WSODOWNLOADS.

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The Ultimate BFCM Email

Marketing Playbook

By Chase Dimond

Q4 2021
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Contents Slide

INTRO 5

WHY EMAIL MARKETING IS SO IMPORTANT FOR BFCM 6

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR BFCM EMAIL STRATEGY 7

RULES WERE MADE TO BE BROKEN 8

AN IMPORTANT NOTE ON RESENDS 12

PRE-BFCM STRATEGY 13

BFCM WEEK STRATEGY 39

POST BFCM STRATEGY 69

TLDR | BFCM Strategy 86

THANK YOU 92
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Welcome to The Ultimate BFCM
Email Marketing Playbook!
If this is your first course from me, thank you for making this
investment. To my repeat course buyers, I see you and
appreciate you big time!

A bit of background on me: My name is Chase Dimond. I’ve

built and scaled an email marketing agency to 7 figures,
and we’re responsible for over $75M in email-attributed
revenue.

I have a few BFCMs under my belt as an email marketer, and

I have a lot I want to share with you in order to help you
crush this holiday season. 👉
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Email Marketing For Q4 Is Not Easy,
But It Is Simple.
It’s quite a bit different from your email strategy from January
to September.

Your entire team will be focused on one singular thing. Your

goal is to drive as much revenue and acquire as many new
customers as possible over the span of a few weeks.

This playbook is your A to Z strategy for email marketing,

based on years of trials, testing, mistakes, and experience.
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Intro
In this playbook, I’ll tell you everything I know about Email
Marketing during BFCM. We’ll go through the most important
things first, which will be especially important if you are unfamiliar
with the world of Email Marketing.

I’ll explain:

● Everything you need before you start

● Timing and expectations
● The before, during, and after of BFCM
● The keys to retention, LTV, and long-term brand building

Let’s get into it.

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Why is Email Marketing so
important for BFCM?
Firstly, Email Marketing is ALWAYS important.

It’s common for Ecommerce/DTC brands to drive between 20 to 30% of

revenue from email throughout the year. In Q4, we’ve seen that to spike
up to 50% and beyond for some clients.

What you’re about to see is incredibly important for getting the results
with email that your brand relies on.

You must already know that the cost of advertising on large platforms like
Facebook & Instagram have gone way up, and will become even more
expensive when traffic is more valuable.
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What can we expect for BFCM
email strategy?
You’ve likely heard about a lot of the rules that marketers need to
follow for email for most of the year. Many of these rules must be
broken for a SHORT period of time.

If done incorrectly, you can damage your domain health and

deliverability, you can alienate valuable customers, and may not
see the results you expect.

In the next slide, I’ll explain the rules that are widely-known in the
Email Marketing community, how to safely break them, and why
this needs to be done. 👉
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RULES WERE MADE

TO BE BROKEN.

The Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook // Chase Dimond

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Rules were made to be broken.
Rule: Rule break:

Don’t send emails to unengaged Send some emails to unengaged

email subscribers. subscribers, even if they haven’t
engaged in over 90 days.

We’ll need to change the way we speak to these subscribers in

order to “win them back”. You’ll be crafting these emails as if
they’re cold traffic.

You cannot make assumptions with this audience. You need to

treat them like they’re new to your brand and unaware of what you
do/sell. Your subject lines should be “big ideas”, and
re-introducing yourself to this audience.
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Rules were made to be broken.
Rule: Rule break:

Don’t send too large/too many You’ll be sending a lot of emails to

discounts to your audience, it leads your list, possibly multiple emails
to burnout. per day.

Obviously BFCM is an exception. This is something you’ll have to work up

to.

If you’re currently sending 1 email per week, slowly increase your send
cadence between now and November 22nd, which is the Monday before
Black Friday.

Discount strategy is another aspect that we’ll discuss later in this course,
but don’t worry about burnout. Your audience will not be annoyed by
discounts for this two-week period. They’re expecting it and frankly, want it.
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Rules were made to be broken.
Rule: Rule break:

Don’t abuse resends, as they can Resends will be a good friend of

damage your deliverability. yours for BFCM.

A resend is simply sending the same campaign with a different subject

line and preview text to non-openers.

Typically, we use this technique sparingly. It’s not ideal to do more than
1-2 resends per month. When a resend goes out, the campaign may get
less than a 10% open rate, which can be terrible for deliverability.

