The "other" BFCM ecom marketers forgot about

A moment is like the mindset with a built-in deadline and built-in emotions.

It's not just back to school, it's back to work, back to routine, back to me. You're not forcing your product into the holiday, you're forcing the behavior change underneath the holiday and meeting it there.

Your back to school isn't one audience. You've got parents, you've got college students, you've got teachers, you've got the back to me adults with no kids. It's basically the same timeframe, but 4 completely different types of people that require 4 completely different types of messages.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow. When your leads turn to go, did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

All right. So today we're going to do one of my favorite kind of episodes. I think it's talking about a moment that everyone thinks they understand and flip it a little bit. So let me start off by posing a little question here because it's very timely right now. If I say back to school, what brands pop in your head, Chase?

Oh man. Going back to when I was a kid, I would say like the Targets of the world, the Staples of the world, And as like a PC guy, maybe like a Dell laptop.

Yeah, no, exactly. Backpacks, pencils, a kid holding a lunchbox in a commercial. That's exactly the problem. Every brand that doesn't sell school supplies right now and looks at back to school and goes, eh, not my moment, and scrolls right past it.

Yeah, I've been there too, right? And it just leads to leaving a lot of money on the table.

Yeah, and it's a stupid amount of money because back to school isn't just about school. It's actually like a Reset. It's like the second New Year, in my opinion, right? So look, you had your New Year's and then you have your summer, and when your back to school happens, it's like when the the change of your everyday schedule goes. And I don't care if you're a coffee company, a dog food company, skincare, candles. Your customers are all resetting right now for their entire routine over the next six weeks window, and nobody, in my opinion, is taking advantage of it the right way. So today. I wanted to break down how to hijack this moment, even if you've never sold a backpack in your life. And the theme today is like capitalizing on a moment. Back to school in this case study, the one we're going to talk about today, is a framework that applies to almost any seasonal moment, in my opinion, on the calendar, but this one's just really easy to pick on. And once you kind of see how you attach your brand to that moment, you don't obviously always have to belong to it, but you can play into it 4 or 5 times a year. Which is the real lesson here today. So most brands only wake up twice a year. They have the BFCM, maybe the New Year's thing, or maybe they got Valentine's or Mother's or Father's Day. And they often go dark wondering why their calendar has all these giant dead zones. So that's what we're going to talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. And then to add, like back in school sits like right in the middle of like one of the biggest dead zones there is, right? Like late summer, kind of everyone's coasting into Labor Day.

Yeah, that's it. So let's fix that. So let me, let me set the table here with the numbers because I think this is kind of insane this year. So I was looking up the numbers because I was curious what people spend. The National Retail Federation is projecting the back-to-school spending is about to hit $147 billion in 2026. That's up $128 billion from last year. That's $147 billion. Wait, that can't be right. $12 billion from last year, not $128 billion. Sorry, $12 billion from last year. So it's $147 billion. That's with a B. And if you break it down into K through 12, it's about $43 billion and back-to-school crossed $100 billion for the first time ever, which is crazy for back-to-college stuff. So, you know, there's over $100 billion just in college money out there. Here's the part that matters to us, the retention marketers, the e-commerce, the direct-to-consumer founders, is that back-to-school is the second biggest holiday shopping season of the year, but people don't talk about it enough. It's the second one to the only the winter holidays basically, and it's bigger than everyone should be treating it right now.

Yeah, I think everyone just assumes it's like this niche, really small thing that's not relevant to them.

Yeah, exactly. So, the moment— when I started thinking about this pod today, I was like, well, you know what? What's better is if we define this moment. Even if people think and confuse themselves in the moment with the holiday, a holiday is a date, right? A moment is like mindset. And so, back to school isn't a certain day. It's not August 25th. It all depends on wherever you live in the country. It's a mindset that lives in your customer's head for about 6 weeks because they're almost actively rebuilding their life. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's like the really important distinction here. Like, I think the moment has kind of 3 primary things, in my opinion, going for it. I'd say first is it has to be kind of culturally understood so that way you don't need to explain it. The second one would be like that built-in kind of emotion, right? And, you know, in this case, it's basically like the fresh start and frankly, a little bit of anxiety. I remember having that sense of anxiety going back to school every year. And then that third one, it has like this natural deadline, which manufactures that urgency for free without you having to make anything up. Right. And I think like this third one is, is really quite interesting, right? Like the fact that you don't actually have to make anything up is so important. Like, School starts when it starts. The clock there is ticking and everyone agrees on it. It's very black and white. So you're not making up like our sale that is arbitrary ends on Sunday for no real rhyme or reason. 'Cause the reason here is legit. And then like the emotion piece as well, I feel like that part's also extremely underrated. You know, back to school is probably one of the only shopping seasons that like, as I mentioned before, like made me anxious but also excited. And you just get to get like new notebooks, you know, fresh start. Summer's over and you kind of got to get your life back together in a sense.

