The Only Black Friday/Cyber Monday Guide You Will Ever Need

0:00Black Friday's literally already here, and most brands do not have a proper strategy in place. And so, that's why in this video, I'm going to be going over the 2026 optimized Q4 profit playbook for brands that want to absolutely destroy their Black Friday Cyber Monday without throwing away all their margins. I'm excited to share this with you because this is the strategy we're rolling across my 100-plus brands at my agency, Well Copy. And I'm going to be walking through everything from key insights that we learned from 2025 to the calendar that you should be following to the offers that you should be running and to the email and SMS

0:27execution as well as templates creative gives all that good stuff. We're going to be covering it all in this video. There's going to be a ton of bonuses and nuggets throughout this whole video, so make sure you stick through the whole end. I'm going to move as fast as I can. Lots of stuff to get through, but let's get right into it. This is the 2026 Q4 e-commerce profit playbook, the complete guide to pre- and post-Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers, email and SMS strategies, and profit recovery. You can see some of the results that we were able to drive just last year in the November and December periods for these

0:52brands. These are all brands where we completely manage their strategy. We wrote all the emails, designed them, implemented them, absolutely everything. So, let's get into it because in reality, everybody wants Q4 on revenue. It's going to be hard for you to not perform well in terms of performance, which you can see on this left side here. Everything looks amazing. However, when you really take things into account, most brands actually barely even profit, or they actually take a loss in their Q4, which is definitely not something that we want to do. We're running deep discounts. We have expensive ads because ad costs literally increase 50 to 100% in this time. We got

1:22COGS and shipping. We got our returns reality. A lot of times, things just don't go as well as you thought. are some brands that are okay with breaking even in Q4, which is completely fine as long as you have a Q1 repurchase strategy waiting on the other side to recoup these customers that you acquired. And I'm going to cover that in

1:38this video as well. This isn't just Q4. We're going to be going over Q1. But essentially, this old playbook for BFCM was built for a market where discounting deeper and sending more still work. And in 2025, that didn't necessarily work. So, 2026 going to be the same. And so, first, we need to understand what

1:51happened in 2025 in Q4 in this period. So, let's Let's through a couple of things after I dove through the numbers and have my team look through this. Now, the first key learning is that shoppers started early this year once again. 26% of shoppers began holiday shopping by the end of September, which is absolutely crazy. Literally in September, 42% plan to start browsing and buying even before November. That's nearly 50%. And out of all the months in Q4, October actually had the biggest jump in revenue compared to the prior year, up 8.2%. However, despite all this, only 13% of brands ran promotions before October, which is pretty

2:22interesting. So, we have these numbers, shoppers are buying earlier and Q4 is not just like a multi-day situation. Now, we knew this from last year, but this numbers kind of confirm it. I say this anecdotally as well because my mom, for example, she starts buying literally in the summer and in September because she doesn't want to deal with the stress of doing all the holiday shopping. And she's a teacher, and so during September, October, November, she's super busy. So, she likes to get that shopping done early, just like a lot of other consumers out there. Now, despite these numbers, 63% still did most of their buying during Thanksgiving week,

2:51which is actually up from 59% in the year before in 2024. So, what's interesting is that shoppers begin shopping earlier, like in September, and some of them are going to make these early purchases, but a lot still do their buying in November. That's our key insight. Customers are shopping early to help budget out holiday shopping and to relieve some stress. They're going to be looking ahead here and figure out what they're going to buy, but they're actually going to place these orders in November. They're going to look in these earlier months, but they might just buy in November. So, in these earlier months, like September, that's where we

3:18want to focus a little bit more on lead capture, which we're going to talk about here in a second. But, let's go into the next key learning, which is email and SMS carried the profit. Now, paid advertising became increasingly more expensive and less efficient in 2025, whereas own channels like email and SMS proved to be the revenue and profit drivers. That's because you've already invested in acquiring these customers and reaching them again through direct low-cost channels directly impacts your bottom line. These are all numbers reported from Klaviyo and their brands, and what we saw here was 42% of BFCM revenue came from email and SMS. And for

3:45Black Friday, 43% of the revenue from email and SMS. Now, what's interesting is that year-over-year revenue growth from email campaigns grew 15.2% and SMS grew 24.6%. So, we're seeing email and SMS becoming more important over the years. We also see a 13.6% increase in repeat buyers and then also a 9.1% increase in new buyers. So, when you take into account ad costs and the fact that email and SMS cost a fraction of what it takes to cost ads, this is really what carried the profit and we continue to see email and SMS being what convert these people and what the smart brands are doing to retain profit. the last little insight

4:20here is just timing is everything looking at our CPM numbers. So, in 2025, September was the cheapest month to acquire customers on Meta. CPMs were averaging $11.21. In November, the same customer in the CPMs was $21.96, which was nearly double and often two to three times during Black Friday week, which is a massive 65% jump from October to November alone. And so, what we see here is that the cheapest month in this time period to buy customer, at least get attention, is in September. The most expensive is in November, obviously, but roughly half the price in 60 days earlier. And so, what I would consider is instead of spending nothing in

4:53September and then dumping the entire budget into the year's most expensive pricing in November, consider growing your list and growing your exposure doing lead campaigns in September. Do brand awareness campaigns in September. Get your brand awareness up, grow your list, and then go hard on email and SMS in November. Don't go as hard with spending so much on ads because they're going to be so expensive and lean heavily into email and SMS. That's the key to making sure you're the most profitable. email and SMS list is the only asset that doesn't reprice when the ad auction costs skyrocket. So, prioritize building it strategically ahead of the peak season. So, to

5:26summarize what 2025 taught us, demand starts in September, but it peaks in November. Customers are browsing and shopping earlier, but 63% actually more than the prior week are doing most of their buying in Thanksgiving week. We want the early sales and the list, and so we want to start in September really with a lot of our messaging. And the auction is priced against you way lower in September compared to November, and email and SMS is what held the margin, 42% of BFCM revenue being attributed through email and SMS at a much cheaper cost than your ad platforms. And this is actually up year-over-year. So, the strategy to consider is to sell and at

5:55least capture early while attention is cheap and then own the peak through email and SMS. Because every brand that waits until November is going to pay super high for these customers. I know we're moving fast, but hopefully that makes sense. Just wanted to summarize kind of what we had learned and some of the key changes. A lot of the same stuff that happened and that we've learned from prior years in BFCM still applies here, but that's like a some numbers to back some of this up. Let's go into our calendar and offers strategy. So, this is what the base holiday schedule looks like for November and December. Now,

6:21what's different this year is Black Friday lands one day earlier than 2025, which gives us 25 days between Cyber Monday and Christmas. Now, Christmas on a Friday means that December 19th to 20th is your last full shopping weekend and December 21st to 24th is your last minute window. So, this is what this timeline looks like. This document is

6:38actually completely available for you. wellcopy.net/bfcm. You can get this document completely for free and you can have these assets, use them internally. There's going to be a lot more assets for you to look at, but we have November. What this looks like right here is we have Black Friday on the 27th. Right here, we got Veteran's Day right here. Cyber Monday still falls in November just like last year. Cyber Monday is on the 30th and then we go straight into December right here. I put in standard shipping at Christmas cutoff on the 15th and then we have the 19th for priority and we have the 21st for

