555: The Secret To Crushing Black Friday Without Slashing Prices

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Have Job podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are to talk about a huge event for e-commerce sellers that is right around the corner, Black Friday Cyber Monday. So in this episode, we’re going to discuss how to maximize your sales during this period without losing money. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now.

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My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:54
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. This year has really gone quickly and we are slowly creeping up to Halloween and Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yeah. Do you do anything promotional for Halloween? Like our industries are not really like Halloween. No. We’re not Spirit Halloween where we make all of our money in the five weeks leading up to it. Now that we actually have a printer, we are going to have a Halloween section now.

01:22
Just because people search for it and people have been buying random design hankies where we just have an image. We just kind of throw it up and it’s not any cost to us, right? To have more products. It’s almost like we’re our own print on demand company now. Yeah, it’s kind of nice. So I feel like the Halloween marketing has already begun only because I’m getting a lot of Halloween ads specific on TikTok. Well, no, I mean, if you go to the store, all the Halloween stuff is

01:51
I try not to go to the store, I do everything online. But online, I’m seeing a lot of the Halloween products. I’m sure it’s in the stores. Are you going to dress like a young person again? Nurse outfit? Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.

02:11
If you have a business where there’s any tie-in to Halloween, mean, like I would say there’s no tie-in for Hankies, but you figured it out, right? Like you figured out the connection. no, this will be the first year. This will be the first year that we’re trying. Well, right, but you’re going to test it. So I’m saying like, if you can find any connection in your business with Halloween, I would definitely add that to your promotional calendar because people are already thinking about it, talking about it. You know, I’m sure if you’re kid, you’re probably already like,

02:41
planning your costume, things like that. It’s already on people’s minds because as you know, like the second Halloween ends, Christmas decorations are up. So like, this is your time right now to be working on a Halloween, you know, call out. And if you guys are on Amazon, they like up the deadline to get your stuff into inventory to October now. Oh yeah. It’s nuts. It’s like earlier than ever. let’s, I mean, chances are most people listening here don’t have like a huge Halloween.

03:12
contingent, although I can think of one person in the class who does, but in general, everyone’s probably going to be doing something for Black Friday Cyber Monday though. I am a little, the way I’m going to do it is going to be different this year, but I’m curious how you guys traditionally do it. So I think the first question that anyone has to ask themselves is how long

03:36
are you going to run your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. I think we’ve talked about this in the past. The length continues to increase. People are starting their Black. I feel like Best Buy starts their Black Friday sale November 1st. Like next week? Yeah. It’s like Black Friday deals. Walmart’s already dropped their catalog. I think that’s the first question is, when do you as a business run your Black Friday?

04:04
campaign and then are you trying to beat people, beat people to the launch, right? Where you’re like, well, these are our prices too. Or are you like, know in the past, sometimes you’ve literally just done Black Friday. A long time ago. We typically make it like 12, 14 days at this point. The thing is, and there’s different schools of thought on this. I’ve talked with people who tease the Black Friday sale two weeks before it even happens.

04:33
I am actually not a fan of that at all. That’s like Ezra’s whole strategy. The reason why I don’t like it is because leading up to it, you’re like, I’ll just wait a couple of weeks before I buy anything major. Sure, it feels great and you can brag that you got a huge Black Friday sale, but leading up to it, I think the amount of sales is going to be much, much less. I totally agree with you.

05:01
We tried that one year where we teased it like crazy and we definitely saw an impact on the sales before the Black Friday promotion started. However, recently we’ve figured out some ways to still keep sales afloat during those. This year, I don’t know if you noticed this, but Black Friday is literally the 28th of November. It’s the very end of the month. Whereas, because you know how it’s the fourth week, but the way the weeks line up,

05:31
So it’s putting you, so you have like two and a half, three weeks before, and then you’re 10 days out. It’s like a pretty long time. So two things that we have done in the past that have worked very well, and I’ve seen other retailers do this. It’s not, we didn’t invent this, but one is doing a product launch at the beginning of the month. So we’ve launched new products the last two years, the first week of November. And that’s just a way to,

06:00
you know, get excitement about a new product. it just, part of it, I think it happened initially coincidentally, right? Like the product was in and we’re like, we better launch it. Cause we didn’t want to launch it during Black Friday and then have it get lost in the Black Friday promotional stuff. And that’s actually done fairly well. Obviously when we launched, there’s like launch pricing. And so the, you know, the pricing’s a little bit better.

