We're calling Black Friday 2026 right now

Discount death is a commodity, but promotional structure is definitely a differentiator in this world of noise that is happening through Black Friday.

Brands keep optimizing for Black Friday because that's where the headline numbers live, where I think Cyber Monday often is kind of under-resourced.

So a good soft pitch on Thanksgiving lands better than a hard pitch on Black Friday when the inbox has 200, 300, 500 sales emails.

The tighter window, the fewer sends, the better segmentation that we're talking about, the smarter customer acquisition, all of those things really do help reduce 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.

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, Chase, it's that time of the year again. And I know we just had this conversation offline, but it's time to talk a little bit about Black Friday because as far away as it is, it will also be here pretty quickly. And I think that BFCM is probably the most over-discussed but under-questioned topic in retention marketing. And that's why I wanted to do this. And I think we're going to have a couple more episodes leading up to this, but today's is going to be kind of like a hot take episode, like things that we've learned about BFCM that people keep doing and all that stuff. And, you know, the truth is every retention marketer has been told the same thing about Black Friday over the last 5 years. Start your campaigns early, send more email, discount deeper, build hype, use scarcity, yada, yada, yada. But I think things are changing.

Yeah. And I think a lot of the info that we're getting is the same as it's always been. And I think most of that wisdom is just outdated at this point, or at least it's going to be wrong for most brands.

Yeah. And I think the reason why it doesn't get questioned is because BFCM week generates so much revenue that brands just don't bother to optimize it. They just blast and pray and they think they're winning because the dollar number is And the big numbers in November don't mean the strategy was good or not good. It just means that the highest buying intent of the week is that week of the year. And we all kind of know that, right? And here's the truth. And this is kind of the— before we even get to the hot take, this is my overall hot take I'll put out there. You could send terrible emails on Black Friday using whatever crappy ESP you have and you'll still make money, right? And the question isn't whether you're making the right amount of money, but what you're sacrificing for the rest of the year.

Yeah.

To get that money today. So that's the thread I want to kind of set. And that's where I want to kind of pull on right now. So let's go through these 10. So number 10, number 1, let's start with hot take number 1. All right. The start your BFCM promotion earlier advice is no longer working. And it was actually starting to hurt BFCM. 5 years ago, I think it was good advice because of all the people we had COVID, the pandemic, everything going on to get ahead of the noise. It was what you had to do to run an early access window in early November and capture demand before competitors. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it worked for a while because most brands were launching their stuff for BFCM, like Black Friday morning. But now brands are starting BFCM promotions, I'd say like late October, give or take. And some are even running like their Black Friday preview sales for like 4 or 5, maybe even 6 weeks. And by the time that Black Friday actually hits, Dude, customers are exhausted.

Yeah, dude, that's exactly right. We've stretched this 1-week event to this 2-month ordeal ultimately. And the process we train customers is to wait. They know if they don't buy in early November, the same discount's going to be available in mid-November and then again in December, which kind of kills the entire point of urgency. It was like the biggest black lever or the actual lever for Black Friday was supposed to pull was the urgency one, right? But urgency always has magic for BFCM and we killed it by extending the window in my mind.

So what do you view as like the alternative then?

Well, you kind of take the hot approach, which is to tighten the window with sharper offers, Black Friday week through Cyber Monday, 5 days strong offer with real urgency, and you don't run these 6-week BFCM campaigns.

Yeah, one slight kind of pushback. There's a counterargument that early access for VIPs still can work. Um, and it does give your top customers kind of like the first crack at a deal a week early. I think that is different and that's not the same than running like a 6-week public sale. What do you think?

Oh, that's fair. And I think that's a different hot take that we can talk about, but VIP early access window is a different thing. There's a relationship at play, not an extended discount window. And I'm fine with that, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the line here is that early access for people like VIPs, maybe loyalty members, those types of things is totally fine. Whereas early access for time, like basically publicly extending the sale, I think that is the key issue. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm thinking tight window with like a sharp offer, real urgency, and it's really avoiding No, not avoiding is not the word. Stop bleeding the magic out of what BFCM is by extending it forever, basically.

