The 3-Week Email Plan That Wins Black Friday w/ Fil Pejic
Kurt and Filip break down buy-two-get-two offers that crush percentage discounts, why five emails on Black Friday is actually conservative, and the three-week framework 8-figure brands use to win Q4. If you're planning to send a couple emails on Cyber Monday and call it done, this episode will make you rethink everything.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you. instead of your competitors. And forty-five thousand stores already use it. And it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to Git Swim dot com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com. Welcome back to the unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Today we are discussing email. Well, all right, not just email, Black Friday email strategy, Q4 email strategy. Black Friday's almost here. Right around the corner, I have a guest today who is going to walk us through an email strategy, tactics, tips. And he's a good person to do it because he is sent. half a billion, 500 million emails just this year for his clients through uh Bedford Marketing. Joining us is Philip Page. Phil, how you doing?
Fil Pejic
Hey Kurt, doing well, thanks so much for having me. Big fan of the pod, excited to be here.
Kurt Elster
I am I am happy to have you, because when we talked before. I got in the pre-interview, I got excited about, you know, a lot of the the advice, your opinions, tips, experience with email. That's always a good sign. So I want to go go over that with you today. And let's see. Where should we start? Hmm. Well, okay. It's already, it's late October, you know, almost Halloween when this is published. Is it is it too late or is it like I could scramble and do okay now?
Fil Pejic
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So if you're kind of like a brand that's just figuring it out or super early days uh and you're looking at the holidays. I don't think it's too late. I think it's always worth kind of tempering your expectations as to what you're gonna get out of Black Friday. But It's always good to kind of go into it and say, hey, let's see what we can do this year. Let's test, let's learn, so that the the years that come after, because many more will come. that you're even more prepared in the future. So I wouldn't say it's too late. I would say depending on your brand size and scale and what you're trying to accomplish from an offer or new arrival standpoint. that you kind of set out, hey, let's try these few things this year. Let's put kind of a simple calendar in place and let's try to execute on it and um keep it simple and I'm sure you'll be fine.
Kurt Elster
I like I like keep it simple. You know what I don't want is people we go, hey, here's a million co like advanced tactics you could do and then people get overwhelmed and do nothing. Right? Do nothing is the only bad option here. Sending anything is better than nothing, most likely. Um so well give me give me a temperature check for the rest of the year. You know, we have seen uh some stores where it's like it seems like overall Conversion rates tend to be down, you know, in general, you know, not necessarily for everyone. And so maybe their Q4 is higher stakes, you know, for us just in our our agency professional services. Like we have we've been up this year, but really like a lot of our growth has been Q three, Q four. I'm wondering if it's the same for your e-commerce clients.
Fil Pejic
Um, I would say it's definitely a mix. Every year we go into it with some clients who are struggling, and then we also have a cohort of clients who are doing really well. I think regardless of where you are as a brand, um, as far as like how the year's been, because I was just at e commerce fuel last week or two weeks ago and There's a lot of folks in the room who are who are very smart, very experienced, and they're struggling. And so I think regardless of where you are on that spectrum Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and just the holidays in general is important. It doesn't matter who or what you are. It's just a question of kind of how aggressive and what are your goals. for the holiday season and making sure that you're kind of really clear on that so that when it when you get to the email marketing stage, which should obviously come after kind of your ads and your funnels and your new arrivals and drops. you're really clear on like, hey, this is what email needs to do for us. Um and so yeah, a lot of our clients are coming from that perspective and we're doing our best to build kind of plans around that so that they can Ideally execute and grow out of Black Friday and not in turnarounds with the harder times we've had this year.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. So I want to know, well, what tools do you use? I assume that most of these folks are Shopify Clavio.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, for the most part, we've got clients on Shopify, Clavio, we've got a few clients that are working with attentives, Postscripts, YachtPo's of the world, and a few others. But I would say like the line share is kind of like a Clavio Shopify stack for email and e-commerce. And then SMS is a little bit all over the place.
Kurt Elster
The do you have a preference for SMS?
Fil Pejic
Um personally, I'm a huge fan of keeping things simple. So I tend to lean towards telling clients to stay everything on Clabio just because you can mix things together. I will give a shout-out to like the Postscript team. They're doing really cool stuff to kind of push the bar. There's a few other like smaller companies doing interesting stuff, like the Librar covers, the One Text of the World with SMS as well. But I think brands should be looking at and seeing if it fits for them. Um, but I I'm biased to keep things simple. I don't have any like monetary contracts with Clavio that pushes me to say that. I just like, like I said, keep things easy.
Kurt Elster
So you told me when we talked earlier that a lot of brands can really make their hit their Q4 goals in the first half of November before we even reach Black Friday. Explain this magic.
