2024 Ecommerce Black Friday Guide: Secret BFCM Strategies From a Shopify EXPERT

already already welcome in in this video we're going over the 2024 e-commerce Black Friday and Cyber Monday guide for email marketing email marketing specifically cuz this is the key to all of your Black Friday work you can see this example for a client of ours $615,000 57% of the total revenue just came from email and this was in the month of November so we're going to be going over how to print sorry if the setup is weird and the lighting is weird I'm in nbnb I'm traveling right now but again this is how to have

novembers like these the ones that absolutely demolish your prior records so Q4 obviously is everything if you're in e-commerce you understand it pretty much the whole year leads up to November and if you screw it up your year is kind of screwed if you have a disappointing Q4 you have a disappointing year it's right at the end of the year and you go in with bad vibes so you better get it right that's that's the key you better get your Q4 right that's what everybody's purchasing so what's inside the stock we're going to be going

over the key to a successful Q4 how to properly set yourself up for record-breaking numbers which is the most important part Black Friday tips and strategies recommended offers to run recommended schedule when you should be sending your emails how many times yada y yada and then bonus giving you the exact custom Black Friday Cyber Monday flow strategy outline that we use to add up to 50% more Revenue so let us get into it that's me if you want my social media links there they are okay so the thing we need to understand here is that

your work in Q3 is what determines your Q4 I got this awesome Benjamin Franklin quote which happens to be the dude on the $100 bill for money by failing to prepare you're preparing to fail and he's on the $100 bill so you should listen to him but you're working Q3 if you don't do anything Q Q3 you're going to have a terrible Q4 so this is the key it is just literally your preparation so let's talk about ads you're likely going to be spending a ton on ads as you should but so will your competition

and everybody else competing for ad spots and it's an election year so ads are just getting driven up because these people are spending a ton of money as well so I'm anticipating unusually high ad prices this year like a lot more than prior years for Black Friday saber Monday and you should prepare for that too prepare for the worst and so that's kind of what I expect and so what this leads us to is to dial in email email is the backbone of your brand it is the quickest cheapest and easiest access to your customer

base you just click a button Boom cost pennies and it's to people who already know like and trust you that's the difference um relying on ads can result in sexy Revenue numbers but very disappointing profit numbers is kind of what I'm trying to say rising ad Price in Q4 Plus increased discounts from what you're going to be sending in Q4 for Black Friday Cyber Monday it's just less profit so you get cool Revenue numbers but you're not taking anything home email is where you regain all your profit since it is so so cheap so again

lead up to Q3 is greater than Q4 that's supposed to be Q3 how unprofessional of me but this these are the three keys for Q4 email success number one email deliverability number two the size of your active email audience number three how primed your customer is to purchase those are the three keys in uh the things we want to focus on in Q3 so starting with deliverability what is deliverability Inbox providers want to improve the experience of their customers by only showing them emails they want to see so that's pretty much the basis of what

deliverability is and that's why they have these different tabs primary promotions and then spam so what your deliverability is is it's essentially your domain and your IP sending like credit score do you have good credit do people open your emails a lot and you're reputable sender and Gmail likes you awesome you're going to land in the primary tab if you have a bad credit score nobody opens your emails nobody clicks on them you just continue to show that you're not a reputable sender you're going to land in spam or you're going to land in the

promotions tab so that's essentially what it is so we want to build a good credit score and just like credit scores in real life takes time to build up and so we need to get to that point and so if we want good deliverability in Q4 we have to focus on it in Q3 so join my free daily newsletter by the way really good stuff actionable free tips guides starts daily so importance of your Q4 deliverability throughout the year you want to keep your email list very very tight and only send to active list users

besides like larger events where you open up the list but like for me and my clients I only send to literally 90day or 120 day engaged lists like there's no reason to send people who aren't opening your emails you're just ruining your reputation so typically that's what we do however in Q4 and Black Friday we want to be opening up our emails to send to the whole entire list to get the most Revenue absolutely possible even people who might be like a big risk what this means is we're going to be sending emails to highrisk

unengaged profiles so as a result we're just inevitably going to be hurting our sender reputation and that's a risk we're willing to take those who already have a fragile sender reputation are going to be going straight to the spam folder when you're sending to these high-risk people you're getting wor open rates you're just going to go straight to spam however those who have a strong reputation that they've built up in Q3 and Q2 will be able to stay in the inbox throughout Black Friday and have a significant significant Edge over their competitors if the spam

