The Million-Dollar Week
Today we're dissecting a Black Friday bonanza. Join us as Sean Reyes of Shock Surplus, a previous guest and a Shopify Plus success story, takes us behind the scenes of their record-breaking Black Friday. With a cool million in a single week, Sean's insights are nothing short of gold dust for anyone in the e-commerce space.
Sean reveals the nitty-gritty of their promotional strategies, from tiered discounts to email campaigns, and how they leveraged Shopify's capabilities to maximum effect. We dive deep into the psychology behind consumer discounts, the importance of strategic planning, and how a shift in promotional tactics led to a 40% increase in revenue.
Sean's candid sharing of their journey – from a non-promotional stance to a finely-tuned Black Friday strategy – provides invaluable insights. If you're looking to understand the impact of well-crafted promotions and strategic preparation on e-commerce success, this is a must-listen episode.
Kurt Elster:
Back again on the unofficial Shopify podcast. We're going to talk about Black Friday a second time, but this time we're going to dive deep into specifics. We're going to do a case study of sorts, Sean Reyes of Shock Surplus, who was on a few weeks ago to tell us about their success growing their dropshipping store to 30 million on Shopify Plus is going to break down their Black Friday. We're going to talk through a real life example here and see what we can unpack. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, Tech Nasty. And as you already know, this is the unofficial Shopify podcast. Sean, thank you for doing this a second time. How did I trick you into doing this twice so quickly?
Sean Reyes:
I love getting into the nerdy details on these podcasts. There's a lot of just generalities and as a longtime listener of podcasts, I'm like, where are the F are fricking specifics. So being where we're at, I just would love to, if you guys want specifics, I'd love to give 'em.
Kurt Elster:
Alright, well then let's start easy. How did Black Friday go? How was your Black Friday?
Sean Reyes:
Before I get into how it goes, I'll back up a second and say that we were usually never ever the promotional people, we were never the promotional company. We figured that during Black Friday, conversion rates would always just usually double or triple, and so why not just reap the benefits of that? But over the past couple of years, we got into more of a promotional strategy, mainly because people like Nick Sharma, his voice would always be like, if you're not promoting, you're really just not in the game. And so we always reap the benefits of just better conversion rates. But over the past couple of years, we've put a little bit more thought to the promotional strategy, especially around Black Friday and some of these bigger holidays Last year we
Kurt Elster:
Put a little, so what we're hearing in the past, you half-assed it
Sean Reyes:
Pretty
Kurt Elster:
Much maybe intentionally or unknowingly. And then this year you said, okay, what if we go full in on Black Friday, run the promos, do the thing that they're expecting? And I'm thrilled. You mentioned Nick Sharma. I just booked him. He will be a guest on the show. Nice. In the next I really like 60 days.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, I really like the stuff that he's kind of putting out, but some of it's new. Some of it's just kind of been around in the e-commerce space, but so last year we did kind of a side wide promotion, just a blanket discount on everything, and that worked okay. But this year we really started back in September thinking about campaigns, thinking about getting those campaigns designed, thinking about all the things leading up. That usually takes a while. And if you're using an email agency or any kind of marketing team, they want to know ahead of time so they can develop the flows, develop the campaigns and whatnot. So this Black Friday, we did 40% better than we did last Black Friday, and we had our first million dollar week basically Monday to Monday was just huge for us. So big success, I had a lot of anxiety leading up to it because of all the work we did thinking wondering if the juice was going to be worth the squeeze, all this work, was it really going to be worth it? And I think we answered that confidently that yes, it is worth all the work behind it.
Kurt Elster:
And was this your first million dollar week?
Sean Reyes:
It was, yeah. Yes, it was. It was quite surprising for us. For me as well, we knew there'd be some lift just because the year has been up about 15, 20% over 2022. So we were kind of expecting maybe around the same thing, but seeing a 40% bump over the previous year was incredible for us. Yeah.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. 40% and a million dollars in a week, I'll take it. So you said that surprised you. I mean obviously you knew
Sean Reyes:
And our most profitable, when we talk top line, everyone always wonders how are the margins, right? You can give away the farm and not make any money, but it was also our most profitable Black Friday as well in terms of gross profit margin, so as a percentage of the sales. So that's another big win for us.
Kurt Elster:
Well, wait, why do you think it was more profitable?