06:20
And we typically make sure the launch pricing is up to par with whatever the Black Friday discount is. So they’re not gonna get a better deal on Black Friday if they wait. And we’re very clear about like that. We’re like, this launch pricing is the best pricing it is ever. You’re never gonna see it lower than this price. Sometimes we want run like a discounted shipping, you know, with the amount, the number, your purchase total. So whereas shipping’s I think normally like eight bucks, it’s five bucks, you know, things like that. So.

06:48
We found that that works really well. Something that we’re trying this year is a challenge the first week of November. Like you’re challenging them to buy? I actually don’t remember off the top of my head what the topic of this challenge is, but basically it’s like five days where we send very specific emails about a topic, encourage people to participate, go live on Facebook, things like that. And then the products that are related to that challenge would be, you know,

07:15
available to buy at a discounted price. So we’re doing that this year because we don’t have a product to launch and we’ll see how that does. I don’t think that will do well as just as well as a straight up product launch, but I do think it will encourage people to get on the site and buy because in my thinking is like the people who buy the first three weeks of November, it’s because you have to have it, right? Your refrigerator went out, you can’t wait three weeks to buy refrigerator till Black Friday.

07:44
or you have a business trip and you have to buy these pair of pants. So you can’t wait till Black Friday to make a purchase. people still are purchasing before Black Friday. It’s just a matter of like having them having a, you have to give them a reason to buy. It’s funny that you mentioned that. It’s because we’ve been saving these aprons that we’ve had made in the USA from a net that we’re gonna launch right before Black Friday and hopefully sell all of them out.

08:14
We’re also heavy loyalty program this year. That’s my strategy. So we’re going to have two bonus points day. We’re going to have half price rewards. We’re going to have just outright bonuses. I’m going to basically work the loyalty program because I’m actually not a big fan of giving out big sales. The biggest sale that we ever run in our store is 15%. And I don’t want to do the math for you guys on the pot again, but let’s just say that even a small discount like 20%,

08:44
makes a huge difference to your bottom line. If you have 50 % margins, that means you have to sell double just to make up for that 20 % discount. Loyalty program on the other hand, it’s basically like a 1 % discount, but it feels like a lot. We did a whole loyalty program podcast, so you just go back a couple of podcasts, you can listen to that. I can’t remember if we’ve done this, but I’ve seen it done is the free with purchase.

09:14
Yes. Offer. That’s a really good. And you know, it’s funny because I see a lot of companies doing this like during Black Friday. And I get like there’s I see both sides of this part. Part of me is like, why are we doing a free with purchase during Black Friday? Because people are already going to shop. Right. Because of the deal. But then at the end of the day, you’re also competing against every other e-commerce store that’s also offering a discount. So maybe that moves the needle for you. Right. So maybe people it encourages them to shop.

09:42
from you versus someone else because of the free with purchase. And you see, think the people that do this, the most, not the most, but like big time are like makeup companies and like fragrance companies. If you see this, like I know like Clinique and some of those brands will run like you get the free kit, the makeup bag and kit. And it’s like always a bag that’s never available any other time. So if you buy, so like that will sway,

10:07
might sway you from purchasing from someone else because you’re like, oh, but I get this bag and it’s limited edition and it’s not available. So that’s another thing you can do. And I would actually say to try it before Black Friday, right? Like November 1st through 15th, run a free with purchase offer where if people, and you can do free purchase, any purchase, or you can make it a threshold, $50, $100, just depends on your price point. But I think that’s a good strategy too to avoid the discounting because even if you’re free with purchase item is

10:36
$3, that’s going to be less than like, I mean, a 10 % discount, that’s only a $30. Like, you you’re breaking even at $30. So if the product costs you $3 to make, it’s a perceived value of $35, $40. That will move the needle for you for sure. So you stole mine. Basically, I do everything that it takes as an excuse to email somebody. Yeah. Right.

