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

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Marketing Millennials

Episode: Should You Pause Your Marketing on Holidays? | Bathroom Break #109
Date: May 25, 2026
Hosts: Daniel Murray (The Marketing Millennials) & Jay Schwedelson (Do This, Not That & Subjectline.com)

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Episode Overview

In this Bathroom Break episode, Daniel Murray and Jay Schwedelson debate a pressing marketing question:
Should you pause your marketing activities on holidays?
Drawing from personal anecdotes and professional experiences, they dive into email and social media strategy, consistency, and leveraging holiday-specific opportunities. The episode is light, conversational, and filled with actionable tactics for marketers about navigating holidays in their communication strategies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Networking Events: Love Them or Loathe Them?

Introduces the hosts' personalities and approach to social interactions before pivoting into holiday marketing themes.

• Daniel's Take: Prefers to avoid networking events and opts for quick appearances:

  “I want to go back to the hotel room. ...30 minutes max. Iron Irish goodbye.” (01:12, 01:45)

• Jay's Take: Finds both himself and Daniel generally antisocial outside of work obligations:

  “So you and I are just horrible people that are antisocial?” (02:15)

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2. Should You Pause Marketing on Holidays?

Email & Consistency

• Daniel:
  • If you have a consistent communication schedule (newsletter, webinar, social posts), never break it for a holiday.
  • Exceptions may exist for certain religious holidays, but mostly, “business as usual.”

  “If you have something consistent going on...I wouldn't break consistency for a holiday. ...People expect you to show up on that day.” (02:50)

  • Holidays may actually be great, as professionals may have more downtime to engage.
• Automation Tactic:
  • Holidays yield auto-replies from out-of-office messages. These are gold for data collection.
  • Use AI tools to extract new contacts for remarketing or to hand to your sales team as additional leads.

    “Those auto replies are gold...use the AI tool to strip out all the email addresses...target them and remarket to them.” (03:47)
    “Send it to the CRM so sales knows as an extra contact...another person at the company that belongs to this person.” (04:54)

  • Note: Excluded in GDPR-restricted geographies like Europe.

Holiday-Specific Messaging

• Jay:
  • Adjust messaging to fit the holiday moment; for example, make light of typical happenings (e.g., “The barbecue’s boring but… check this out”).

  "You don't just want to pump out your regular garbage. ...Talk to the moment that people are in..." (05:37)

• Daniel:
  • Contrary to articles dictating 'best times' to market, don't skip or delay just to chase optimal open rates.
  • Even reduced performance is better than zero; you can always resend to non-openers later.

  “If you have something consistent stick to the consistency...market on these holidays.” (06:32)

Long-form Content

• Jay:
  • Longer content often performs well during holidays/weekends due to increased audience downtime.

  "Long form content during a weekend or during a holiday can do particularly well because of the time somebody has..." (06:11)

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3. Social Media Strategy on Holidays

• Daniel:
  • Consistency is king: don’t skip posting because it’s a holiday. Missing one day makes it easier to skip again, breaking the habit.

  “You should always build that muscle of...posting every day...just post something.” (07:39)

  • Holiday posts may have less competition and could be shown for longer windows in LinkedIn’s current feed algorithm.

  "LinkedIn...might show up the next day...and you were competing against less posts on a business network." (07:39)

• Jay:
  • Agrees LinkedIn's feed has shifted: posts may “go bonkers” long after initial publishing.

  “Now it’s like...I wake up in the morning, and...this thing's like went bonkers...” (08:34)

• Daniel:
  • New algorithm favors engagement within interest groups rather than general audience.

  “It’s this new interest-based...cycle of more and more wants to show to the actual people who want to view it...” (08:54)

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4. Human Side: Socializing at Barbecues vs. Networking

Slips back into personal territory, humorously comparing business networking events to social holiday barbecues.

• Jay:
  • Jokes about being antisocial, even with close proximity neighbors and friends.

  “I don’t want to do any...I only want to do my own thing. ...I am in therapy. I’ll admit it.” (10:27, 11:40)

• Daniel:
  • Notes the social/strategic benefits of attending even casual events, likening it to network-building.

  “If you don’t go to things, you stop getting invited to things...” (10:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Daniel on Consistency:

  “If you have something consistent going on, I wouldn't break consistency for a holiday. ...People expect you to show up on that day.” (02:50)

• Jay on Data Tactics:

  “Those auto replies are gold...use the AI tool to strip out all the email addresses...target them and remarket to them.” (03:47)

• Daniel on Social Posting Muscle:

  “You should always build that muscle of...posting every day...just post something and know it might get less engagement or it might be more...” (07:39)

• Jay on Personal Quirkiness:

  “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...” (11:40)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:12–02:18 — Hosts discuss their attitudes toward networking events
• 02:20–03:47 — Should you pause marketing for holidays? Email marketing best practices
• 03:47–05:37 — Advanced tactic: Using auto-replies for data and retargeting
• 05:37–06:32 — Tailoring messaging to fit the holiday moment; long-form content benefits
• 06:32–07:23 — Challenging 'best time' marketing dogma; consistency vs. perfection
• 07:23–08:34 — Social media strategy: maintain posting consistency, LinkedIn feed dynamics
• 08:34–09:38 — Observing LinkedIn algorithm shifts and effects on post performance
• 09:38–11:53 — Comparing barbecues to networking events; playful confessions and social habits

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Conclusion: Actionable Advice

• Do not halt regular marketing activities on holidays.
• Leverage auto-reply data for remarketing and sales opportunities.
• Stay consistent with both email and social content, even if metrics might dip.
• Holiday messaging should be of-the-moment and empathetic to the audience’s real-time experience.
• Consider the potential for higher engagement due to less competition and different consumption patterns.