Sean Reyes:
Just because the amount of total discounts that we gave out versus top line mixed with the ad spend. That still, we came out way further ahead of every previous Black Friday for sure, because previous Black Friday we gave away a 5% side white discount, and sometimes that's, this year only ended up being about four and a half. So we squeaked out a little bit of a head. But in terms of the amount discounts given away the ad spend to get those customers, the acquisition costs compared to top line revenue, it was about four and a half percent. Whereas previously it was closer to eight.
Kurt Elster:
This is crazy to me because I'm not getting out of bed for less than a 15% discount. What were these promos and offers that people were like four and a half percent take my money?
Sean Reyes:
Well, we did some. So previous, the whole idea of do you give a flat dollar amount or do you give a percentage amount, usually a flat dollar amount looks bigger to the, and there's always that hypothesis. It depends on your industry, depends on your product. RAOB is typically $550. So 5% of that, you're looking at about $25, $27. And so we tested back in September during the Labor Day sale, whether people were more attracted to a 5% offer or a 20 or $25 offer. And naturally people are way more attracted to the $20 offer. Our $20 offer is double what we usually give our customer on a kind of an email sign or $10. So to them they're like, oh wow, this is double what they usually are offering. So for them it was like double the discount, even though in retail a 5% discount, it's like a joke. And so we're like, okay, well let's try the flat dollar amount because it actually is more attractive to the buyer and it's actually a win for us. And so I'm sure some of our customers are listening right now, they think maybe they got, but it works much better for us where our AOV is really, really high.
Kurt Elster:
So what were the promos and offers? This sounds like tiered discount.
Sean Reyes:
So we had tiered discounts really trying to incentivize because we have a lot of customers and a big audience of people that three months, six months, two years sometimes on these windows of people waiting to buy a thousand dollars, $2,000 or $3,000 item. And so we have a tiered discount where the first tier is 500 to a thousand dollars and then a thousand to $2,000 and then $2,000 if not where the three different tier discounts. And the first tier was 50 bucks off, second tier was a hundred dollars off, third tier was $250 off. So we were really trying to capture the market share of people that very, very high end that I know everyone is waiting to make their big purchase of the year on their vehicle. So we hear from these customers all the time, especially six months leading up to it, that they're waiting, they're waiting the economy, what's the economy going to do? All these kind of things that are in the customer's mind. And so we really try to incentivize everything above our A OV and really went back from that perspective. And we really didn't discount much at all below our A OV because margins are a little bit tighter and we generally don't want, don't really, we're not trying to attract the Amazon price shopper to our
Kurt Elster:
Business. And so a typical purchase for you would be something like coil overs, like, Hey, I want to replace shocks at springs on my vehicle. I want that adjustability or that tighter ride. And what's a coil over kit typically cost, just to give some frame of reference here.
Sean Reyes:
So on a popular truck like a Tacoma or F-150 or a Silverado, I'm sure a bunch of listeners have one of those three vehicles, a coil over kit and rear shocks are in the thousand to $1,500 range on the middle of the road. And then we have high performance versions, the 2000 and $3,000 range. So pretty big, really big purchases. The other thing that really worked for us is letting, this seems so obvious right now, but maybe not letting the customer know that you are going to do a sale. That was something we previously didn't do either.
Kurt Elster:
You'd say,
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, well obviously people expected during Black Friday, but we didn't. When we were on the other side of things not wanting to discount, we're like, well, we'll throw a sale and everyone should be happy that they got one right. It's a little bit arrogant, but nowadays it's like you're competing, the retail is a war, so you're trying to get all the attention that you can. So we really started ahead of time, maybe not even early enough, but at the beginning of November we started sending out campaigns and letting people know with a top running banner in the email that, Hey, there is a Black Friday coming up. These are the dates. Read our blog posts so you're prepared. So that was another thing that worked pretty well for us.
Kurt Elster:
So you mentioned, actually, you know what I want to know, how would you set up your homepage when you're sending people to the site for the promotion? It sounds like tiered discount. What's that homepage look like? And then are we using landing pages?