11:03
And then we have all this stuff lying around since we have so many skews that just don’t move as fast. And so we’ll give those out as free product. And we still have a bunch of stuff lying around from when we last told our supplier, Hey, what do you got that’s just lying around that you just want to get rid of for almost nothing. Right. And, usually we’ll just have them shove that into our shipment and give that out as free stuff. Actually, we’ve been giving out these free hankies for, I want to say three years now, and we still haven’t run out.

11:35
I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all and I think it’s a great way to liquidate overstock inventory, things like that. There’s not time to do it this year, but think this for 2025. If you can think of a specific product you can create for the month of November, is absolutely, and it truly is limited edition.

11:54
And the way to get the numbers right on this is like look at your sales the past three or four November’s see how many unit, know, see how many orders you have and then because what you don’t want is like, you you want this exclusive item and you order 50,000 of them, but you only are doing 10,000 orders in November, right? So, you know, order if you did 10,000 orders the last November, then order 10,000 and then you then you can run out and have the scarcity, right? Like you can market this in a bunch of different ways, but creating that like limited edition

12:24
Like the thing that comes to my mind right now is like a tote bag that’s like fall themed or even holiday themed, right? Like a Christmas themed tote bag, something like that that people would want like over the Christmas holiday. And that’s like exclusive. You can only do it now. And you can give out something like a tote bag no matter what you sell. Right. Doesn’t have to be. I mean, you guys could do tote bags. Anything like that. them. That’s actually been on my list of things to add to the portfolio.

12:53
And the only thing that you need to think about if you want to create an actual special product for this, which I think is worth doing, because we’ve seen some really great success with it, is that you want to make sure that it’s something that will flat pack in an order. So everyone knows how their orders ship, right? So what you don’t want to do is create an item. Everyone gets a Yeti mug, right? That all of a sudden increases your shipping by like $6 because your package is a different shape. You got to think about it. That’s the biggest strategic

13:22
move you make there is that you want to make sure that whatever it is can go in your standard packaging without increasing your cost significantly. It might increase it a little bit, right? But that’s okay. But you don’t want something where it’s like, well, now we have to use 10 by whatever boxes and we have to order new boxes because it’s, you know, like you, I’ve seen people do this and it’s a nightmare, right? So just be thinking about that before you jump on that bandwagon.

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14:18
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14:29
Yeah, fortunately with linens, it’s always pretty light. I’m just curious for the product line of your client, can you turn around something really quick like in two weeks, three weeks? No, absolutely No, can’t because it’s paper, right? Yeah. Okay. The printing cost in the US versus Asia is, I mean, we’re talking landed 80 cents from Asia and $7 in the US. it’s not even, it’s like not. It’s 7X, that’s crazy.

14:58
It’s a huge difference in the quality, in the quality of the paper. You can afford a better quality of paper. You know, there’s like many factors. However, that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t, you know, order something like I was just thinking when I was talking about that for you, like a special tablecloth, right? You could give free tablecloths. Those are flat. They fold. They’re nice. Like we stopped doing tablecloths. It’s actually a huge nightmare. I’ve actually really because people get the wrong size. Well, just think about how many different

15:28
odd-sized tables there are. Yes, but I would say you just do the rectangular table. Round table people are out of luck. Well, there’s round, there’s oval, even rectangles, there’s different shapes. Yes. It has to drape evenly so that the ends come down approximately the same. What about table runner? We do sell table runners already. To me, that would be something I would do like a holiday table runner free with purchase. It’s only available like

15:56
during this time of the year. They can’t get it another time. It’s a special design. I don’t know. Better yet, like a free hanky. To dry their tears after spending the weekend with their relatives. Although your brand doesn’t quite work with this, but I would totally like send an email that’s like, need to dry your tears after a dinner with family? We’ve got what you need. See, that’s something that I would try, but I’m-

16:25
almost positive Jen would not be on board with something. I can see why Jen would. I don’t know if I would try that for your business, but I think it would be really funny. I think it’d be hilarious. But yeah, to the older demographic, maybe not so much. They’re the ones crying the hardest. We raised these people, these idiots. I’m trying to think. The other thing that we like to do, we actually treat Black Friday, Cyber Monday as really a way to get rid of a lot of stuff too. We’ll just bundle.