However, this could lead to a few thousand in sales that otherwise

wouldn’t have happened.
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An Important Note On Resends
At the time of creating the content for this course, we don’t have exact
details on how iOS 15 will affect our open rate metric, holistically. We do
know that Apple Mail users will show as opening ALL campaigns (100%
open rate).

However, we don’t know how Klaviyo & other ESPs will handle showing
open rate data across the board.

Since we might not know who has and has not opened our last email, a
resend could mean that we change the subject line and preview text, and
one aspect of the email.

Swap out an image, make small changes to the header or subheader copy,
or do something that’ll make the email appear different.

It’s more work for your creative team than it was in 2020, but unfortunately
this is necessary.
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PRE-BFCM STRATEGY

The Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook // Chase Dimond

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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Intro
It’s time to get into it.

For your pre-BFCM Email Marketing strategy, I’ll tell you:

➔ What campaigns you need to send

➔ Which flows you need to implement
➔ Tips for acquisition via pop-ups
➔ Helpful tips and tricks

Let’s go.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Your pre-BFCM campaign strategy should be based on the fact that
you don’t want people to spend a ton of money with you until Black
Friday.

Your emails should be mainly content-focused instead of

sale-focused until you begin to tease your sales. Use the 30-60 days
before BFCM to get your audience to fall in love with you because
of your identity, your values, and the content you create. Not
because you give them 15% off every week.

Here are a few campaign ideas for you to send that’ll drive
engagement and elevate rapport with your audience!
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Click any of these to see an example of what this campaign
would look like.

➔ Engaging Story

➔ Founder Story

➔ Meet The Team

➔ Testimonials

➔ Personality Profile

➔ Incentive To Reply
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
All of those campaigns are used solely to engage the audience.

If there’s a sale involved, the sale is an afterthought. The idea is to

show that the brand has a personality. A personality that is probably
fairly similar to that of your audience members. “Buy from us
because we’re one of you.”

Bonus tip: Getting your audience to reply to your emails is very good
for deliverability. I cannot recommend that last example enough (for
ease, this one). Offer a discount, gift, promotion, etc. in exchange for
a reply. This shows that your domain is not spam and these emails
will be delivered safely without questionable links/unwanted content.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Working on your deliverability in September, October, and early
November is critical for present and future inbox placement.

Whether you achieve superior inboxing by prompting them to:

reply (auto-whitelisting), click the “star” next to the email, or
manually move you to the primary tab, this is important.

Don’t just tell them to do it, though. Tell them WHY.

Use this copy angle on the next slide to tweak for your own
brand.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Hey {{firstname}}, good news and bad news.

The good news is that we’ll be dropping a new product for you in 3 days,
and we think it’s our best work yet.

The bad news is that we only made 300 of them. That’s not that many,
and we REALLY want you to have one.

We’re announcing the drop via email in 3 days. To make sure you get a
notification for this email and be the first to cop, do this:

1. Move this email to your primary tab, or click the star next to this
email in your inbox.
2. Reply to this email with a 🔥 so we know you’re interested.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Quick brief for you, if you’re unfamiliar with the terminology:

A “flow” email is an email that is set up as an automation in

your ESP (i.e. Klaviyo), and is sent to select subscribers based
on their behavior. If X, then Y.

For example, when someone signs up to your list via a pop up,
they get a welcome email. When someone adds items to their
cart and leaves the website, they get an email reminding them
that their cart items are waiting for them.

Just for context.

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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Flows are so beloved by the email marketing community because
they’re seen as a one-and-done approach to driving revenue (please
optimize them ongoing, though). Once you set these flows up, they
automatically make you money in the background.

This is the one time of the year that you can turn these flows off
and replace them with new, BFCM-specific messaging.

This is something you can do a week before your sales officially

begin.

You can do this with all flows. And I’ll show you how to tailor your
messaging for BFCM, and why this is necessary.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows | Email
Collection
All pre-purchase email flows are fueled by a pop-up.

Most Ecommerce/DTC pop-ups will state that a prospect can sign up

with their email in exchange for an initial offer.

The offer could be:

➔ % off
➔ $ off
➔ Get entered into a giveaway

For BFCM, a tried-and-true offer is to promise early access to Black

Friday deals when you sign up.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows | Email
Collection

If you’re unsure of how to setup a pop-up in your ESP (i.e.

Klaviyo) for your store, I would recommend doing a quick
google search for this information as a lot of the ESP’s have
great documentation for this.

