Today, we as a party in government felt it necessary for us to make comments on two issues that we feel that cannot go unnoticed, namely the arrest of the vice president or acting president. of the patriotic front honorable given Lubinda. And number two, we want to comment on governments announced maize flow price that FRA will be by the maize for this particular year's harvest. As a party in government we feel it is necessary for us to add our voice to the many comments that have been made by citizens regarding the arrest of the acting president of the patriotic front honorable given Lubinda on account of alleged failure to report himself before the parliamentary privileges committee in accordance with the requirements and as provided for by section 10 of the national assembly powers and privileges act amendment number 13 of 2016 which brought into effect a requirement that once a person is summoned before the parliamentary privileges committee such a one should produce themselves before the privileges committee which is the disciplinary committee of parliament for those individuals who violate parliamentary rules regulations and or conduct of business as such such as to bring the name of parliament or the national assembly into public audio or ridicule. We want to edge citizens particularly those in the political arena not to politicize the arrest of honorable given Lubinda. As fellow citizens we as UPND do sympathize with the situation that honorable given Lubinda has found himself but find it necessary to say it is a good lesson to him and to all of us in leadership that when you are in leadership you should make laws generally for the good governance of the nation and not targeting individuals we are aware that this law was brought into effect by the patriotic front and honorable given Lubinda had the opportunity to have been minister of justice at the material time we as UPND objected to this punitive provision in parliament but as usual they used the arrogance of numbers to defeat us and brought this law into effect and we all remember the motivation the motivation was that previously president HH then as leader and president of the UPND had made commentaries relating to conduct of business of parliament and some colleagues in the patriotic front were wishful that he should be brought before parliament so that he is embarrassed before parliament and so they went and crafted a law targeting an individual look now look now what has happened this is very unfortunate honorable wind should not have found himself in this predicament and for those for us who are in office who are given the opportunity to make laws for the governance of the country let us make laws that bet us the life and livelihood of our people and not targeting an individual so that an individual's freedom of expression and speech can be stifled it should not be like that but you will recall also that this is not the only bad law that was crafted targeting HH and his supporters or members of parliament you will recall that the national dialogue forum act which they passed had a provision that any person who stops a member of parliament from attending the national dialogue forum commits an offence and is liable on conviction to two years imprisonment the target was HH that he should not stop as his members of parliament attending the ill-fated NDF forum which was meant to discuss duty there was also in that same act a provision that any member of parliament who fails to attend the NDF shall commit a criminal offence and is liable on conviction to two years imprisonment that was targeting members of parliament of the UPND fortunately that one we defied it outrightly we challenged them to arrest us and we didn't attend the NDF we told them arrest us and we shall go and prove our innocence in court because you are violating our freedoms we were elected to attend parliament and when we abscond at parliament we are never taken to police we are never arrested how can we be arrested for failing to attend a workshop called NDF conference that is how they just let us go but the law was there they passed it I am giving this background to show that when you make laws to target individuals sometimes things do backfire in this particular law section 10 of the national assembly powers and privileges act amendment number 13 of 2016 has boomerangat right in the face of the patriotic fright so they should not complain they are testing their own medicine but I would like to indicate that for us as UPND and party in government we see this to be a bad law we see this to be a bad law but for the time being it is a law enforced and enforceable by the law enforcing agencies and also the courts of law so ours will end at sympathising with our dear colleague Honourable Given Novinda but we take note of the lesson make laws to govern the country better not to target individuals this is a lesson just like a lesson a number of PFMPs lent when they hurriedly passed a new constitution and supported it vigorously and robustly and voted for it without knowing that in there there was a requirement that for one to be a member of parliament you needed to be a great host certificate of order and some of them did not have so they were left out these are serious lessons for us and for those charged in public mandates to be able to supervise national affairs there is no need to personalise legislation good laws must focus on only one thing to look into the future generally with an intention to carry a particular mischief and one would say it is a mischief to refuse to appear before parliament yes but that is why laws assign different punishments laws assign different punishments there are omissions and commissions of offences that notwithstanding the fact that they come out of the domain of criminal law they are still they still assign a punishment which is less punitive to a citizen it is our contention that this particular law is punitive to citizens let me now talk about the issue of the announcement this morning by the food reserve agency FRA that for this particular year's harvest FRA or government through FRA will be purchasing maize at 280 kwa 50 kg back meaning that 100 kgs will be 560 kwa so we have seen a dramatic increase from last year's maize price of 180 kwa to 280 kwa an increase of 100 kwa very unprecedented very unprecedented but I would