16:54
things together and we’ll create these bundles that we never offer anytime. It boosts the average order value, but it feels like you’re getting a lot more stuff when in fact we’re just trying to liquidate a lot of things. I think bundling is actually a great strategy. I don’t see people doing it probably as much as they could, but I think if you have products that are easily bundleable, that should be something that I would definitely try. We’re just creating like gift packs of something where you raise the price, but it looks like you’re getting a lot of stuff.

17:24
It’s like those stockings they sell that are already filled with candy and cheap stuffed animals. They’re like, look what you’re getting for $19.99. It works. It works. There’s pre-made Easter baskets that they sell at CVS and Walgreens. The other thing you can do, especially when you were just talking about gift packs with bundles, is redo some of your photography with the holiday theme. Pictures of-

17:51
A lot of this could be done in Photoshop too. I always think if there’s actual photography, it’s a little bit better. Stuff in a stocking, stuff under the tree. If you sell table runners, the table setting is all Christmas. You’ve got the evergreen and the Christmas plates and things like that. I think about our friend Natalie at Totally Dazzled. She sells bling and she sells napkin rings and things like that.

18:18
A lot of her napkin rings are just sparkly, but I would redo my photography. I she’s probably already doing this, this is not advice for her specifically. It’s just like, you know, I would redo my stuff, like on your best sellers, on your things that you know are going to do well. I would reframe some of that in the holiday spirit, because it could be that someone was like, I don’t really need napkin rings, but like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have some nice napkin rings when my family comes?

18:42
when you frame it that way, people that maybe were like, I don’t need this product, were like, ooh, but that’s kind of nice. I think you could actually use AI to do this now. Probably. I haven’t tried, actually. But I’ve had uploaded one of our napkin photos to Mid Journey and had them use our napkins to set a beautiful table, for example. And I suppose it’s not a far stretch to say, hey, a beautiful Christmas themed table or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s.

19:11
The other thing that you could do is, I think we know a of people that sell glassware and barware. I would have pictures of the glassware and barware in holiday-themed drinks. So the martini espressos and the candy cane coming out of the … And probably AI can do most of this for you as well. But just changing some of the photography, especially if you’re on your own site, I think that actually works.

19:41
really well and just gets people thinking about how that product is something that they would now want in their home. I’m just curious, and Andrea, we should have Andrea on at some point, but I’m wondering what the ad strategy is for your clients. I actually dialed down my ads because they get really expensive over the holidays. I’m just curious what you guys do. I actually have no idea. I don’t think we dial down. Now, just for people listening to this, we are going to start dialing down in September.

20:10
Right. October because the season. the election. Oh. So be thinking about this because obviously we don’t we only have these elections every four years. This is not something that isn’t it’s going to happen every single year. But in an election year, the ad costs are just so high that even on really well performing ads, you’re spending double, triple, think sometimes quadruple what you would normally spend. And it sometimes becomes not worth running. So definitely keep an eye on that. And if you’re wondering why all of a sudden your ads are like

20:40
in the toilet are super expensive, that’s probably why. One of my ideas which got shot down like a microsecond was to do political designs on the Hankies. I think they would do really well. They would do very well. Yes, but I wouldn’t be married any longer. No, it’s a choice you need to make. You could do both sides. It’s not like you would just do one side. Yes, know, but the problem is you’re going to anger

21:10
you’re going to anger the other side. It doesn’t matter if you saw for that. In fact, just total side note. My street is very diverse. We’ve got signs for everybody in the yards, except my house is the only house without a sign. Part of me is like, what sign could I put in my yard that just confuses everybody other than a solar panel advertisement? We had a contractor at my house yesterday giving us an estimate for something.

21:39
We were going back and forth. He’s like, I’m just impressed with your silent sign political war on the street. And I was like, right. It’s like and they keep adding signs, right? Like, so every week there’s like a new sign in someone’s yard. Like they’ve gotten a bigger flag or a bigger sign or they’ve added additional signs. So I actually think if you are willing to take that risk, my brother’s done well on some of that stuff where he’s capitalized producing products on both both sides. Right. Like not taking a side, just offering it for.