7:07overnight. So, this is all going to play a super important role in what's next. So, just one day difference from last year. Now, the main offer strategy that I highly suggest and we see the best results for for brands is to cycle through different offers at different dates. Now, a lot of brands just pick a discount and run it all the way through Cyber Monday and wonder why their revenue kind of sags behind. Well, this is the most exciting time of the year and customers are getting hit with all sorts of stuff. They're getting hit with emails, SMS, new brands, offers left and right. So, you need to match that

7:37excitement. If you just run the same thing, you're going to get forgotten. So, if you just have one offer for Black Friday Cyber Monday through the whole entire period, you're going to get offer fatigue on day 7 through 14. Still going to get a great few days, but you're going to start to get some fatigue. Your list engagement is going to stall on day 7 to 14. You're not going to have as much urgency because there's only one last chance push. You can only say last chance on days 13 to 14. You're going to have very low repeat purchases as well because people don't buy the same offer

8:01twice. Somebody bought 50% off, going to be very difficult to get them to buy 50% off again. But what if your next offer you had something different and sexy? Somebody buys from 50% off, but then your next offer you have something like some sort of crazy bundle free gift, I'm much more likely to get a repeat order. And so that's why we like to run multiple different offers. Now if we run different offers at different time periods, like we have early access offer, then we have a Black Friday offer, we have a Cyber Monday offer that's all different, we have a lot of positive effects here and this is where

8:27we see the best results. This is because it's going to keep your list engaged across two to three weeks as each new offer gives people a reason to open, click, and buy again. It creates multiple different urgency peaks instead of just one last chance push. If we have three different offers, then we'll have a last chance for this offer, last chance for this offer, and last chance for this offer, and that has built in urgency. We're going to reactivate buyers who didn't buy the first time or didn't like that initial offer. We have all this excitement with new offer coming and then last chance as well and

8:53we're cycling that over. It's going to drive more repeat purchases because different offers are different incentives to come back and buy again. And something as well that isn't really talked about is different offers for different preferences. Some customers respond better to percent off, some respond better to dollar off, some respond better to bundle offers or bogo offers or different free gifts. This allows you to hit all those different customers. This lets you test your angles and positioning as well so you can apply this into your later year offers. It also increases your perceived value and brand energy. You're not just repeating the same offer for the same

9:21time period. You got all sorts of fun stuff going on. So I know that might be a lot, bear with me here, but I still want to highlight that a great offer is simple, it's urgent, it protects margin, feels different from anything else you ran the prior year. We're going to talk about offers here in a second, but that's like the core strategy that we like to preach is make sure you have different offers for different time periods because we get all these extra benefits compared to this boring sort of setup right here. Now, I have a big announcement here. I have the BFCM email and SMS vault, which is being released

9:48this week inside of my private community. You're going to get custom email and SMS templates for Black Friday Cyber Monday. You can see a few of these right here and how they look as well as advanced Black Friday Cyber Monday course content that isn't just in this video. Within my community, you already get a 30-plus module email course. You get 250-plus email templates. There are two live calls every single week, one with me and a community of e-com brands and marketers for 24/7 support. Now, you can see some of the activity going on in the community and how people are asking questions. You can see people reaching

10:13out in my DMs. We have the course content and modules. The BFCM email and SMS vault is coming out here shortly, and this is not going to be something that you want to miss. So, if you're interested, click the link in the description below. But now, let's go to the actual full recommended timeline

10:26with dates in these different offers. Now, this is going to look like a lot. That's because it kind of is, but this is an important time, and so it's okay to go a little bit crazy here. So, September is all about filling the list. CPMs are at a low. So, this is where you want to make sure you're spending on ads. Consider doing giveaways. Consider brand awareness sort of stuff in your ad account to get that awareness. And start to run some subtle gifting and holiday messaging, okay? This is where you want to kind of start to use that. Maybe you put a holiday collection already on your

10:51website. And try to get some of these early shoppers in this window. Now, in October, this is a little bit different than what I said last year. Last year, I was like, "Don't push too much in October." But this is where I would consider doing an early gifting event. Now, 88.7 billion dollars moved online in October last year, which was up 8.2% but only 13% of brands promote this early. So, this is where we want to have some sort of early gifting event and just push convenience. Like getting gifting done, spread the cost across your different paychecks, skip the stress, and don't be afraid to run a

11:19longer chill offer but with early bird shopping at the core of your messaging. This is where I'm down to start having a holiday collection on your website. Start to push that messaging a little bit more on get your gifting in. Here's a special offer. But don't go absolute balls to the wall. Until we get into November, which I have this nice little

11:36calendar timeline so you could see it. But, November 1st to 16th, I'm saying at the beginning of November, let's start our holiday kickoff offer. Make it a strong offer, but not as strong as the next ones. This is just the warm-up. We're going to run this for 2 weeks as sort of like a warm-up and then through Veterans Day. Before we get to our next offer, which is our early access. That's where we're branding it as Black Friday early access and we run that for a week before we launch Black Friday not on Friday, but actually launch it on Wednesday. I found that it's good to be

12:03able to have your Black Friday Cyber Monday offer on Thanksgiving because people are around family. There's a little bit of dead time on Thanksgiving after people have kind of like gone through a little bit of the day. So, I found really good success with doing this and then running Black Friday through the weekend until you get to Cyber Monday. You launch that next offer and that next offer is offer number four. You run Cyber Monday. I don't like to run it more than a few days personally cuz then we just move towards gifting on the fourth right here. Then we're just going to run some sort of

12:28general gifting offer throughout our standard shipping cutoffs right here until we cut it off kind of like right here and that's what we want to do right here. As far as like the offers, we want them to be semi-similar to each other and we don't want to go too complicated. Since we're already doing all sorts of different offers, I don't want you to

12:43have the craziest like confusing offer. Keep these simple, but just different in these different time periods. And I recommend Black Friday as your biggest offer. Make it special. It is the most special time of the year, so make it your best offer. Then Cyber Monday, make it just as good, but just a different mechanic such as adding a free gift or introducing a product drop into there or

13:03going from percent off to dollar off. And then for our gifting time periods, which is going to be November 1st to 16th and then also December 4th through 14th, I recommend you could do like the same sort of offer here. Curated gifting bundles, have a curated collection page or that sort of thing, which I'll talk about in a second. And we really want to use these shipping cutoff dates as well because that's inherent urgency behind it right there, these last minute shoppers. So, make sure that you do that. Then also we have our Christmas and New Year's Eve. A lot of brands are going to be running New Year's Eve

13:28sales, as well as 2027 sales, so you can start teasing that a little bit. So, for example, this is what some sort of example cadence could look like. And this looks like a lot, but let's talk through it a little bit. In October, you have a free gift with purchase and a special gifting collection page. You launch your gifting collection page already on October, and you could have some sort of free gift with purchase sort of thing running in the background, and push your collection page a little bit. Before then, we go into November 1st and 16th, having special bundles and gift sets, have new stuff, have dollar

13:55off framing, and that just lives on one specific part of the website. Before we then go to November 17th to 25th, which is our early access, it's percent off, it feels gated, and you have exclusivity right there. You still want that on the website, but make it seem like it is like a early access sort of thing. Where then we go into Black Friday for the 26th to the 29th, which is going to be our best offer. You can just have percent off, but just a bigger percent off right here, and then simple to understand. And then we have November 30th to December 3rd, which is going to