like to explain it as well as a party in government that the government thought through in coming up about this price a number of issues were considered among us which are the following one successive governments have been telling the nation a rhetorical story that would like agriculture to become a genuine alternative to mining and they have done less to inspire farmers to expand their agricultural activity in the past what we have seen farmers have been reduced to national laborers producing chip maize in order to feed the nation a government whose manifesto is anchored on agriculture to become Zambia's economic turnaround point maize has been fetching in the past many farmers had abandoned growing maize for commercial purposes many were growing for subsistence purposes the cost of production of maize was outstripping the value one gets after harvest so this announced maize price for 2023 by FRA is in keeping with governments vision that agriculture should gravitate towards becoming Zambia's main economic activity for the majority of our people realising and recognising that the majority of our citizens in the informal sector are involved in agriculture secondly this maize price has been arrived at knowing very well that this year our expected harvest is below and therefore government had to consciously enter the market to ensure that it is competitive in buying the maize so that it can quickly mop up the required national stocks that would support national food security for the nation I have received a lot of calls from people asking why this, why that the government is in this business for two main things one, reward the farmers for their hard work and encourage those who are just seated like some of us here in Choma town just seated doing nothing you don't want to go and farm your friends are involved in agriculture look now those who are involved in farming are beginning to reap so this is an opportunity many young people out there in the countryside are denying this country their population dividends given that they are the majority in terms of population but many of them are away from agricultural productivity they prefer to hodo around and reside in town it is time we thought about getting involved in activities even those that may find you reside in the rural area because there is productivity so what government has done also helps us as a patin government to answer some of the calls we have heard from some sections of our community or society saying there is no money in circulation government has now introduced more money in circulation by paying farmers an unexpected high price only those who didn't involve themselves in farming will be complaining about no money money must be linked to productivity that is when its currency holds value for the economy those days are gone of Tantamin Tantamin start dishing out money which you can't explain where you found it it's not linked to productivity you are running a forced and artificial economy and then you are saying we are performing numbers don't lie those who are saying in PF if in Fiyariko we know Fiyariko kiref in Daramata Shide Moneka no numbers don't lie PF left the economy at negative 2% we moved it now to about 3% growth rate GDP meaning 5% points positive so who is performing economy is not about sharing money the economy is about productivity so that the goods and services you produce attract value so there is more money now in circulation through FRIL there is money in circulation through market booster loans to marketeers without discrimination of political affiliation whatsoever there is money in circulation because social cash transfer has been doubled from where this government got it from there is more money in circulation because as we speak right now CEC a busy processing loans to small and medium entrepreneurs to become productive there is more money in circulation now through the increased CDF many young people out there are involved in metal fabrication and carpentry making desks desks which previously would have been imported or sourced from far away from where they are required the money is going to every constituent and every word of this country parents who used to pay for their children now have kept that tuition fee in their pockets there is money in circulation because the government has a very free education the government is paying even paying for examination fees retirees paid except zampost and Unza former workers from 2017 government is already paying attention to that KCM workers arias paid off tazara workers retirees paid off tazama pipeline wekton and now begin to supply or transport direct refined final product of fuel so that the cost of fuel comes down which will inform the cost of living expected it will respond positively shedding is part of history now we can write it as part of history it's gone many new shortages dealt with then you add napsa


So my name is Heather Solos, and I work for an email marketing company, not the one sponsoring the conference. So this is how I also run a website called HomeEC101. I started it back in 2007. It's on WordPress. And even though it suffers horribly from Cobbler's Child Syndrome, because all I ever do is test things for my company on it now, but it still pulls in 250,000 page views a month, so that's good for testing these different items on. I have learned, again, working for Feedblitz two and a half years ago. I've learned a lot about email marketing and best practices over that time. I have seen a lot of people say, but it works. It's not always an excuse to do anything. So as we go over things, I want to start with best practices because having a lot of names in a list doesn't matter if they're never going to respond to you anyway. Feedblitz. We do RSS in email marketing. So you'll hear people say, just buy a list. Well, the problem with buying a list is that it is full of email addresses that we already know are bad. So if you try to import it into us or MailChimp or something like that, it's going to hit what's called a spam pot, and your email list is going to get blacklisted.  