Fil Pejic
I think it's super realistic for some brands. It's obviously not going to be every brand that can kind of hit like whatever their goals set out, because it's obviously a factor of what you set your goals to, but Um, from my experience, most brands are not being aggressive enough earlier on in November. They kind of see Black Friday as the only moment to go aggressive with marketing, go aggressive with email, update the banners on the site But more and more over the last few years you've seen um anywhere from smaller brands to the most sophisticated brands. Basically the second Halloween ends Um that next day is holiday season. And I'm even seeing this year a lot of brands are kind of treating Halloween as the early holidays, which is super interesting. Um, and so when we work with brands, what we've uncovered is, hey, when we set up a proper strategy in place that's differentiated from BFCM, Focusing just on early November. Um, for a lot of brands, we can kind of hit those initial targets that they might have had for Black Friday and that period after Black Friday. We can get a lot of that revenue very early on, get take a lot of their customers kind of out of the funnel really on early on and then kind of build a whole nother layer of revenue going into BFCM. And it's also nice because they'll get the revenue earlier on so they can reinvest that directly into the holiday period.
Kurt Elster
So I'm wrong in if I'm thinking all of my emails and my sends happen on just Black Friday or you know like that week. It's really I believe you break November up into three separate periods.
Fil Pejic
So for the most part, the way I look at it with brands is there's like two, three weeks before Black Friday. We look at that as kind of one period. We look at The week leading up to Black Friday, uh, and maybe a few days like that weekend and that week leading up to Black Friday as one period. And then we have kind of the up until shipping deadline. So it's like December 1st or December 2nd all the way until shipping deadline. I kind of look at it as like three sprints and we work with brands within each of those to figure out what's the right promotional cadence, what's the right like new arrival cadence, and just email cadence in general. And I look at each of those as separate time periods. And then within Black Friday, we also look at that in its own little universe. But that's how we approach it at our agency with our clients.
Kurt Elster
You touch on a little bit. I want to understand content mix. How much of this is promo versus non-promo? What are we actually sending here?
Fil Pejic
I guess we can go deeper into this, but every brand we work with will kind of start off the conversation of what's coming in the brand, like what is new. Um, because at the end of the day, like everybody wants to make kind of sell new arrivals and sell out limit edition new products that are obviously high margins. So we'll always start with that. We'll look at what's an actual like blockbuster new arrival. in the sense of when we drop this, are people gonna go crazy and buy this? Um the best brands are building your arrivals around the holiday in that way. So we'll first layer those into the calendar. From there we'll look at what their promotional strategy is in general and we'll look at Week by week, what sh what can we be doing that's interesting around um their best sellers, around things that maybe they're trying to stock out of that they have too much inventory on? Or they just want to lower inventory from a cash flow standpoint on things. And then just like general sales and like special days throughout the month that we want to hit on. Um so we'll look at it from a promotional angle. And then the last piece is like, hey, we've kind of built up the calendar from a promo and um new arrival standpoint. Is there anything else? Is there like gift guides or any other kind of types of content that we want to build in on top of that? And that's basically like the bottom-up approach of like how we build out a calendar. So it's less about like, hey, let's get a 30-30-30 like three-way split like perfect 33% split across the three promo and your arrival and non-email promotional content. Sorry, non-promotional email content. It's much more about like what do we have and like let's build onto it from like a profit first standpoint and then kind of set the calendar that way.
Kurt Elster
It's an are you sending you once you've determined what this content is, what these emails campaigns are, are you just sending this to the entire list? Do we do any segmenting here? What's the strategy?
Fil Pejic
Uh every brand is different. I would say for smaller brands throughout the holidays, you definitely want to ramp up how many emails and to how many people you are sending and kind of also pull up your engaged segments. So if you're used to sending to a 30 or 60 or 90 day engaged, you probably want to pull that up a notch just to get a little bit of a broader cohort for your big sale days, your big new arrival days, for the end of sales. uh we're we're typically blasting the whole list um as long as the list is obviously like rightfully cleaned. Um and that's like the smaller brand strategy um for the bigger brand strategy ideally the brand is um When I say bigger, I'm talking about the eight figures, the nine figure brands of the world. You likely have like many different hero products and different strategies for every product. So Look like this is where you'll get a lot more involved with like the brand teams and figuring out what their objectives are. But in an ideal world, there's some level of segmentation within each of those products. But those products should be layering on top of each other within your sales. Um, and it should be relatively straightforward on like who should be getting what campaign or who should be getting a more generic campaign. within those promos. Um and then for new arrivals, definitely there's like some level of segmentation. So if you look at apparel, for example, whether it's a new arrival that's for men or for women, we can play around with different segments there as well. That makes sense. But in general, smaller, less segmentation, bigger, definitely a lot more segmentation because relevance does matter a ton at that scale.
Kurt Elster
Let's walk through I want to walk through an example for a brand. Uh give me one that do you have any hobbies? Do you have a brand you like that's not a client that you're just but you're familiar with? Um I'm trying to think.
Fil Pejic
We could talk about like from a basketball. I I play basketball a lot. What's that brand? Vicatree. I forgot how to say their name. They do like the shoe and soles. Uh that's that's the first one that comes to mind. They're definitely not a client, but they're an interesting company.
Kurt Elster
Oh it's victory.
Fil Pejic
Victory. Okay, that makes more sense. There we go.