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, so the homepage, that was one thing we kind of, I would say dropped the ball on. We didn't have, our homepage is very much not product focused. It's a hero banner with lifestyle image. And I think the way we've built our business is very much not, it's not really product focused. And it is kind of been that way for the past few years where we really focus on the lifestyle. So our homepage has always been lifestyle imagery, blog posts on learning and some of our other just lifestyle we stuff we do as a business. And so the homepage, we didn't really change it up really at all to show a Black Friday sale going on or show a popular item or whatnot because one of the things we really pay attention to is you might have a sale on this vehicle or this vehicle's item, but it doesn't matter to all the other customers that have a different vehicle. So popular products, most recommended product, sometimes it didn't really work well for us. And so our first thing is get into the vehicle finder land on your category page and there is where we would show different sale items or the blog post about what the details are. A lot of our ads were delivering to the blog post outlining the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. So people will land on the blog post, see the immediate discount codes and understand how it worked for them at that point.
Kurt Elster:
I can't believe you put your landing page was a blog article.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, yeah. I mean that was all the pre Black Friday, cyber Monday and then during the sale of those, call it five or six days, it was a lot of going to the category pages of different brands. So our Bill Stein search campaigns, all of those delivered to the Bill Stein category page box delivered to all the category page because that way choose your vehicle and then your results would get squashed down to what was applicable to your application.
Kurt Elster:
And then for people's reference, how many products or skews in this catalog so they understand the issue that aftermarket automotive drop shipping phases?
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, we've got over a hundred thousand SKUs on our site. There's some catalogs out there that with over 2 million, and so showing exactly what fits the customer's vehicle is the first step in the user experience. And so I really keep that in mind when I deliver a user to our site, get them immediately into their vehicle so they understand what's available. The price tiers and guaranteed fit is one of the biggest trust building factors for us. And so I really think about that as a core principle rather than delivering them to an item that a might not fit their vehicle. It might be on sale, but once again, if it doesn't fit their vehicle, then they're let down and they'll bounce.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough one where it's like, all right, I want to spend $1,200 on this item, but I don't need it. And so if I'm not, my life is not going to change. If I slam my 79 Volkswagen Beetle, I really want to, but for $1,200, I better be real sure those parts are going to fit my car.
Sean Reyes:
Exactly.
Kurt Elster:
And so I have not pulled the trigger my vehicle, it rides too high, but okay, focus, Kurt tiered discount is one of my favorites. You're a fan of tiered discount. How do you determine the tiers? How do you figure out what those thresholds in the discount strategy should be?
Sean Reyes:
The tiers are a little, I want to say obvious, but you have your factory replacement stuff zero to 500 on most of our truck vehicles. 500 to 1500 is very much the entry level performance setup. And then beyond that is all high level high performance spend a lot of money. These people typically don't really have a budget they want, they just want the best for their vehicle. So we have understood this for a long time. And so building the discounts, we have that very much in mind. We also have done a, I don't even know what you want to call it, but you lay out the different price levels in a sheet and when you apply the discounts, a $50 discount at $999 is, we'll call it 5%, but down at $501, it's a little bit more. So as the discount, as you get higher in the tier, that flat discount gets kind of smaller, if that makes sense as a percentage.
And so when you cross the threshold into the next tier, that a hundred dollars discount, call it $1,001, is now one 10% of that item, of that $1,001 item. And so in retail where you're like good, better, best, it's kind of that same situation where you're trying to get people to step up to the next tier, something that they wouldn't have really thought about. They were shopping an $800 item, they were shopping a $900 item, but to get them into $1,100 item, a $1,200 item, you give 'em a really big fat discount to move them up. And so that happens $800, that 800 to $1,200 tier, that happens a lot in that space. And then when you get to an item that's $1,500, $1,700 to get them into that next level of $2,100, $2,500, you give 'em another fat discount. So that just crossing that threshold, they're saving a lot more as a percentage of their total purchase. So we really thought about that mainly because we know the customer extremely well. We know that's behind their thoughts and their budget concerns. And so for us, that's how it worked out for us.
Kurt Elster:
Now in Shopify, I could rattle off six ways you could implement that discount system, and they all have their pros and cons and just based on different limitations, how did you implement your discount strategies? In Shopify?
Sean Reyes:
We did it through manual codes, which I'm not a fan of because people forget the codes. People have to go back to the landing page or remember the codes. So
Kurt Elster:
Or worse, they place the order and then they email you, Hey, I forgot to put the discount. And now you've got to deal with like, all right, well we'll give you a partial refund.
