words tell us all in caps, followed by a conversation prompt, seems to work really well. So what doesn't work? Well, Threads is a new app, even if it is writing on Instagram's code foundations.

[00:05:11] 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 that they do on other platforms.

[00:05:21] And maybe you've seen those dear 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,

[00:05:34] 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 right alongside some obscure topics. Topic tags are being tested right now in Australia.

[00:05:54] A recent survey highlights the top delivery priorities for holiday shoppers with on time delivery of gifts, of course, being the most critical aspect. 86% have responded saying that in addition to that obvious finding. It also found that 73% of shoppers consider it important for bricks and mortar stores

[00:06:12] to also offer delivery options. If traveling for the holidays, 40% said they want their online purchases delivered to their destination and almost three 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 ship.

[00:06:28] So of course they have, as we say here, a dog in the race. The survey pulled 3000 US 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 holiday shopping

[00:06:47] 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.

[00:07:06] 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.

[00:07:22] But as ad technology has matured, it's much more about signals interpreted by machine learning 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.

[00:07:38] 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. Let's be honest, retros can be boring.

[00:08:00] And if you're the organizer, you know it's more than just running a meeting. You have to synthesize and categorize themes, get the team involved, assign next steps and make it all a fun safe space where teammates want to participate.

[00:08:12] Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps you run effective, engaging and actionable retrospectives. We use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team. That can be complicated. A lot of if-vents.

[00:08:27] But making it visual and sharing it directly with our client sped things way up. Plus our side can share spitballing ideas with private mode. The client doesn't get to see our thoughts until we've decided on the approach.

[00:08:40] Whether you work on the marketing side or in product design, engineering or UX, bring your team together on Miro. And your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com. That's three free boards at Miro.com.

[00:09:06] What do you want to experience the most in your lifetime? The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify you can only get into your online shop, without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient design and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration,

[00:09:26] you can sell and sell through Instagram, eBay and Co. It was never easy to reach new target groups. Shopify offers to build all tools on a single secure platform to your online business. Test free and present a business of the world. www.shopify.de.try

[00:09:46] Simply enter shopify.de.try and start. Made for Germany, powered by Shopify. I'm not happy about it. These new load time delays are five seconds or more. In a statement to media, YouTube said, quote,

[00:10:20] 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.

[00:10:34] 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 notice the slowdown wasn't quite as slow if you were using Google's Chrome browser.

[00:10:52] According to research by Tnuiti, 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 outster of OpenAI's CEO. I won't catch you up here. It's all over everywhere else.

[00:11:14] But here is a genius exploitation of the moment by a smart mattress company that tells a mattress topper that can analyze your sleep. The company's CEO posting this yesterday on social media, quote, breaking news the OpenAI drama is real.

[00:11:28] 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,

[00:11:45] eight sleeps dated 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,

[00:12:04] 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 for email newsletters, podcasts, small sites like ours.

[00:12:28] The site is grizzlyads.com, really cool site actually and building out stuff really fast. So A, if you have a newsletter or 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.

[00:12:43] And B, we are beta testing it and we have opened up classified ads 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.

[00:12:58] Just look for the link that says advertising in the show notes. I'm Todd Mappin, see you tomorrow. Because they'll never take that out of my life.

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