Yeah. And you know what? That tension that it's creating is gold for copy. You can play into that optimistic angle. You can do the fresh start. You can play into that like get organized before chaos hit angle. But, you know, both work. Same moments, 2 totally different emotional doors that you can even play with.

Yeah. And for me, like the takeaway here from like segment 1 is like, A moment is like the mindset with a built-in deadline and built-in emotion. So like your job isn't necessarily to go create like all of this demand. It's really to latch onto the demand that already exists so you can capitalize on it.

Yeah. So, you know, look, most of our listeners aren't selling pencils, right? They're selling supplements, apparel, home goods, beauty, pet food. I mean, there's so many things that people sell. So how do you think, in your opinion, Chase, You play a school moment when you don't sell anything for school. You got some ideas? Because I think we can come up with some cool ideas just spitballing right now.

Got it. So outside the traditional, the notebook example that we keep talking about, right?

Yeah.

I think like the rationale here is like you need to stop thinking about like your product and start thinking about like the actual consumer behavior. So when you think about like the consumer behavior for back to school, it's like I need to reset my routine. And then, you know, with that, right, like that means everything in that said person's day is going to change, right? It's much different than it was like in summer, and it's gonna be a bit different than it was last school year. So you have to wake up at a certain time, you have to have meals with your classmates, you have to commute, whether that be down the street or, you know, further. There's budgets, there's stress levels, there's just like this entirety around it that I think often is unspoken.

Yeah. So the question becomes, how does my product fit into the new routine? Let me rattle a few categories and we'll go back and forth and we can see if we can—

Okay.

Once you see it, you almost can't unsee it in my opinion. So let me start. I'll kick it off. So I'll give you an example and then you can go. Example would be like coffee brand, right? It's not back to school, it's back to 6:00 AM wake-up calls. Here's how you survive the new morning routine. Or skincare, it's how you reset the skin The same way every morning when you're resetting something else, like it's your new fall routine, for example. Or like a supplement company may say like immune season is coming because kids bring home germs in this building, so stock up now. You know, you see what I'm saying? You got some that kind of resonate like that?

Yeah, I think, I think, um, that makes sense. I think the one for me would be like meal kits and food brands, I think, are like Almost kind of cheating, right? So like saying goodbye to the summer free-for-all. Here's how to get dinner back on schedule and, you know, eat healthy again when everyone's also still super busy. I think that is like a probably a massively underrated one.

That's a good one. Uh, I got another one that I was thinking about, like home and organization companies are obvious. New season, reset the house, doing that. Or like a pet brand even, right? The kids go back to schools and the dogs are suddenly home again. So you need to help your pet transition. The angle change here. I mean, there's so many ways to think about what else you got. All right, stop. I know you're enjoying this pod, but I've got just 30 seconds of your time real quick because I have a question for you. Is it just me, or has everyone's tools gotten way more expensive lately? And SMS is where one of those tool prices continues to sneak up on you. You'd think, cool, it's just a few cents to send, but once you're sending like a real list, that bill really adds up. Because I've run brands and I've been on the ESP side, so I know what the pricing models work and how it's really But SMS can look simple on the surface, and then once you get starting to send some volume, the bill starts looking a bit different. That's one of the reasons why I really like what Omnisend is doing right now. They just rolled out SMS pricing update, and guess what? They lowered the prices starting at just $0.007 per SMS depending on the country and the volume, of course. But you're already sending email and SMS together and having it all in one platform. That matters a lot. You can build automations where email and SMS works together. Instead of treating them like completely separate channels. And secondly, Omnisend has been investing in AI. They launched their brand new MCP that connects Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude so you can ask questions, pull insights, check performance, move faster without digging through any dashboards. So if SMS is a real part of your growth strategy or you've been meaning to make it one, go check out Omnisend. Head to omnisend.com/sendit to get started. And now back to your show.

Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Um, I'd say like apparel then, right? Like that's another one that in my mind should be obvious. Maybe it's not. Um, I think it's interesting because you don't want to kind of compete head-on with the actual school clothes rush. Um, unless that's kind of like your lane, but the whole, like, here's the wardrobe for the new season, back to the office even, right. For the parents, maybe you don't have to go after the kids, but maybe summer's over, playtime's over. Back to the office would even be great for the likes of like a Biltor or Cuts.

Yeah, that kind of gave me like the light bulb. So it's not just that, it's a reframe. It's a secondary reframe. It's not just back to school, it's back to work, back to routine, back to me. And the whole segment of your list with no kids that still feel that September is still reset because like the summer is over, right? Even empty nesters, they're going to feel like the kids are gone, the time is now kind of angle. Like there's so many ways to think about it. Chase, you got, you got a, like a way you think about this when you think about moments?

Yeah. So I think the framework is as follows. I think you need to ask 3 primary questions. The first essentially is like asking, you know, what changes in my customer's daily routine during this period of time, during this window? The next one would essentially be like, what new problem or goals show up because of that change? Right. And then the third would be like, does my product, actually solve the specific thing that we just answered? I mean, if you can answer those 3, I think you have a really, really ideal back-to-school campaign. And again, it doesn't have to be a backpack.

Yeah. And let me add the whole trick to attaching it to any moment. You're not forcing your product into the holiday. You're forcing the behavior change underneath the holiday and meeting it there, right?

Yeah. I was going to say, like, say a brand's listening, right? And they go like, this kind of feels like a stretch. I guess my question for you is like, how do you know when it's a stretch versus like an actual fit?

That's a great question. It's a stretch when you have to explain the connection, I feel like. If your email needs a paragraph just to justify what you're talking about, school, you should probably kill that. But if your connection lands in the subject line without explanation, you're good. Reset your routine doesn't need a paragraph. Everyone kind of gets that instantly because they're all dealing with it right now.

Got it. So that makes sense. That's a clean text. And like, if it needs, like, I guess, like some explanation or like a footnote per se, I guess that's when it feels more forced. Is that right?

That's right. So let's get a little more tactical in this thought process because I think we're going down somewhere. Someone's driving right now thinking, great, sold. What do I actually send? Let's give them some campaign ideas. You want to kick it off?

Yeah, sure. I essentially think there's kind of like 5 Plays here, right? The bundles and the kits, you know, the routine story, the actual segmentation angle, how you drive the urgency, and then the offer structure.

Okay. So let's start with the bundles because it seems like the easiest win in my opinion, right?

Yeah. So like back-to-school shoppers, I think, think in terms of like kits. So they're not trying to buy like one specific thing. They're often buying like this kind of setup. So you need to package quote unquote the setup kind of accordingly. So you take like 3 or 4 of your existing SKUs and you need to wrap them together as like a starter kit or a reset bundle or whatever you want to call it. And now you've created basically like a new hero product without actually having to create anything net new. And I think like the really benefit here is like bundles do 2 things for you. Number one is they're going to increase your average order value. And 2, they're gonna give you something new and exciting and fresh to blast and send to your segment. So you can't email your list like buy the same product again, but you can email them something of like, hey, we built a great perfect bundle for this upcoming season. And it gives people like a really great reason to engage and open. And then the next one I mentioned before was like the routine story. So this is more focused on content, not just like an offer, but more around like the lines of, Here's how to build your fall routine type of email, or like maybe even a short series that positions your product inside this routine. So it basically is going to help earn the sale instead of just bluntly asking for it.

Yeah, I love a routine series because it doesn't feel like a sale. It feels like a help almost, right? And that's the move when you're attracting a moment you don't obviously belong to. So lead with the routine and let the product kind of ride along is what you're saying basically, right? What about the third one? Break that one down.