Yeah, 100%. And I think the prediction here is like the brands that go back to this tighter kind of Black Friday, Cyber Monday window this year especially, I do believe they're going to outperform the brands that are still doing the 6-week campaigns by a decent chunk.

Okay, that's a great prediction. We'll come back to this after Black Friday when we talk about post-Black Friday this year. But let's move on to hot take number 2. Hot take number two is another unique one, and I think it is that the deepest discount doesn't win on Black Friday anymore, and brands competing on discount death are racing to the bottom. Every year I feel like this, right? The brands feel the pressure to discount deeper than last year. So maybe they did thirty percent, and it becomes forty percent. Forty percent becomes fifty percent. Fifty percent becomes doorbusters at seventy percent, and the customers just kind of keep waiting for the deeper discount. It's bad training that we're doing in the market, and that training each year. The discount seems to be steeper than the last, so customers don't buy until they are sure getting the deepest possible price.

Thoughts? Yeah, which then signals that like customers don't buy at the start of your sale. They wait until the end.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. The 30% off email on day 1 of BFCM gets ignored because the customer assumes there's probably a 40% one coming on Cyber Monday, which is what's happening. And the brands that actually win, they aren't the ones with the deepest discounts. To me, I think they're the ones with the clearest value. Yeah, well said.

Will you walk through that a little bit more?

Yeah, of course. So look, the number one way to think about this is simple. I'm talking about bundle pricing, which instead of a percentage off, it's like buy 2, get 1 free. Feels different than 33% off, right? The math is similar, but the psychology is completely different. You understand that?

Right, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I was going to say, right, totally agree with you. Do you want to keep going?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, so the tiered pricing, if you think about it, you spend $100, get $20 off, spend $200, get $50 off, spend $300, get $100 off. These things drive AOV way harder than that flat percentage, right? Another one that I like out there is the gift with purchase, free gift or free product. product included with your order. Customers love a good perceived value of a gift and you can control the costs on your ends. And the reality, in my opinion, from what I've seen is that all of these convert better than the percentage-based discounts in most cases. And they don't use, they don't really train the customers to wait for that deeper discount. Yeah.

And I think the brands that are still doing like the flat percentage off, like 25% off everything, maybe 30% off everything, I think they're the ones that are going to look exactly like every single brand in the inbox.

Yeah. Discount death is a commodity, but promotional structure is definitely a differentiator in this world of noise that is happening through Black Friday.

Yeah, absolutely. And then to kind of add to that, I think the brands that have the strongest kind of BFCM performance over the last couple years, at least, again, they're not the ones that are doing the deepest discounts. They're more so focused on like the most distinctive kind of unique offers in the market.

Yeah. So I think the hot take lesson here is that you should stop discounting on like— and stop not discounting, stop competing on discounting math. What you should do is start competing on an offer creativity. And I think that's really the lesson we should all be taking away from that. Hot take number 3, as we think about BFCM for 2026, is the send more email during BFCM playbook is kind of hurting brands more than it's helping. I think this is going to upset some people. Chase, you want to take a crack at this one and talk about your thoughts here?

Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, every best practice, every kind of single BFCM checklist that you see says send 14, 16, 18 emails over BFCM week. And I think the logic here is like the buying and the high buying intent, right? Lots of competition for inbox attention and more sends equals kind of more chances to convert. But what actually happens is the unsubscribe rate during this week for brands that send that many email. can hit 2, 3, even maybe higher percentage, which is really high.

Yeah, that's real damage.

Yeah, exactly. And then the unsub kind of aren't the deal hunters. The deal hunters stay because they want the deal, but the unsub are the quality subscribers in my opinion, right? Those are the ones that have the healthy kind of lifetime values who are tired of just being blasted and blasted and blasted, right? So essentially what you're doing is you're trading very short-term BFCM revenue For kind of like this long-term list damage, if you call it that, right? With your best customers. In my opinion, that's kind of a, a really poor trade. And then the deliverability hit that can happen from these BFCM blasts, those don't go away, right? Like those can last you well into your first quarter, right? Where inbox providers will see the engagement metrics drop significantly and they have the option of sending you to spam for the next 30 to 60 days. So. January comes around, you're trying to recover and build, and your emails might not even get delivered.