I’ve included a few slides on form recommendations that my

Klaviyo rep sent me. However, these recommendations
should be applicable to any ESP or form builder tool.
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KLAVIYO / POP-UPS

For popups - ideally you would have two separate forms

that are optimized for each experience, one for desktop
and one for mobile. Since we typically see a ton of traffic
coming from mobile devices, we recommend optimizing a
form exclusively for mobile.

Our top recommendation for timing delay on desktop would

be to leverage exit intent. We've identified that exit intent is
more effective at converting than other delays for desktop.
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KLAVIYO / POP-UPS

Customers seem to be more receptive to the forms when

they are being interrupted right before they are about to exit
the site, so the exit pop up improves the overall website
experience.

On mobile, we rely on a different strategy. Since exit intent

functionality is not present on touch-based mobile devices,
we recommend leveraging the scroll delay and displaying the
pop up after the custom has scrolled down towards the
bottom of the page. We've seen success with showing after
60-75% of scrolling.
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KLAVIYO / FLYOUTS

When it comes to flyout we typically don't see these

impleted nearly as much as we do popup forms.

We typically see flyouts being leverage post email

acquisition, when looking to acquire additional
customer data points to live within a customer profile.
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ORDER MATTERS.

The Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook // Chase Dimond

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ORDER MATTERS

In my own testing + talking with others, the order of asking for an email
and phone number matters. We’ve seen the most success with asking
for an email address FIRST, and phone number SECOND.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows

It’s 7-10 days before your Black Friday deals begin.

You’re running traffic to your website, customers are seeing your

“get early access” pop-up, and signing up with their email.

The first email they receive is an introduction from the brand.

This is Welcome Email #1. Introduce the brand, the founder, and
tell them again why they’re on your list.

They’re there for early access to BFCM deals. Tell them when it
starts, and tell them they’ll be the first to know.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Your Welcome Series should contain 4-5 emails that indoctrinate
your audience into your brand.

Usually, your first Welcome email includes a 10% off code, but you
don’t want them to use that code to buy yet. You want them to wait
for the big day.

Within this series, you’ll want to showcase your best sellers,

testimonials, press features, funny content, and anything you’re
proud of.

The one constant is that you continue to tease the upcoming sale
(and include a dynamic countdown timer if you’d like to).
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Regarding the dynamic countdown timer:

This is not something that Klaviyo offers natively. This is

something you’ll have to input manually via a third party. It’s
fairly simple, but not a lot of people show you how to do this.
It’s something I went over in my main course.

If you want to watch me do it and follow along…

CLICK HERE
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Your abandonment series should be updated for BFCM if they
contain a discount.

Most Cart and Checkout Abandonment flows offer a small discount

in the 2nd or 3rd email in the series.

What I’d recommend for you is to remove the emails that contain
discounts, and offer scarcity in a different way.

Tell your customer that a major sale is coming up, and you could
potentially run out of stock if they wait too long. Tell them they can
safely get it now, or they can wait until it’s heavily discounted.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Your Winback Series will be very important in your lead up to BFCM.
Of course, you’ll be acquiring plenty of customers with your ads, but
it’s a good idea to re-engage customers that are already warm to
you.

It’s MUCH cheaper to re-engage cold leads than it is to acquire new

ones, and it’s certainly not a shot in the dark. If Winback emails didn’t
work, marketers wouldn’t do them. They do work. There is still a
chance that they can come back and be great customers.

On the next slide, I’ll give you some copy to swipe for your
Winback flow.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Hey {{firstname}}, remember us? We’re {{brand}}. It’s been a while!

We’re reaching out to you to let you know that we’ll be offering a
huge sale for Black Friday & Cyber Monday real soon. If you’re
interested in getting products from {{brand}} at our lowest price ever,
here’s all you have to do.

Click the button at the end of this email, and poke around for a bit.
Do some window shopping, and take a look at what you think you
might like! We need to know that you’re engaged in order to offer
you this crazy deal.

Hope all is well. See you on the site!

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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Flows
You just read the minute details of tweaking flows for this
holiday, but the big picture is this:

The better you understand your customer journey, the more

targeted your flows will be, the higher your chances of
success will be.

Take time to audit where your customers are coming from

and why they clicked your ad in the first place, in order to get
your brand messaging on lock.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Segments
This is a brief section to outline how your subscriber segments
should look.

Segmenting your audience is something that should be done

year-round, but it’s especially important to outline which
subscribers are hot and likely to buy, or cold and unlikely to buy.

