#44 - (Internal) How We're Prepping for BFCM

BFCM blah blah blah… biggest time of the year blah blah blah… most revenue generated blah blah blah…

I’m sure you’ve been beaten over the head enough times with this.

Still… Gotta be a broken record about this because it’s crunch time.

Our team had an internal meeting this week, and I wanted to share some key insights we’ve gathered, plus some of the strategies we’ve deployed successfully (last year), and are planning to deploy again.

Let’s get into it.

1) Have Your Early Access Ready

With some brands starting their sales as early as mid of October, you want to make sure that you’re not ‘left behind’, as your consumers are going to run out of money.

Additionally, it’s no longer a ‘mad rush’ to purchase items, with consumers taking their time to decide on purchases before BFCM, and a longer window will lead to more conversions.

How We Did It:

For Swee Lee, we ran an early access pop-up (look below) for visitors, whilst running a gift-card giveaway contest for existing subs.

These opt-ins tend to be ‘higher intent’ vs your average subscriber (open rates of 70%, click rates of 20%+), and we also followed up by retargeting non-openers to ensure we captured as many sales as possible.

For Qure on the other hand, we focused on highlighting specific Black Friday skincare bundles during early access (bump AOV), and had these up around the fourth week of October.

The sequence looked something like:

Pop up (join VIP list for early access VIP sale) > flow (thanks for joining and look out for our codes) > campaigns (VIP list invite + retargeting) > last chance email/SMS campaign.

2) The Days of Batch & Blast Sending Are Over

Personalizing just ‘first name’ is no longer cutting it, and consumers will cut you (no pun intended) if your emails read generic.

This means utilizing dynamic product feeds, segmenting your customers (new/returning/winback/vip.etc), based on product interest (checkout/browse/atc) or even old subscribers vs new ones (who came during BFCM).

For Truly Beauty, we did this by tweaking copy between past purchasers vs VIPs vs disengaged segment.etc, with different subject lines, preview texts, and body copy, which got us up to a list utilization of over 75%, which brings us to our next point.

3) Start Ramping Up Your Email Sends Now

If you’ve been typically sending 50k emails per send, and suddenly ramp it up to 100 - 150k for your BFCM campaigns, Google might flag you as a spam account or think your account was compromised due to the sudden jump in senders.

Make sure you do the necessary legwork now, whilst making sure you don’t neglect your numbers (eg: spam rates below 0.3%, bounce/unsub below 1%, Google Postmaster Domain Rep med/high).

Even more groundwork would include making sure you run your litmus tests, list cleaning, and the basics like DMARC, SPF and DKIM are setup correctly.

Also keep an eye out if you have a decent number of Bigpond/Telstra emails coming into your welcome flows (if yes, create a separate flow for them asking them to whitelist your emails - we’ve seen major issues with them for deliverability)

4) Drive FOMO

At its core, we’re all wired the same way.

We’re excited by discounts/limited time sales, curious about what our favorite influencers are using, and easily convinced by friends and family.

Use this to your brand’s advantage, whether through social proof (XYZ people just signed up for this offer in the last 24 hours! - Klaviyo recently released a sign up counter you can check out here), scarcity (only 100 boxes left), reels, you get the idea.

5) Don’t Underestimate The Power of Live Text

This is a secret ninja tactic we’re giving away, but make sure your live text/body text mentions the key word (Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday) during sales.

It helps because when customers sift through their inbox to look for deals, they search for these terms to filter those sale emails.

And if it’s not in your subject line or preview text, make sure it’s at least in your body text, because image texts are not searchable.

And that’s a wrap!

Still had quite a bit more the team discussed, but also wanted to prevent this from turning into a 10 min read.

Hope you’ve gotten value out of this one - and please let me know if you want us to do more of these.

Also, if you’ve any qns, feel free to shoot them my way.

Have a good weekend :)