22:08
both demographics. I think if you have a brand that can withstand that, I would try it for sure. You don’t have a brand that can withstand that and you don’t have a marriage that can withstand don’t know. Yeah, exactly. We actually have a friend from ECF. runs a factory. That’s his bread and butter. He had a Trump something, Bobblehead. I can’t remember. His whole brand is funny. Yeah. Right? Funny things.

22:35
And like, think he’s made millions of dollars off that one Trump thing that he sold. So, yeah, so I think if if you are OK with it personally and you think your brand can withstand, know, you’re going to get some backlash from either side. But I feel like two people are so heated about everything right now that like the sign was hilarious to me because it’s like they’re just like they’re not. And the funny thing that cracks me about all of it is like all the neighbors are friends and hang out.

23:04
Right. But it’s like the yard is like the battleground. then like if they walk their dogs together and stuff, I think people are willing to put a sign in their yard. Right. Like I can’t remember a lot of signs in the yard when I was growing up, you know, and stuff like that. I’m a little anti-sign because of vandalism. I’m not I’m not saying to sell so so political signs, but like people are buying political paraphernalia in a way that I don’t feel like.

23:31
I see more people and part of it is I live in Florida and we have a lot of crazy people here. like I probably every day that I’m out of my house, I see at least one person wearing a t-shirt or has a bumper sticker on their car or something with a political leaning on it. Every usually more than twice it more than once a day. But for sure, once a day, I see it. To be honest with you, I rarely see any of that stuff here in California. Well, because we know how everyone votes there.

24:00
Well, know everyone boats in Florida too, right? No, we don’t. We’re usually 50. It’s usually 50-50. Is that right? It comes down to a couple hanging sheds. That’s true. But yeah, think more than ever, people want to wear the hat or the t-shirt, have a koozie with something on it. So if you’re in that space and that’s something that you feel comfortable doing, I would try it. Why not? What’s the worst thing that can happen? You lose all your friends?

24:29
Maybe I can just do this under a different domain. Politicallinens.com. could be hornetlinens.com. Yellowjacketlinens.com. Killer bee linens.

24:45
It’s Queen Bee linens. Queen Bee. And then Beyonce will come after you for the trademark. Okay, back on Black Friday. Yes. But listen, we gave people great ideas. They can now market all of their merch. One thing that we did last year during Black Friday, which I think we talked about on the podcast, but we’re trying again, is we are doing a wait list.

25:09
which I said earlier, I didn’t like doing it as much because I think it does like, you’ve got to hype up the wait list to get people on it. So then when you’re hyping up the wait list, people are like, well, wait, there’s a wait list. Am I going to make a purchase? What I found that people are still purchasing and I don’t unfortunately have data of like not doing a wait list. So I don’t know like, well, what would it be without the wait? You know what I mean? I don’t have anything to compare it.

25:37
but this year we’re giving an absolute ridiculous discount for the first day of the wait list. Really? Okay. Insane. The business has the margins to support it, so that’s one thing. Obviously, we’ve talked about this on previous episodes, but last year the wait list did so well, and we had a high discount last year. We’re actually increasing it by 5 % this year that we feel like it just is the gangbusters move.

26:06
And people still, it’s weird to me, like we’ll send a waitlist email out and the email will still make like five grand. Sure. Yeah, no, that always happens. So actually walk me through this. How early do you send out the waitlist? So I actually like to be at least three weeks pre-launch day. in the waitlist, literally it’s a one day of that pricing. You don’t get it for the rest of Black Friday, right? So I think this year we started, we’re starting Black Friday like

26:32
the Thursday before Thanksgiving, so like a week before Thanksgiving. OK. Yeah. So because I think it’s either the Wednesday or Thursday because it runs like 11. goes from like that Wednesday or Thursday to the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That’s a crazy long sale. It is. We talked about that in the beginning, like how many days? So so the first day. the waitlist is really simple. Like the very first email is, hey, Black Friday is coming. We all know this, you know, we’re going to do something we’ve never done before.

