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[Music]
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hey everyone this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview
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except for this week experienced WordPress product owners on strategies tips experiences failures and successes
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of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Matt Cromwell co-founder of givewp and a
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senior director of customer experience at Stellar WP and today I have Katie and
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Zack with me no guests all co-hosts Katie yeah I'm Katie Keith co-founder
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and CEO at b 2 plugins and I'm Zack Katz founder of gravity kit and trusted
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login and today's topic is strategies and tips for a successful Black Friday
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sale maybe we say Black Friday Cyber Monday sale uh maybe we say Black Friday
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Cyber Monday giving Tuesday sale um but it's a good one and we decided to have just us talk about it because uh we all
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have lots of things to say about it so yeah and this is a great topic
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because Black Friday 2023 is just five weeks and two days away so now is the
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time for WordPress product owners to plan their campaign and if you are watching live
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please comment uh we are all here to support you and uh answer your questions because uh we have so much knowledge so
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very much we want to share it with you I I think we really do better when folks are asking questions too I know I do um
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but uh uh let's kick it off so I'm excited to talk about this we Black
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Friday is always an interesting subject overall um and I have heard some folks
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who are kind of like e it's too much effort I'm not going to do it um why should we actually say this is such an
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important subject for product owners to think about um Katie what's your take
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well um whether you like it or not the Black Friday Friday Cyber Monday Etc sale is the biggest shopping day of the
What is Black Friday
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year and it's absolutely huge in the WordPress industry um and a big proportion of companies do take part
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although not all um however most people don't approach it in a very evidence-based way um as far as I can
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tell and very little is done to share data amongst us product owners within the community and so that makes it
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really hard to know what does and doesn't work so I think a big goal of this episode of WP product talk it's for
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us to discuss this openly share some stuff and hopefully start to get the conversation going more
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widely yeah and in terms of numbers like okay it's a big period for sales uh
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November is uh 40% of actually it's 45%
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deviation from average of our sales so like if your average uh if your average sale a month is $100,000 it's $145,000
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uh that's a huge number that's a that's a that's a gamechanging number in terms
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of whether you should focus on this yes you should uh if you do not focus on it you're missing out on a big bump that
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you would uh not get every year if you're doing a recurring product absolutely I think what I also like
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about it is it's a good kind of segue into just thinking about sales and discounts in general um it's it is kind
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of the outlier it's not normal uh it's definitely exceptional uh but if you
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have not done a lot of experimentation with sales and whatnot in the past this is a great way to get started into
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trying them out and seeing how it goes um I think the whole subject of discounts in sales is actually a bigger
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subject that uh we probably should also talk about at some point or another did feel like we've maybe touched on it
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before um but um but this is a good way to get into it uh and experiment Katie I
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really liked what you said about like doing this in a very evidencebased uh
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way I think that's a bit of a unique thing can you lean in on what you mean about that a little
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bit well at Barn 2 we've done Black Friday since
Measuring the impact of Black Friday
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2018 and um so each year I try to measure the impact and learn from it for
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future years so I try to get various data from our campaigns um I look at the
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total revenue during the campaign period during the month of November and I Benchmark that against our previous
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year's sales and also uh I try to Benchmark it against like equivalent periods in say September October when
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there wasn't anything unusual going on so I can see like what Zach said a minutes ago about um deviating 45%
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that's kind of a way to get that sort of information and I look at things like
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what are our highest selling days so that we can see any patterns and where to focus on energies and emails and
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things I look at our average order value which strangely it's not always what you
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think it often goes up during the sale despite offering a discount and that's