14:21be Cyber Monday, which is just going to be a twist. So, instead of percent off, make it dollar off, add a free gift, anything like that, mix in a free drop. And then December 4th through 14th, you can mix something like a tier to spend. And then we have like our free shipping offers for cutoffs, all this sort of stuff. This is like what I mean by

14:35cycling different offers right here. Now, this takes a lot of coordination, that's why you got to get on this early, and that's why I'm dropping this video in August. So, that's what that looks like, but I want to give a disclaimer as well. If any of this is overwhelming, feel free to tone things down. Now, like just because this is the most optimized strategy, it doesn't mean it's the best for your brand and your particular bandwidth. If you are tight on bandwidth, don't feel like you have to bend over backwards and cause the most stress in the world to make all this happen. You are more than welcome to

15:02just do one to three core offers. I definitely recommend having at least a early access, Black Friday, Cyber Monday offer that are different, but don't feel like you let down your whole And then you can just focus on producing really good content and delivering email and SMS at a high frequency. I definitely recommend mixing as many new offers as you can, but if any of this is too stressful, you will get worse results if you don't do it, but also you're still going to get sales from the time period and just the inherent urgency in Black Friday Cyber Monday. So, I walked through the timeline. Now, let's talk

15:30about different offers for your brand and the different offers that I like to run and I recommend mixing in some sort of mix of a few of these and I'm going to talk through a little bit about my favorites. But, one of my favorite things to do is drop something new. Have that newness built in. A new flavor, a new colorway collection, limited edition sort of stuff absolutely crushes during this time period cuz it gives people a reason to buy you rather than a competitor selling the same thing. It's a reason to care just beyond the price if you can mix in a drop into your Cyber

15:58Monday or Black Friday special collection. Anything like that, that's my absolute favorite. The one thing I highly recommend every brand does if it has multiple different SKUs, at least three SKUs, or if you already have bundles on your website, just brand it as a holiday bundle. Add some cool little gift elements in there, add banners, and have a branded holiday collection always on your website. Make it focused on seasonal and all that good stuff. It's going to lift your AOV, makes gifting effortless, and gives you something to merchandise. Here's like for example, Gymshark right here. Gifts for her, gifts for him, and then they have different bundles available on the

16:28website. Highly recommend always having that and this is something that I would launch early as October, maybe even September. And then we're going to get to my favorite. I'm going to break down some brands in a few minutes and walk through some of their strategies, but the up to X% off sitewide is the classic. You should definitely run this if you have a lot of SKUs. It's the simplest. It's easy to understand. It's easy to adjust mid-sale and adjust your pricing if you're running low on inventory or like margins are a little bit worse than you thought, whatever it may be. And it pushes people to browse

16:55your whole catalog. And so, I really like the up to X% off and I wouldn't even mind doing this for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with a different period. I'll just maybe adjust the amounts. But, that's my favorite and it's something that most brands for at least once, whether it's early access Black Friday or Cyber Monday, one of those should be an up to X% or up to X dollars off sitewide. The next thing that I like to do is stacking a free gift on top of your discount because 20% off is very basic. But if you do 20% off plus a free gift, that's completely

17:22different. And the gift costs you a fraction of another percent off discount as long as it does not cost you as much, but it really separates you from all the other brands. So I love adding a free gift. So say for example, Black Friday, you were just doing 25% off, consider Cyber Monday doing 20% off plus a free gift or 25% off plus this free gift. And bonus points if the gift is giftable itself. So then people can justify in their head. And I actually did this last year. It was a perfect justification for me to buy from a brand. It was like an extra phone case or something and I

17:48bought their core product and I was like, "I'm going to buy this for me and then I get this free phone case. Sweet. I'm just going to gift that as a stocking stuffer to my sister." So of course, I bought from that brand over a competitor. Make sure it's a gift that people actually give a [ __ ] about though. And then the other one that I would highly recommend, if it makes sense for your brand, is do some sort of BOGO free, buy two get one free, buy three get two free, BOGO 50% off, whatever it is. My favorite here is going to be BOGO 50% off because if you

18:12think about it, BOGO 50% off really is just 25% off. If you do the math, somebody pays full on one item and then 50% off the other, that means that's I don't know if this visual is helping you, but the last 50% off of the second item, that's 25% of the whole right here. So in reality, it's just like 25% off, but it sounds way better. BOGO 50% off. So I highly recommend, if it makes sense for your business, do that as one sort of thing. It's one of my favorites that you can do and it's very fun. If you are going to do dollar off,

18:37something I absolutely love, love, love that I see a lot more brands do is store credit. And so instead of saying $20 off, give people credit. It psychologically hits different rather than saying you've got $20 off because if you say $20 off, it's like I got to place an order to get $20 off. It just feels like a discount. Say $20 credit, then it feels like I'm giving you a $20 bill. Then you can have really cool urgency around like, "Hey, we're removing your credit. We're removing your $20 credit." And it feels like somebody's taking $20 from you. And that hits a lot better and it hits

19:07psychologically into loss aversion. People don't want to lose something that they own. And in reality, this is literally just a plain discount code, but we just frame it as store credit because it works better. And then, for subscription brands, you just really want to lead with subscription. I am done with the 20% off site-wide if you're a subscription brand, and then just not highlighting your subscription offer at all. A lot of brands will do this, and it absolutely pisses me off

19:30because it's such a wasted opportunity. For example, say you're a brand that gives 20% off on subscription. Just naturally, if somebody subscribes, you give them 20% off. For Black Friday, you run a 20% off sale. The common mistake I see a lot of subscription brands do is they will say they'll just advertise 20% off. But, in reality, if you do the math, if you already have 20% off, and you give an extra 20% off, that is 40% off right there. And so, instead, we want to lead with, "Hey, 40% off subscriptions, or 20% off one-time if you place a one-time order." Cuz otherwise, subscription just looks the

19:56same as one-time. So, if you are a subscription brand, I highly recommend making subscription at the forefront of your offer, and really consider that, and not leave it on the back burner. Highly recommend starting to build and build some sort of starter kit, a holiday starter kit built around your product, and advertise discount like 50%

20:11off plus free gifts, limited time. That's going to be the highest LTV acquisition offer of the year if you can get people on subscription. So, try to build some sort of starter bundle. And just to stay on the topic of subscription brands, I get asked this a lot, which is going to be your active subscriber strategy. So, for people who are already subscribed on your product, what do you do for BFCM? So, many subscription brands make the mistake in November of just blasting one site-wide offer to the whole list over and over and over and over and over again. And then, these active subscribers see a

20:36better deal than they're currently on, and these people cancel, and either place just a one-time order and never resubscribe, or they cancel and resubscribe to the promo rate. And you just discounted revenue that you already had, reset their tenure, and broke their billing cycle, which is obviously not ideal. Now, if you are fine with that, and you accept that, that's completely fine. If you're just like, "Let's just

20:53maximize sales and keep it simple." Cool, go ahead. But, I recommend some sort of balance here. I want you to exclude your active subscribers from most of your BFCM campaigns. You can do what you want, but I would recommend maybe just a couple messages towards our active subs. A lot of people are going to exclude their active subscribers completely from Black Friday Cyber Monday. I don't necessarily agree with that either. Just because these are also your highest value people. They spend the most money with you. These are your brand advocates. And they're gifting for other people. They have families and loved ones. So, if you exclude them