When you are putting plugins on your site, don't annoy your visitor. You don't need to start off with a relationship by irking somebody and trying to give you your email address just to access the information they want. Do not mislead the visitor. If your landing page, and buy this at this time, I just mean whatever page on your website that they happen to arrive on, is about a topic that you never normally write on. It was a one-off. Don't try to get them to join the list on a completely different topic because they're not really your readers anyway. Monetize that page in another way. Put ads on it. Find something to sell through an affiliate link on that page. Make it work for you in a way that fits that page rather than trying to make people fit into a shoe that doesn't fit. Again, don't annoy the visitor. Do you know what dual opt-in is? Two. It doesn't mean two. It means that not only has somebody given you their email address, they have also given you permission to email them. And that permission is what's important. If I give you my business card today, or yesterday, and I say, hey, let's keep in touch. This doesn't mean you add me to your newsletter. I never agreed to be on your newsletter.  If you host an event and you have a fish bowl and you're collecting business cards and things like that, make sure it says, put your card here to get my newsletter. That's okay. They have then given you permission. It's not, you don't just take anybody who hands you their card. There are many different places you can put opt-in forms and pop-ups on your site. We mentioned landing pages before, but at that point I only meant a page where people showed up. A landing page sign-up form is a form on a page specifically dedicated only to collecting the email address. You can use that like in your signature and you just link to that page. So you're like, hey, you want to follow me? Just link to the page. That would be a landing page sign-up form. You can integrate forms into your theme.  So you've written an article. Somebody has actually read through to the end. That's when they're most interested in you and you already have their attention. Go ahead and ask for their email address at that point. Standard widgets fit into your theme, into your WordPress theme. Sometimes you use a short code. Sometimes you paste HTML in. Scrollbox is another one of my favorite ways to have people sign up. What that is, is it measures, it watches as people scroll down your site. When they hit a certain point, 30%, 40%, 50% of the way down the page, that's when the box sign-up appears because you know they're interested in you. Pop-ups are a mixed blessing. They're totally a mixed bag. You don't know what you're getting into. Why would I give you my address? But if you set what's called an intelligent pop-up, a respectful pop-up, you set it to go in two, three pages into the visit, and they've already decided that they're interested in you, and then you're giving them a way to ask to join. Lightbox is just another form of pop-up. It depends on what plug-in you're using as to how they phrase lightbox. Sometimes it's just a part of the theme. Sometimes it shows up on the theme. Veteran footer bars. In my experience, you probably see this as hello bar. Do you know what I'm talking about? In SumoMe, it is the smart bar, but it stays at the top of your page, and then as you scroll down, it follows you. I haven't had much luck with that one personally. Those are just the different types we'll be mentioning. The more expensive plug-ins usually have analytics, but you need to know what you're looking at, and you need to have Google Analytics working with that as well to understand what you're actually seeing. Impressions means that somebody has seen or been exposed to the form. It does not actually mean they've seen it because of ad blindness. How often do you scroll past things in sidebars and never see them? Submissions is after somebody has given you the email address and hit submit.  That's for you. Now, sometimes the analytics described by plug-ins will tell you a conversion is somebody has hit submit. Does that make sense? So what I recommend doing, if at all possible, with the plug-in you choose is on your own page, on your own website, create what's called an activation reminder page. So it'll say thank you for your email address. Don't forget to go to your inbox and click the activation link. We look forward to hearing from you. Whatever, however you want to phrase it, whatever fits your site. So you collect the analytics on that. This will tell you, and you can compare the submissions to the submissions given to you by the plug-in to the activation reminder pages within Google Analytics. Set up a thank you page on your site too for the people who actually go as far as hitting the activation link. When they hit the activation, then they go there. This is going to depend on your email service provider if they give you the ability to do this. It varies by provider. Now, your hosting company, depending on what plug-ins you choose, it also depends on what hosting level is, how much it matters. Because some plug-ins can add a lot of page load to your time to it. Sorry, to your website. These are three tools to where you can spot check during the trial period of any plug-in to see if it's slowing down your site. This matters because if you go to webmaster.google.com and use their page load test, you can see that you may be penalized for load times. You especially want to be paying attention to mobile right now. Make sure your site is responsive. Make sure any add-ons you've put onto your site are also responsive. Because if you add a plug-in to your site that's supposed to collect email addresses, but when it shows up on that mobile screen and you can't close it, you've just lost a potential reader. If they can't input their address, you've lost a potential subscriber and you're just shooting yourself on the foot. When you're testing a plug-in, don't forget to put a trial period reminder in your calendar so you remember to go cancel it if it's not working for you. Because I don't know about you, but I've had many monthly ones kind of adding up rather rapidly. All right, so this did say five list-building plug-ins, but because Natalie Lucier is here, I added pop-up ally to it, and she starts off with a free pop-up. You get two choices, so you can just do a little bit of A.V. testing on your copy or your colors. She does have optional upgrades, and she calls it a light box pop-up. And she calls it Exit Intent, and I agree that the term is proper, but there's Exit Intent and then there's Aggressive Exit Intent.  