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because people are like buying lifetime deals or bundles all access pass type
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things so you think oh 50% sale my average order value is going to be 50%
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lower but actually that may well not be true it may be higher than usual which
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actually does affect knowing that affects some of your decision- making about for example customer acquisition
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cost can you afford to support these people buying at a discount well actually yes you can if your average
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order value has gone up so maybe you shouldn't be so scared about a bigger discount so I find knowing that really
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helps me to plan future sales uh things like if we would do
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email marketing which everybody does on Black Friday we'll get to that later um
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what was the impact of each email like I've noticed our first two emails generate the most conversions and then
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they reduce each emails be beyond that so that helps me to plan how many to send and things you can also look at
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things like unsubscribe rates are you're pissing people off and um that might be a reason to change or reduce your emails
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I look at where our sales are coming from and I think we'll get more to that about that when we look at things like
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roundups later but it's so hard 's always data I don't have that I want I currently don't
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know how our renewals are different from people who bought on Black Friday and I should know that I also don't know how
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many of our sales are new versus existing customers during the sale period And I should know that too so
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always looking to learn other people's data have they found the same as me and what else am I
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missing so much I mean so that's I love the your data focused approach because
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you've been sharing a lot about that on Twitter and you and I have talked about these things before I think it it's so
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helpful because I know that a lot of folks take approach Black Friday kind of like if you build it they will come kind
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of situation um uh where it's like I'm just gonna do a sale because everybody does a sale and oh hooray I got more
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sales um that's the beginning and the end of it but it's really not like uh I love the that you highlighted uh
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renewals in particular I think renewals are the big caveat that not enough folks are paying attention to um I do see
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overall the trend that if people buy things at a heavier discount their likelihood of renewing is a lot less I
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won't say like significantly less but a lot less than your Standard customer um and so you do have to be a lot more
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strategic coming up to the following year with those particular customers uh to try to encourage them to renew um
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that's a strategy that I'll talk about a little bit later um so that's that's a good one um in the wings here not
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particularly a question but we got a a little uh WordPress celebrity in the in the wings here Matt MOS uh is over here
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um I think that's Matt madas isn't that WordPress tutorials for beginners yeah looks like him looks like him but that
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channel name is a little bit different um this is my first time offering sales sponsorship does that count um I'm not
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sure um potentially oh sponsorships oh yes yes yes this is referring to he's
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actually this is great great the wp minute in particular is it's offering uh for folks like us uh cool he's just
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confirmed it is Matt it's a weird Avatar there Matt you got to do something about that um but um he's offering F uh the wp
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men is offering for you to be able to highlight your Black Friday sale um on their Channel which is a cool thing so
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um Matt does good work over there so there are folks that um more and more
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are advertising the Black Friday sales that might also be in n interesting thing we want to talk about um but um in
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terms of how good those are going in terms of how well those actually do promote existing sales there have in the
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past been all these different sites that that just list all of the Black Friday sales in different ways um I don't know
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if that's uh uh been effective for you all but um it's an interesting tactic that I feel like is changing a bit um I
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don't know uh Katie Zack what's your take on those things well yeah I've no noticed this
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year for the first time I'm being approached by a lot of people wanting me to pay to be featured in their Black
How to get featured on Black Friday
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Friday stuff some of that most of that's written articles some is more kind of in
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Innovative things where they post you in lots of different places some is videos
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which is really interesting because um every year I get my assistant to submit
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our deal to dozens and dozens of sites and we've been published on between like
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20 and 70 roundups and we do not track post track sales from them last year we