Sean Reyes:
Yep. Yeah, so we were backing up a little bit with Shopify. We're on Shopify Plus, we wanted to get to checkout extensibility and start testing a one-page checkout. But by the time we were kind in that space to do it, it was already late September, early October and just a bad time to make that kind of changeover, even though everyone said it's simple whatnot. The reason why I'm talking about checkout extensibility is because you could run, once you switched over to that, you can run numerous automatic discounts, whereas by default, Shopify only lets you run one automatic discount. So that wasn't really going to work for us on Black Friday, so we had to resort to just custom discount codes, so we had to custom discount codes on the blog post. We had all the codes popping up on live chat, so if someone was on a product that said Bill Stein on it live chat would pop up and be like, here's your discount code. Check out the details here if you want to know more. And so all those different, we try to spread the touch points out all over the place. I think one thing I definitely learned for next time is getting the discount code on the product page itself through a meta field maybe below the picture or next to the add to cart, or we'll figure out a way to make it better so that the customer isn't hunting for it. They had to
Kurt Elster:
On Amazon, they've got that checkbox where they go like, oh, you can essentially, it's coupon clipping. It's like click here and add this offer and it's like 10% off. And of course you're going to do it, but if you don't, they don't apply it. I would love to do that on Shopify.
Sean Reyes:
That's such a good point. I mean, we saw a lot, we were surprised how many orders came through that were eligible for discount codes and did not use 'em, which really says just a ton about consumer psychology because they see the blue banner on top saying Black Friday and Cyber Monday, maybe discounts are live or pricing is in effect or sale is happening. And so they maybe automatically think that the price that they see has the discount already built into it.
Kurt Elster:
I think you might have, I don't know the details of the tiered discount itself. I think you might've been able to do this with line items and script editor. That's going away though. And I think you, with automatic discounts, you could do product discount based. It's like this collection of products gets X percent off minimum this price, and then you say combined with product discount, and then if there's more than one, it applies the higher of the two. And so for doing tiered threshold, I think you could do it with automatic discount. I'm sure there's limitations and weirdness. Every discount method has some limitation to it, and that's how we did it on a different site.
Sean Reyes:
Gotcha. This is one of where we learned some things on ours because we had an automatic discount tier in the 300 to 500 for certain items. And so when people were adding those items to their cart, they would have the discount applied, but then if they cross into the 500 to a thousand dollars threshold, they weren't able to apply the manual discount code. So we had a little bit of a fallout there.
Kurt Elster:
Okay. Yeah, see there's always something.
Sean Reyes:
Yep. Yeah, so we had a little bit of fallout there, not that much, but definitely learned a lesson there.
Kurt Elster:
And well, what was the impact on average order value? Positive or negative?
Sean Reyes:
Definitely positive. Our usual A OV is about $550 during the year. Actually it's gone up to five 70 now, but five 50 is, but what we've been working with as that's what's been in my brain as a baseline for our just store in general. During the sale period, it was up at seven 70
Kurt Elster:
Or
Sean Reyes:
Basically all of November, not even Black Fridays especially. That kind of dragged it up quite a bit, but seven 70, it's a huge increase and that was a 20% increase over last year's A OV. So last year's A OV was still pretty good. I think it was like six 50 or six 80, so top line went up 40%, but a OV also went up about 20%. So we didn't just pump more of the low margin stuff
Kurt Elster:
Off. And on Black Friday, sometimes you see a big influx of people just because of all the promotion and conversion rate goes down. Other times you see, hey, we saw there were all these people waiting for a great offer and now it's here. And it's like I was deferring this, I was going to buy a supercharger and I deferred that for eight months and now's the time, I'm not going to do better than this. And conversion rate goes up. You have enough of those people in the hype. Did you see conversion rate up or down?
Sean Reyes:
Conversion rate for us was definitely up over the trailing six months. Remarkably though it was down over last year. I think we discussed this on maybe the last podcast, but our re-skin of the site to the new theme last October, that kind of skewed the results a little bit. But yeah, conversion rate for us was down this year during the sale period. So yeah, kind of surprising there, but up for us compared to this year. That makes sense. So down versus last year up versus this year
Kurt Elster:
And Yeah, I wouldn't, as long as revenue is up and AOV is up everything, all the revenue metrics point up, I wouldn't get too caught up in conversion rate conversion. Just it's so dependent on other factors that it's one of those metrics that it's like you love to see it go up, but also take it with a grain of salt.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, I think our Facebook traffic versus last year was up 250%, so we had a lot more, we didn't have, I'd say we had a lot more middle funnel stuff happening, a lot more remarketing this year. We had a much bigger funnel kind of already built up on the brand from more top of funnel ads from the prior six months. And so I think that helped out a lot as well.