Kurt Elster
It's victory, and then they took out the vowels and used a K. Okay, great. I like it. Victory. So we're gonna use Victory in Souls as our example. They're we're gonna run we're gonna brainstorm there you're welcome. Victory by the way. We're gonna brainstorm a a campaign here. What is our And we're gonna do November. What's it look like? What's our we're gonna start with a assume an early bird sale right after Halloween Think through it with me.
Fil Pejic
Um, so the first thing, like before we even hit sales, I'm looking at like what's new. I'm assuming Victory is like iterating their product, maybe like What I'm willing to bet with a product like this, because it's all about I'm just looking at their site really quickly, but um it's about like jumping higher performance. Uh I'm willing to assume like a lot of like parents buy this for their kids. So it's probably a really awesome holiday gift because kids want to be better at sports. They want to be like the superstars in basketball. Do do the highlights the same way. So I could see gifting being a big thing. And so this season's probably like they probably crush in this season. So I'm thinking like A like new arrivals. Like ideally they're launching like some upgraded version of their products or they're launching some sort of maybe collaboration with NBA players or someone like that. Um that's definitely like what I want to layer on first. Um and just make sure like, hey, new colorways, holiday colorways. These are all like really awesome and like simple high margin emails that I want to see them sending. And let's just assume like those are all out of the way. Um, I'm probably starting to look at like, okay, what's what's happening on a promotional standpoint. And feel free to cut me off here, but I would say to start, I definitely want in the first week to go after probably some of the higher uh AOV customers. Um what a lot of people don't think about when it comes to um promotional planning is within each brand you have different cohorts of spending. Um you have your higher end customers, your middle end customers, and your lower end customers, your higher end customers, they want to spend they can spend more money, they have more discretionary income. to spend your middle tier, they're probably buying like your average, they're your AOV customers. And then you have kind of your lowest end customers. That's like your deal shopper. They'll always come and pick up the stuff that's 80% off or seven 70% off if you do that. Coming in early into the month, I'm probably looking at, okay, for a brand like this, how do I win over those like like customers with bigger discretionary balances? that want to like buy maybe multiple. So I'm probably exploring with them either some sort of interesting bundle offer or working around like buy one get ones or buy two get ones or whatever it is. I'll probably play around with that to start in like the first week. Um going into this or and maybe we'll just start with the buy one, get one offer, buy one, get one 70% off. That's interesting.
Kurt Elster
BOGO kills. Like especially for an apparel brand where you could do like, you know, you sell socks, hats, like the t-shirts. If the unit economics make sense, BOGO's great. And even like buy two get one's great. You know. And in Shopify with automatic discounts, these aren't tough to do anymore.
Fil Pejic
A hundred percent. It's like Shopify has made it so easy, which is super awesome. And like I look at like a lot of like the the supplement brands and they get a lot of hate. Um in the e com world, but I think they do a lot of things really brilliantly. And you look at some of them will do crazy offers like buy three supplements, get like five free, and like insane stuff like that. And They're not just doing it by accident, like it works. So when I see like crazy offers like that, I kind of try to scale it down a little bit and say like what's like an insane offer that actually could work within the scope of like brands I'm working with. So like We've got one brand this year we A B tested earlier on the season, like a buy to get to. Uh so you buy two of of the X product and you get to for free.
Kurt Elster
Um and like it's just
Fil Pejic
It's just amazing margin for them because there's nothing being discounted. Uh, and it's it's it's basically buying two, whereas the AOV, like the average um order size is a one unit. So they're basically doubling their unit size, plus they're getting basically all that margin on the second skew, and then they're giving up some margin on the third and fourth, but their like cost per unit is low enough where it's like totally upside for them. So
Kurt Elster
That's really clever.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, so if you're a brand like um like you said and you haven't tested BOGOs, you should be testing BOGOs. Um but yeah, that's probably like my week one is Hey, let's test like a little flash sale. Like let's test like a two, three-day BOGO offer. Um, let's try to take out some of those higher income people off. Um the next one I'm doing is Uh and maybe it's like a more aggressive like buy two, maybe it's a uh or even like a spend tier, spend over 200, get an extra. like uh insole for free. Um we could play around with something like that and then maybe in the second week we go on like a buy one BOGO, which is just getting the person who would usually buy one. Let's get them to buy two. Let's push them up one tier.
Kurt Elster
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Fil Pejic
I I guess sorry to interrupt you, but like I would actually look at it a little bit different, like I don't want to just dump all my new arrivals in the first week. Um typically like with new arrivals, I wanna intersperse them throughout the month. I want like almost like a checkered pattern. I want like new arrivals and promos coming in and out because The way I see November, it's just like a bunch of holiday shopping dopamine hits. And if I just do all my new arrivals up front, all of my folks who might be looking for an offer, I'm kind of Kind of giving them nothing to work with. And if I just do offers, there's nothing new. So a lot of my like old school like customers, they're also gonna be like annoyed.
Kurt Elster
I don't have a reason to buy even if it's a good deal. Okay, I got you.
Fil Pejic
So let's like intersperse it. So like week one, let's do a new arrival and let's do the buy to get to offer to get like a little bit of both.
Kurt Elster
Smart.
Fil Pejic
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Cool.
Fil Pejic
And then week two, I'm that's week one.