folder is absolutely loaded and then there's barely any brands in the main inbox that is how you stand out so super important to dial in your deliverability so stop sending to your whole list now just lock it down don't do anything too experiment experimental with your list your Q4 will suffer because of it stop stop stop only send to a 30 to 90day engage segment and ensure you're getting 50% plus opens so slowly build your reputation give you Tres points in the eyes of Google if you are lower than 50% opens then you want to

tighten your list even more do a 14-day engage list if you have to but this is just a formula for just creating your engaged list super simple this is the segment in clavio open email at least once in the last 60 days or clicked email at least once in the last 60 days sometimes clavio misses click or Mrs opens when somebody clicks um and then if someone can or cannot receive email marketing they can't receive email marketing because they haven't um that that'll take out people who have unsubscribed people who have bounced suppressed all that

good stuff so that's literally it just sent to that list for your campaigns from now on don't worry about the other people you can we'll we'll get them in Q4 okay and then what we want to do is we want to send multiple times a week it seems counterintuitive but to to improve your reputation to send more but you need to do that to continue to build more trust points you want to be sure you're sending multiple times a week because every single time you're going to boost your reputation so would you rather send once

a week and get one bump per week or send three times a week and get three bumps to your reputation a week especially if you have bad deliverability right now you need to be sending three um you need volume and consistency to look like a reputable sender to Google if you get 60% opens and 5% clicks on one campaign that won't do anything that's like eating a salad for one meal and thinking you're healthy and you're going to lose like 50 lbs that it's that's just one thing it doesn't matter you need to consistently do

that and also one of the main things that not a lot of people realize with deliverability is you need to be sending consistently to stay a reputable sender if you send an email and then for four months you don't send a single email and then all of a sudden you're sending thousands of emails a day like for Black Friday that's going to look at like spam in the eyes of Google like what is this domain they weren't sending they weren't sending anything for forever now they're trying to send tens of thousands like that that's an

instant way to spam you need to be consistent you need to stay with a strong reputation and so just be consistent say multiple times a week to your um engaged list you want to really build your community strength with your educational non- discount campaigns so for Q4 if if we're sending all these emails um leading up to Q4 we want to make them non- discount campaigns and we to boost our reputation and then we also want to build our community so that for Q4 they're very passionate and primed to purchase and then we're also building

up the amount of active people in our email list so this is super important so we do that by giving them value giving them fun content giving them dopamine releasing email designs and copy and we put in the work now in Q3 to cash in on Q4 so here are 29 non- discount email ideas if you want them um just make your emails quick super digestible literally less than 100 words like people sound shocked when I say that but your email shouldn't be more than 100 words because people don't like to read people like to

scroll Tik Tok you need to keep things as simple as possible I have a really good video tutorial on this it's 54 minutes on non- discount email strategies with a ton of examples highly recommend you watch this if you don't know what to send you're like three times a week I make it super easy for you in this video so those are the points um cuz we th those were like the main points for building up the trust and reputation um deliverability now we also want to avoid big sales leading up to November would highly

recommend cool down leading up to a massive black Friday you can do like small stuff we want our list to be hungry hungry hungry for a deal I'd recommend your last day last sale before Q4 being back to school or Labor Day and then just chill if you want to do something Halloween just like a quick small Halloween one you can I'd try to kind of avoid that and do something brand do a branding play on Halloween um but yeah avoid those big sales so those are the points those are going to um that's how

to set yourself up for successful Q4 so we want to improve our deliverability we want to Prime our customers for purchase by not sending discounts and sending them a ton of educational campaigns and we want to do this consistently so that we build up the active people on our email list and of course make sure you're running popups pop-up forms right now building up the people on your email list so you have more people to sell to on your email list in Q4 so now let's get into Black Friday tips and strategies let's get tactical

here so so Black Friday is no longer just Black Friday everybody's trying to be the first of Black Friday resulting in people starting their sales like 2 to 3 weeks before the actual day it's turning into just like Black Friday month so I wouldn't recommend this too much as it's going to downplay like your main offer for Black Friday and people just aren't quite ready to buy that early there's no holiday spirit quite yet when you're trying to sell people stuff in October there's no like Christmas Christmas spirit that's when I that's when I want

like buy stuff cuz I procrastinate uh um and so like once I get on Thanksgiving and like I'm with family then it's like okay I should start like buying stuff and then black Friday's right there perfect timing so you do want to educate on Black Friday early so you don't want to send your Black Friday stuff too early um you don't want to send your sales too early but you want to educate early so that people know that you're going to be running a large offer and you can kind of like hype it up and