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This episode is highly recommended for marketers looking for practical, real-world tactics wrapped in an entertaining format. As always, Daniel and Jay remind listeners to focus on consistency and to never blindly follow outdated best practices.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome 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.

[A]

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 top 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. This 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 to 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?

[B]

No, I want to go back to the hotel room. That's why 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 don't like, it's a mixed bag. It depends on, like, what conference to and what type of people are there.

[A]

So if you're going to a networking event and you're not, like, it's not your network event, you're going to somebody else's network 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?

[B]

Yeah, 30 minutes max. Iron Irish goodbye. Because 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. 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.

[A]

So do you think anybody likes going to networking events or does everybody there.

[B]

Actually, I think some people just go to conference for the parties, not the, the conference.

[A]

So you and I are just horrible people that are antisocial?

[B]

Yeah, pretty much.

[A]

Okay, good. Pretty much. All right, listen, this thing is coming out on Memorial Day, and so there's a lot of debate. Should 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 business marketer, consumer market or whatever you are. Should you be treating kind of the holiday days differently than regular marketing days?

[B]

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 to do that. I 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, I think business as usual people expect you to show up on that day and also people. So most, a lot of marketers have more time or a lot of business professionals have more time during those days. So they're opening emails or they it's in their inbox and they see it and they wanted to read it because a lot of them don't have time during the week to just open a normal marketing email.

[A]

Yeah. And I'll give you two kind of tactical things you could do related to around holidays. One is if you send out your email to your database, let's say on Memorial Day, right to your Firefoil 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 AMIA has gdpr, so you can't do that there. But you take all the auto replies and you could do something simple. You use the AI tool to strip out all the email addresses in the auto replies that you get and then you could take that data and use it for retargeting, 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 like 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.

[B]

And another thing you could do too is what I we used to do back in the day when I when with auto applies is you send it to the CRM so like sales knows as 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 salesperson or something like maybe they're getting trying to get in contact with this this person's not reaching out reach out to this person so you can auto now AI you could do it way easier and you could 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. So that's another thing you could do

[A]

with Those auto replies 100% and you know 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 hol we our emails on that day that we send out promoting stuff Literally the subject line says the barbecue's boring but and you open it up and 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 and add an incredible performance to that email because the more that you can be of the moment and speak to the moment the more people like oh yeah I'm going to check this out. So you don't just want to pump out your regular garbage. The other thing Daniel I know into this is long form con long form content during a weekend or during a holiday can do particularly well because of the time somebody has I believe in

[B]

marketing at less like when people think it's a best practice because you will go into these these blog posts for years and say here is 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 and you've said this I 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. It's still people opening your emails and digesting that email and you could also do a 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 need turn it off because people say it's the wrong thing to do.

[A]

So let me ask 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 you're like, no, no, no. Certain things I wouldn't do on a holiday.

[B]

I think the bet the most important thing on social is consistency and habit forming. So you should always build that muscle of because you can skip when you skip one day, then you're like, maybe I'll skip another day and it becomes this like 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's gonna might get less engagement or it might be more engagement because now like the LinkedIn feed has this like 24 to 48 hour like window. So it might show up the next day or the following day and other people's feeds because got fed and they got and you were competing against less posts on a business network. So I think you should try it at least or keep that muscle like moving during those days.

[A]

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's 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's like went bonkers or whatever and I'm like, how the hell that happened?

[B]

I 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 4 or 500. But like I 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 season. It's this cycle of more and more wants to show to the actual people who want to view it versus people before just showed it to everybody and never got likes or likes. And then if people had pods it worked. So I think it's actually a better algorithm than it used to.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah, I agree with you. All right, so one last thing. Back to the original topic. So we don't like going to networking events, but now it's Memorial Day. You get invited to a barbecue. 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?

[B]

There's two sides to this coin. One is, do you need, like, your kid to get in and be friends with that other kid and start. So there's, like, that strategic play of it. And I love. We're calling this a strategic. Of going to Memorial. But also, I think that if you don't go to things, you stop getting invited to things. And if you look. Yeah, well, yeah, but when you like

[A]

making new friends, it's hard to say.

[B]

Yeah, But I think, yeah, Jay's the type of person is 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?

[A]

This is the truth. Okay. Daniel and I live relatively close to each other. Okay.

[B]

And.

[A]

And he moved into a new home. I would say, would you move in that home, like, six months ago or something like that? And so me and my wife got Daniel and Ari a housewarming gift. It'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, 5, 10 miles of where I live. And we just haven't brought it over. Cause we're really weird people.

[B]

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, a hundred miles, probably from Jay. And I probably saw him more in the hundred miles than I saw him

[A]

in the 10 minutes. That's right. Yeah.

[B]

He doesn't like seeing people. And even when they get closer, he has one of his best friends that move near, too. And he's like. He's. No, I don't want to see you.

[A]

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, so. Oh, you're probably never.

[B]

Never gonna have a breakthrough.

[A]

I don't even know if this episode's gonna 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.

[B]

Also, everybody go by Jay's new book. It's on Amazon. It's. It's actually releasing in next month. I have. I have two books coming, so it's going to be really good. Jay's going to. I'm going to. I'm going to make Jay sign one of them for me. Yeah, you're going to love to do that.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate you. All right, we'll see you at the next one. Daniel. Come on, man. I got to 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.

[B]

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millennials 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 line 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.

[A]

Later.