No, this is really good. I think that explanation's real. And the BFCM hangover, I would call it, is kind of a deliverability hangover too. And it's brutal. I've seen it year after year where brands burn their contacts, they burn their reputation and stuff. So what do you think, Chase, this year is an alternative to all this? 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 a 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 priced. 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.

I'd say it's sending fewer but smarter emails. You know, it can be a little bit higher than, than this, but like 6 to 8 kind of strong emails over BFCM week. Instead of like 16 that are just subpar mediocre ones, right? Each of the emails needs to have a job, right? Where each one targets a specific segment and you want to be aggressive with these segments. Don't send the same email to your full list. You want to send different variations and different versions to your engaged list. And then to your unengaged list, the recent buyers, the lapsed customers, et cetera. So this does mean that you're gonna produce more kind of email variations, but you're gonna be sending fewer total overall messages per each individual kind of recipient and subscriber. And then the inbox providers are going to reward you for it cuz your engagement's gonna continue to stay high, which means your deliverability's going to be clean. And then in that January, kind of that recovery is easier and you might not have to even recover at all. So for example, like if you're sending 9, 10 emails in the sequence, often they're gonna have really low, if any kind of incremental ROI, right? They just damage your, your list. So cut the bottom half of the BFCM kind of sends, cuz you're gonna make almost the same revenue with a lot less damage.

Okay, dude, I love that. I, I think that's as clear of an actionable plan as we can get. So we're moving right to hot take number 4. Hot take number 4 is an interesting one, something that I don't think a lot of brands think about, but customers acquire acquired through BFCM are quite arguably the worst LTV customers that you get all year round. The brands keep optimizing for acquisition for this window and they're well documented because— but the reality is most people are still ignoring it, especially at the brand level and across multiple brands and category. BFCM acquired customers have 30 to 40% lower repurchase rates than customers acquired in non-promotional periods. So Lower AOV on subsequent purchases, higher discount redemption rate, and a faster churn. All the 3 worst things that you want out of a buyer, right? And because they came for the deal, they generally have like little to no relationship with the brand. They got the lowest margin first purchase and they're conditioned almost to wait for that next deal at this point. And if brands celebrate BFCM acquisition numbers like they're great, we acquired 40,000 new customers during BFCM. You've seen that before? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. How many of those are going to buy again next year?

It's a good question. So I think the data shows that probably 15% to 20% versus the typical 40% to 50% you might have from your customers acquired in a non-promo window. So if you did the customer acquisition cost math on a BFCM customer, you need to almost think radically different. It's like a normal customer is worth $200 LTV, but a BFCM might be only worth $80. So you can pay way less to acquire them, or else it doesn't make sense for the brand. And most brands Brands aren't doing that math. They're spending the same customer acquisition costs on BFCM customer as a regular customer and watching their unit economics quietly degrade.

Yep. So what's the move then?

That's a good question. The big thing is you should stop chasing BFCM acquisition the same way that you're probably doing it today. You should pull back spend during BFCM week and let retention channel do the work. Basically clear the funnel. That's the entire thing about BFCM. It's a funnel clearing event. Focus on paid acquisition in the weeks around BFCM, build the funnel, and then clear it. During, right? And then you segment your new BFCM customers immediately and they get a different post-purchase flow than the customers acquired at full price. Maybe a different welcome sequence, maybe different content, different second purchase initiatives because you have to work way harder to retain these people and the default behavior is going to be to churn. So you've got to think that way.

Absolutely. I think the kind of spicy version here is like, You can accept that BFCM customers are not a great cohort and instead focus all of the efforts instead on your existing customers, right? I'm talking about like reactivation, second purchase, you know, even be like VIP rewards and potentially skip new customer acquisition entirely.

Okay, that's a strong move, right? One I advocate for most brands. Use BFCM as a retention play, not an acquisition play.