Any customer can convert, but it’s all about how you frame your
messaging.

The next slide shows the segments + definitions that you should
have in time for BFCM, in order of intent.
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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Segments
VIP Active 14D Engaged 30D Engaged 60D Engaged 90D
Someone who
has placed an Someone who Someone who Someone who Someone who
order 3-5x OR was active on site has opened or has opened or has opened or
spent more than in the last 14 days. clicked in the last clicked in the last clicked in the last
2-3x AOV. 30 days. 60 days. 90 days.

Purchased 90D Engaged 120D Unengaged

Someone who Someone who Someone who

has placed an has opened or has not opened or
order in the last clicked in the last clicked in the last
90 days. 120 days. 120 days.

The Unengaged Segment should mainly be used as an exclusion.

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Pre-BFCM Strategy | Segments
Ensure that you prioritize your VIPs over anyone else in your
audience. They’ve paid you hundreds (maybe thousands) of
dollars since they heard about you, and they’ll probably keep
going.

These are your biggest fans, and you cannot let them down. Give
your VIPs early access, extra incentives, and special treatment.
They deserve it.

The next chapter is all about the week of BFCM. Let’s jump right
in, right now.
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BFCM WEEK STRATEGY

The Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook // Chase Dimond

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BFCM Week Strategy | Intro
This is it.

This is the moment you waited all year for.

Time to break records and reach as many people as

possible.

You should be pumped. Heck, I’m pumped for you.

Let’s go.

Let’s make some money.

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BFCM Week Strategy | Offers
Your discount structure is something you should test prior to
this week.

There are a handful of offer types that you can run with. It all
depends on what your margins look like and what your brand
is known for.

Brands that do discounts every week/month will have to go

big.

Brands that hardly ever do discounts will be able to run with

just about any decent offer to convert like crazy.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Offers
Here are the types of offer structures you can use for BFCM:

➔ Flat % off
➔ Flat $ off
➔ Tiered % or $ off
➔ Gift With Purchase
➔ Free Shipping
➔ Buy 1 Get 1
➔ Price Change Offer

For an example of each one of these, see slide 58.

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BFCM Week Strategy | Offers
All of those offers WILL convert, but it’s about what will work best for
your audience.

When attempting to test offers, the math works like this:

If your AOV is $100, test if people respond better to 10% off or $10

off.

Even though it’s the same discount, certain audiences will respond
differently to different offers.

This is something you should tackle at a smaller scale in the months

leading up to BFCM.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Segments
On slide 37, I cover some Pre-BFCM Segments that you should be
hitting in the weeks and months leading up to BFCM Week.

Pending your open rates and deliverability are strong, for BFCM Week,
you should be fine increasing your segment size.

For our clients with strong results (20%+ on campaign sends), we’ll
typically leverage a (+/-) 150-180 day engaged segment.

For our clients with decent results (15%+ on campaign sends), we’ll
typically leverage a (+/-) 90-150 day engaged segment.

For our clients with poor results (10%+ on campaign sends), we’ll
typically leverage a (+/-) 90-120 day engaged segment.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Segments
It also could be wise to include last year BFCM & Holiday buyers
into this years send (even if they aren’t apart of the ((x))day
engaged segment you select).

NOTE: The recommended segments on the previous slide are

general recommendations.

Please pay attention to your own results and metrics to pick

the right segment for your particular business.

Segments chosen are always dependent on performance of

previous sends.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Segments
Note: In most cases, sending one single campaign to your full
list should be okay.

I’d look to leverage this full list send right before, or on Black
Friday itself.

Reason being: If you can get a portion of your unengaged list to

open or click or visit your website, they’ll be grouped into your
engaged group for your Cyber Monday sends.

After leveraging the one full list send, please go back to your
engaged to semi-engaged BFCM segment.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
For your Black Friday campaign strategy, you likely already
know what you need to do.

You need to go big. Bigger than you have all year.

What’s most important is that I tell you just how competitive

your subscribers’ inboxes will be on the day/week of Black
Friday.

You want more eyes to be on your brand, not everyone else.

The next slide will tell you how.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
If you were able to get a large number of subscribers to
“whitelist” you by replying to your emails or by clicking the star,
hopefully you will be one of few emails appearing in the primary
tab.

All of a sudden, your competition for attention goes from ~100

brands in their inbox, down to 10-20.