Kurt Elster:
And in the last episode at the end, you mentioned cart bot, you said, man, check out cart bot if you want to do free gift with purchase. I love free gift with purchase and we've had the most reliability using Rebuy to do it, but Reba, it's a complex app and so not super beginner friendly and that's a good thing it could do so much. The app we had been using, which I won't name, I think it struggled with the amount of traffic on Black Friday. So this previously very reliable app suddenly was not adding to as many carts as it should have, which was upsetting. So now it's like, all right, and you had just told me about Cart Bot, I'm like, next year I'm going to try that one. So did you do free gift with purchase?
Sean Reyes:
We did not do that. We have, yeah, we don't. Mainly because we ran out of hats otherwise we would have,
Kurt Elster:
Is that what it usually is? You get the cool embroidered shock surplus hat
Sean Reyes:
Pretty much, yeah. Our merchandising game this year has been pretty weak or flexing that next year, but we've been using Bot for, to minimum advertise pricing. The brand says that this has to sell for a thousand dollars. We all have to sell for a thousand dollars. And so how do we add more value to that purchase? That customer may not see elsewhere, whether buying it directly from a brand or another retailer. So we use Carbo to be like, here, here's an extra $200 in value if you buy from us, we know the economics of that purchase. We know they come back and redeem that $200 of value that are going to gain another $800 in top line and $400 in profit. So giving them that $200 upfront is still $200 more profitable for us. And so we've kind of carbo is doing that for us and through the sale period rather than delivering them a free gift with purchase, which we want to do. But yeah, have gifts first.
Kurt Elster:
The other thing we noticed this year is the clients where the really successful sophisticated people that we know are running promos no matter what. Some of them were down year over year on Black Friday and consistently in a majority of them it was because they had just been running early bird sales more aggressively this year than in the past. And so then once you did like, alright, let's look at the last 60 days, then you see the real result versus just looking at that very brief week or less long window of Black Friday. Did you do any early bird sales? When did discount season start for you?
Sean Reyes:
We did do an early bird sale, mainly because we have a very specialized item that the map of that item is $800, but it's kind of hard for the customer. They can't it themselves most of the time. And so we take that $800 item, we make it easy for the customer, do some value adds on it and sell it for a thousand dollars. We've been doing this for about two or three years now, and competition has caught on and we know this is a very hot item just in the industry, in the category as a whole. So we looked in,
Kurt Elster:
I'm dying to know what the item is or even category.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, it's a stein. It's called the Bill Stein 61 12. And it's a very beefy shock. It comes with its own springs, but it doesn't come fully assembled, boil over does. And so it just springs and the shock. But the shock is just it's extremely undervalued in the market. Other competition are priced at a thousand dollars for the same item and Bill Stein is priced at $800 or seven 50, and so very extremely good product. And so it's already attractive for that. And then we make it even more attractive by making it easier to install. So what we did and what we've been doing, I hate to give this away, but basically all year we've been cornering certain applications. We buy out the country of them, and so we we're the only ones with those items. And so now rather than selling it, that's
Kurt Elster:
Diabolical. It's a serious inventory forecasting.
Sean Reyes:
We know that we have extremely accurate 30 day demands, not even for ourselves, but just for the country as a whole. And so we look at dad and in September, October and in November we just buying up all that product. And so our early bird sale was like, Hey, we've got this in stock and we're giving you a deal on it. And so we were already known in the space to being one of the people assembling these products. And so one just that brand awareness helped out a lot. And then the discount on top really helped us move all the inventory that we had piled up
Kurt Elster:
Those springs on when they're loaded. I mean you could kill somebody with those things. That's why this is so it's like, oh, you have to assemble it. Not as easy as that might sound.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, yeah, Google coil, spring compressor, memes, there's a lot of ridiculous stuff out there.
Kurt Elster:
Mechanics, as soon as they see that spring compressor, they treat that a loaded gun because everybody has that story, at least if you're in a shop. So what was customer response to that early bird sale compared to the main Black Friday event?
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, I was happy with it and we kind of did what we predicted, but in terms of the Black Friday sale being way, way ahead of expectations, the pre early bird sale was kind of met expectations, if that makes sense. But we did start that. So that helped out flatten. What we were really trying to do is flatten the curve and get the early attention there because I know that a lot of other stores, a lot of other places were going to be doing frankly, bigger discounts than us. And so by securing the product, not allowing all the competition to sell it, it was one of those things where I know that was more of a play to secure the sales and limit competition rather than blow expectations out of the water with big numbers, if that makes sense.