Yeah, it's very counter to kind of what's the norm, but I do think the data can help support that.

Yeah, that's a good one. All right, let's go to hot take number 5. For most brands, Cyber Monday is the most profitable day over Black Friday, and brands keep overinvesting into Friday and underinvesting into Monday. Chase, this one's yours, man, because I think you've got a hot take here. Walk me through this one.

Yeah, so with all of this, right, Black Friday definitely seems to get The headlines, the big revenue days that we did X amount of revenue on Black Friday, press type releases. But I often see, like when I look at actual the dashboards, like the profit picture is different. Black Friday has higher kind of promotional pressure, right? Deeper discounts, higher ad spend, and with that lower margins. Whereas Cyber Monday typically has higher average order value and more buyers using kind of saved carts from Earlier in the week and typically are a bit less price sensitive. So because the people buying Cyber Monday are buying more intentionally, you know, they've been thinking about it. Black Friday buyers are then on the other hand, more of like the impulse buyers who are chasing that discount. And then the economics here, as I mentioned, do show this. So at least for brands I've seen, Black Friday revenue was maybe 20% higher than Cyber Monday, but Cyber Monday profit was often about 30% higher.

And let me add real quick, I think Black Friday discounts are typically deeper and Black Friday paid spend is typically higher, right?

Yes. Yeah. And then brands keep optimizing for Black Friday because that's where the headline numbers live, where I think Cyber Monday often is kind of under-resourced.

Okay. What do you think on the counterintuitive? What's over-investing in Cyber Monday look like in your mind?

So I think you need to have stronger creative for Cyber Monday emails. You need to kind of refresh, not recycle from Friday. They need to be different, right? So a different offer angle, maybe Cyber Monday is the last chance for free shipping or extended for 24 hours. And you need to keep your Cyber Monday segmentation super tight. Don't blast your whole list with the same Cyber Monday email you blasted on Friday, right? Cyber Monday should be different and should feel different than Black Friday, not like the second wind of the exact same campaign.

Yeah, that makes sense. Let me add an operational tip that I can think of.

Okay.

So most brands or their teams are exhausted by Cyber Monday. So Cyber Monday emails get less love than Friday emails. Plan ahead and against this if you can. Have your Cyber Monday email fully built before your BFCM week starts and don't wait to write them on Sunday night. That's like tip number 1. And you should pre-build everything. Like Friday is busy enough. So that's my like operational add to it. Try that this year. That might actually feel really good if you think about it that way. Let's go to hot take number 6. This one's interesting because I was very against this for a long time, but sending emails on Thanksgiving Day used to be taboo basically. It's not anymore in my opinion. And the brands that are opting out to basically participate on Thanksgiving are leaving money on the table. The conventional wisdom for years was that Thanksgiving is family time. Customers don't want to be marketing emails. Give them a break. Save it for Friday. And 5, 7 years ago, even 10 years ago when I was a brand, that was very true. But the behavior has absolutely changed. Customers are checking their phones constantly during Thanksgiving, between dinner, you know, watching the football game, before bed. The respect to holiday framing is kind of outdated with the younger generation. What do you think, man?

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. Yeah, absolutely. And the data really does back this one up. So Thanksgiving Day open rates are roughly equivalent to other weekday rates now. And conversion rates are sometimes higher because the customer is in spending mode. And then also the inbox is less competitive. Most brands still respect kind of this old rule of thumb, so the email will stand out more. So, or actually stand out even a lot more cuz it's way less competitive.

Yeah, I agree with that. And you know, it gets interesting, the brands sending well-crafted Thanksgiving emails, not the aggressive sales emails, but like the thoughtful early access or We're grateful for your content, though cheesy, are seeing huge engagement right now because the format is unexpected. The customer's defenses are down and they're scrolling like casually and they're not in like a shopping mode the same way. So a good soft pitch on Thanksgiving lands better than a hard pitch on Black Friday morning when the inbox has like 200, 300, 500 sales emails.

So what do you believe like is the right kind of Thanksgiving email? What does that look like?