21:22completely, then you're ruining your chances of potentially getting purchases outside of subscription. And also, if they're your best customers, you want to include them as this. You don't want to hide your best sorts of offers. And so, I'd recommend also mixing them in for at least a few of your messages. I'm not saying send them multiple emails every single day, but I do want to include them in a few of them. But, the real big thing that I want you to do is I want to you to give them their own offer. Make an exclusive subscriber-only offer over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You're going to have your non-buyers and your

21:50prospects offer, which is your core offer, but to your active subscriber list, send some sort of special offer for their own. I recommend using add-on offers such as 50% off a one-time add-on to your next subscription order. So, this is super easy in your subscription platform. You can have add-on functionality where essentially it's just the next subscription order that gets rebilled for the customer. They're going to get this next product that you sell them at 50% off. It's just added into their next shipment. And so, that's what I highly recommend in making sure that you have something there. Now, your subscribers are the most valuable list

22:18that you own. So, BFCM should deepen that relationship. Make them feel special. Include them in on your core offer, but don't overdo it. But, focus on subscriber-friendly offer that adds subscription revenue. So, I would say in general around 25% of your sends will go towards your active subscribers. And here's like a graphic. Instead of doing this site-wide promo and just blasting to your active subscriber on every single send, instead maybe include them in a couple, but also give them a special subscriber offer to try to get expansion revenue on them. And that's what I would recommend there. That's the safest in my opinion. Now, I have a few

22:50brands here as well in showing you their example offers. We have three subscription brands, and then we have two clothing accessory brands. Let's get into AG1 in their specific offers. They actually did not run anything unique until actually right before Black Friday. Now, they were running ads towards their core offer. It's always a discount plus a starter bundle, and they were branding that and sending that all through November, but they just didn't give an increased special offer until Black Friday Cyber Monday. So, it's not like they were sending nothing. But, their special offer here was a massive discount bundle right here. And so, they had these curated bundles, which was a

23:22big percent off, 26% off your first subscription order, and you could use any of their other products right here. And it was the same offer through the whole period, but with different angles in promoting these different products and the different bundles that they had. I don't think this is the most optimized. I would probably do different

23:38offers for the different time periods. One of them just focus on the greens, the other focus on this, just so they had a little bit more urgency. But, that's something I could consider. The other thing that I do like that they did was an annual savings. So, if you wanted to bought their product on an annual subscription, a lot of times people at the end of the year, they are trying to spend a little bit. That's an offer that they pushed as well. So, really interesting to consider that if you are a subscription brand. Let's go to Create Wellness. And so, they really focused on the percent off, up to X% off. And I

24:05think that they did a really solid job here, except for I think they pushed a little bit too late in their email and SMS list on what their offers were. So, they started November 24th, and Black Friday was the 28th. And so, they started that week with their offer with early access. They did up to 53% off, and they just got people on the website and browsing. And I highly recommend that for any brand who doesn't know what to do, and they have multiple SKUs, just do up to X% off. But, the nice little twist that they add was a free mystery tub on orders $100 plus. That's an

24:34amazing AOV booster. This is absolutely awesome. I love this. Use this code, and you get this free gift. And so, it's driving AOV, and you're getting this mystery sort of gift, which is awesome. And then, they ran that same offer, but just branded it as Black Friday right here, which is generally okay. I would like to add a little bit of pizzazz, but whatever. Then, Cyber Monday, they changed it, which I do love, 30% off gummies, and they just focused on that, but it was pretty much the same core offer. And then you can see a special gifting offer that they did right here at the last chance. And this was a free

25:04offer if you subscribe to the product. And so, they mix in a couple different things there, but they were primarily focusing on the free gift above a certain order threshold and the up to X% off. Let's go to iM8 right here where they started on November 19th, ran it through December 1st right here. They

25:19have four bonus products, $118 value. And just throughout this different period, they just changed the messaging from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. This is what a lot of bigger brands do just for simplicity, which isn't necessarily the worst thing, but again, I would highly recommend mixing up the different gifts that you're giving away. Maybe have a monthly offer for one of the different periods or quarterly offer for a different period or anything like that, but you can see what they do. At the very least, make sure you brand differently kind of like they did right here. Now, let's get into some clothing brands. Now, Cuts Clothing, they started

25:48early October 31st. They just ran the same core thing up to 60% off. However, what they did was they changed the offers on the website and the pricing throughout the whole different period. So, it wasn't just like the same thing every single time. They had up to 60% off as the whole time, but different prices and different product drops throughout the whole period. That's how they were able to keep up with urgency with all the new product drops and all the new offers that were coming onto the website, which was how they were able to sustain their revenue and not do the crazy fresh new offers. Whereas Gymshark

26:18right here, this is what they kind of do every year. They have markdowns of up to X% off site wide, up to 50% off right here, which they actually launched on November 16th, but they spent some time announcing it. And that was their early access offer. And then they did an extra 25% off onto the sale for Black Friday, which I absolutely love. Early access, have your core offer, Black Friday, make it better. Then they had a different branded sale for winter sale after that right here. For the gifting period, they just had a gifting section of the website, which kept things pretty simple. So, those are what some of the

26:49big brands did. Steal what you like, get rid of what you don't like there. So, that is timing and offers. Now, let's get into email and SMS execution strategy. This is where the profit is made. We know our offers and we know what we have to do. Now, let's go to email and SMS. So, what I need to make clear is that the work you do before BFCM is what is going to pay off. If you want a record-breaking Black Friday, it

27:08starts months earlier. It starts now. This is what you should be doing in the lead up to BFCM. Grow your list aggressively. Make sure you have a banger pop-up form. Run paid traffic to collect leads on the website with your pop-up. Just make sure that you have a banger pop-up. Grow your list, run brand awareness campaigns, get people to your website, run collabs, whatever you got to do, start growing your list. Then, two, fix your deliverability. If you're not landing in the inbox, you're not going to be making any money. So,

27:31tighten your sends during this period. Don't just blast to your whole list. Make sure you're only sending to your engaged list. Make sure you're focusing on your opens and clicks. Make sure you're pushing for replies, getting people to reply to your emails so that you can get to the main inbox. Do not just blast to your whole list. It's

27:44going to mess up your deliverability. Then, lastly, make sure you are doing an analysis on your suppressed past profiles. You could have past buyers or window shoppers that are suppressed in your account right now. So, go through and make sure you unsuppress your segments for those who may be interested. So, make sure we focus on getting more profiles. Make sure we're getting better inboxing and improve our deliverability leading up to Black Friday. Make sure we bring back some of our old profiles so that we have a big, warm, and engaged list for our Black Friday Cyber Monday. That's going to be the first thing. Now, let's get into the

28:11email and SMS sending schedule. So, we know the different time periods here. Now, how much do we send? This is not the time to send one or two emails and hope for the best or one or two SMS. Email competition and SMS competition is absolutely brutal and it gets more crazy year after year as people continue to realize how much of money makers email and SMS are because they cost a fraction of ads. Um, so, your frequency is how you stay visible and it's how you drive urgency. This is the time of year to be aggressive. You are going to get unsubscribed, but that is completely