Natalie doesn't use that.  It's when you poke around a little bit and you're looking and then it suggests that you sign up. And a lot of that is her ability to write good copy in the plug-in, because that matters to you. How you make the ask will really affect and test everything. Let's see, what else would I want to say about her? Her 30, she also has a 30-day email list course. Highly recommended, and I'm not an affiliate or anything. Gravity Forms, their developers are here. We use them at Feedblitz. I spend a lot of time doing support for Gravity for people who use our company using Gravity Forms. They are nice and reasonably priced at $39 annually for unlimited forms. Now, these forms can be used for many, many things, and List Building is only one of the potential options there. Yes, ma'am? What if you have multiple sites? Is it per site? Yeah, $39 per site. Then they have, I want to say it's $79 for three sites. So each jump up, you get... Yes, they do have that too. Thank you. Ninja Forms, their sponsors, thank you. And Zach did a very good presentation if you happen to see it yesterday. They're also freemium, as in the base is free. And correct me if I say anything wrong, please. And as an example add-on, they have like a MailChimp integration. They have the forms already pre-put together that you can then adjust, and it's $18. So that'll save you a lot of time and energy trying to do it yourself. Those forms integrate anywhere on your website, and then I spent way too much time poking around their demo this morning. So definitely give that a shot. Pop-up nomination. I like this one because it has a... because I've been using it, and it has a lot of granular targeting. What I mean by that is that I can... I can put different copy on different pages depending on what somebody is going to be doing on that page. Like on Home Act, I have a lot of recipes that do okay on Pinterest. And when somebody is browsing through on Pinterest, they're probably not signing up for email, but I can tell them, hey, why don't you follow me on Pinterest and I grow things that way? And it makes more sense for me to grow that user base there for those people. If people are solving a problem, then when I... they arrive by an organic search, and I know that's the bulk of the traffic on that page, then the copy I have there says, hey, would you like to learn more ways to solve problems?  I've given them the answer, and they've gone far enough into it that I know they may be more interested in hearing more from me. And I then target the list that they're added to by category. The single site is 47, and the developer is 97. This is annually. They only do pop-ups, so that means you're not going to have, like, the forms that go into your site. OptinSkin, this one is good for forms integrated into your website. I enjoyed using it. Their support has been kind to me while I was figuring it out. They don't do pop-ups. They are a little more expensive, and they do have a lot of already pre-populated designs, and as you can tell from me, I'm not a designer. OptinMonster, another one with good response times, at least when I've had to talk to them. They have, not only do they have the forms that integrated into your theme, they also do the pop-ups. You can do the granular targeting as well. They do have the exit intent, and I can't remember exactly how aggressive it was, but sometimes you do want an aggressive form depending on your goal with that list. You only have 14 days to try it out, which I don't know about you, but that's not really a lot of time to dig into testing. This is their pricing model. It was way too complicated to just... And then lead pages are on the cheaper end. It's 37... Well, no, they weren't. Sorry. Take that back. It's $37 monthly, so that adds up very quickly. What you can do is if you have a campaign of some sort where you are driving people to a specific page, say you're doing a big Facebook push, and the goal of the Facebook campaign is to drive people to your website. You can drive them to a lead page landing page. It's very easy to build very nice squeeze pages or whatever you want to call them to drive people to your final destination. Then do that campaign for a month. See how it works. Is it worth the investment at that point? Sumo-mi, this is one of my favorites, just personal bias. I enjoyed working with their support team. Again, it's a freemium, meaning the base level is free, but they have a lot of optional monthly add-ons, so be careful because it can add up quickly. They have the... excuse me, the list-builder is a pop-up that you can get very granular with how it's targeted, or you can let them, or the plugin itself, make the decision based on the user behavior. That's what I've left it at because I'm lazy. And one of the things I really liked about it is because when I was testing this plugin, I was very focused on site speed at the time, and I had a hard time with OptinMonster, which, when I was doing research for this presentation, I found that they released a fix in the interim. Sumo-mi was not slowing down my site like OptinMonster had been. Does that make sense? They fixed the problem when I was... Okay. They do have the scroll box, which is the one that pops up as people scroll down, and they do have the smart bar in the header. Now, I went through that way faster than I wanted to. So, does anybody have any list-specific questions or plugin-specific questions? Yes, ma'am. Some of them are cloud-based services that have a WordPress plugin component. Yes? Yes, ma'am. Yeah, there are absolutely specific limitations for that. I will agree. But my question is, what is your end goal with your list-building? Are you trying to grow traffic with your list? Are you trying to make a specific sale? Are you trying to do customer... Okay, so you were doing something for a client who's specific. The reason why I asked is because I have had a lot of interactions with people who are adding barriers to people signing up to their list. Unless you are going to do something with the information, don't ask for their name. Unless you are going to specifically target these people and address them, why do you need their name? All you're doing is adding one more reason for them to not want to sign up. But then for you, then the... Which one was it? Consider the easiest to customize. Let's see. Are you looking for pop-up only, non-pop-up? Look at it. The CSS part, the styling of it, then be able to put in there what you want, what look you want for it. OptinMonster was pretty good for that. I don't have personal experience with Ninja Forms, so I can't speak to the ease of that part. Pop-up Alley will probably not be it because it says that you can do psycholors and stuff like that, but I think you're wanting to get really into it, aren't you? Yes, and feel free to pitch in whenever. Yes, ma'am. This is a little off the list about email marketing. Absolutely. In the past couple of months, I've had a lot of clients calling in and they're saying stuff to me like, we want to send out 3,000 emails a week, et cetera. How would you handle something like that? What would you use?  