Kurt Elster
And then week two, I'm I'm I'm flip-flopping it. I'm doing the same thing.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, so I'd like for a brand like this, let's launch like partner some sort of partnership like let's let's let's partner with the Golden State Warriors and the Lakers and the Miami Heat. Let's drop some like exclusive limited editions that are in like super tight inventory situations that we can kind of push and make feel special so that people feel like they got a deal that's not coming back later on in the month. Um and then let's once again let's try to get a different tier of customers into our um into like the the from a promotional standpoint. So maybe we could test like a more simple buy one, get one, or even just like a spend tier offer, spend Whatever, $100, get a free, um spend $200, get two free. So that we kind of appeal to that customer who doesn't need four insoles. Maybe they just want one and we can convince them to get two. Um the nice thing about insoles is like they go bad every five to six months. So like you will need more.
Kurt Elster
Um good.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, and if I give them two, like they'll be back next Black Friday and I can retarget them. So I'm not too worried about that. It actually works out in my favor. Um, so that's probably week two. I would say that's like reasonable. Um week three is like where we're starting to get like a little more juicy. I would say ideally like are like one of our best launches probably are not our the best, but if they have like let's say like a new like an upgraded version of their like in Souls, like let's launch that the week before BFCM. Um and then let's also experiment with like that like um lowest cohort of customer who we still haven't really spoken to. Let's exclude anybody who's purchased all throughout the month. Let's exclude some of our higher AOV customers who have purchased in the past. And let's like try to target the folks who have been discount shoppers. over the last couple years um or who've never purchased and let's do whatever we can to get them into let's get them out of the funnel let's get them to buy some things so that's where I'll do my like up to percentage off discounts or Um some really cool like gift with purchase offer that's that's like irresistible. One of my favorites.
Kurt Elster
Gift with purchase.
Fil Pejic
Exactly. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Especially you said like, hey, if you've got like a limited edition thing. If you make the gift with purchase a like some exclusive, that does really well. Like one of my favorites was um Hoonigan often would do uh enamel pins. But the enamel pins you could were never sold on the site. You could only get those as a free gift with purchase and they would change them. And like one of the the best campaigns we ever saw was they changed the pin each day for five days. I think was how it worked, like over Black Friday, to really incentivize like you have a a bonus reason to purchase in addition to, you know, all the other campaigns that were going on.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, I love that. Uh I think that's like such a smart strategy. And the reason I love it is because I look at like, once again, these like little dopamine hits, but also Forcing people to open your next email is so important. So when you limit things to one day at a time and you properly communicate, like hey, this expires at midnight. And tomorrow something new is coming. It forces them, it forces that like inherent like FOMO and curiosity, but also urgency all at once. So that it's like, hey, I need to check every email from this brand because I like these products. And like I want to get the best possible thing. So I love that. And coming out of what you just said, I will call out like one huge caveat like for all the brands listening who are like Hey we have like 16,000 like whatever old insoles like let's just give with purchase it because why not? uh we need to get rid of the inventory.
Kurt Elster
I would just give GWP's distressed inventory, right?
Fil Pejic
I would just give a really uh may maybe add maybe add that as the second gift with purchase on top of something that people actually want.
Kurt Elster
Like at 50 get X, at 100 get Y.
Fil Pejic
Maybe or maybe just give them two gifts with purchase because realistically, like that thing they're over inventoried on, this is just me guessing. I don't know people's situations, obviously, but most of the time it's like it's a slow seller. It's not like It's not something that your customers want necessarily. Exactly. For the most part. Sometimes brands just are having cash flow problems. And if that's the case, run that gift with purchase. That makes sense. Why not? But um I see a lot of brands try to push through an overstocked slow seller. And if you think that's gonna work in Black Friday, I would like Put like a really big asterisk like watch out because it probably won't and you'll probably be disappointed with your performance. Um you should look at more creative ways. Um things I see brands do is like mystery gifts and like I said, layering on multiple like put put one favorable gift and then also tack on that extra like less favorable gift and that way at least it feels like someone's getting a bunch of stuff Um, I'm not a huge fan of just like pushing crap onto your customers. So like ask yourself, like, is it worth it or should we just throw this stuff out and like sell higher margin, better products? Um, so Big strategy question to ask and like everyone's situations are gonna be different, but that's kind of my POV.
Kurt Elster
We've got uh week one, two, three. And we're just doing, you know, new novel and various campaigns with a focus on AOV. Like all the camp not one time have you been like, hey, 25% off the site wide. It's been spendx get why bO uh so like bundle discount or uh you know sp spend like tiered discount would work too where it's like yeah we're do it's site wide but there's like wide sale percent off but hey spend more and the the discount amount goes up. I like those two. See so I appreciate the the focus on AOV as opposed to, you know, I can get a great conversion rate if I just go, yeah, everything's 50% off, right? But I'm probably not gonna make a lot of money doing it. So What um that gets us up to the big day. That gets us up to Black Friday week. What are we what's our plan there? And w like these past email, were we segmenting them? Like if someone makes a purchase, or then are we gonna segment them out? So we're not like, hey, that thing you just bought's now on sale? Yeah. That's what I always struggle with. It's like, do I want to see if they'll purchase again? Or do I want them to not feel the burn of, hey, it's now on sale?