28:36okay. We are going to be recuperating our list throughout the year. So, let's go through this different period. I have this graph as well, but we have our early holiday kickoff during the time leading up from November 1st through 16th. Now, this is going to depend brand to brand, right? If you're a brand that already sends daily, then don't stop with that. Continue to send daily during this period. Then Black Friday, Cyber Monday, send 2x to 4x per day. But, for most brands, they kind of sit at three times to four times per week. And so, that's kind of like what I'm using to judge. They are like two times to four

29:03times per week. That's what I'm using to judge. Early holiday kickoff, every other day emails is completely fine. And ramp up frequency as well as the offer ends. So, as we get to days 14, 15, 16, that's where you can mix in like daily emails to have that urgency right there. SMS, every other day as well. If you only send one SMS per week, ramp that up

29:19during all of November and December. That's completely fine. And just rotate which day you send email and SMS. Just rotate during that time period. That's what this looks like right here. You have the launch right here on this Sunday. You have your gifting email and SMS. You're going to go email, SMS, email, SMS, email, SMS, email, SMS. And

29:35then email right here, Veteran's Day. Email, SMS right here until we go to closing where we have three emails and we have this closing SMS. So, that's what I recommend there. Again, if your brand that already sends daily, I don't recommend You don't really need to send any more than that in my opinion. If you

29:47want to send two every day, be my guest. I would consider doing a resend every day. So, send every day and then resend that email in the evening. That's maybe what I would consider doing. Now, let's get to early access Black Friday, which launches in the middle of November. This is where we want to go daily or five times to seven times per week and to

30:03continue with every other day SMS. That's fine. So, once we have our early access launch, which is going to be right here, you can see this red email every single day until we go to early access closing. And then with SMS, we're just going to do every other day roughly SMS and then double down right when things are ending. And then boom, now we go to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That's where we're sending 2x per day or 3x per day. You can do 4x if you want to go crazy. Take a look at your numbers. If you want an extra little push, then you can do more. But, kind of just like

30:29general baseline for most brands, have an AM send and then a PM send. Then SMS, just send one SMS per day. And that's going to be the same thing through Cyber Mondays as well. Two per day in this time period. And then SMS, just one per day. Then once we go to our gifting period, that's where we go back to kind of every other day and sprinkling in our email and SMS. So, you can see during Black Friday, two. And then on our big days, so leading up to Black Friday, we're just two right here, two emails per day, two Black Friday, two Black Friday. Then on our big days, that's

30:54where I'm going to go three. So, on the Friday and Saturday, three Black Friday, three Black Friday. Then Sunday, two Black Friday. Then we go to Cyber Monday, two emails. Then we have one, one, one until Cyber Monday ends. Now we get into gifting every other day, email, every other day, SMS. So, just alternate with that is. But, you can have increased frequency right at these shipping cut off days. These are going to be big money maker days as well. So, make sure that you have those days covered on email and SMS as well. And then we'll kind of stop and slow down after the 21st, after our shipping

31:20windows have come around. But, progressive brands, we're going to be sending daily, even up to four times emails a day in these peak days. And so, we're going to be going absolutely crazy. That is the standard. Inbox competition is super high. Again, we manage over 100 e-commerce brands, and this is how we run Black Friday, Cyber Monday. This is where we see the most success. I wouldn't be recommending something if it didn't work. If you're concerned about sending this much, well, I don't know what to tell you because it works. And again, if I was an eight or nine-figure brand, I'd probably even be sending more than this. But, this is a

31:46really good place to start. Obviously, that's a lot of stuff, and if you want to do that all, you can. Or, you can guarantee to have a successful Q4 by working with us. Even if you want us to slot alongside your current team to keep up with the volume that you want to do. There's just a [ __ ] ton of stuff that you need to do to have a banger Q4. It's very overwhelming. We have a team of $250 million email and SMS marketers that are built and trained to execute all these exact strategies, as well as extra secret sauce that we would be able

32:08to run for you. So, if you're a seven or nine-figure e-commerce brand or interested in getting some support for Black Friday, Cyber Monday to absolutely destroy your records, you should book a call. Link is going to be in the description. Now, let's go over the segmentation strategy. So, this is principle number one right here. And

32:20this is go wide with your segmentation. First thing that you're going to want to do is unsuppress everyone you can. Now, most brands are sitting on thousands of profiles that they've cut off. So, go through back and reactivate anyone who has literally ever opened an email, has ever browsed your site, or ever placed an order. And just make sure that they've never unsubscribed, and they've never marked you as spam. Super easy to just unsuppress these profiles. You can just create this segment inside of Klaviyo. Opened an email, browsed a site, or placed an order, has never unsubscribed, and has never marked as spam, but is currently suppressed. Look

32:48at how many people those are, and unsuppress them. Because if anyone's ever going to buy, there's ever a time to unsuppress anybody, it's now. And then once we have that, we send wide. This is the time of year to go [ __ ] crazy. Do not just send to your engaged list. Do not overthink this, and be concerned about deliverability. This is where we go wide. And so what I recommend is for your launches and your closes, definitely make sure that both email and SMS you send to your whole list. So every offer launch, every offer last chance, that goes to absolutely everybody in your database, no matter

33:14what, send to the whole list. Then everything in between, for those intermediate dates, I would rotate between the full mass list, and then some sort of wide engaged list. So either a wide 365-day engage, or 730-day engage segments. So you're not hammering all the cold profiles on every single send, but you're still sending a good amount to them. Now when I say a 365-day or 730-day engaged segment, that's just going to be a segment of anybody who has opened an email in the past 365 days, or been active on website, or has placed an order in the past 365 or 730 days. Now I know that may seem aggressive, or a bit

33:47much, so I want to have a note on deliverability. If you go into November with a healthy sender reputation, a few weeks of elevated volume and lower engagement metrics, even with getting lower opens and lower clicks, it's not going to absolutely destroy you. You have 11 other months of the year to recover, and deliverability you can

34:01recover faster than most people think. And the revenue you make in these three weeks by sending to these wide lists is going to be worth more than the metrics that you're trying to protect. So that's the whole reason why we start warming the list in September. We want to do that work early so that we have earned the right to be aggressive when it counts. We want to be landing in the main inbox, and we want to go crazy and be aggressive here. So this is a graphic that I put together with my friend ChatGPT of open the floodgates. So in our normal sending, we're only sending

34:25to a fraction of our list for most of our sends, but in BFCM, we're opening it up. We've got our past buyers, we've got our browsers, we've got engaged, and we've got reactivated people. That's going to make us more money. And so, our send cadence here is launch to the full list. When we're having this, we have our launches, and then mid-campaigns, we're going to have our wide 365-day

34:41engage list, as well as our full list. We're going to mix those in, and then go wide again. We're going to mix in full list and wide, and then closes, we're going to make sure we have our full list as well. And so, that is how it should look, and that should be your strategy here. And again, this document is completely free for you. The link is in the description. Also, wellcopy.net/

35:00BFCM. This is completely for free for you to have. Now, the next thing that I'm the biggest fan of, because I'm a lazy son of a gun who likes saving my time and doing stuff that works. So, that is with resending our same emails for efficiency. People are receiving so many emails. They forget what they see. A lot of people aren't even opening your emails. A good email during Black