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were on 24 I think um roundups and we tracked one sale from a Roundup which
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was cables and that is not one of the ones that we submitted our deal to they did it voluntarily and so I'm um maybe
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like really high-profile people like map um it's worth doing but on the typical
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Roundup on a kind of a medium level type WordPress site my experience is it's not
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worth bothering even if you don't pay so why are people suddenly asking for money
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what about uh you Zach yeah that was my experience as well uh last year we got
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zero sales and I think the year before that we got two sales from all the submissions that we did so this year uh
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it's just going to be a nice to have uh it's on our list as things we could do for Black Friday so Monday but there are
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so many other things that we'd rather work on uh and rather spend time on including basic stuff like making sure
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that the page is really good like i' I'd rather do usability testing on our page
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uh then submit to a bunch of deal roundups uh sorry Matt yeah I do feel
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like that that's might be why some folks are trying to ask to have sponsored uh
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Pages now because they are going to put more effort into it and I I did chat with midus a little bit about uh his
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approach and and he is promoting these things in a different way so ideally if you're paying for placement they're
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they're going to do some work to make sure that your your deal gets um highlighted more um but I will say that
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generally speaking because of the way in which Black Friday is a thing that's in everybody's mind whether you're a
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digital product or Nike shoes or whatever like generally folks are like I
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want to buy this plugin anyway I'm gonna wait until Black Friday like they're going to come and they're going to buy
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because they're looking for that discount um they're not gonna it's not going to be because they happen to be cruising some other random blog and see
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your sale I think personally um there might be like you said those one or two that stumbl that way but like they're
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going to come to you because they already know you that's that's been my experience more
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um yeah yeah and I I think maybe for product owners we should kind of back up
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a step and say like okay how do we organize the Black Friday deal campaigns
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like what do we how do we structure them um and I'd love to hear from from both of you yeah yeah I'll jump in um Black
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Friday for us we definitely have prepped uh long in advance um and again for Stellar WP um we have a lot of Brands
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now at this stage and each of these Brands actually came in with a different approach and different ideas about how
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to be successful on Black Black Friday uh Cadence in particular has huge success with their lifetime deals um
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that and that is a bit of a a difference or or unlimited licensing deals I themes also did a lot of that in the past which
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IES by the way is solid WP now if you haven't noticed um little plug um
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because it's been what I've been working on for every day for a long time um but um and and so we've been kind of working
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towards more or less trying to find what we feel like is the right uh mix of best practices for Brands across the board uh
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we definitely prep far in advance um we tend to do a combination of of uh really
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strong uh email marketing uh directed towards a custom Black Friday landing
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page um with also a sitewide banner all over the whole site um that's kind of
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for me the really bare minimum Basics is making sure that you're using your email
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marketing to the best that you can because like I just said a minute ago it's folks who already know you who are
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going to buy on that day I don't think you're going to attract a whole bunch of um people who never heard of you before
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U maybe they've never been customers before but they're they they know you in one way or another so leveraging your
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email um list is a big deal um and then
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um also making sure that there's a sitewide banner everywhere and then there's also a dedicated landing page I
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really think the dedicated landing page separate from your normal pricing page is is kind of a key
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differentiator um because it really allows you you to to give the exact
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messaging that you want to do for this specific sale there's lots of other sales that we've done where we just like
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update the pricing page itself um or individual product pages uh in order to
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say this particular thing is on sale right now um but for Black Friday it's like give them a custom experience make
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it fun make it flashy um make it all about exactly what the details of the sale are because people are really
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looking for the details of the sale like does this apply to my renewal or not am I able to refund it how many site