That's a great question. I'm sure the listeners would love this. I think it has to be a light touch, a soft hook, maybe early access link to your BFCM offer for my VIPs, or maybe we're grateful for you to be our customer message with a small token, not like a hard sales push. And the timing matters here, I think. Mid-morning is a good time when people are in food prep mode, but not yet at the table, or like late evening because most people are eating their dinners at like 2:00, 3:00 PM on Thanksgiving. So like the evening time after dinner when they're scrolling their phones or watching football, Right? I think that's important. Just, you want to avoid that real dinner time, which I think in Thanksgiving is like 2 to 5 PM. I feel like that's like dinner time.

Yeah. And then one more is don't make the email about the deal. You need to focus on the relationship with the deal kind of being the secondary aspect.

Yeah, that's right. The framing is super important. That alone separates you from 99% of the brands in the inbox that day. So do it. I think that it's a hot take, but I think that more people are starting to catch on to this one. So let's just say we called it first out there. Hot take number seven: The post-BFCM slump that every brand complains about is mostly self-inflicted. Okay, so this one I want to dig into because I've seen brands in Q1 every year and they blame what they call the market conditions. Okay, I get it. It's not the market conditions. It was because their own BFCM strategy created a slump for them. So three things happened during BFCM that destroyed Q1. All right, let me go through them. Number one, they have list damage. They oversend. We talked about this earlier. They create unsubscribe spikes. The engagement drops and they hurt deliverability. For 30 to 60 days. So January emails aren't even hitting the inbox. That's number one. Number 2 is they pull forward demand. This is a big one. BFCM customers buy products they would've bought in January, February anyways, just at a deeper discount. So these customers don't buy again until later. January revenue gets cannibalized by BFCM. And then third one is that, that bad customer cohort we talked about. The customers acquired during BFCM are the low LTV ones that we just talked about. And they're not coming back in January no matter What emails you send. The slump is not just— is like bad deliverability hitting a list of pulled forward customers and a bad LTV/BFCM acquisition. That's what makes Q1 raw. What do you think?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the brands look at their January numbers and panic, run more discounts, send more emails, which makes deliverability worse, which just gives you this kind of downward spiral. And for those that are not wanting to spiral, what do you believe the fix here is?

It's simple, man. It's just plan for it. Plan for the slump and don't be surprised by it. You should have a Q1 strategy that accounts for what we call the BFCM hangover and don't blame it on the market. Specifically, I'm talking about heavy reactivation campaigns for Q4 buyers, strong post-purchase flows for BFCM customers focused on second purchase conversion. Like you should be really focusing on it and less emphasis on acquisition spend in January. You need to give your list a break in January, spend less time and send more engaged segments only, and let your reputation recover. And the brands that pull this off are flying again by mid-January, in my opinion.

Yeah, 100%. And then kind of the actual hot take here is if you run kind of BSTM correctly in the first place, I believe the slump is going to be that much smaller, right? The tighter window, the fewer sends, the better segmentation that we're talking about, the smarter customer acquisition, All of those things really do help reduce kind of the slump we're talking about.

Yep, that's right. Q1 success is built in November and making Q1 friendly, those choices that you make in BFCM are going to affect you into Q1. So that's the lesson on this hot take. Let's move to hot take number 8. I think this one's on you. SMS during BFCM is one of the most abused channels in the industry. We had to talk about this.

We did. So I got a couple thoughts here. You know, so brands often kind of triple their SMS volume during BFCM. They go to like 4 to 8 sends a month to like 8 to 10, maybe even 12 sends in a single week. And then they wonder why, like, the SMS opt-out rate just absolutely explodes, dude. And then once an SMS subscriber unsubscribes, they're gone. It's poof. Like, you can't win them back like email. SMS opt-outs are permanent in a way that email subs Aren't. And brands that blow up this kind of SMS list during BFCM are damaging the channel for the entire rest of the year and then years to come, right? They're basically trading that normal 4 to 5x SMS revenue in one week for like a 30, 40% smaller list going into Q1.

Yeah, dude, that's a brutal trade and mostly invisible because BFCM week revenue looks so good on paper. So what do you think's the right move with SMS?