Kurt Elster:
No, absolutely. I think the early bird sales never have the dramatic numbers when you're in it looking at it. But then in December when you go back and look, you realize like, oh, in total, that really had quite the impact. Even if we're robbing Black Friday a little bit to sell earlier, but Black Friday essentially, I mean there's people deferring purchases as soon as September waiting for Black Friday. So I think you're spreading it out. I'm a fan of just, hey, increase that frequency, those impressions, that opportunity for yourself. And when you have a genuinely valuable offer like you did for the right person, then it's just great for everybody.
Sean Reyes:
And there's actual manpower that goes into these items as well. So we were really trying to, somebody's got to do
Kurt Elster:
It.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, we were actually really trying to flatten this curve so that we didn't have more hundred assemblies that we needed to get done during the Black Friday and post black Friday week. We wanted to literally spread that whole workload and all those man hours over two weeks, two or three weeks rather than just in that week period. Because eventually you let customers down, which we really didn't want to do.
Kurt Elster:
And then I want to switch gears. I want to talk about email campaigns. Surely email was a huge part of this success
Sean Reyes:
Attribution, right? And Klaviyo is obviously going to claim tons of attribution for us.
Kurt Elster:
Well, anything that those attribution reporting that's third party is going to be like, Hey, we think that person thought about us. That's our revenue. You're welcome.
Sean Reyes:
What's funny is our Klaviyo dashboard average click array and place order rate is only fair. It's only the yellow. There's excellent, fair and good.
Kurt Elster:
Yeah, they help you benchmark it, but it's like, what are you benchmarking me against everything Clay always sells up Slack.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, exactly. So our clickthrough rate has always been fair and our place order rate has always been fair or bad, but like you said, conversion rates are only part of the story. It's really revenue per recipient or revenue per customer. If you could maximize that, then some of these other metrics are very secondary. And so we opted for, we use Flo, they've been great for us and they were really on top of things. We usually deliver four to six campaigns a month. Black Friday we opted for the 12th campaigns. And I think that really played, I think it played a big part. I think we talked about this on the last podcast where email has been around so long, people really don't think it really does much with your building a list and all of that. It's almost the oldest form of funnel for e-commerce, but I think it's one of the ones that work the best still. And so we had just for November in general, we climbed up. So we were usually trailing at about 23, 20 4% of revenue through email. For November. We did 32.5% of revenue through email. So a 7% bump during the Black Friday or during November in general. And for email in general, just under a million dollars email revenue for November compared to a 2.9 top line. So yeah, that's kind of our performance there.
Kurt Elster:
How many emails went out versus what would you normally do?
Sean Reyes:
Usually do six emails. We did 15 emails if we include, so 12 emails, three SMS, and that's another thing. SMS, we've been slacking. SMS has been really big, but we haven't got our SMS kind of thing humming as well as our email campaign. So 12 campaigns basically for all of November
Kurt Elster:
12 campaigns. And we send some SMS. Yeah, SMS is interesting. They're resistant to it. You got to pay by the send. It feels like a little different and invasive, even though at this point our inboxes are just a free for all. But with SMS, I think it's just so easy to overthink because you're capped out at less than tweet length. You really can't distill an email down to just a tweet's worth of text. Hey, sales, like Black Friday starts now. Shop shock surplus link. Not too tough, but a lot of people are like, I got to pay to send it, skip it. It worked out for you.
Sean Reyes:
SMS was 3% of $950,000 of Klaviyo attributed revenue, if that makes sense. So revenue recipient was 75 cents. Campaigns themselves did 360 thousands, did 560,000, which is surprising flows
Kurt Elster:
Were surprised by flows out flows, outperform campaigns.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah,
Kurt Elster:
That's wild.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, we've done, all I've been building is segmented flows for brands, vehicles. Well, just those two really over the past couple years because language in this industry is very much, are you a truck guy? Are you a Toyota guy? Are you a car guy?
Kurt Elster:
Yeah. It's so locked into the brand and the category, even though it's all fundamentally the same thing, you are engaged in motorsports involving two to four wheels, right? There should be so much overlap there, but they're like, you're into Honda Civics, I'm into trucks. We are not friends and we know nothing about each other. Don't talk to me about that. Insane. But at the same time, I get it, you want what's relevant to you and it is just really niched down. It'd be like going to a jazz person and trying to sell 'em Jay-Z tickets. It's like it's not the same.