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licenses do I get all those things become hyper important on the Black Friday sale and so dedicating time and
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attention to those things I think are really important there interesting because we've never
Dedicated landing page
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had a landing page we've just done the banner thing and all of that um and
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we're doing it for the first time this year and I've been really skeptical because you've got to get it designed
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and then you've got to get it coded so it's a fair amount of work but I know you can reuse it so I was convinced by
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my marketing team this year um so we'll see how that goes but I was always sort
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of unclear as to whether it would make a difference to actually have one so we will see that's a good question though
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because you're situation is similar to iconic over on our side and when you are a series of a lot of different products
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um having one dedicated landing page is more challenging um so is your dedicated
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landing page are you promoting all of your products on that page or what is the dedicated page doing exactly well
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like all of our projects we looked at iconics as part of planning hours along with gravity kit and other people I know
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um but yeah it's actually like everything quite similar with like all access kind of more prominent higher up
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and then a list of products lower down um and we've just relaunched our all access because it never sold as well as
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iconic so we're trying to learn um but yeah I think it's kind of like our
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plugins page but with Black Friday branding because we've already got a
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page which lists all of our products so I was like that's the landing page um so
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that's kind of why I was unconvinced um but it's like that but with more stuff at the top yep some of the things you
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can do with a dedicated landing page that you can't do without one is to if you have it tagged using WP Fusion for
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example when somebody views a page you can tag somebody if they come to your page that uh is already a customer you
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can say viewed the Black Friday landing page and if they have you know they're more interested than people who haven't
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and that's a really good way to segment your email list so that um you're sending the right emails to the right
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people and that's one of the things that we've been really focused on for the past few years now is uh targeting our
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emails so that only people who are interested in things get the things they're interested in so if you've if
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you in the last week in our emails you clicked and you viewed a certain page that and then they didn't end up buying
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that's a product that they might want to receive more information on or a special additional discount perhaps um you know
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you can really understand people's intent by the their behavior on your site and the goal is to do that without
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being creepy which is always a little tough but um you know our goal is to provide more value and to make sure that
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we're fitting them with the product that they actually need and they don't necessarily know they need uh so email
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marketing plus tracking uh behavior on the website is a great combination nice
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we have a couple uh supportive comments here I want to highlight real quick um
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haret Aurora says dedicated landing page is a must valid point rocket ship love
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it um and absolutely I I feel like it's really important I do like I said I do
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think it is more challenging for folks like Barn 2 or iconic um where all
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access pass is something for sure but so often you'll have like one uh extension
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that tends to drive a lot of Revenue and the other ones are far less uh it's it's hard to like get all the attention onto
19:08
the thing that people actually want to buy under those circumstances uh this another interesting comment that's
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supportive uh cander badha says I also support Custom Design email newsletters
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and landing page for Black Friday Cyber Monday sales it's almost gives a festive Vibe I absolutely agree I like um that's
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one thing I do really enjoy about the Black Friday stuff is um is being able to make it fun and interesting um and to
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and have some have it be kind of thematic um in one way or another it it does take more effort and more more time
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and things like that but it also just uh it it fits the holiday season I think so
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and Matt mados has a good point about uh the he has in the comments that uh it's
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hard to know it's easy to run a sale if you already have a newsletter uh list that people have signed up for updates
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about it's easy to it's easier to run a sale if people already know you and and that you offer certain products uh I
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would say that this is an iterative process our our first year we didn't have a huge list compared to what we do
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now like uh that Black Friday grows as the company grows and that the always be