27:02
Which is true because each year we up it. So we haven’t done it before. We have a one day discount. It’s going to be insane. We don’t tell people. Right. And like I want you to be on the list because I’m going to email you at 6 a.m. on this day. Like I tell them the date that it’s going to happen. Like I give them all the details. And then, you know, this is a little difficult to set up. We do it like a click to tag. We don’t make people opt in again from email because they’re already on the email. So we do like a click to tag set up, which you can do in Klaviyo. It’s not.

27:31
simplest thing but it’s doable and that’s email number one. Email number two is excluding anyone who’s already signed up for the wait list because to me I want to just… They’re on the list, it’s fine. Once again, I give a little more information. I don’t tell them the discount but I let them know this is 24 hours, stuff will sell out, all that’s true. We have a free gift with purchase this day only.

27:58
The free gift with purchase that day only is literally something that we have to get rid of. It’s like, have 10,000 of these, we do not need them in the warehouse. That’s five to six days after that first email. Then I will resend an email to unopens, either from depending on the performance from either the first or second email. There’s just a recent basically same email, but different subject line.

28:22
testing out and then the final email goes out usually the day before the sale or like two days. It’s under 48 hours before the sale and that is a text only email that says, hey Tony, you’re not on the list. And then the email is literally two sentences, hey, tomorrow I’m giving you 35 % off. I literally tell them, tomorrow is 35 % off. You’re not on the list and you’re not gonna get the coupon. All you need to do for me to email you this coupon is click here.

28:52
Done. That email still makes money, which is crazy to me. Although part of it is probably like a residual from the next day. It’s taking credit for sales on the coupon day. Sure. That email does pretty well, as far as getting signups because it feels like a personal email. It’s addressed to them. It’s two sentences and I’m just like, hey, you’re going to miss out on this and we’re not doing it again. All things that are true. Then the next day, 6 a.m., that email goes out.

29:22
with, you know, here’s your- of people buy, I’m sure. Yes, crazy number of people buy. And what we do is like, so Black Friday starts that day and let’s just say our Black Friday discount is 20%, right? That’s the across the board discount. And these people are getting an additional 10%. So they get a coupon for 10 % off the 20, right? So the math doesn’t exactly work out to whatever, you know, the math doesn’t work out to that because of the percentages off, but-

29:51
Then that day we sent an email at 6 a.m. 2 p.m. to unopens like, just a reminder, this is your coupon. You haven’t used it yet. Obviously, it doesn’t go to people who purchased that day. Then the final, this is it. Tomorrow the price is, this coupon is not good. You haven’t used yours. What are you doing? Kind of thing. That is usually one of our highest days sales of the year. Yeah. What’s funny about all this stuff and

30:19
when people talk about Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategies, it is almost impossible to split test something like this, right? Yeah. Like you’ll never know whether one strategy that you did work better. The only thing you can look at is maybe the prior year. Yes. However, I have a little split test strategy for you. Oh yeah. Let’s hear it. So that’s your first day. You blow it out of the water.

30:44
Then the next day, are very excited that weekend. So if you start the weekend before Thanksgiving, people buy all weekend. But then you start to fade, right? And I think it’s for a couple of reasons. Your people that were gonna buy have bought, because they’re worried about inventory running out, things like that. Also, Monday is like, okay, now all the kids are out of school usually, because most kids get a full week of spring break. People are traveling, right? This is your ski vacation, this is your trip to see the family. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, before Thanksgiving,

31:13
tend to not be amazing because people are busy like, know, oh great, Aunt so-and-so’s coming, we don’t have the space, buy an air mattress. Like if they’re buying stuff, it’s like stuff on Amazon that can be delivered that day. So I was like, okay, what can we do to boost these days? So the way I split test and how I figured out what moves the needle for these people is that I sent, I have talked about this email before and I only send it like three or four times a year depending on what’s going on, but it’s basically like, hey,

31:43
you know, basically what coupon code are you gonna get? And I’m like, free shipping, 10 coupons available, $10 off your order, five coupons available, $5 off your order, 25 coupons available, buy one, get one free, any item in the store, 30 coupons available. And I’m basically like, try the coupons until they work for you. So first of all, that email gets a ton of engagement, because they’re clicking over, trying all the coupons, because the coupons actually do have a limit on them.