Yeah.

Everyone's probably high-fiving. We crushed it. Right. We did great. I think the move here is to really stay disciplined on SMS during BFCM. I know it's easier said than done, but like 4 to 6 sends over the entire week, not 8 to 12. You have to keep the cadence alive with like your normal program, just slightly elevated. And you need to use your SMS extremely kind of strategically, not the same content as the emails. SMS really needs to be focused on like the time-sensitive decision-ready moment. So a sale ends in maybe 4 hours. This specific item is back in stock, not here's our brand story plus 20% off, right? SMS during like this time really needs to be like your closing mechanism, not the way in which you kind of make people aware and you want to segment hard. I know we've been talking about that, but you really need to segment hard. You know, SMS needs to go to engaged subscribers only. So you want to skip the SMS send to the unengaged subscribers, because look, let's be honest, they're not buying anyways, and you're just gonna absolutely torch that relationship. So the marginal SMS send during BFCM is more expensive and more damaging to your list. So why are so many people doing that is kind of my question. Hmm.

So less sends during BFCM, I think way less. than most brands usually send. So I like that. That's probably right on point to the way we should all be thinking about it. Let's go to hot take number 9. Your VIPs don't need a BFCM discount and giving them one is leaving money on the table. This goes against all what the loyalty consultants teach.

Dude, so true. The loyalty playbook basically goes like this. Give VIPs early access to your BFCM deal. Make them feel valued, reward them for being top customers.

And what, what, what's the problem here? Like, what do you think this is?

Look, I think the issue here is like VIPs were likely going to buy anyway. They often buy at full price throughout the rest of the year. They're clearly and easily your highest lifetime value segment. And they're typically the lowest price sensitivity kind of customers. So you're giving them 30% off their products. It's just basically taking margin from yours. And giving it to them. Again, not that that's awful, but like, that's not ideal. And in return, you're not buying loyalty. They already were loyal. So the discount is a thank you that doesn't change or alter behavior. And you gave away a really kind of precious margin during this time to get this behavior that they already were kind of showing you.

All right. So I know what the listeners are already asking right now. What's the alternative? What do you do instead? What are your thoughts here?

Hey, it's Chase. Got 30 quick seconds? We built something specifically for you. Jimmy and I together have over 20 years of combined experience in email marketing, and we finally put everything together in one place, and it's called Ecom Email Certified. I know it's fancy, but it's gonna be great. Whether you're brand new or running campaigns for 7, 8, 9-figure brands, it covers it all. You know, deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, SMS, literally everything. Has over 175 total modules totaling 25+ hours of content. Even has quizzes, a community, and you're gonna get a real certification. It's way better than college. Don't tell your professor that, but it is. And we've designed it to take you from beginner to certified expert. We're talking about the kind of marketer who actually moves the needle and drives real revenue. Check it out at ecomemailcertified.com. And now back to the pod. Yeah, I think you want to reward kind of VIPs a bit differently. Um, not with the discount everyone else gets, but with exclusive access. I think that's the key. So exclusive access, limited edition products, first crack kind of at restocks, personal notes from the team and the founder, you know, free upgrades, different kinds of bundle exclusive, basically all the things that you can do that have really high perceived value. But don't cost you much or at all in margin and the things that don't anchor them to the discount. Because once you discount your VIPs every BFCM, they're going to do expected, they're going to wait for it. They're going to be trained even on their regular orders.

That's an interesting one. So you're training your highest LTV customers to be discount sensitive, which is like the opposite of what you want, right?

Exactly. Exactly. You know, you want to with this, like, and again, I kind of want to push back slightly here, but like some VIP recognition during BFCM is fine. The thank you for being a customer gift, the early access to a new product, just don't give them the exact same discount that you have, like exclusive for your really deep deal hunters. You want to focus on the VIP experience, not just the same deal as others. And again, I'd say like to kind of make sure that this is going to work for your specific brand, measure this. You want to track kind of VIP behavior before and after BFCM. If the VIP spending pattern is shifting towards discount periods, unfortunately you're kind of slowly conditioning them away from flying, from the buying at full price.