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collecting like always always be asking for people to sign up for your newsletter that's a permanent good
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advice because you know your list is your business when it comes down to like being able to promote new opportunities
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for customers to uh buy new products or to upgrade their products your your list
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is something you should be cultivating at all times uh so it's iterative and it
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grows year-over year so if you're just starting out and you're like you sell one thing one one product for Black
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Friday congratulations you sold a product um that's that's 100% uh better
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than it's infinite percent better than not selling anything so don't give up is what I'm saying keep keep growing your
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product business it's going to happen just don't give up yeah yep absolutely
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well let's get through some of um the um important tactics uh we want to
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highlight one I thought was really great uh Katie highlighted on Twitter um she
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said asked uh on Twitter when do you think is the best time to start a Black Friday sale and why and it was a poll um
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Katie tell us a little bit about this poll and what you learned from it yeah so um I've been doing a few tweets
Poll
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lately asking people their experiences about Black Friday and and sharing mine as well to try and pull knowledge like I
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said earlier and one of them was a poll saying when to start it because I've noticed in the last couple of years
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people are often starting earlier and earlier um often even doing like the whole of November or something and as
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swearing by that strategy whereas um I work with Ellipsis um and as my
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marketing company and they really strongly have advised me don't do that you're devaluing your products um keep
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it relatively short so that customers don't see you as the sorts of company that always does discounts and this is
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just one short sale a year apart from that you stand by the value of your products so I did a poll and um
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49% which was the biggest um group said start a week before Black Friday which
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is great because that's what we've decided to do this year already before I did that poll um 34% said start it on
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Black Friday so I assume that would just be like a four- day sale until the end of cyber monday 11% said first of
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November so that would probably be a full month long sale and then there was a few comments about anything in between
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that as well so I thought that was interesting the majority are not saying do a really long sale but that is
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definitely growing in WordPress products I have a it's always
Sales
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complicated when it comes to sales because uh people want to buy your product so let them buy your product
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they you you're telling them you're they're going to be able to buy your product coming up for you know 40% off
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in three weeks you just have to wait that's really not customer friendly is it when the customer is trying to
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accomplish a solution that your products help them solve and you're saying yeah
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I'd love to help you and give you a discount but no you should really wait so we've taken a different approach
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which is uh to start early we we start early we have an early access sale if
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they've expressed interest we give them access early I think this year we're doing something like November 7th or something like that but we just added a
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popup on our website uh where if somebody signs up for our newsletter they get a discount immediately we don't
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want not not necessarily the full Black Friday Monday discount but a discount uh
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because we want to make sure that people are able to accomplish their goals as soon as possible as quickly as possible
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with as little friction as possible so I think that you know withholding this sale for the devalue the concern of
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being uh your brand being devalued I don't think is the right answer if it is
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less good for customers and if customers know that a sale is coming up and they're just like really I personally
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get angry when I'm I'm like come on you know you're going to do a sale just give me the discount now we've all had that
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experience and I think that might be a bigger brand hit than than having a
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longer discount period maybe I'm gonna push I'm gonna push back on that a little bit I have to say because I do
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think that um the sale is limited on purpose um because we can't offer these
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discounts all the time we can't offer them infinitely um like says the average
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order value is higher it wouldn't be if it was infinite though would it that
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you yeah I I definitely think like that it does need to be for a limited time I
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like I voted definitely one week before Black Friday is the best time like that that week of basically um and I