Fil Pejic
Um I never know. It's it's a great question and it's something to like test within itself. Um for that's the reason I start with like my bigger offers earlier in the month, and when I say bigger, I mean like appealing to higher AOV customers is because if you stagger it downwards, um you're offering like a offer on like a bunch of products, which is like gonna be your highest value, but also ideally your highest margin offer. And then the next week it's like uh for two products. And so that's less value per se to the customer. So even if that first week person who bought sees that again, They're not going to be annoyed. And then that third week, you have like the offer kind of on one product. And so that person who bought four, like, they don't really care because they're like, hey, I have four of these things. Like I got a sick deal. Like, I don't care about you, one purchaser. Folks. Uh, and so that's kind of how I see it is like staggering it.
Kurt Elster
You should be segmenting out people who So hire requirements at the start of the month. It's not a set set rule.
Fil Pejic
It depends all on your brand, but that's how I like to play around with it and just like set like sequence it out just to like keep it kind of like in a like like I said in a simple format. Um like for some brands it's not realistic, like in like maybe you're in like the apparel space or something and you're really like drop heavy. There there might be different kind of types of brands, but for this specific brand, that's how I play around with it because I'm guessing they just sell a ton of insoles and like I don't know if they sell other things as well. Um, but I'm guessing that's kind of how they look at it or they should be looking at it. Um and then I would say like we definitely want to be excluding at least people who've purchased in like the last like seven days during BFCM. Usually I'm much more aggressive with like exclusions from sales. Um, but during the holidays, like people do repeat, they do come back. So once BFCM comes, I just want to make sure whatever that offer is. Uh it feels like something special and limited time so that even though those folks maybe purchased early, they don't feel like they got screwed. Um, so that we can actually hit them with an offer again, and then that way we can actually get them to purchase one more time. And if you're like a bigger brand and you have like loyalty programs and stuff, this is like gravy for you because those people probably collected points and they've got another excuse to like spend those points now. Um especially in like the apparel world. That's a big one.
Kurt Elster
Hey, what about brands that refuse to discount? There's always some and they make a they really pat themselves on the back for not offering you a discount. That's what always baffles me about that approach. I get that like the you know how some brands operate. But the email that's just like it is so smug in them not giving you a discount.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, uh I mean if you're in that cohort of brands and you're listening right now, you're probably like typing like an email or like a tweet to me being like, oh, this guy, like he all he wants is like discounts. Um but uh I think um I I don't disagree um with some brands who stay like super like non-promotional Um the obvious example is like the luxury players in the world, the the really, really high end, because inherently like that consumer. wants to pay for full price and they want to feel like people can't afford that product. So when they see a discount, they almost feel turned off and they don't like they don't want to shop with that brand anymore.
Kurt Elster
I think those brands could still do like a free gift with purchase exclusive.
Fil Pejic
And and that's what I was gonna say. Like, I mean like if you shop at Gucci, like Gucci will send you like uh come to the store, like here's like a special we'll give you a like a special gift or we'll give you like here's like a $200 gift card uh and it's not a discount but it it really it kind of is so um I guess like high level like what my thoughts are. There's like a there's a there's definitely an outlier like cohort of brands who probably don't need to discount. Um that being said, the brands who are listening who are like um were better than discounts. I would just argue like you're probably leaving a ton of money on the table by not testing it. You should use Black Friday as a as a moment to Not like agree with me, but like kind of prove yourself wrong. Um, you can take 10% of your cohort and try to run a promotional calendar against them and actually see like, hey, like if I run this sale, um just for these next two months, run a couple offers on this cohort. Come next November. Let's take a look at that cohort over a 10 month stretch. Did those people come back and purchase more or less than the average cohort who doesn't get promos? And you should have like a statistical opinion on whether or not makes sense. I think on average when I hear brands who don't promote promo, um for the most part, I think they're being too conservative. And when we do end up testing, usually the data like favors running occasional promos just because whatever uh in America I live in Canada people love discounts here people want discounts at every tier at every customer spend cohort every household income Everyone loves a nice offer in Canada and and I I I know the US is no different from working with my clients. So my my like comeback to that is basically like, hey, like go test it. Like Neither of us is correct. It really depends on your brand. Um, just like we test like offers for the brands we work with, you should be testing offers on your brand and understanding Like am I right on this or am I making like a really big mistake? Because the upside could be two to three X growth because you're kind of building in these really big peak moments for your brand that are also driving other benefits for you that you don't even realize.