To make sure that your audience sees you in the primary tab,
your initial “sale starts now” email could be a plain-text email
from the founder. Plain-text is known to be superior for inboxing
and deliverability, and could perform extremely well.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
You also need to factor in inbox traffic, and when their inbox is most
likely to be quiet.

Get a head start wherever you can. Send early in the morning, right
when your audience is waking up. Considering even resending the
same campaign to non-openers* (review slide 12 again for more info
here) with new subject lines and preview text again at the end of the
day when they’re getting off work.

It’s easy to get lost in an inbox. You need to do everything you can to
make sure all eyes are on your offer.

In the next slides I’ll outline a potential send cadence for the week of
and the week before.
 WSODOWNLOADS.IN NOVEMBER

SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY

16 17 18 19 20

TEASER GUESS THE

DISCOUNT

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

THANKSGIVING BLACK FRIDAY

VIP LAUNCH + ANNOUNCE SALE SALE
TEASER THE SALE REMINDER REMINDER SALE SALE ENDS
REMINDER MIDNIGHT

28 29 30 1 2 3 4

CYBER MONDAY CYBER MONDAY

LAUNCH NEW SALE ENDS
OFFER MIDNIGHT
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Tuesday, Nov. 16th - Tease the sale (3 examples here)
- A huge sale is coming soon, stay tuned, whitelist us.
- Segment = Your BFCM Segment
Thursday, Nov. 18th - Guess the discount (example here)
- Encourage the audience to guess the discount, if you guess correctly, you get
early access
- Segment = Your BFCM Segment
Sunday, Nov. 21st
Email 1: Sales start tomorrow for Non-VIPs (example here)
- Tell your audience that the Black Friday deals are starting early (Nov.
22nd for non-VIPs)
- Segment = Non-VIPs (exclude VIPs)
Email 2: VIP Launch (example here)
- Hey VIP, you get early access.
- Segment = VIPs (exclude Non-VIPs)
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Monday, Nov. 22nd - Sale announcement (5 examples here)
- Hey everyone, the sale is here!
- Segment for Sale Announcement: Your BFCM Segment (exclude
VIPs)

Tuesday Nov. 23rd - Sale reminder (4 examples here)

- Did you see that our sale started? Get in now!
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current Year BFCM Buyers
- VIPs or Non VIPs)

Wednesday Nov. 24th - Sale reminder (same examples as directly above)

- Sale still going!
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current Year BFCM Buyers
- VIPs or Non VIPs)
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Thursday, Nov. 25th - Happy Thanksgiving + Sale Reminder (4 examples
here)
- Happy Thanksgiving
- 48 hours left! Get in if you haven’t yet.
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current Year BFCM
Buyers - VIPs or Non VIPs)

Friday, Nov. 26th - Sale ends tonight + Resend after 4-6 hours (6 examples
here)
- The sale ends at midnight, this is the last chance!
- Segment & Resend Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current
Year BFCM Buyers - VIPs or Non VIPs)

At this point you’ll have sent 9 emails over 11 days, so you can go quiet on
Saturday and Sunday if you’d like.

You’ll be back on Monday & Tuesday anyway 😈

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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
It’s the weekend after Black Friday week. You’ve probably just
made so much money that your computer is glowing. But are we
done yet?

Not quite.

We haven’t even done Cyber Monday yet.

In order to not annoy your audience, you can’t do a bigger sale

on Cyber Monday than you did on Black Friday. The offer just
has to be different. Let me explain.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
It would be a bad move to do 30% off for Black Friday, and
then 40% off for Cyber Monday. A huge portion of your
audience would’ve just spend all their money on a smaller
sale.

Instead, change the offer and the angle, or simply extend the
sale.

For a new offer, you could run a “gift with purchase over $50”
offer, or something similar. This may encourage new customers
to actually purchase again, in order to get the mysterious “gift”
that you’re offering them.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Now that it’s Cyber Monday, you have 2 to 3 emails left to send before
you can relax.

Monday, Nov. 29th - Black Friday Sale extended (example here)

- We extended the sale, get it before it’s gone again!
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current Year BFCM Buyers -
VIPs or Non VIPs)
OR

Monday, Nov. 29th - Cyber Monday Starts (7 examples here)

- Same great products, different deal. Maybe you’ll like this better.
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL Current Year BFCM
Buyers - VIPs or Non VIPs)

Note: I personally prefer the ‘Cyber Monday Starts’ option.