35:20Friday/Cyber Monday has a 50% open rate. That means half the people that receive your email don't even open it. And of the 50% who do open it, nobody's going to remember if you resend the same email. So, saving creative bandwidth, send the same email. You can send the same email multiple times. It does not

35:35matter. Your customers won't remember. Even if people do remember, you think they are going to be absolutely pissed off at you? No. We just need frequency to be sure that we're in the main inbox. I just recommend making sure you change your subject line and your preview text. So, don't worry about it. People receive this email, this first send, they see it and they don't buy. You got to understand, they're receiving hundreds of other emails. They're receiving hundreds of other ads during this time period. Yours is getting buried. And so, it's very soon where your email is completely buried, and the person is never going to open it. So, we need to

36:03bump it up in the inbox by resending it. So, then, maybe this time they actually act on it. But, they don't remember it. Just make sure you have a new subject line and a new preview text right here. If you're worried about oversending to your list, which I wouldn't be, or worried about people receiving the same email, but you can also opt to resend that specific email only to non-openers of that email. So, in Klaviyo, you can

36:22actually do this, or in any platform. You just create a segment of anybody who received your prior email, but didn't open it. So, say I sent an email on November 27th and I want to resend that email on the 28th but only to people who didn't open that email. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Klaviyo, I'm going to create a segment, and I'm going to say, "Find subscribers who received my November 27th email." You're going to insert the campaign ID and you're going to say, "But that person did not open it. Zero opens." And I'm going to send to just them. You can do

36:50that. I'd recommend just hitting the same people because you may as well. Now, let's go to our email and SMS principle number three for success, which is going to be utilizing text-based emails often. Now, not every BFCM email needs to be heavily designed. In fact, most of our I wrote some of our highest performing emails. Actually, all of our best performing emails were these simple plain text emails that look like they're coming from friends. While everybody's doing these crazy blinding graphic designed emails, which are great, it's often these emails that look

37:18like they're coming from a friend. Corbin from Breeze. What does it taste like? It says, "Heyo." as the insert line. "Hope this helps. Much love." A lot of times this is what stands out. And the super flashy crazy stuff just doesn't perform as well as something like this. And so, this is why it stands out. It's different from what other brands are doing. They feel personal, like a one-to-one message, not a mass campaign from a brand. And because inboxes are flooded with graphics and promo banners, a clean stripped-down email like this really stands out. And the best part of all is that they are

37:44quick to write and easy to put together. Exactly what you need in a high-pressure, high-frequency environment like Black Friday Cyber Monday. So, a couple of tips. Make it come from the founder or someone on the team. This personal touch is going to help you stand out. So, make sure you change your sender name to like Corbin, whatever the first name is, just like this, which you can see here. So, make sure you do that. Make sure you're bolding your offers and your important info. And then have one clear CTA as well. Don't overwhelm with a ton of different CTAs. I found that across all the sends that I've done, the simplest

38:11text-based emails perform the best. And now, here's an example of a brand, Breeze, who sent 50% of their emails were these plain text-based. You can see plain text-based, graphic, plain text-based, graphic, plain text-based, plain text-based, plain text-based, graphic, graphic, graphic, plain text base. You can see 50% of sends being the plain text base. So, don't be afraid to use these. They perform the best and they save your creative team a ton of bandwidth. So, that is the third principle. Let's go into the next initiative and principle, which is going to be simplify your graphic email content. Okay? This is not the time for long story telling heavy emails. People

38:40are here for the offer, so give it to them fast. The best performing BFCM emails are dead simple. A bold hero section that clearly outlines the offer, strong CTA, maybe a few structured products and I have some great examples here for you. Long extensive emails are going to slow your production, they're going to increase your stress in an already extremely busy time. I would rather you create two super quick Black Friday emails designed rather than one really good long email. I'd rather get that frequency. So, just literally make the whole offer just right here, right in the hero, a single large CTA above the fold just like these. Keep it light

39:09on the content and use urgency everywhere. These banners, just like this, banners everywhere. This is the sort of stuff that we want to do. Badges like this, banners and just crazy stuff as much as you can right here. I'm giving you 50 plus Black Friday Cyber Monday templates just like these, which you can see, which are available if you join my community. Reminder, templates just like these that you'll be able to use for yourself. So, just look at the school community link in the description. I will definitely make it worth it for you. But, look at how simple these are in terms of it's literally just the offer right here and

39:39then maybe like some products right there. Super simple, to the point. Just duplicate this, just send this every single time, add these banners, make it special and that's what we want to do. And the same is going to apply to principle five, which is simplifying our SMS content in Black Friday Cyber Monday. Just state your offer, have some urgency, and tell the customer how to claim the offer. Super simple, I have some examples here as well. And the one thing I always like to highlight and remind people is that using images in your SMS just like these right here, having an image actually costs three times more expensive to run than a plain

40:09text. And so, consider just having those sprinkled in to give some excitement and novelty, but try to keep it simple especially if you're worried about costs. What I found is that you typically make more revenue with an image, but the ROI is typically a little bit worse. However, with the images usually your gross profit performs better. And so, usually it does make

40:26more money doing this in the long run. If you're really worried on cutting costs and ROI, then don't use it as often, but I definitely recommend doing stuff like this. You get extra space, it feels special, and it typically does perform better in the long run. You can see how simple the copy is. These creative gifts will make them do that Christmas morning happy dance. Limited time BOGO, literally just stating the

40:44offer and telling them how they get it. And hey, this case would look great on you. Get it right now for 50% off our biggest sale of the year. Bold those big points, highlight how it's the biggest sale. And then, same sort of stuff when you're using images, just highlight the offer, get it big in their face, make it branded, all that sort of stuff right here. And I've actually linked a Black Friday Cyber Monday swipe file for you right here, so you can use these and get inspiration right here. Tons of good ones that you can use. Thank you to Attentive. That is principle number

41:10five. Now, let's get into important stuff with principles number six and principles number seven that most people actually don't do, but are the most important. That's principle number six, which is going to be updating our pop-up forms with our Black Friday Cyber Monday offers. Now, you're about to get more site traffic than any other time of the year. This is your biggest opportunity to grow your email and SMS list. It's also your biggest opportunity to get your leads and be able to hit them with retargeting offer. A lot of brands will just turn off their pop-up form during Black Friday Cyber Monday. Problem with that is that you're wasting all that

41:36site traffic. The other problem is that what if somebody goes to your website and then abandons the cart? If you don't have a pop-up form, you never got that person's email, and they just leave. You don't get any retargeting. That's why it's important to have a pop-up form that gathers people's emails because we'll be able to grow our list and get a [ __ ] ton more people, but also be able to hit the abandoners and be able to send our daily email and SMS that are going to get people to buy so that they

41:56don't go buy from another competitor. But, we can't just use the same generic pop-up. Your pop-up should clearly feature your Black Friday Cyber Monday offer. Just ask for the user's email and phone number. Now, obviously, the customer does not need to opt in to get the deal, but many will, and you will grow your list, and they will convert at a higher rate because now you're able to hit people with daily emails and daily SMS and urgency if you gather their email. So, we want to use a different pop-up for the different periods and offers, early access, and then Black Friday, and then Cyber Monday, and then