Kurt Elster
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Fil Pejic
Um I'll share like an interesting anecdote, which is um I recently interviewed a candidate for a role and I won't say too much about like what market she was in and like what country, but she basically like worked with like like a Netflix equivalent. Um and she said that on Black Friday they sent 30 campaigns just on Black Friday. with like insane levels of code like uh segmentation. But um and that's really just to like illustrate at the scale that like Netflix is where and this is just for one country that that she was operating in. Um, they have such a big list and like so many cohorts of users that it makes sense for them to spend the time building out 30 different email campaigns just for one day because the ROI is I I I hope the ROI is there for them. So um that's kind of like the perspective of like if you just like slide the scale to like the biggest possible list, like that's what like the really, really sophisticated brands are doing is they're going really aggressive for Black Friday. I would say for um for for us, like our like most aggressive brands, we're doing five emails on Black Friday. We're doing three on cyber on like on Saturday, three on Sunday, and then um anywhere from three to five on Cyber Monday as well. And the reason for that is like these are literally the biggest. like like the biggest spike days of the year. And we've tested this in past years of like sending more and it it always drives more revenue. Um, and so five is like what we're doing now for most brands. I don't know, we might do a podcast next year and I might say, hey, like that wasn't enough. We're testing seven now. Um, but that's kind of what we're testing now, is like if we push to five, where does it land? Um and if you if you subscribe to like a lot of like the bigger apparel brands, a lot of the bigger homeware brands, gifting-based brands. Just just watch what they do this year and you'll probably be surprised by how many how many text messages and how many emails you get just in like a 24-hour span. But yeah, that's basically our approach.
Kurt Elster
But i I agree with you. You know, the answer is send more and you know November, December is just a free-for-all on inboxes. But people still get nervous about it. They rightly want to protect their audience. And so how do what are the signals that they're going too far, that they're they're burning their list? And what do we what metrics do we look out for? How do we Help give people the tools to be confident in sending more email.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, for sure. Um, I would say like first things first, the ROI needs to be there. If you look at last year, maybe you sent two emails, take a look, like how much revenue do those emails actually drive. And is there like a return on investment? Like if I pay my agency to make three more, um, will there be an ROI there? And that's the first question I would ask. From an actual like metric standpoint, I kind of see Black Friday as like multiple days in one. And so like you can break up Black Friday into three days, you could break it up into five day, like five, whatever. three to four hour increments. Um and people are behaving differently at every hour of the day. They're at work, they're at night shopping. They're doing late night before midnight urgency shopping. But the metrics I'm looking at, um, at least this year, is definitely like um the normal metrics. So we're looking at opens, we're looking at clicks, we're looking at how much revenue. And then I'm also just looking at like Shopify. Like basically once that email sends out, it's got like a one or two hour half-life until like your old news. Like like people have already moved on to other things uh and they're shopping um they're shopping for other stuff. And so that's how we're approaching it. Um and From there, we're able to assess like, was it successful? Should we have sent more? Should we have sent less? Um, we are keeping us an eye on unsubscribe rates, because that's probably what you're hinting at. Um, I wouldn't um I wouldn't say we've had like major unsubscribe issues, um, at least for most brands that we did like three, four, five in the past years. It's literally never been an issue where it's like, oh, we got a bunch of unsubscribes, like people hated us. And the reason for that is very simple is you send good content. Um Black Friday is not an excuse to just send garbage to your like customers. It needs to be intentional, like the content needs to be interesting. And every campaign should have should be either a build on the last one or it should be something different or unique. Um I've mentioned it a few times in this podcast, but like I see it all as kind of like dopamine hits. So it's like how can we make every email on that day? unique and like break through the inbox and get people to open um and differ from the last because if someone opens the first two and they're the exact same the odds that they'll open the third, fourth, fifth are very small. But if you can be more creative throughout the day with different types of content and just get people excited to open those emails, all the better. And then there's also like the reality of like people aren't around all day on Black Friday. You might have like a three-hour window to hit And if you don't act in those three hours, like that customer has six hundred other Black Friday emails in their inbox and like you don't exist. So the odds that they'll even see those is like very little. Like I don't think anybody goes back and like clears out all their Black Friday emails because it's just gotten so ridiculous at this point.
Kurt Elster
The, you know, for me it's unsubscribe season. That's where I find everything I've been subscribed to and start picking out the ones I don't want anymore. Um, but okay. It sounds like, you know, on that day, because there is so much noise, I need to stand out. I think the the signal is going to be subject line and to a lesser extent preview text. So how give me your thoughts on subject lines because I know you got them.
Fil Pejic
Uh I have a lot of thoughts on subject lines. Um I see so many brands make so many errors. So I'm happy to share like If it's interesting to you, I can share just like some simple like starter frameworks of like things that we approach. Um so When it comes to subject lines, like the 80-20 approach is one, like keep your subject lines short. Um, I get so like I get so many big brands that send me like a novel. Like it's like a sentence, sometimes two sentences long in my inbox and I can't open it. Like uh as a as a marketer, like you should be looking at everything on your phone. Unless your demographic is like 70 plus, then like maybe you should be looking at it in like AOL or Yahoo or something like that. But like if you open your emails on idea like an iPhone or an Android, you'll see like how much copy people can actually read in the subject line. What I see so many brands do is like they'll put this novel inside of the subject line. It'll get shruncated with those little like dot dot dots because it can't squeeze the whole message. And then by the time the person opens the email, they're no longer looking at that subject line. They're looking at the content. So essentially what you've done is you've just created, um, you've just created content that no one's going to read. And when I look at the preview text, what basically like 95% of ECCOM people don't realize is the preview text, when it gets cut off in on your phone, like when it gets truncated, so like Whatever you have like five, six, maybe seven words to put into that preview text on the on on like the Gmail app, for example. When that preview text uh gets truncated. It can never be read again. So when someone clicks that email and they open the email, the preview text doesn't show up anywhere. It it's disappeared. It's gone. The whole concept of it's a is a preview of the email. So Gmail doesn't show you that. So you basically once again created content no one's going to read. So if you compound those two things, you've created a long subject, a long preview text, you've basically written all this copy, you've gotten your bosses to approve it. and whatnot and nobody can read it. So the first thing first, keep it simple, keep it short.