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personally have seen also when we do it the the Monday before Black Friday all the way we' go go all the way until
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giving Tuesday because of give WP um and um the Monday Tuesday Wednesday before
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Black Friday Friday there's sales for sure and it might be a little bit of a lift but it's not huge the big sales
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happen on that Friday but for us for some reason or another Cyber Monday is always the biggest it's always that day
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and it's somehow in people's minds that like that that's that's our day the digital day Cyber Monday um and like
25:48
they're buying shoes on Friday and buying prod plugins on on Monday or something but Monday always is the big
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day for us um and then for give w P it also the Tuesday um as well so and it's
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in that time because we are doing significant discounts um on purpose because I do find that for Black Friday
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you can't do a 25% discount nobody cares about a 25% discount it just doesn't
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work it's not valuable it's not what they're looking for even sometimes um I think it was I think it was Alex from uh
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from Ellipsis that did a big study on how many uh How deep the discounts were and how many folks uh reported what they
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did based on their discount um I think his suggestion was you can't really get away with anything less than 40% but
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doing 40 to 50% um for your products for a short M period of time it does have a
26:42
big impact especially as you scale and you get larger those ticket those sales
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are going to become support tickets as well um and it's really hard to scale
26:53
when you're cutting cost so extremely as well um that's I I would push back on
26:59
that one but I hear what you're saying about being customer Centric and I'm always sensitive to that stuff um I will
27:04
say that anytime somebody reaches out to us in advance is like hey I'm trying to make stuff happen and can you help me
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out we always help them out for sure so it's not as if there's like a hard roadblock or whatever but but um we
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can't do 50% sales all the time that's I do think it Waters down the brand so
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have you had uh special deals for Cyber Monday in the past like as opposed to like so you have
27:29
a 40% sale for the rest of the time and then like a special Cyber Monday sale
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nope because we tried that uh a couple years ago and it didn't really it was a
27:39
lot more work and it didn't move the dial so I just uh was interested in um if you had experience with that that's
27:46
an interesting one like what if it was like you start off at 40% on Friday and
27:51
and then 50% on Monday I'm not sure um so and that's something that we've we're going to do spoiler alert we're going to
27:58
do that this year uh where it's it's always strange to me where you have Cyber Monday and then the sales over or
28:05
giving Tuesday the sales over and then your site just goes back to normal and it's going from like a 100 miles an hour
28:10
to nothing it goes back to less than normal for us it goes back to less than nor yeah and it start so starts the
28:17
horrible month of December and the terrible month of January and so what we're going to be
28:23
doing this year is we're going to be tailing off our sale uh as opposed to doing you know a big sale and a nothing
28:31
we're going to have a a late Comer sale just like we have an early Comer sale um try to incentivize try to smooth out
28:37
that curve because we want people to to buy our plugins and you know if if it
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ends and they know that they've missed a big deal we don't want them to feel bad so if they come to the site and they get
28:49
any discount I think it'll feel better than than having zero uh zero sale after that well that is becoming more of a
Last Chance Sale
28:57
thing I noticed maybe one or two years ago a lot of Wordpress companies say that their sale ends on Cyber Monday but
29:05
then they do like a surprise Last Chance sale and we tried that for the first
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time last year and normally our sales from Tuesday to Friday so after Cyber
29:17
Monday drop by 30% compared to a normal Tuesday to Friday from September October
29:23
whatever but when we did a last chance sale which as that said is a smaller discount than your main Black Friday one
29:30
our sales only dropped 12% instead of 30 so it did soften the blow a bit so I
29:37
think that's worth um considering obviously you don't want to lose the urgency of Cyber Monday but it does seem
29:44
to make some difference to continue a small sale abut but what you said Matt about the dates was interesting because
29:51
we've have slightly different experience about the days like most people are finding Cyber Monday is
29:58
best and we always did until last year when Black Friday did twice as much
30:04
revenue as Cyber Monday I don't know what changed and nobody else I talked to
30:09
said that Black Friday was bigger but I thought that was interesting and I do know sorry no you about um starting
30:18
early we started a week before Black Friday andif 32% of our revenue from the
30:25
sale period came before for Black Friday so Friday to Thursday um and the year
30:32
before 51% of our Revenue came before Black Friday so I think it is worth
30:37
starting a bit before the increase is already building up and the excitement
Extend Sale Date
30:42
the the problem with having everything on Black Friday not everybody's available on Black Friday not everybody's G to be available on Cyber
30:49
Monday like the goal of the sale is to make sure that everybody who's interested in buying our products is
30:55
able to buy our products and does Buy buy our products right so by extending the sale date I think that we also
31:02
extend the opportunity to uh to reach everybody who's interested and I think
31:07
that by having a the shorter the date of the sale the more they going to be uh people who are left un uh unaddressed
31:15
for sure like I I what you know anybody watching right now you're probably not
31:21
the give WP typical customer so I won't be giving anything away but like we we always extend to the Wednesday um after
31:30
which we it we say it's a Black Friday giving Tuesday sale is what we call it so it's always those dates but then we