get the get them thinking in the back of their head that there's going to be something that they should check out so running an early access deal is good but I wouldn't start more than one week before Black Friday just cuz of timing and it's I I just haven't seen stuff that's too early perform too well um so get your offers in your calendar now like sit down take a day to actually think what do you want to run and figure that out now so you can properly prepare and make plans accordingly so these are

lists of like different offers that you can do discount offers and bundle deals so you can have obviously like sitewide discounts a flat percentage on discounts on all products uh you can do products specific so this one can be good for marketing because if you have one that you're doing like 60% off you could say frame is like up to 60% off and like most things are like 20% 30% um and just have different deals and encourage browsing that's the other good thing it gets people looking on the site gets them browsing a ton of

stuff so this is one of my favorites to run you have tier discounts so increase the discount based on the amount of spend so like 10% off $50 uh orders above $50 20% off orders above 100 yada yada yada you can do that as well to encourage people to spend more and get a higher discount one thing you can also do is like alternating flash sales which is a fun one um which we've seen some success with like having different sales on different items in the store like every day of the week um for like

Black Friday week limited time discounts on select products or categories changing every few hours would be a bit much I'd say every few days and then you have bundle deals so like buy one get one free off a free item with the purchase of another or like product bundles so create like special bundles with like a massive discounted price and then you could have that be your your uh your offer like a skin skincare set Tech bundle all that good stuff moving on mix up your offers but not too much you don't just want to

run 20% off for the whole season for like Early Access Black Friday and then Cyber Monday the same thing you want to change it up this way that you can have urgency on your offers you can get more urgency you can keep your list excited for what's coming next so like for example if you're doing one thing for Early Access another thing for Black Friday and another thing for Cyber Monday you get three urgency periods there so for Early Access you can say absolute Last Chance yeah you're never going to have this again so then

you can get a ton of sales squeezed out there and then the same thing for Black Friday then the same thing for Cyber Monday whereas you can't really do that if you're just doing the same offer the whole time so um you don't want to be too confusing and overwhelm the customer that's the other thing I see a lot of people try to get so so fancy with their Black Friday SA or Monday that it becomes counterintuitive they spend all this time doing all this stuff trying to like do some crazy uh crazy offers but

and they just confuse their customer and then they're like what is this uh I'm just going to go to the other store so keep it simple so I'd stay away from like New Deals and discounts every single day because that'll confuse them they may just go to a comp competitor plus if you give a different offer every day people might not buy because they'll be like I'll just wait and see what tomorrow's is if you have like um the 13 Days um what's that Christmas thing 13 days of Christmas something like that and some some

brands do that with like it's a new thing every day it's cool it's a lot of work but the thing is like people will always be like I'll just wait until tomorrow see what offer it is tomorrow so make sure you're mixing them up I'd say just different one for Early Access Black Friday and Cyber Monday and then go from there what's very underrated is a product release and that's something that you can only do if you start prepping now so everybody just runs sales for Black Friday Cyber Monday one way to stand out is

by limiting is by releasing a new limited edition product that's something that's super cool and makes your Black Friday so much more important and gets people buying that and other stuff on your store so the brand below dropped a variant off their bestseller and then ran a massive offer on it absolutely smashed absolutely smashed um it's a nice bonus to Black Friday Cyber Monday and again helps you stand out for everybody doing the basic like 20% off the site it lets you be like we're doing 20% off the site and we just dropped this new

this new whatever it is like something based off popular item just brings you more attention which really is super good good um but most just don't do this because it takes a lot of time to prep to have a new product release for Black Friday Cyber Monday cuz most people aren't doing Black Friday Cyber Monday stuff until October that's just not enough time to get a new product release however if you're watching this that means you can start today I'm releasing this on July 12th so that gives you a lot of time so you should

do that 100% if you can um get a new product release going so this is a recommended timeline for how I like to run my Black Friday Cyber Monday to keep it simple to make sure that we're sending enough and keep it simple enough to where people can um people can shop so November 2024 this is what it looks like and then here's December as well so I like to do Early Access Black Friday and then Cyber Monday and then frame Early Access is something like Black Friday a lot of things are going to go

out of stock you can shop items with this early access deal um for guaranteed whatever and avoid like the holiday shipping Fiasco avoid getting like your stuff messed up by USPS by ordering today you get Early Access everything ships before all that good stuff and so that can perform really well but starting off in the leadup I just like to focus these weeks um not every single email maybe you could have a slice at the bottom of each email or something that's teasing the deal being like something big is coming for Black Friday or and