Yeah.

Which destroys their LTV over time, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, loyalty isn't built by discounts. It's built by relationship. And exclusivity. BFCM is the season that is most likely to screw this up.

Okay. That leads me to the next hot take because I think this one's really, really a unique one, but this is probably a little bit more broader than retention marketers, but I was trying to fill the last one and I came up with a really hot spicy take. BFCM shouldn't be your biggest week of the year and brands that build their entire business around BFCM are setting themselves up for failure. Most D2C brands plan their entire year around BFCM and they build inventory for it. Basically, right? They allocate their marketing spend. They define their annual goals based around how BFCM performance happens. Thoughts?

Yeah, I got a couple thoughts. So, you know, with this, right? Like, I think the problem, right? Like the, and the problem with that, right? Like, is clear, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The problem is it makes the most of the rest of the year secondary. Basically, you're optimizing the One week instead of building a healthy 52-week business basically. And one bad BFCM, it's going to tank your entire year.

Exactly, which is that concentration risk, right?

Massive concentration risk. I think that it gets worse and worse every year, the more brands compete with the same amount of attention in the same week and they build their businesses. So BFCM is so meaningful, but it shouldn't be existential. Maybe 15%, 20% of annual revenue, That's fair, but not the 35% to 40% that I see, right? And it requires you to develop a strong, very strong revenue moments throughout the year. You know, Taylor Holiday talks about all of the time, the 4 peaks that you need to build. Brand birthdays, seasonal launches, subscription growth, loyalty-driven purchases. There's a Q5 strategy. There's Mother's Day, Father's Day. There's so many campaigns that are relevant and distributing that revenue across the year is a much better way to build your business. And the brands that do this, they have multiple meaningful revenue moments. I think 4 is the number that you have. Even Amazon has it. They've got 2 Prime Days plus their Black Friday holiday and the New Year. Like that's their like 4 moments, right? And the reality is one bad campaign doesn't destroy the entire year if you have multiple shots.

Exactly. And honestly, it's going to be way more profitable too, right? Because they're not running 30 to 40% off promotions in one specific concentrated week. You're running smaller, smarter promotions across the year that have just way better margins.

Yeah. And let me add one more thing to that idea. The brands that develop or depend on BFCM are also the brands that more likely are going to overdiscount. They're going to oversend. They're going to create post-BFCM hangover like that we talked about. So BFCM dependency creates a BFCM problem basically, and it's kind of all connected to all of that. So what I tell founders, and this one goes out to the founders a little bit, Set a goal for BFCM to be no more than like 20% of your annual revenue. Build the other 80% on like a more stable foundation. And if BFCM makes more than 25%, this at least tells you that you have a concentration problem that you should be addressing as you continue to build into the future.

For sure. And then to add to that, there were retention marketers still listening, push back when leadership wants to make BFCM bigger, bigger, bigger, you know, bigger BFCM at the expense of the rest of the year. It's typically a worse trade, in my opinion, not a better one.

Yeah. Okay. So last lesson is optimize the year, not the week. And that is kind of our first shot at BFCM this year that we're going to say the 10 hot takes that we're thinking about. We're going to come back with playbooks. We're going to talk about other things that we have and the brands listening to this. If you're listening to this in like October for some reason and you're planning your BFCM, there's still time to course correct. Cut your email count, tighten your windows, rethink your VIP strategies and the rewards, set a Cyber Monday strategy and plan your January recovery. That's kind of the big message that we've been sharing here. Most of these decisions you can change tomorrow. So with that, that's a wrap for today's episode. If you enjoyed this, you have someone you want to share it to, a founder or a marketer or marketing founder, someone who doesn't even listen to retention. This wasn't purely a retention pod today. It was really about the marketing strategies around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and they're all relatable. So you should definitely share this With your favorite marketer, and comment below if you think that something we said was dumb or stupid or didn't make sense, or you think you have a better idea around it. We'd love to hear you talk about it. With that being said, until next time, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next week. See ya.

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