Yeah. So the third one, I think this is one that's often skipped by a lot of people, is the segmentation piece, right? You know, your back to school isn't one audience. You've got parents, you've got college students, you've got teachers, you've got the back to me adults with no kids. It's basically the same timeframe, but 4 completely different types of people that require 4 completely different types of messages. And then like when you send each, the timing itself, Should be a bit different, which we'll talk about kind of in the next segment. But if you blast one generic back-to-school sale to your entirety of the list, you're leaving like the best segments on the table. So the parents are gonna want something like, please make my life and my kid's life easier. Whereas like the college student, they wanna look good and they wanna be independent. The teacher on your list, right? They wanna feel appreciated and offering like a teacher-type discount, I think during this window is a huge, huge Good will play. So I definitely recommend that. And then with it, right, like the teacher appreciation offers, I think those tend to do really, really well because I haven't seen anyone frankly do them. It's gonna be a probably small segment. It's a really small subset of your group. But I think people are gonna build a lot of brand affinity and I think it's going to drive tons of word of mouth. You know, one teacher knows another teacher knows another teacher. And then kind of moving on to like that 4th play of urgency. I talked about this earlier, but you don't have to manufacture the deadline. The calendar literally does it for you. So school starts in, let's say, 10 days, or your last chance to reset before the school chaos. And then the countdown timers actually mean something here because the date of when they're set to isn't made up. It's legit. It's real. And then on the tooling side, right? So if you're running email and SMS together, this is where like your ESP, like Omnisend, for example, is going to help you and allow you to coordinate the 2 channels in a way that's really important. So with email, you want to do like the longer form kind of storytelling, whereas with SMS, you want to focus more on like the key urgency of like, look, there's only 48 hours left to get this. So I would go set this up in Omnisend or, you know, whatever ESP. It makes it pretty easy to run the 2 in tandem. Yeah.

So, you know, the worst version of this is a customer gets the same message twice on 2 channels, but the good version is when the email tells the story and SMS closes the gap. That's, that's very much what you're kind of saying with the email and SMS side, right?

It's funny how much time brands spend trying to get more traffic and how little time they spend thinking about the traffic that they actually already have. Because every day people are landing on your site, they're browsing products, clicking around, and then they're leaving without buying or joining your list. And for most brands, they just accept this as normal. I don't know why, but they do. And this is where retention.com comes in. It helps e-commerce brands identify anonymous website visitors and turn more of that traffic into opted-in email subscribers. So instead of only marketing to the people who actually fill out a form, you can actually grow your list from the visitors who are already visiting your site. And what I like about it is that it's flexible. You can start free. You can turn it on when you need it. You can pause it when you don't. And you just pay as you go. There's no big annual commitment, so you just test it. And if it works for your brand, you keep using it. It's basically a way to get more value out of the traffic you're already paying for. Go check it out at retention.com today. And now we're back to the pod. Right, exactly. Um, so with that, right, like the last one is the offer itself. And my hot take is that it And I guess maybe it's not a hot take. It doesn't have to be a discount, right? I guess the surprising take is it doesn't have to be a discount here. So when we talk about like offer, I'm talking about things like a gift with purchase in this instance, or allowing people to hit some kind of free shipping threshold to focus on and push that bundle. Even things like early access, maybe even like some kind of bonus routine guide type of a thing. So this moment gives you the urgency that doesn't require you to actually have to leverage A discount. Yeah.

Well, this is the thing we say every episode, but it matters here more than usual, right? The moment is the incentive. The deadline is the urgency. So you don't need to slap 40% on top of it. Save the discount, leave with the bundle and the story, and only bring the price in at the very end for the people who didn't move on. Let's talk about calendar real quick because This is where brands blow it, in my opinion. When do you start the sale?

Yeah, I think it's one of those things where it happens or it should happen earlier than you think. The data that we were looking at this year says something like 62% of shoppers had already been shopping by early July. So if you're firing up your back-to-school campaign in like mid-August, the moment's probably halfway over.

Yeah.

