Entrepreneur

The most lucrative month in e-commerce starts in a couple of days. There is no greater time than now to double down on marketing. Hopefully, this post inspires you to try something new with your marketing this Q4.

Before I get into the good parts of this post here's a quick disclaimer:
- The 1.2 million that I am referring to in the titles comes from 2 brands that I do not own. However, the 1.2m is from sales that are directly attributed to the marketing channels that I manage.
- The marketing structures that I used for both brands are almost identical. This is why I grouped them together for the sake of this post
- I do not manage paid ads but they were running on both of these sites in addition to the marketing that I will mention below
Another disclaimer, this post has a large focus on backend marketing. The larger the brand, the more important the backend marketing is. So, if you’re currently doing less than 15k/month, I’d recommend putting less effort into the things I speak about below and putting more effort into things like media buying, social media growth, influencer campaigns, etc. In a nutshell, what you probably need is more front-end traffic.

Now let's break down how you can easily do over 50% of your sales in the month of November with back-end marketing. I managed Email/SMS marketing, Reddit Marketing, and Website optimization for these brands. I have already made a post about how I pushed millions with Reddit marketing, so this post will focus on the Email and SMS.

How I run effective Email and SMS marketing in November

Week 1 - This is the ramp-up week. You want to change your marketing from friendly and informational to cut-throat and urgent. The first thing I do is create a new email/SMS pop-out for the brands. Keep the text simple, something like “Do you want 10%? – subscribe to our mailing list for exclusive Black Friday Deals” works better than more wordy pop-outs. Next, I update the automated flows, I add timers (This can be done easily using sites like Sendtric for HTML timers) to the abandoned cart emails and add a BFCM month banner to all of the emails. This adds urgency and makes them feel like they are getting a good deal regardless of when they buy during the month. You can also butter up VIP customers with an early access sale at this time. It’s also a really good idea to add a free gift to orders during this week, it doesn’t have to be big. You just want to be in your customers' good books if you want to convert these guys twice in a 30-day period.

Week 2 - This is the inspiration week. The goal of this week is to get customers to visualize receiving your product(s). Pick out the products that you want to push and embed them into an email that put customers in a buying mood. Here are some examples, “Best Christmas Gift Ideas” (followed with reviews that showcase people holding the product by festive decorations), Black Friday Favorites (followed with some type of scarcity like “these products fly off our shelves every year around this time, secure yours before we sell out”), or some type seasonal blog post style email which features a use case for your product at this specific time of year (Ex. Baking niche- holiday recipe, Pet niche – “My dog became the star of my Christmas party” followed with a stupid story, Fitness Niche- “5 ways to stay lean during the holidays”, etc.) If you have a large American customer base, this is also a good time to send out a Veterans Day email.

Week 3 – This is the week to build hype. If you want to do a promo, now is a good time to do a free shipping promo in an email that talks about stock being low on Best-sellers. Make it seem like there is an opportunity to buy things at full price with free shipping. Customers should feel like if they don’t buy now, they might not be able to get it at all. At this point, you should have generated 30-40% of the sales that you will generate in the month of November.

Week 4 – This is where shit gets crazy. Let customers know that Cyber Week is here and there will be no better time to buy from your site. I like to run 1 product promos all week, these promos do very well on SMS channels as well. Do an aggressive discount on different products multiple times this week. Make sure there's a short time window to be able to get the discount. This keeps customers on their toes and it builds anticipation. People will be waiting for the item that they’ve been eyeing to go on sale. Avoid heavily discounting your best sellers at this time. I like to send 2 versions of a Happy Thanksgiving email. Version 1 is just a general happy Thanksgiving email that goes out to people who haven’t made a purchase on your site. Version 2 is Happy Thanksgiving + early access to the Black Friday Sale. (If your email list is under 15k I’d suggest sending this to all buyers, If your email list is larger than 15k I’d suggest sending this to people who have purchased 2 or more times)

BFCM- Black Friday and Cyber Monday are really just 5 emails and 2 SMS campaigns. Email 1 – Black Friday Sale Announcement, Email 2 – Last chance to redeem Black Friday Sale, Email 3 Cyber Monday Sale, Email 4 – Last chance to get Cyber Monday deal, Email 5 (optional) – Cyber Week Sale. When I run sales for Black Friday, I focus on bulk discounting (ex. Save $50 on orders over $200). Try to at least double your average order value. I focus on convincing the people with the extra funds to spend as much as possible during this weekend. Cyber Monday is for everyone else who may just want 1 or 2 specific things at a better rate. I've found that it is extremely hard to get people to place huge orders after they’ve already bought the things that they really want. This is why I always do bulk discounting first.

Bonus- This email is often the most profitable email of the entire year. After all the sales are done, write a plain text “Thank you” email from the “CEO”. I made a whole post about why this email has the potential to be the most lucrative email of the entire year. If done correctly this email will EASILY outperform any of the sales emails you sent during November. 350k of the 1.2 million I mentioned earlier came from this 1 email.

Email and SMS Revenue Breakdown
Brand 1:
Email Revenue: 332k
SMS Revenue: 56k
Brand 2
Email Revenue: 667k
SMS Revenue: 140k
During November, it is very possible to do over half of your sales from existing customers. Around this time of year media buying becomes more competitive. If you have an existing customer base, doubling down on the backend stuff will be more profitable than looking to acquire new customers at this time of year.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my post, Id be happy to provide more clarity on any of the subjects that I mentioned in this post. I wanted to keep this post a bit shorter but I didn’t want to be too general/vague. I apologize for the length and if I rambled a bit on certain points.