42:20gifting. Make sure you match the offer timing and urgency. So, you can see right here, you literally for Cyber Monday, you just duplicate this but change Black Friday sale to Cyber Monday. Just super clear, list the offer. I recommend doing a quiz, something like this. And this is a really good sort of quiz and this is what we're going to be running for our brands. Before we ask for email, we're going to ask customer a question. This actually performs better with getting opt-in rate. Ask a simple low barrier to entry question first before asking for email. This is a really good one that you're going to be able to segment later

42:45during Black Friday since you're going to be getting a lot of new people versus repeat people. Gather that data. Are you trying us for the first time? Yes or I already love it. Super interesting. You could see like Mother's Day, so this is how you change it there. You could also doing like scratch to reveal. This is something you could do as well if you're using a different pop-up platform. And so, highly recommend or it is absolutely completely necessary to make sure that you're updating your pop-ups that you capitalize on all the extra traffic you're getting and to be able to hit people with these offers. And the other

43:09juicy thing that not many people do, but is such high leverage and generates amazing results is updating your flows for Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the juicy stuff. Now, during Black Friday Cyber Monday, we cannot just use the same flows that we're having year-round. Those flows have days in between them. They have incorrect content. They don't have urgency. They don't mention your Black Friday Cyber Monday or early access offers. So, we need to update our flows to highlight our special offers. We need them to be quicker and be high urgency. Don't wait 2 days between emails. We're waiting 2 hours between emails before we hit

43:38people. And so, the core flows that I recommend having on during Black Friday Cyber Monday and the only flows that I recommend having on are your welcome flow, when people join the list off of your pop-up form, site abandon, somebody goes to the website but then leaves, then we have browse abandon, somebody goes to the website and then they view a specific product and then they leave, then we have our cart abandon flow and our checkout abandon flow. People go to cart or they go to checkout and then they leave. Then we have our immediate post purchase flow. Now, I like to keep this super duper simple because you also

44:02have to keep in mind that we're sending daily emails and daily SMS during this time period. So, we don't need super long drawn-out flows because these people will join the list or or they will receive an abandonment email, and they're receiving like two emails a day from us. So, we don't need to have like four emails, six email long abandonment flows. I just like to have one email when somebody opts into the list for the welcome flow, and customizing that email around the Black Friday offer. This is perfect. Black Friday sale, it's happening, buy one get one 50% off, and then have a little bit of copy around

44:29here like, "Hey, we're stoked to have you join our team. Here's the Black Friday discount right here." That's perfect. Just one email, and then they're going to be receiving all your crazy campaigns. And then for our abandonment emails, just one email for site abandon is completely fine. But then for our browser abandon, for our cart abandon, and our checkout abandon, we're going to send two emails. We're going to have high urgency. We can see it's a little bit hard to see, but this

44:48is two hours in between these messages. Urgency. People are not spending too much time to think about their Black Friday Cyber Monday gifts. So, you want to hit them with crazy urgency. This first email, I'd recommend doing a graphic-based email, and the second email, follow it up with a plain text-based email. So, this is what a couple of our browser abandons can look like. You can see this one for abandon browse, which is if somebody views a product and then leaves. It says, "Black Friday sitewide sale. Checking out our nasal strips. Look at this offer. Up to 60% off, free gifts, and free unreleased nasal strips right here." You have your

45:14dynamic block right here, and then 60% off plus free gifts. That's perfect. Abandon cart right here. Black Friday sale banner. "Your item's ready for checkout. Get it today for 25% off, limited time only, buy one get one free on all sports accessories. Shop Black Friday sale." Special copy, and then even education down here and testimonials, and don't forget your offer down here at the bottom. These are perfect. Then also post-purchase. After somebody buys, just one simple message is good. You can follow it up with a second one if you want. But like this one, after somebody buys, "Congrats on

45:40taking control. Really appreciate it." Go for that immediate upsell. Now, normally for my post-purchase emails throughout the regular part of the year, I like to more go for experience. But Black Friday, [ __ ] it. Get more sales. So, "Get more for yourself or gift a loved one. Reminder, our Black Friday sale is still live. Shop now." Then following it up even a day later with Black Friday sale. "Hey, Black Friday

45:57sale is still live, but not for long." Make sure you follow it up right here. And then a cross-sells. so if you purchased a hair product, shop this. If you purchased deodorant, shop this. If you purchased this, then shop this. And these are all examples from our clients and our brands from last year. So, again, if you want somebody to manage all of this and updating these for the different time periods, then should click the link in the description that tells you to book a call. Should book a call and we'll be able to manage this all for you. And again, reminder, these all get updated based on the different

46:24offers. So, early access, all of these are going to be different. Black Friday, all of these are going to be different. Cyber Monday, all of these are going to be different. You're not going to change too much about the email besides just the offer. I'm not going to change any of this design. I'm just going to change the offer. So, if Cyber Monday is 20% off, I'm going to change it to 20% off

46:38and change Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Keep it simple on yourself and just make sure that you are updating this and you have these optimized because they make a massive difference highlighting the offers. That's the sauce that not too many people talk about. And so, to summarize our email and SMS execution, how are we executing this? So, on our campaigns, we are sending emails and SMS frequently. We are sending daily and then we are sending multiple times a day on our large peaks. On Black Friday day, on Cyber Monday day, go absolutely crazy. But, we're going to keep our content very simple and just straight offer focused. Nice and simple. Simple

47:07graphic-based emails. We're going to utilize our plain text-based emails that have no design, look like they're coming from a friend. We're going to resend campaigns. Literally, campaigns that we're already made, we're resending that with varied subject lines and preview text to maximize our reach and efficiency. And then, moving on to pop-up, we're going to customize our pop-ups for our different periods. So, we're going to customize our site pop-ups for early access and then we're going to change it for Cyber Monday, then we're going to change it for Black Friday, then we're going to change it for Cyber Monday, whatever other offers we do. We're not going to turn off our

47:34pop-up forms cuz they're critical tool for growing our email and SMS list and by capturing our traffic in these peak periods to enable us to send them daily messages and marketing. And then, lastly, our flow adjustment. So, we're going to update our existing flows with new strategies. Our welcome flow, browse abandon, cart abandon, site abandon, checkout abandon, and post purchase to reflect our offers. We're going to update them for early access and then update it for Black Friday, then update it for Cyber Monday. We're going to keep these flows short, quick, snappy. Just one or two emails per flow, splitting by only like an hour, two hours between

48:03them, and just highlight our offers and drive conversions quick. And for all these flows, pop-ups, and campaigns, I literally have templates within my community in the BFCM Vault. You can see some of what they look like. Literally weekly live calls with me to talk through your Black Friday Cyber Monday strategy, and access to the community of over 300 plus people in there. There's also a general email course in there, 24/7 community access, and all these resources. Highly recommend you check it out. If you haven't already, if there's any time to join, it is now with the Black Friday Cyber Monday email and SMS Vault, the most valuable email and SMS

48:33resource and Black Friday strategy access that you will get. But, hold your horses, we are not done because Black Friday Cyber Monday does not just stop at Q4. Really? Now, a lot of brands are just going to break even or not profit nearly as much as they want to or should during Q4. So, this is what I like to call the Q1 profit recovery system. So, how can we get more out of our Q4 buyers? Because, if we take a look here at our new customers acquired in November and December. Now, this is data