Kurt Elster
Um character limit.
Fil Pejic
Character. So I I look less at character limits. Uh I'm like kind of old school. I usually what I tell my team is like five, six or seven words max. But those words better be short. If you're using emojis, you should almost treat an emoji as a word. So like one emoji plus like five short words, like that's fine. Um That's how I look at it. Less character limit because um it doesn't always work and then preview it on your phone ideally like multiple phones send it to a colleague um uh send it to whoever and like ask send it to your c customer at least and like look at it how it looks like on their phone. Um and that'll give you an idea of like, okay, this is like this is long enough. It's not getting truncated. It tells the story I want to tell before I get my click.
Kurt Elster
Um the second piece lines trying to get a brief sensical subject line. Never will you overthink anything more than trying to do those subject lines.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and we've spent a ton of time in our agency. Like we've got like like infinite numbers of like inspiration and ideas, and we're always saving like subject lines we like.
Kurt Elster
I'm sure you have a like a six spreadsheet swipe file.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, we've got swipe files. Um, but more importantly than a swipe file, like, and I can share some of this. I've got like some notes here, but Um we like we have like frameworks for like how to disrupt the inbox because every campaign is different. So you can't always use the swipe file and like steal stuff necessarily, you kind of have to always reinvent yourself because I find like with subject alliance, just like with everything else, people start to copy each other and stuff starts to feel old. A lot of brands like they stick to a structure over time and it's always the same, it's the same, it's the same. But at the end of the day, a subject line, like it needs to disrupt, it needs to feel different because you want to win that click. to get people to open your campaign. And your campaign also needs to disrupt and it needs to get people to click to your website and ideally buy what's new on your site, whether it's new arrivals, whether it's a promo. etc. So it really does all start with that subject line. So if you're not like treating it as poetry and like giving it love, um you your open rates are gonna be worse. And it's a very simple mathematical equation from there on how that impacts at the end of the day your bottom line.
Kurt Elster
So when a yeah when the dust settles, Cyber Monday rolls around, and then we're you know, we're still going 'cause it's like Black Friday we're running our sale, Cyber Monday we're running our sale. What are you looking at after the event when a client says, how do we do? Like what's the what are the metrics you point to to say this did or didn't work?
Fil Pejic
Um so typically with clients, we'll look at like what their targets are as a total business and also for email coming in. Um we'll look at like how well did they sell through their like whatever hero products that they were looking to sell through. Um, and then we'll look at like any tests that we did happen to run, um, any holdout testing. We'll try to see like, was that a good idea? Was that a bad idea? And then lastly, we'll look at just like list behavior. How engaged were people? Were they clicking? What got the most clicks? Black Friday obviously doesn't like the holidays doesn't stop at Black Friday. Um, but that's usually a point where we assess like, okay, the next like twelve, fourteen days, do we feel good about what we're doing or do we need to like make like an urgent correction, of course?
Kurt Elster
Alright, let's walk through another exercise. You could send five emails. What are they?
Fil Pejic
Okay, so is it like November, December, or when when when are we what what what are my what's my criteria?
Kurt Elster
It's gotta be in the next six weeks.
Fil Pejic
Uh the next six weeks. Okay. Um I think if I'm like this brand like um victory first thing I'm doing is definitely like the like a new arrivals like a release um along with like Probably some level of like bundling in there as well. Um, just because I don't have a lot of emails to work with, so that whole like strategy and hierarchy like obviously doesn't make sense. Um, but I think early on what I want to do is just have a barely big early November like blockbuster release and also include that into a bunch of bundles. Um, try and still capture those like bigger hire hire a AOV cohort kind of customers. Um that's probably the first thing I'm doing. Um Probably the week before Black Friday or maybe even like mid-November, I'm definitely running some sort of a special offer to capture anybody who hasn't purchased my new product. And who's never purchased? Um uh and then possibly some customers who haven't purchased in a long time, um, just to see like, can I pull some people out of the market? uh and like just like clear like clear some folks out of my funnel. Um and that'll be like ideally a very different offer from whatever's coming in Black Friday so that people don't get pissed off come Black Friday. Um so that's two. I think my third email, obviously my third email is gonna be Black Friday next. That's the biggest sale day of the year, so I want that to be kind of like a blockbuster promo that I've ideally tested at this point. Um Cyber Monday, I'm hitting again. So I'm making my Black Friday sale four days long. My Black Friday, I'll probably put some sort of special offer just for Black Friday. And then on on Cyber Monday, maybe I'll switch it up a little bit with a different Gip with purchase like we talked about. So that'll be my fourth email. And then my fifth email. This is super brand specific, but I kind of leave it as like a placeholder promotion opportunity, basically like coming out of Cyber Monday. I'll let the brand figure out how are we doing on inventory, how are we doing on like our sales numbers and like do we want another promotion or do we want to do like a really gift guide heavy Hey, like last chance to shop before Christmas kind of thing. Uh, and it'll either be like a promo to clear out inventory we have too much of, or it'll just be a really simple like gift guide and like reminder of what makes our product special and why it's like the perfect holiday gift. I don't know. That's kind of where I'm thinking. Do you think I missed anything? I'm curious.