So I don't know when this pod's going to come out exactly. I think it is going to come out early August because we're shooting it right in the beginning of August. But the reality is, is if you're hearing this pod, it's not too late, but you've already missed half of it. So you need to get going because that number resets how you think about it. The moment doesn't start when school starts. It starts 6, 8 weeks before. And people who are the most valuable, the planners, the anxious parents, they've probably already started shopping in July. But here's the really rough cadence that I was thinking about. Late July, you probably want to plant the flag and kind of pre-sell. The soft season's coming content, get the routine story going, kind of start getting your audience going. And then your first couple of weeks of August, which is like right now if you're listening to this pod fresh, that's like the peak. The bundles are live, the full email and SMS push, segmented messaging. You've got a big wave going on, the college wave. And the K-12 and college are almost on different clocks too, which is really important to know. K-2 start, 12 starts like mid-late August, I think for most. I think my kids start in like mid-August. But college, they start much later and they're more into like the early to mid-September timeframe. So you still got time for that college, which is the biggest segment of the dollars, which is why this episode's really important. Which means you don't want to kill the campaign the day the little kids go back, right? There's a whole second surge 2, 3 weeks later when the college spend and those college families are spending like an average of $1,400 this year, which is a very serious shopper right now. And then there's Labor Day, which is right after it, which is a natural like bookend. So a smart calendar is a tease that starts in like July and it peaks probably in early to mid to late August and rides that college into September. And then Labor Day closes all out. That's probably the calendar that I'm thinking about.

Yeah, that's like a 5, maybe 6-ish week runway from a single moment. And if you compare that to like a brand sending like one back-to-school email on August 20th and calling it a campaign, like that's kind of the go-to at this point for whatever reason. And the goal here and the key here is remember that one email is not a campaign, right? You really do need to have a series of emails.

That's a fact for sure. Okay. Last thing. How do you keep this thing from feeling forced? Like how do you know if it worked? Like authenticity, right? We talk about that. We said it earlier, but the whole, it's like the whole game. The connection needs like a little bit of explaining. It can't be forced. So you have to almost lead with talking about something that is common, like a behavior change, not the holiday, right? Nobody's mad at a coffee brand by talking about early mornings in September. They're weirded out the coffee brand is shoving pencils in their email basically, right?

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Oh, and let me add one thing to this. It made me think about measuring it. You don't want to look at the revenue during the windows. You want to look at the moments pulled the new buyers The moments pulled in the new buyers or the reactivated lapsed ones. So a moment campaign is one of the best reactivation tools there is because it gives a lapsed customer a fresh reason to come back that isn't, we miss you, here's 20% off, the typical stuff. There's other ways to do it. What other things would you track?

Yeah, I would track like new customer rate and like the reactivation rate during this window, not just like top-line revenue. Right. This is going to help you understand like the moment, whether it actually worked or did it just pull maybe forward some sales that you potentially could have gotten either way.

Yeah, that's the real metric. Did the moment create demand or just borrow for the next month? Okay. So here are the big takeaways we talked about on today's pod, which are really important. One, back-to-school is the second biggest season of the year and it's based on mindset and it's not date-based. That's pretty big. Number 2, you don't sell school supplies to play it. You don't have to sell school supplies school supplies to play in it. You have to attach it to the routine to reset underneath of it. So it's like the new year, fresh me kind of mindset because of its routine change. Third was to think about the bundles, the routine stories, the segments. Let the calendar build the urgency for you. And if you are— well, it's probably a little too late now with this pod, but number 4, you want to start earlier than you're comfortable with. The moment is already moving in late July, so you need to go. And do it, right?

Yeah. And if you have recommendations on like, if you could only do one thing maybe this week, next week, what do you recommend that be?

Yeah.

Here's a low-risk first move. Don't build a whole campaign yet. Just take the existing bestsellers you have and write one reset your routine bundle. Go prompt it in AI, do whatever. And one bundle that you can create, one story and send it to your engaged segment list. See if that angle lands with your audience before you go all in and that One afternoon test will tell you if there's a moment here for your brand, basically.

Love it, man. It's very low risk, very quick and easy to do, but it'll give you this signal on is this going to be a viable opportunity or not? Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, that's it, man. So go find your moment, people. We hope you appreciated this episode. As always, thank you to all the sponsors. As always, thank you for tuning in. Grab resources below in the descriptions. We'll see you next week. Adios.

Cheers.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.