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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Tuesday, Nov. 30th - Sale ends tonight (4 examples here)
- Get this new (or existing) deal before it’s gone at midnight!
- Segment: Your BFCM Segment (exclude ALL BFCM Buyers - VIPs
or Non VIPs)

If the sale is really doing well, you can resend it again 4-6 hours later.
Or feel free to extend it one more day. Just understand that this can
potentially come off the wrong way to your audience.

Be careful with promising urgency and then pulling it back. Nobody

likes to feel like they got tricked.

On the flipside, you may have people that are thankful that you
extended the sale because they thought they missed it.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
For reference, here are a few campaign examples that
showcase different types of offers and how they’re
announced:

➔ Flat % off
➔ Flat $ off
➔ Tiered Discount
➔ % off + Gift With Purchase
➔ % off $X+
➔ Free Shipping
➔ Buy 1 Get 1 (BOGO)
➔ Price Change Offer
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Here are some subject line swipes you can use for your
teaser/lead-up campaigns.

A) We’re about to have the biggest sale ever 🤯

B) 5 DAYS LEFT: The biggest deal of the year

More:

A) Savings are coming, {{firstname}}...

B) DON’T miss this huge sale...🚨
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Here are some subject line swipes you can use for your sale
announcement emails. Test to see how well your audience
responds to showing the offer in the SL vs not showing the offer.

Example:
A) Save 25% for BLACK FRIDAY 🔥
B) The BIGGEST discount of the year 🔥

More:
A) STARTS NOW: 25% off all week 💥
B) HUGE SALE: 25% OFF SITE-WIDE 🚨
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BFCM Week Strategy | Campaigns
Here are some subject line swipes you can use for your
last chance emails.

A) LAST CHANCE to save 25% off 👀

B) Don’t go to bed without opening this email 👉

More:
A) 24 HOURS LEFT: Don’t miss this 25% off deal
B) LAST CALL for 25% off 🤯
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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
Your pop-up and your flows should be centred around the sales
that are currently happening.

Your language will change again, your trigger cadence will

change, and it’ll be much more aggressive than you’d normally
be comfortable with.

Just like last time, we need to imagine our customers going

through the journey from ad to conversion to make certain
decisions.

I’ll explain!
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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
So, a prospect stumbles upon your ad while scrolling Instagram
on a chilly November morning. The ad says “25% off for Black
Friday starts now”.

They love your ad, and they click through to your website. The
pop up fires in under 3 seconds, and says “Save an extra 5%
when you sign up for our email list!”

They sign up, get a code for an extra 5% off on top of the

site-wide sale, and purchase. They’re so happy they found you,
and they’re so happy they signed up to get an extra discount.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
It can be a struggle to get a prospect to sign up for your
email list when they’re already getting a massive discount,
but a little extra incentive will go a long way for most people.

For the week of BFCM, your first Welcome Email should

just be repurposed content from your initial sale launch.

In 24 hours, if they haven’t converted, they should receive a

best sellers/testimonial email. In another 12 hours, they
should get a sale reminder email.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
All of your abandonment flows (site, browse, cart, checkout) should
trigger much faster than normal.

Typically, we space these flows out to send over the span of 4-5 days.
Instead, they should all send within 36-48 hours.

Each email in the flow should be sent anywhere from 2 hours to 12 hours
of each other, with email 1 in the flow sending even sooner (try 15 to 30
minutes after the abandonment happens). For example, if this prospect
abandons their cart, you need to follow up quickly.

Reiterate that the sale won’t be here for long, and inventory is going
quick. “Get it before it sells out!” should be your main focus for all of
these flows.
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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
Your post-purchase flows should be extremely brand/founder
centric.

In order to ensure people that they bought from a real brand that
makes high-quality products, the founder needs to be present in
their inbox within an hour of purchasing.

This can be plain-text, and many customers will feel like the
founder took the time out of their day to personally thank them
for their purchase.

Copy example on the next slide.

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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
Hey {{firstname}}!

I’m Bob Ross, the founder of Nike! I just wanted to send you a quick
email to say thanks for supporting us for the holiday season.

My team and I hope you enjoy what you ordered, and we’re all so
thankful that you found us online.

We’re working as hard as we can to get this to you as fast as

possible, and we promise it’ll get there safe! If you have any
questions at all, just reach out to my team and we’ll get back to you
ASAP.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

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BFCM Week Strategy | Flows
An email like that goes a long way with new customers. My
agency notices that these plain-text emails from the founder get
a TON of responses from people who think that this is a unique,
one-off email to them only.