Don't send out that many emails. Okay. Is it a duly opted-in list? If you don't know where it comes from, you need to know that information. If you are doing it yourself, because you can damage your own ability to send an email in the future, send emails that end up getting hit by spam. I would definitely use an e-mail service provider. Mailchimp's an option. Feedblitz is an option. Constant contact. Aweber, you're going to want to use a service like this. I often, Monster, ask how granular targeting and sumo means granular integration. Would you please explain that? Okay. And what I mean is, I use those interchangeably. I'm sorry, but what I mean is that you are able to change what you're doing based on the URL or the user behavior. It means that you can really get in there and fine-tune what's going on with your forms based on where the user is or what they're doing. Yes, ma'am? Do people integrate easily well with different... No. These have various levels of integration with various e-mail platforms. Mailchimp, you're going to find a lot of ability to be integrated with many of the plugins because they are just one of the largest e-mail providers out there. Does that make them always the best option? Sometimes. You'll need to look at the integration pages of the plugin itself to find out what it works with. Sometimes you only have to paste in a form and it'll work, but again, that's going to depend on the plugin and the e-mail provider you're using. Yes, sir? Apart from the nuts and bolts, what type of verbiage or incentives do you find overall can pull better? Well, it depends on what you're looking for. Are you looking for an immediate sale? Are you looking to just bring somebody back and form a community? And so if you want the immediate sale, you're going to want to use the call-to-action that says, you know, hey, join this list to get whatever deal you're offering. If you are trying to join a community, you want to say join, become, use the appropriate verb for it. Don't use a ton of exclamation points. I know they want you to get excited sometimes, but what I want you to think about is think about your own behavior. Think about, but more, think about your users. What mode are they in when they are going through your site? What are they looking to do? And one of the things that helps, too, is to create what's called user profiles. So you have it, so you have, you know, all of them, and this is Joe, and Joe is looking to do X. What is going to make Joe do X? And so if you can put a personality with it, that helps you form the copy around your call-to-action. Another thing to think about as you are actually sending the mails to your list is if you're looking for your subject lines and you want to stay out of the spam box, take a tour of your spam box. What is in your spam box? You're going to need a shower after, but... Do not use capital letters except for title case. You don't want to say free. You don't want to say hot deal, exclamation point, exclamation point. I have many conversations about this stuff. It's not one particular word or thing, except Cialis, that puts you in the spam box. It is a very gray filter. Okay, this will raise your potential spam score a little bit. And this over here, this sender is not as reputable. So that raises your chance of being put in there a little bit more. Would you need to... Oh, yes. That's why the custom activation page that I suggested you set up to track for Google, that needs to have that information in there as well. You know, hey, go check your inbox for the title of the email you're sending. And make sure you add us, the sender email, to your white list. And so that way, you're telling the client how to make sure they follow through with it. Okay, that's what I'm saying. That's why you helped them create that activation reminder page. Or if that's your role, you know, or... Does that make sense? Oh, right. To make sure that their people make sure that they get the double off the email. Right. I'm talking about them getting the final notification to say, hey, you've had a new subscriber, or this person has contacted you. Okay, so you want them to be able to get the auto responder that alerts them to that? You know, it might be how just in the back of the WordPress, if they don't get that email. That seems to happen quite a bit. That's Gmail being exceptionally helpful. Yeah. And you can create a filter. In Gmail, always put it in the inbox. You may want to set up... There's a plugin that's an SMTP WordPress plugin. It might be called something like SMTP WordPress, but it could be that the server, the tool within WordPress that sends emails, sometimes that fails. So it may not be getting out of the server at all. And you may need to set up something that actually goes through your client's own mail server, the SMTP server, and give it a WordPress way to log into the SMTP and send that mail out to get out of the first place. It may be stuck before it ever leaves WordPress. That's a very good point. We deal with many forms of email issues a lot. And part of the problem is that every host handles emails differently. So the way that people set up their form, maybe their contact form gets filled out and they get that notification. They want it to show it's coming from their user. Well, for their host, that looks like spam. You're sending email as someone who is not you. And so the host will just throw that email out. It's also the most common issue that we see, but another one that we see fairly often, and this is getting kind of