then you also want to include gift guides talk about how these items are perfect for perfect for uh gifts and so that's going to like Prime people in the back of their mind like oh yeah I could get this thing for someone and then they're thinking about it and then Black Friday comes along and they're like okay yeah yeah I'll get it for them this would be a good gift and so just continue to tease deals make sure that you're teasing Black Friday is going to be freaking huge even like the day before I'd recommend

that so I recommend starting a week before on this Friday through the weekend do your Early Access deal whatever it is uh slightly less offer than like your main Black Friday offer but you can frame it as something as as get guaranteed shipment or get guaranteed access to best sellers whatever it may be um I like to run this for a few days um and then you can run it I'd run it all the way through Thanksgiving um but 27 and 28 I like to make emails that are really focused on Black Friday and really

hyping things up so something like a text-based email from the founder being like yo you guys have no idea what's about what's coming this is going to be massive make sure that you pick everything that you want yada y y you can send a um a Thanksgiving uh thank you so much for being a part of our community send a Thanksgiving type email to show your thanks and then we get to Black Friday I don't like to have Black Friday too long like to have a ton of urgency so 29th 30th and the 1st my

birthday is on the 29th this year which is going to be quite unfortunate that it's that it is on Black Friday so as someone in e-commerce is probably one of the worst days it's going to be so busy um but happy birthday to me early birthday um and then we and then we go straight into Cyber Monday and do that for three days um some people change it into like cyber week but at that point it's kind of Overkill people are sick and tired of two weeks of deals so this is what I'd recommend um

this is like the timeline and of course you can fit in emails and SMS however you want here but definitely you want you're going to want to be sending a lot and when I show all this these are emails every single day like we're sending every single day here and then sometimes 2X and 3X a day it's yes we're sending a crap ton of volume every brand on the face of the Earth will be sending emails so we need to understand every brand they they all lead up to Black Friday and so an hour after

like you send an email on Black Friday your email is going to be buried because all the other brands are sending and you're probably not going to be seen by anyone who didn't open already in the first hour so on big days like Black Friday would recommend sending 2x 3x in one day just to be sure that like you're staying top of the Inbox and people are actually seeing your emails so don't be afraid to do that we it it performs a lot better so like you could do one email here one email one email

one email one email one one and then you can do like three two 3 2 two two that's probably the Cadence that I'm going to end up going with uh for my Brands the seven and eight figure brands that I work with it's probably going to be something along those lines so don't be afraid to do that and then one thing that we also want to do is we want to resend emails to non openers so kind of like what what I said there um your emails are going to get buried and so we want

to resend the emails to anybody who didn't open if it's an important email like Black Friday launch maybe you're only sending one email you only have the bandwidth to do one email on Black Friday then you can send your email at 10 a.m and then send a follow-up email at like 400 p.m just resend that email but just send it to people who didn't open just to make sure that they saw it so this will help you if you're worried about spamming your customers too much so I'll let this play so say we have this

campaign here here all you have to do is you go to list in segments we're going what we're doing is we're creating a segment which is just anybody who received that email that I referred to so say that's your Black Friday number one email um we're just creating a list of people who received that but didn't open so here I am just creating the segment naming it non openers of that email you just want to do received email at least once over all time and then you add a filter and you say where campaign name

equals whatever the name of the campaign is and then boom that's going to show anybody who received that email who did the email go to and then now we want to do people who didn't open that email so now we're doing opened email zero times overall time where the campaign name equals whatever the campaign name is so we do that and then we're all set and then we create the segment and then it's going to spit out however many people there are let's see uh not too important because you guys can just trust me and

that this worked um here we go it's loading and it looks like there were 28,000 people so it was sent to like 50,000 people and 28,000 received it but didn't open and so then you could just resend the email to that list whatever you named it so make sure to do that highly recommend that also one of the big keys that we want to do to save time and improve our conversions is use text based emails cuz for one text-based emails absolutely absolutely absolutely crush it cuz they're so simple they're personal it seems like it's

a friend reaching out to you and they help you stand out cuz everybody's focused on design and it's from the founder so it feels more personal while everybody's doing like the crazy branded stuff um and it just works so well like if you look at this example these absolutely Crush It Corbin from Breeze there's not like a lot to distract people the buttons are clear and easy to see these just perform so well and so this these what these are also going to do is take strain off your design team and allow you to send