It’s a very powerful psychological tool to make that connection

with new customers. They will remember that.

I still remember the brands that sent me a birthday email and it

made me smile — even though I was the one that implemented
that email 9 months prior.
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POST BFCM STRATEGY

The Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook // Chase Dimond

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Post-BFCM Strategy | Intro
We’ve officially made it past the most stressful sales period of the
year.

Not all of us made it. Some of us got our ad account banned, some
of us had major supply chain issues, some of us dropped a wood
pallet on our toe in the warehouse and had to sit down for a few
hours.

One thing that 90% of us will have in common is that we check our
P/L sheet and we netted way less money than we actually thought.
“How did I drive $1M in 5 days but only made $80K?”

Let’s address this.

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Post-BFCM Strategy | What Happened?
BFCM is not exactly known for bringing incredibly profitable
days. Not with some of the discounts we’ve seen recently.

If you’re profitable at 75% off, more power to you.

But BFCM was never about profitability. It was about volume.

I’ve said that BFCM is the season of acquisition, not profit.

Here’s what you do in the wake of BFCM to make these losses

worth it.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Your goal for the next 3-6 months is to nurture all of the leads
you just acquired in this two-week period.

You paid good money to acquire this customer, and you WILL
break even on them, and become profitable eventually. Just
not today.

Your audience is most definitely burnt out, so the idea of

running another sale in another week or two is out of the
question. Your strategy needs to suit the needs of your
audience before yourself.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Firstly, as soon as your sales are done, you should certainly send
a campaign from the founder (plain-text) to thank everyone for
participating in this massive event. This email should help make
a solid connection with your new customers and build trust.

An angle that I’ve seen work well is the “supporting our small
business” angle.

If you’re under $10M per year, you can probably get away with
calling yourself a small business. People will feel good about
themselves for supporting a small business, and they’ll tie those
good feelings back to you.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Another thing to cross off your to-do list after BFCM is to reward
your VIP segment.

You may now have a number of new VIPs who just spend a ton
of money with your brand, and they need to be recognized.

Whatever your AOV is, give them the equivalent of 20% off in the
form of a free gift card.

You can choose the top 100-500 spenders, and send them the
copy I’m giving you in the next slide.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Hey {{firstname}}!

Hope I’m reaching you at a good time, but I was just checking some
numbers for the holiday season and realized you spent a very
generous amount of money with us.

Firstly, wow. Thank you so much, and I hope that your order is worth
every penny.

To give you a proper “thank you”, I’d like to offer you a free $10 gift
card to use any time you’d like.

I wish I had an actual card to give you, but this is the internet, so I can
only give you a link!

Use this whenever you’re ready to come back, and thank you again
for your support. We TRULY appreciate you.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
That’s how you charm a VIP, right there. That’s an undeniably
nice gesture for a brand to give to a customer, and they WILL
come back — provided your shipment doesn’t come in broken
or 3 weeks late.

As for the rest of your new audience, you need to keep them
entertained until their credit card is paid off and they’re ready
to shop again.

On the next slide are a few examples of brands that have really
solid emails that engage customers WITHOUT offering big
discounts.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Sign up to these email lists, you won’t regret it.

➔ Birddogs
➔ Disco
➔ CROSSNET
➔ Lunya
➔ Brave Robot
➔ MatchaBar
➔ Poo-Pourri

*we manage the email channel for 5 of these 7 brands.

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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
Every brand that I referenced in the last slide is a
Ecommerce/DTC brand that has a solid grasp on who their
market is, and what they want to hear about.

Their content is NEVER boring, and they’ll maintain a 25%+ open

rate just because of the reputation they hold with their audience.
The same way you run to Spotify when your favorite artist drops
new music, these brands’ audiences are excited to open every
email.

They simply never miss. This should be the goal of your brand’s
content strategy.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Campaigns
In terms of campaigns to send, it could truly be anything.

You can recycle or re-spin the campaign ideas from my

pre-BFCM section, or just follow these basic principles.

Make your content relevant, relatable, and funny.

If something funny happens in the news that could relate to your

brand, that could be an email. Make up a story about the team
and your office shenanigans, that could be an email. Just do not
bore your audience.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Your flow strategy will mostly go back to the way it was before
BFCM, except for one thing.