32:11
Oh, I see. You put you set limits and you just send out, these there’s only like, like hate. The first 10 people get free shipping. The you know, we have 25 coupons to give you five dollars off your order. You know, we’ve got 10 coupons to give you a buy one, get one free. And so we send that out and that does really, really well. And I’ve tried it with a couple groups of people. So I’ve tried it, sending it to basically everyone who hasn’t purchased yet during Black Friday.

32:39
that obviously performs the best. However, the best group of like that performs, I mean, in general, it performs best because it’s going to the most people. But if you wanna look at like segments of people that love it the most, it’s the people who have made one purchase in the past, but haven’t purchased in like six months. So it’s a good way to get people kind of off the fence for like they bought a product, they haven’t come back six months. We’re like a nine month, you know, sales cycle, but.

33:08
People tend to buy during the sales. So that performs exceptionally well with that group of people. The other group of people that it performs well with that compared to other emails sent to the same group is never purchased. So we’ve sent lots of different emails of people that have never purchased in the past, but this email gets people to move. like that one. I like that one. Where’s the split test part of it though? Like how can you…

33:35
So what I can do, and this is manual, right? This isn’t the most efficient thing to do. So within the first hour, I go in and see how many coupon codes are left, right? And I can see that like, I thought BOGO would be a huge mover, right? It’s not, people don’t use the BOGO coupon. Like the free shipping obviously works the best. And I try to limit the codes so people know like they’ve got to order that minute.

34:03
the $5 off your order tends to work better than the 10 % coupon. So what’s that showing me is basically like, okay, this discount moves people more than this discount because like if I say there’s 10 codes, there’s probably a little bit more than that. And so then I can see like what codes are still like lingering and what codes are not. And so then I know like if I just wanna send a blanket email, like, hey, so sometimes during a big sale, we’ll send an email that’s like, hey, in addition to your 20 % off,

34:33
you can do one BOGO, right? Like you get a BOGO. So, and what I, or you can do an additional $5 off or you can, you know, triple your points or, whatever it is. But so doing that email allows me to see like what people jump on the most and what is uninteresting to people. And what I found so far is that BOGO actually doesn’t move the needle at all, which to me is crazy because like our products like are way more expensive than $5. than one of the same? I mean, in your case.

35:01
Well, yeah, because curriculum, most people have multiple kids and we sell a lot of curriculum. So it’s like, yeah, the chances of you needing two pieces of curriculum because you have four kids is really high. For our store, the $5 off coupons are mainly our cheapie customers, which we don’t care about. And our bigger customers tend to use the percentage off coupons. So it’s all just kind of skewed because $5 as a percentage of a large order is much less than like a 10%. Right. You have to spend.

35:31
Yeah. So yeah. But I like the idea of having a limited, creates scarcity, scarcity. like that. Yes. And you know, I’m like watching it on the back end. And the other thing that I will do, so hopefully no customers are listening, is like the worst coupon. Like if that sells out, the 5%, because we do even like 5 % off. Like if that gets used up, I just increase it. I’m like, if someone’s trying the codes, I’ll give it another 15 or 20 codes.

35:58
I’m not increasing it to unlimited for sure. It’s always less than the amount of people that are going to buy, but we will up it a little bit. The other thing I’ll do is I’ll resend that email to people who opened, clicked, and didn’t buy and be like, more codes added. It’s very possible that they wanted the 10 % off, clicked over, couldn’t get it, and then gave up. If I send it at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, I’ll resend it at

36:27
6 p.m. on a Wednesday to people who open clicked and didn’t make a purchase. Yeah. So one thing we do every year that works well to keep up the sales is we do flash sales every day. So we email everyone for all the way actually up until the deadline for shipping. Yeah. This year it’s probably gonna be a little different. So if it’s on the 28th, then yeah, that’ll take you all the way up to just yeah, it still works for us this year to do it that way. And now we have infinite more

36:57
bullets, so to speak, because of the loyalty program and all the other crazy things that I’m going to think up to just anytime you send an email or a text, it’s going to make money. Yeah. Is the point here. And then I usually dial down the ads. That’s why I was curious. And especially with the election year, I’m definitely dialing down Facebook ads. Google ads probably won’t be affected. Yeah. Just guessing as much since their search intent. Yeah. So another idea for a live.