Kurt Elster
Well, alright. I agree with all of those. And then, you know, if we if we take the handcuffs off Of, you know, five emails over two months. Why you could also do shipping deadline in December, um, you know, like last day for guaranteed Christmas delivery, and then on On Christmas, you know, you could do we always do like didn't get what you really want. Um, and then you could either offer people like a gift card or just, you know, a another another s like specific sale to try and get them to buy. Because often people have like on Christmas Day, maybe they got gift cards, you know, maybe they're they're in a good mood, but just n not enough people try and do a Christmas Day sale. And so I think it's and like inboxes are quiet that day. And so I think it's a a missed opportunity for a lot of folks.
Fil Pejic
Yeah, I agree. I think uh I think there's a lot of people who are like alone on Christmas and like they're looking for like interesting things to do and like um there's people who uh maybe they're traveling or maybe they're like in some weird situation on Christmas and like you could still talk to those customers or even that like post-Christmas meal, like everyone's kind of tired and like wants to take a nap. Maybe you could hit an offer during that. Like you could do cool things and like play around with that. Um I was I saw Ezra Firestone talk a few weeks ago at ECF and like one really cool one that he said was like a countdown to New Year's sale. Um we're gonna be testing that with a few clients this year, but I thought like what a brilliant idea cause you're kind of mixing this like concept of like urgency. end of year inventory, like last chance to like get your like New Year's resolutions in. You kind of like bundle that all up and like tie that up with like the natural like anticipation of new year where everyone's kind of like nervous like crap another year's coming kind of thing. And so you pull that all together. I I thought that was like a brilliant concept for sale. So shout out to Ezra. We're still on that one.
Kurt Elster
The yeah. No, as re he's really good and he's done um I know he's done seven figures on just like single day Black Friday uh with with Boom in the past. Uh he's been on the show. We've done this same style episode with you we have done with him uh in years past. So I always make sure to do like a marketing episode. Um okay. Well, if I wanted to hire you to handle these things for me in the future, where do I go? Tell me where we could find you.
Fil Pejic
Uh so bedfordmarketing. co. Um we've got a website you can reach out. I have a Twitter account, Ball and Phil. Um, filled with an F. And then for those of you guys who are like not looking for an agency, but you love email and you're like, wow, I want to like hear everything. I don't want to like nerd out on this stuff. I actually have a like a newsletter and maybe Kurt you can just link it. It's like a beehive link, so it's kinda hard to type out. But if you can like it, But I go really deep into like and like all the topics we talk about, like I nerd out very in-depth, as you could probably tell. Uh and so you that's probably the best place to find me, honestly, if you want to hear me kind of rambling on Twitter or work with our agency, like more than happy to chat.
Kurt Elster
Beautiful. All right, I will include all that stuff in the show notes. Uh Phil, alright, one last one. Give me your single favorite subject line. You get one.
Fil Pejic
Single favorite subject line.
Kurt Elster
It's just three eggplant emojis. I bet the open raid is wild. They're like, what is this?
Fil Pejic
What I found is like a new arrival and a sale email subject line will outperform like almost any creative like funny cute idea. People just love those.
Kurt Elster
Don't be clever. It never works.
Fil Pejic
So that's like the sad truth. But if you're like, hey, like I'm on my like fourth sale email Um, I think anything that's like shock or curiosity driving is like always so interesting. Like something crazy that like you're just like, what the hell? Like I just got off the phone with the US Senator or something like that. And you're just like, wait, what? And like it's just like it's just you have to click on it. Um that's probably like one of the better ways.
Kurt Elster
You say I just got off the phone with the US Senator made me immediately go, you did? Exactly.
Fil Pejic
And that's that's really like the art of subject line writing is like that needs to be like once when you read a subject line, like it needs to be like gears turning in people's heads of like, wait, I have to open this.
Kurt Elster
It's curiosity driven, but like it it's really tough, you know, to come up with something that is, you know, clever, clear, concise. Harder than you think.
Fil Pejic
Yeah. So I don't know, maybe a future subject line episode we can go through and like riff on like some really crazy ideas, but That's my challenge to all the listeners is like how do you spark that? And if you do that going into holidays, you will like you will beat out like all your competitors, at least in the inbox, which is a really nice thing.
Kurt Elster
That's all good advice. All right. Philip H. , Bedford Marketing. Thank you so much.
Fil Pejic
Thanks, Kurt. Really appreciate it. Hope you have an awesome PFCM, everyone.
Kurt Elster
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