You have all of these new customers, and these new customers
likely have a lot of thoughts about your product that they haven’t
shared with you yet.

In your post-purchase flows, it’s time to get aggressive with

review requests.

Reviews are incredible currency in the Ecommerce/DTC world,

and you cannot miss the chance to get as many as possible.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Just in case anyone reading this is new to Ecommerce/DTC, having
thousands of reviews is one of the best things that can happen to
your business.

● More reviews = more credibility

We still live in a world where some people do not feel
comfortable buying things online unless it’s on Amazon. Why
Amazon? Because customer service is their priority. They have
a lot of reviews on their site, and they’re harsh on brands that
underdeliver to Amazon customers.

Amazon is seen as a “real business” to people who are

unfamiliar with online shopping. You need to get on their level
in terms of social proof, and reviews are the way to do that.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
● More reviews = more content
Reviews can be repurposed as ad copy, email angles, and
can be front and centre on your website. Some of the best
ad hooks are simple reviews from happy customers. As you
saw in my previous email example, reviews can also fuel
positive content for a campaign.

When generating reviews, it can come in many forms. The

technique I’ll share in the next slides will get you a large number
of high quality reviews if done correctly.

DO THIS 👉
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Prompting customer reviews for individual products on your
site is always helpful, but there is a step up from that.

If you sell a product that is easily demonstrable, ask your

customers for photo or video reviews for a generous
incentive.

You can collect media reviews by creating a TypeForm to

send your subscribers to.

This is the information you should include 👉

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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
In your TypeForm, include the following information:

➔ Name
➔ Email
➔ May we use this content on social media with credit to
you?
➔ Instagram Handle (if comfortable)
➔ {{Media Drop}}

Over the next few weeks, you could generate hundreds of

UGC videos to use in ads/feed posts.
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Post-BFCM Strategy | Flows
Remember that a review prompt email should not be the first
email they receive in their post purchase flow. It’s important
to build rapport before making an ask like this.

Your post-purchase flow should follow this cadence:

1. Thank you from the founder.

2. Leave a photo/video review for $ off your next purchase.
3. Last chance to save $ by submitting a review.
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TLDR | BFCM Strategy
I understand that you just read A LOT of content. I’m positive
that there are points and suggestions in this course that were
missed, but I’m going to do a brief TLDR for you to explain
the overall reasoning for my recommendations.

Sometimes when we get too caught up in the details, we

don’t know what the big picture is even supposed to look
like.

On the next slide is a 30,000 ft view of your Email Marketing

strategy for BFCM.
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TLDR | BFCM Strategy
Overall goals:

● Acquire a large, new cohort of customers with a

compelling offer.

● Nurture these new leads/customers and entice them to

become “fans” of your brand.

● Compel existing email subscribers to convert with a

special offer.

● Make a ton of sales.

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TLDR | BFCM Strategy
Pre-BFCM Goals:

➔ Tease upcoming deals, but do not push sales within 20-30

days of your BFCM offer. Do not burn out your audience.

➔ Send content-focused emails to entertain your audience until

the sale arrives.

➔ Remove promotions from your flows/automations. Use

BFCM-related verbiage, and explain that these products may
go out of stock.

➔ Create a pop-up that encourages early site-visitors to sign up

for early access to the sale.
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TLDR | BFCM Strategy
During BFCM Goals:

➔ Aggressive campaign strategy. One email per day, plus

resends to non-openers stating the importance of your offer.

➔ Trigger abandonment emails faster.

➔ As soon as a customer buys, they should receive a plain-text

message from the founder

➔ Ensure that these new customers recognize your brand as

much as they recognize your product. This is vital for a longer,
healthier LTV.
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TLDR | BFCM Strategy
After BFCM Goals:

➔ Send funny, entertaining, content-focused emails to your

audience. Do not push sales for at least 4 weeks after this
event.

➔ Ensure that your new audience knows everything about your

brand that you want them to know. Introduce the team, the
founder, and your values.

➔ Create flows that politely ask for reviews in exchange for an

incentive.
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Thank you for paying attention!
I’ve been lucky enough to work with some insanely
cool (and large) brands over my decade of email
experience. I am a data-driven learner, and I’ve taken
as much info from these tests, wins, and failures as
possible.

Years later, these lessons are packaged into a

course that I’m 100% positive will help you crush last
year’s numbers.

Thank you so much for being a part of this.

One more thing on the next slide...

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Thank You + Quick Favor

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