2x to 3x a day no problem so usually like on those busy days we'll send at least one of them as text based and a couple throughout the week that are text based um just to keep things simple and allow us to be able to send this much and so highly recommend use your text based emails and don't be afraid to send like multiple send them from the founder send them from the brands send them from like other characters um you're more than welcome to do that just do this it'll help you get all your

sends out the other thing we want to do it's very important is we want to update our flows so we're going to want to update our which are the automated emails like the welcome flow card a bin and browse aand and all that good stuff post purchase stuff um it's kind of stupid if you have a card abandoned flow that lasts like two weeks and you have that live for like Black Friday which only lasts 3 days so you're going to want to update your flows to have your tighter time frames and specific to your

offer so rather than waiting like 2 weeks to have somebody go through a cter banon flow we if somebody banners their card on Black Friday they're probably shopping around to check out other stores so we want to remind them right away so we want to send our emails like super fast we want to send multiple emails a day um and this is going to have a massive massive massive effect on conversions so just use I'd say three to four emails per abandonment flow and then like welcome flow then have them separated by a few hours

just for extreme urgency in case somebody is on like the last day Black Friday we want to still remind them multiple times so do not worry about being spammy if that's what you're thinking Black Friday is the only time of the year where you can get away with being scammy people don't view it as scammy or spammy um people don't people don't view it that way they know it's Black Friday and so and they have money to spend so make sure that you don't be afraid to do it so this genuinely should not be free

use this Black Friday flow strategy um to to set up and have these set up prepare these weeks in advance so that you'll be good to go but essentially what we want to do is we have a welcome flow website abandon so anybody who goes on the website they don't view an item at all they just like go to the website and they leave then we have brows abandon flow somebody views an item they physically look at that item's PDP page um then cart and check out abandoned flow then we have the post purchase flow

so these are what you want to set up you can see like the welcome flow we're going to have a custom popup as well just with the access to the Black Friday offer we frame it as that get access to up to 60% off even though they can have it on the site but these get these do really well they get people on your email list and allows you to send them like abandonment emails all that good stuff so I just like to do super simple discount explanation just for and the and then the best

sellers you say welcome here's what we're running for Black Friday Cyber Monday um shop now and then just list out best sellers then we have the website of Bandon flow um I like to wait like 45 minutes for this you could cut it shorter if you want um typically like a non-black Friday I usually have this 2 to four hours but right here we want to really cut it we just want to mention the abandonment being like hey we saw you checking us out something like that um by the way this is the best deal

of the Year this isn't going to come again yada yada whatever that is then we have the browser band inflow somebody views an item and leaves you want to wait 30 minutes to for this first email and then email one I like to do just like a nudge discount info wait 4 hours urgency best sale of the year plus like recommended items um and then show their item again and then wait 24 hours to be like gone forever more urgency last chance and so that's what I do there and then the card and checkout abandon

flow kind of going to be similar we're going to wait 20 minutes though and we're going to nudge and then give the discount info again talk about how it's the biggest deal wait 4 hours extreme extreme extreme urgency get them to impulse purchase and then a last chance 24 hours later and then post purchase flow we want to send them an immediate thank you right off the bat being like thank you for participating in like Black Friday Cyber Monday I know it's a crazy time of the year um by the way you can still add

to your order or say something like that like Place another order I know your family needs I know somebody I know somebody would enjoy this as a gift something like that but you want to send that immediately and this is going to be massive this is one of like this just performs so well just immediate add to your order get some more stuff this is the best sale of the Year why not stock up even more something like that um and then you want to wait 12 hours or 24 hours whatever you want and then

give your friends and family for the holidays and just give them give an email just about hey you bought for yourself or you already bought one thing why don't you get some more why not it's the best sale of the year um and so you want to change these slightly for Early Access Black Friday and then you want to change it for Black Friday then you want to change it for cyber money as well slightly different and then just have those prepared in clavio ready to be turned on at the flip of a switch so

let's freaking print this is what we are going to do Black Friday Cy Monday over 600k if you use these strategies you are going to be able to do that through email so that's it for this one thank you for checking this out I hope you got some value for it make sure you're prepping today for your Black Friday Cyber Monday getting the most out of it make sure to join my free newsletter link is right here inbox newsletter comom ssubscribe genuinely should be like $497 so if you want more more help let me know

but thank you so much for watching this video again hope you got some value from it and I'll see you in the next one