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, our whole ethos has been around user experience and the farmer in the Midwest doesn't care about Baja Racing, doesn't care about West Coast Toyotas and doesn't care about a commuter on the 4 0 5 freeway in Los Angeles.
Kurt Elster:
I'm interested in all of those things and the farming too. Why not?
Sean Reyes:
Yeah, those guys are great because you get them once and then you have another four or five purchase for their other vehicles. And so we really think about those acquisitions as well.
Kurt Elster:
Alright, what I want to know now, having seen this success, when you really focused and you did this first million dollar week best ever Black Friday, what are you going to do differently next year?
Sean Reyes:
So next year we're going to hopefully have all these automatic discounts in place, or at least the ability to do them. We will make it very obvious on the product DL page that A, either this is the discount code to use, or B, make it automatically applied in the cart, put the languaging there that it is going to be automatically applied into the cart right next to the add to cart. Some of these technical requirements, our team is pretty small, and so it was hard to execute all the big wishlists, but knowing what we know now, knowing all the discounts that were missed, knowing the, I want to say we didn't really see too much of, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the AZA cart wasn't that much bigger. So I think a lot of people really thought that They see these people have been shopping for a month or two seeing one price, and then when they come here for Black Friday, they still see the same price and maybe didn't understand that you had to apply the discount.
So we didn't really see a big add to cart boost like I was expecting, but the increase in conversion rate made up for that. So more automatic discounts, I think a little bit bigger of a heads up or more specific messaging to those buyers because if you're shopping, this is my kind of idea, but if you're shopping at a store and you understand everything's on discount, you still might not understand that the item you've been shopping gets a hundred dollars off or gets $150 off. And so if you've been shopping a certain item, you get a remarketing campaign in Facebook or an Instagram being like shock surplus, here are the tiered discounts, it still doesn't, it might still not connect that your item is going to receive $150 off. So I think next year we're going to do a lot more focused remarketing efforts to be like IB, you get $150 off.
Or for the iBox shopper, if you've been shopping this Bill Stein item that's going to have $250 off, rather than just throwing everyone in the bucket of here, the discounts available, go, we don't know. You go figure out, were shopping. Yeah, we don't know what you were shopping specific. We do know you were shopping specifically, but we didn't have the campaigns to communicate that we understood the customer that deep, which I do and we do, but we didn't have all the deliverables lined up with how I would usually like to do it. So we'll get an even bigger head start next year to make that happen as a big thing.
Kurt Elster:
And as our takeaway, it sounds like for you, black Friday was preparation meets opportunity, and this was the year where you're like, we're really going to prepare for this, and you had that million dollar week, which is like the coolest ever. What's the one key takeaway you want people to have from this episode? What's your advice for other Shopify merchants?
Sean Reyes:
I think really incentivizing a OV. Just if you think about average order value, you already have so many people, your audience, so much of your audience is ordered because of the average. Those people are already going to convert buying. They're in a buying mood. So you're average consumer, you're just going to get whether a hundred percent more of them, 150% more of them, whatever your conversion rates are. So keep that funnel intact. I would also probably advise, one thing I want to do is fill the funnel a lot more next year because we know that the conversion rate of Facebook visitors is call it 1%, right? And so that's fill the average funnel a lot more and then incentivize above a OV with really thoughtful campaigns or discount structures to get people to really upgrade or really think about something that they would not have thought about before.
So that's kind of a hybrid of how we treated Black Friday in general. Whereas before, it was like, well, I know if we just fill the funnel of average people or average consumers, we're going to see double the conversion rate. We're just going to make a lot more money that way without having a discount. And so we kind of play the hybrid strategy of doing that with building a tier to get people to really upgrade and think about things that they wouldn't have thought about before. So everyone's ready to buy that $500 item. Maybe they're hoping for $450, but if you could get them to think about the luxury version at $750 through some kind of creativity or value, then that's where I kind of like to play
Kurt Elster:
Fabulous advice. And clearly it has paid off, and I look forward to seeing what you do next year. It should be a good time. Sean Reyes, shock surplus. Thank you so much.
Sean Reyes:
Thanks for having me back. Hopefully we helped out some people.
Kurt Elster:
Oh, for sure.
Sean Reyes:
Cool.