complex. So if you would like more information on it, Yoast has a blog post on it, but it's about setting up an SPF record for your domain. And what that basically means is that you allow another service to send email on your behalf, but that has to authenticate through your domain. So if you use a service like MailChimp or something else, and you want all of those emails from MailChimp that shows coming from your domain, when users receive that in their mailboxes, the kind of metadata in that email says that it's from MailChimp and not from your domain, even though the email address does. And if your domain doesn't have a special record that says, yes, I allow MailChimp to send email on my behalf, it can automatically route people's spam folders. So that's kind of an advanced topic, but I would definitely recommend going on Yoast's website and reading his blog post about that, but that's a consideration if email is really important to your business. And that no effect on the host issue that you were talking about, that helps fix that? No, every host does things a little bit differently. The best way is to make sure that your host, if your host has limitations, you can talk with them and you say, hey, who can I use you to send email from? Like, what email addresses do I have to show that email is being from? And that's the best way to make sure that you don't have any issues. But if you find your host is not responsive, because some hosts aren't, then using something like Mandrill, that's what we recommend with Nidget Mortars is to use Mandrill to help kind of take your host out of that equation. Great, thank you. Yes? With my small business clients, we're recommending Office 365 for their personal email needs. I've jumped at what you were saying about the SPF record. I'm not familiar with Mandrill, but the goal with when you're using Office 365 when you're setting up your MX records to point there, you can't have any other non-Microsoft addresses as far as I know. The SPF record is actually set up with your domain registrar. So where are all the Microsoft links? Oh, they're on there as well. The big client is on Microsoft, and we have Microsoft SPFs that I had to put in. Okay, yeah, that should take care of everything. The email address that you've used to send from your form, given a real Microsoft 365 or Google apps for that matter either way, they're not the same that way. And then use that SNTP plugin so that when it sends out, if it's going from your system now, it's coming from your form. Yeah, I'm not sure how you type that in. Do we have any list-building specific questions? Yes, ma'am. It's okay. If I'm talking to a designer, if I'm talking to different clients, some clients may feel it's appropriate, both are using MailChimp just to have the sign bar MailChimp widget join my mailing list here. And so what would be kind of a use case or an encouragement that I can share with them about the necessity of going these extra steps and using the list-building-focused plugin instead of just that? Well, let's say that you have a developer's license for one of these that you like. Ask your client if you could do some A-B testing to prove. And one of the things that I like to do when I'm testing the list is use what's called a hidden field to tell where people are coming from, or you could even have a second list for each form, right? So you make sure that your test that you set up has approximately the same number of users landing on the page. And then you follow which list is growing faster. That's how you can demonstrate it. It won't take, you know, it's less work to demonstrate it than to try to just insist. Yes, ma'am? When you're... I'm a business owner, so development is not my thing. So if you're going to do this A-B testing, and let's say you have some commit-through rates and commit-through B, do these plugins integrate into MailChimp to create two different lists that would you treat them differently afterwards? You can have different lists within MailChimp. And so, yes, you can do that. You can say, okay, so we use this copy on this one, and the open rate, you look at that later, the open rate on list B is much higher than the open rate on list A. So we're going to go with the copy on list B because it creates the better lead than the copy we were using with list A. And so where you might find that useful would be to compare whether you're giving away an incentive like an e-book or a prize or something like that, and compare the open rates. It doesn't matter how many people sign up if nobody opens it later. So, yes, you might be able to get a lot of numbers, but can you sell, let's say you do sponsorships for your newsletter down the road, if you don't have an open rate, brands are not going to be interested in it. Yes? I think to tag onto that question, if you can already A-B test like that in MailChimp, what's the advantage of having the form maker do anything like an A-B test? Okay, well the A-B testing in MailChimp is more about your subject line. Which subject line is going to get people to... Well, I mean just in the segmentation, like they came in from this group and went to one group, and I hear my response rates in that group. I mean the audience segmentation. Right, okay. I don't use MailChimp on a daily basis, so I can't tell you exactly what their A-B testing is. I'm sorry, it's just out of my wheelhouse. But from what I know about MailChimp, their A-B testing is more about a single send. You give it two different subject lines and then it picks the one on the fly that... Well, they don't call it A-B test. I'm just saying when you look at what you send, and you know where they came from, you put them into a group called third page. What I'm saying is we're using it like A-B testing. They're not calling it that. So what's the advantage of doing it again with the form for a builder person? It just makes it simpler. You want... I'm going to explain it. Neither one is better than the other. It's one form of testing versus another form of testing, and it fits your workflow and your priorities. Yes? If you're giving an incentive to get the email, is it best to deliver that right away? After the double opt-in. It depends on how often you normally email. If you only send out a newsletter once a month and they join on date two, they're not going to hear from you for 29, 30 days. So what you need to do then is send them a couple days later, hey, you know, here's what's... you're going to get a sample of what you're going to see. Maybe say, would you like to see last month's and provide that?  