49:06taken from our custom analytics tool. It's called Well TV. All of our clients get access to it, and it includes retention analytics that you cannot find anywhere. I have to show it off because this is my baby. I love it so much. Being able to track stuff like this that you cannot find anywhere, and email and SMS specific stuff, and subscription specific things, and just insights you can't find anywhere. I'm in love with this. All of our clients get it, and so you should become a client. But, you can see right here, looking at these cohorts of our customers acquired in November and December. This is real client data

49:33right here. We see that new customers acquired in November and December show 30 to 50% lower repeat order rates than customers acquired in all other months of the year. What we see right here is this new column shows how many new customers were acquired in this month. And then right here, this repeat percentage, this shows what percentage of that cohort, of these people for November, what the 3,500 people who were new customers, 24% of them have ever come back and made another purchase. And this December cohort of 5,400 people, only 19% of people have come back and made a purchase. And then we can see the

50:05clear diff- versus the prior months, 37%, 37, 36, 29, 29. The worst cohort was 29%. And you could also see this when you look on a month-to-month basis where it's really, really prevalent. So, what this shows, again, cohort by cohort Let's look at, for example, August right here. We see that what month one

50:23represents is September, cuz that's M1. This looks at how many months from the first purchase. So, people in August, 11.9% of these 1,900 people placed an order in September. And then the next month, 11.3%, 11%, 7.6%. And you can see just how low these numbers are. So, M1, the people who bought the next month after their original purchase were sitting at literally 12 to 17%. But down here, even December at 7.2%, 9%. You can

50:49see the differences month over month. So, you see just how low these people are. Cuz the BFCM cohort is the worst cohort they will acquire all year. You need to make sure we have a strategy to win these people back. You just spent your most expensive CPMs of the year at your deepest discount of the year to

51:02acquire your least loyal customers. That's the shitty part about BFCM. They're also your least loyal customers. A lot of them were acquired on a very high discount. They came for a deal, not the brand, and nothing you've shown them says you're worth full full price. These are new customers acquired in that period. They were acquired just based on price. That's all that they were acquired on. That's all they give a [ __ ] about. It was less about your brand. And half of them weren't even buying for themselves. We have gift buyers who never even use the product. The person who used the product, if people bought

51:30for other people as a gift, they're not even on your list. And so, we needed to convince these people who bought them as gifts to actually buy from us themselves. And they bought outside their normal cycle. A gift purchase in November tells you nothing about when they'll need you again. And also, they're one-and-done by default. Now, most brands never see these people a

51:45second time, and most time you won't. And so, what this means in summary is that the revenue you booked in November was largely spent buying it. You had discounts, high CPMs, you got shipping, returns, and the only asset you actually keep from Q4 is often the customer. You have the list. You were nearly break even in this time period. So all you have is the customer. And right now, most brands let that asset expire, the customer. And they let them kind of just like go away and they don't have any sort of winback strategies for these people. So you need to be intentional

52:09about winning these BFCM customers back. So let's break down the Q1 BFCM winback playbook. This is what I have found to be the most optimized. Now, you likely broke even or close to even over Black Friday Cyber Monday on these customers. You probably made some money, but not as much as you should. So it's really important that we're intentional with getting these customers to buy back so we can really turn a strong profit. So in January, this is where you want to build the brand that you never sold them, okay? These people came in and they bought a discount. They don't know your story. They don't know your

52:37founder. They don't know your process or why you're worth full price. These people just came in off of a flashing discount. Now you have about 60 days to teach them before they forget you entirely. So I really want to encourage you in January to have a lot of nice content. Have brand story content. Have why we're different content. Do a brand deep dive series specific to your Black Friday Cyber Monday cohort if you want to. I'd recommend just doing it to your whole list because might as well, but consider doing it just to your Black Friday Cyber Monday cohort. Content such as founder story, how the product's

53:06made, what problem it solves, customer results, etc. No discount. The goal here is to get people to convert at full price to recoup our margin or at least get people to buy into us. Where maybe they won't buy now, but they're like, "Oh, this actually is a brand that I'm interested in and I like." But if somebody doesn't buy in January, we really have February and March and this is the breaking point. Now I say February and March right here because if

53:28we look at right here, this is April. Look at how much the decrease in repeat order rate drops in that month after that period. So it's really like you have 90 days to really get these people to buy back or else the repurchase rates just fall off a cliff. So this is where we're going to separate this Black Friday Cyber Monday cohort into. Did these people come back and buy again at full price? So, say in your brand building sequences, these people bought again. Or the person just bought the item over Black Friday Cyber Monday,

53:53they loved it, and they bought again. These are your real customers. Now, move them into your normal life cycle. They're just in your regular engage list. But, if they haven't bought, let's stop being patient. We've seen the falloff. Very hard to get these people. So, we're going to hit them with a very strong offer specific to our Black Friday Cyber Monday first-time purchasers cohort. Similar to what they got on Black Friday. You've already paid to acquire these people. And so, essentially, if they never buy again, which it's likely that they're not going to, you'd never get money off of them anyway. So, consider doing a deep

54:17discount to win these people back. And you could address it straight up. Be like, "Hey, you bought during Black Friday. Like, what up? Here's an even better than Black Friday deal." Something like that is what I would recommend. And watch the returns because the Q4 cohort value is not real until the returns settle. So, some brands will

54:31post negative revenue days in January. So, don't calculate your true BFCM numbers, profitability, and CAC as well until February. And also, don't view your cohort performance for the customers you acquired in Black Friday Cyber Monday until later down the line after you've run this sort of offer at the end of Q1. So, the last thing as well on that is with your Q4 BFCM purchasers, make sure that you save those people, and you can tag them, and include them in next year's Black Friday Cyber Monday list. Because if people

54:56don't rebuy in Q1, that is fine. Whatever. But, these are proven Q4 buyers. So, be sure to keep track of these people and include them in next year's Black Friday Cyber Monday, okay? Cuz they've proven that. And so, this is kind of what it looks like. November, you got a Black Friday Cyber Monday buyer. They bought on a discount. Lower break-even profit is what this looks like. January then. Okay, let's build the brand. They don't know much about me. So, let's do founder story, product stuff, customer results, all that sort of stuff. Try to convert them at full margin. If they didn't buy, I don't know

55:20why I sounded British there, but if they didn't buy in February and March, we're going to see did they buy again? Then they're real customer. Cool, no problem. But, if they didn't, I'm going to hit them with a very strong win-back offer right here. And just make sure you're tracking your numbers throughout this whole entire period. And that's what

55:35this win-back playbook looks like. There's a lot of other advanced stuff that we'll want to do in this period to get these people to come back. We have a lot of cool advanced strategies. So, don't just think that we're done at Q4. Now, that does it. If you want this document, it is available in the description. But if you want to guarantee a successful Q4, we went over a lot today. It's going to be hard for you to execute this on your own. Why don't you just chat to the experts who can execute this for you? So, you should book a call in the description below to

55:58work with us. Hope you got value from this video. I'm going to have some more Black Friday Cyber Monday videos. So, if you're watching this in the future, take a look at some of the other content that I'm posting cuz there's going to be a lot of good stuff. And make sure you check out all the links in the description. Thank you so much for watching this video, and I'll see you in

56:11the next one.