37:25
or not a live for an email that you can send is to email people that you’re gonna go live. most people are like, wait, don’t want, one, I don’t wanna go live, two, like don’t have anything to talk about. All those things are false. You can go live, it’s not that hard. And also two, you do have things to talk about. If your products are super uninteresting, then I would go live from the warehouse. I would talk about the packing, the shipping, how many orders, because that does a couple things. One,

37:53
It gives, if people like don’t know anything about your company and then you’re in the warehouse and they’re seeing like actual physical packages going out, that’s sort of that social proof. Like, hey, we’re not gonna rip you off. Like we’re an actual real company that has a shipping and logistics team. If you don’t, if you have a 3PL and you don’t have your own warehouse, do like a, hey, these are like.

38:13
This is, you talk about those bundles, right? Like here, look at this bundle pack. You’re gonna get this and you’re gonna get this and you’re gonna get this. And here’s this gift basket that we made with the bundles and doesn’t this look great? And wouldn’t you love to put this under your Christmas tree? You could talk about like, I think about, you know, our friend Dana Michelle that they used to do, I don’t know if they still do the cooking ware and stuff like that, but you know, they’ve done a lot of videos where they do drink recipes and stuff like that. Like I would do a drink recipe, make sure you have your glasses in the front, right? Or your stirrer or your whatever it is, your shaker.

38:41
I know Natalie was these. Yeah, they work. Yeah. So they do two things. They do three things. One, an excuse to send an email. Two, anytime you send an email, people spend money. Three, it legitimizes your business. So for people who don’t know you, haven’t heard of you. And the other thing is, what you can do is you can actually, if you go live on Facebook, you can run ads to that live, right? Which they tend to perform fairly, they’re a little bit cheaper.

39:08
Um, so it just, cause it’s getting natural engagement right first, and then you can, uh, you know, use that video in an ad. So I think if you are willing to put yourself on camera, that, uh, that is something that I highly recommend doing. I can just imagine my customers. Oh wait. So the person who runs Bumblebee linens is an eight middle-aged Asian dude. Cause Jen’s not going live. That’s when you get on the disguise.

39:37
A little prosthetic and some wigs, you’re good. No, but I think for Bumblebee, do think, I don’t know, I feel like you need to have a person, at least the back of their head, but I would just show the embroidery machine embroidering something that’s holiday I know. You know I mean? talked about this in the past, but I think ideally you have someone just show off the products. Maybe Jackie would just… If I butter her up enough, maybe she can do this.

40:05
See, ideally, you host it on your own site so they can buy it right away. So maybe it’d be like a YouTube live or something. then again, if you have a Facebook page with a lot of people, and I think we have like maybe 15, 20,000 on there, you might be more likely to attract people. it’s, I don’t think you can embed a, can you embed a Facebook video on? I think you can do both actually. With StreamYard, I think you can do both.

40:32
That’s what I was wondering. broadcast on Facebook and then you also embed it on your site. Yeah, but totally. I love that idea. I mean, this is why TikTok works so well, right? Yeah. Because people see an actual business orders being fulfilled and and a tour of the warehouse, really. And I think the other thing you can set up is you can set up like a many chat flow, right? Where as you’re talking about it, you can get people to comment on whatever it is. comments sold or?

41:00
No, they comment like, if you want to learn more about this specific product, comment, know, hanky or whatever. Oh, yes, I see what you’re saying. Then you send them something that leads them to the listing, gives them a coupon, gives them the whatever extra points, whatever it is, right? You incorporate that as well. I would love to try this. The other issue is we’re usually so

41:28
with orders during this time too. And I’m more useless than Jen is in actual operations. yeah, yeah, but good ideas. But anyways, the moral of this episode is you guys got to start planning your Black Friday, Cyber Monday now, because everything’s getting pushed up earlier and you don’t want to be caught up.

41:55
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now giving large, costly discounts is generally not the way to go on Black Friday, so follow the strategies in this episode to make more profit. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 555. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. And remember, never buy a BMW.