And as far as I know, every email provider has what we call the people factor, people who don't understand that hitting spam is not the same as unsubscribe. But another thing I do recommend is within your email template itself, go ahead and make a prominent unsubscribe at the top so people are less likely to hit spam because Gmail also likes to truncate newsletters and oftentimes that unsubscribe is hidden in the truncated portion and people get upset and say that you're hiding it and it's broken and whatever. Yes, Carl? You mentioned that you use pop-up domination a lot, but during your testing, you found that SumoMe was really easy to deal with. I use pop-up domination on feedblit. That was set up when I came on, and it has been working, but pretty much left alone. I've only gone through to test different functionality. I know that it works. I know the way that we have it set up works. I have thoroughly worked with the SumoMe. So that was my experience with the customer service and adding it to my own site and the way it functioned on my personal site. And then I guess we won't take up any more of your time. Thank you very much.


It was a straight line going up. There was no you, the you is sort of like, well, maybe at really low levels of social media, there's more depression, and at really high levels of social media, there's more depression, and there's a sweet spot in the middle. That's not what we found. What we found was basically a straight line. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell, and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now, if you've been a super fan of the show, you know that Johnny and I have railed against social media, and the negative impacts our clients have seen in their lives, but we didn't have much more than anecdotal evidence to go on, so we're so excited to have Brian Primmick with us today to talk about what that real impact is at a scientific level of social media. Many of us may fall in the trap of comparison, we're just overdoing it on social media, and I'd love to kick off today, Brian, but just talking a little bit about what got you interested in studying the impacts of social media. Yeah, it's a great question, and I wasn't so interested at the beginning. We had been studying a lot of other media types, video games, films. I mean, always interested in the impact on health, but social media and mental health really came about very organically. I was a family practitioner for 18 years, and whenever there was an emotional health condition, there almost was always a story that had something to do with social media, and so I think that the research questions came about exactly the right way, which is that in a very authentic, organic way. Yeah, kind of like how social media is now propagating in our lives very organically, and there's almost so many platforms, you can't even keep track of them all, and we're gonna dig really deeply into a lot of the research, but I'd love just at the start here to know what surprised you the most in all of the research that you did in social media. Well, when we first set out to look for associations between media and social media exposures and mental health outcomes, things like depression and anxiety and loneliness, we did not expect there to be sort of a direct linear relationship like what we found. We expected there to be more of like a U-shaped relationship. In other words, we expected there to be sort of a Goldilocks spot in the middle, that perfect little dip of the U, which is the, if you use just 47 minutes a day, then you're maximizing your likelihood of depression, you're minimizing your likelihood of anxiety, and so that's what we set out to do was to find where that sweet spot was, but when the data actually rolled in, it was a straight line going up. There was no U, the U is sort of like, well, maybe at really low levels of social media, there's more depression, and at really high levels of social media, there's more depression, and there's a sweet spot in the middle. That's not what we found. What we found was basically a straight line that every increase of social media was associated with a consequent or some type of increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, just about any outcome that we looked at. So that was a surprise. Absolutely, and I think we were all sort of searching for that Goldilocks moment where we could just get 15 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day and not have any negative impacts on our mental health. Just something to add there, and with waiting for that Goldilocks moment, the power of social media, I think, became relevant to everybody in the last few years, and with that came a giant fight over the control over that power. And not only that, I think there's a lot of folks that are trying to fix everything that has went wrong with it as well. And what we're all feeling is somewhat of a tug of war between the powers it be of controlling it, fixing it, how to use it for the betterment of mankind and civilization. We're faced with all of these different forces and the effect that I seem to see and think about is everyone come running into help or to take advantage of the situation. And because of that, we're all dealing with that tug of war, and it's getting increasingly more and more out of control. Yeah, no, I completely agree. It's one of these things because we absolutely want to try to find the positive because conceptually, theoretically, of course, there should be some possibility for positive. I mean, absolutely, we've all had moments of connection on social media. Certainly there can be opportunities for warmth and for generosity, but at the same time, it's this double-edged sword. It can also breed feelings of depression, anxiety and isolation. The question becomes, how do we balance the challenges with the benefits? And I think just because we found that using more social media, at least in our sample, was pretty much always associated with at least an increased risk. It doesn't mean that every single person who used social media became depressed. It just means that that was certainly a risk factor for them. That doesn't mean that there isn't a possible positive way to use it for society. At one point, we're not there yet as a society. So that's why the book came about, was saying, well, we need some practical, evidence-based, as much as possible, suggestions on how to maximize that value. And then hopefully we can redo the study later on and see if people are using a better, if it's less of the Wild West and everyone's just kind of doing everything, if people are doing things with a little bit more guidance if that is going to ultimately be positive. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I mean, I'll just say one more thing. I realize I'm kind of going on here a little bit, but it's kind of like a giant buffet, right? If you just put out every food in the world and you just let people loose on it, right? They're probably not gonna make the best choices, especially when it's brand new and they don't even, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. This is so amazing. And of course we've got all of the marketers and we've got all of the platforms trying to make us stick as much as possible to exactly what is going to pad their pockets, which is more time on and more engagement with larger numbers of people for individual users, that very well might mean more chance of a gaffe, more chance of a misunderstanding, less real positive emotional work. However, that's what people are doing these days. So we need to figure out a way to get better suggestions and ideas to people so that they can potentially use this for benefit. I think that's one of the most important things for everyone to realize, and it goes back to the Calhoun experiment. The rat utopia, you have everything you need. I mean, what's going to happen if you put all of us in front of a buffet without any discipline? So now we have an abundance of information and look at what it has done to us without thinking about using any discipline towards it. And now I think we're all reeling back on, okay, well, that running up to the buffet and gorging as much as possible certainly didn't help our situation whatsoever. And now everyone's trying to figure out what is the best way to discipline ourselves and use it. And certainly your book goes in much depth in all of those situations. I was just gonna say the title of the book is You Are What You Click. And I don't know that everyone in our audience has a firm grasp on how the algorithms work and what this attention economy is that you're talking about. So if you could share a little bit around how these algorithms work and how this is different than traditional media and what you mean by you are what you click. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So some people will open a social media page and they'll look at it and they'll just sort of experience it. And they'll think, oh, well, that message came up first. So that must be my best friend or that must be the message that is, you know, the most relevant to me and the one that's going to make me the happiest and the most satisfied. But it couldn't really be more far from the truth. In other words, when we teach media literacy or social media literacy to young people, we want them to understand when they open their social media platform that if it's a shade of blue, that shade of blue was like determined in very precise experiments. If there is a little thing that accompanies like a message coming on, the pitch of that, the decay of that, the kind of waveform that it is was determined very, very precisely. And when we are, you know, it's not like you turn on a television and it's the same message that's coming to everybody, you know, who's watching CBS at 9 p.m. Eastern time, you know, it is extremely different and it is very much tailored, not just to the individual, but to the individual in a way that will maximize profits. So for example, if there are a couple of messages that are being sent at one point, and one of them is a really good friend of yours that you care about and want to hear what's going on with them, but they don't have a lot of contacts and what they put in the message doesn't have any words in it like car or computer that can be used to match an advertisement to it or sell something. That message is not gonna come up first.  That idea of stickiness is a very, very important social marketing and social media marketing idea. Anything to increase stickiness. We want people to stay as long as possible. That moment that they're thinking of leaving, you know, I mean, we've all been on a website before and like literally you start to move the mouse toward the X and then all of a sudden it says, wait, wait, you know, and that kind of thing is going on all the time on social media. And so a truly social media literate person is realizing that. They're experiencing this platform not just as like, oh, this is the way it is in the world. They realize that there is a lot of algorithm and a lot of science behind that. One of the things that you had put in the book was some questions to ask when you are seeing some of this advertising just to help you through it. And I think we've reached a point with media that I think that everyone should take a marketing class so they understand the depths at which they can reach. And I've talked to people about this before and even when I've talked about predictive marketing or any of these other things, they're mind blown and they don't even realize just how deep it goes. But because AJ and I have to do marketing for our company and we work with marketers, we're always fascinated and not only the depth but at what levels it is reaching certain emotions. And most of the time, you're not even consciously aware of them. And at least if you've taken a marketing class you can sort of understand some of the mechanisms that are at play. You can look at them for what they are and then know when you're triggered emotionally and when the ads imagery has worked to invoke such emotions to fire you up and then the enhancement of those emotions through the text. And at the end, now that you're riled up here's what we would like you to do. Donate, vote, buy, whatever that might be and know what that call to action was put there because they had done the research to know that you would be at your most heightened and most susceptible to that call to action.