31:36
always surprise extend to Wednesday um and um and that Wednesday like Katie
31:43
said tends to be a lot better uh when we do that surprise extension but the only people who know about the surprise
31:49
extension are folks who are naturally already coming to our website or who are getting our emails so again it's
31:55
basically a lot like what Zach is saying they either just were busy doing holiday
32:00
stuff and like oh great I'm so glad I didn't miss out um or they just you know are just getting to it for the first
32:06
time they they they knew about us already and just were coming later so I do think that the extension is good we
32:13
also always for the rest of that entire week like Thursday Friday all the way pretty much until the following Monday
32:18
even if somebody's like hey we missed out on your sale we'll give them a discount um so like we we we're we're
32:25
going to continue to always try to help people and be um um supportive of them even when it goes long especially when
32:32
they reach out if they take the effort to ask us a question we're gonna help them get over the finish line for sure I
32:38
think for for us one of the things that we try to do is to approach the customer from their different value propositions
32:44
that we offer like uh so that we aren't sending the same message which is like sale sale sale sale sale sales don't
32:51
matter if they don't know what Solutions you're providing so we try to make sure that they're aware of the needs that we
32:57
will fill by their sales so don't forget the Basic Marketing thing like it's not about you it's about them it's about the
33:03
TR problems they're trying to fill and with our emails because all three of us have products that have we have so many
33:10
different products we're trying to um promote uh that our emails are going to
33:16
be targeting different products different reasons why people will want the products and making sure that that
33:22
we address the whole spectrum of reasons rather than just hitting one thing which is the s
33:27
uh and that's another reason why um a longer sale is easier because you can
33:33
tell a longer story like you can address more of those uh things people the eager
33:38
eager people get it early the people who are skeptical might have a different uh email flow that uh that you might want
33:45
to write so yeah I don't forget to diversify the types of emails you're selling and to whom you're writing the
33:53
emails yep yep yep uh we got a good question here too um let's see haret is
New Product
34:02
asking some good questions which one should we highlight here in order
34:10
yeah one I just chose one to highlight which is uh for new product uh for new
34:16
products is getting people on board more important and converting them next year
34:22
uh just like getting them in and then having it Renew at a higher price or something like attracting users is that
34:28
the way to go for for Black Friday like a $1 for a pro version like a steep
34:33
steep discount just get them in the door yeah I like that question a lot because it it it shows that there's more to this
34:40
sale than just the sale uh this should be the beginning of a customer Journey
34:46
um and um that's something we think about a lot um and truthfully I'm a
34:52
little that's why I'm also a little bit skeptical about the whole thing of like discounting for forever because like I mentioned at the beginning um when folks
35:00
get your product heavily discounted they often are less likely to be renewing the
35:06
following year they're because the the price point is more important to them than um this isn't an assumption this is
35:14
a generalization so but it seems like the price point is more important than than the actual solution the actual
35:21
product itself um so I think it's a lot harder to uh get those folks to stay
35:27
renewing at for givewp in particular our average um uh lifetime uh for a customer
35:34
is somewhere between three and four years um it sometimes it's been all the way up to five years um and those are
35:42
definitely our most valuable customers when they end up being two years or less um they end up often asking a lot of
35:50
support um and costing us a lot on on that side um and always looking for
35:55
discounts at renewals as well well and that can just be really noisy and difficult so um I would like in the on
36:02
if it's a spectrum of like get them in at $1 because you'll get them later at the renewal versus like don't discount
36:09
very much at all I would be like like let me give that a number 10
36:15
is don't discount at all one is is get them at the renewal I'd be like a seven is what I would say I I'd be like at a
36:22
six and a half seven on that scale leaning toward not discounting
36:27
leaning towards just a nice healthy discount yeah right right right not like not too aggressive like1 yeah that's
36:34
where I am there's some evidence that I mean I don't have very good data on this but it's pretty well accepted that Black
Renewals
36:41
Friday buyers renew less uh in the future that's one reason um that some
36:48
people don't like to Discount lifetime deals but if this is going to be a customer that's less lik to renew then
36:54
personally I'm happy to Discount lifetime deals because it's a way of getting maximum Revenue up front so I
37:01
would do the opposite of asking for like one dollar or something because they're less likely to renew um but there might
37:09
be some interesting strategies regarding if you're whole strategies like freemium
37:14
so um hasid also said about um spend the whole year getting people to use your free products Black Friday can be an
37:22
opportunity to try to finally get them to go pro and I think that's a really good point if you have a way of
37:28
contacting your free users that I hadn't thought of absolutely yeah yeah and if you have
37:34
inap messaging uh built into your plug-in like we use help Scout beacons so that people can uh do their own
37:42
knowledge based uh support in app and and we link to things and that opens up in the beacon that's really nice uh help
37:49
Scout and intercom for example offers Beacon as well it's a great way to we
37:54
only do this like once or twice a year to push out messages alerting customers to sales uh and uh it's a great thing to
38:02
build into your products in case you want to use that in the future now that's not going to be Word wordpress.org compatible so um make sure
38:10
that what you do is wordpress.org compatible if you're on.org um but I
38:16
wanted to mention one way that you can get around the $1 for a whole year thing is you could do a dollar for a month
38:22
paid trial as a way to get around that and have that Renew at full price after a month and you can kind of combine The
38:30
Best of Both Worlds there yeah Adrien from Groundhog does that continually and
38:35
he actually has a lot of success with that it's a really interesting model for sure um and I mean I did we talk gosh I
38:43
keep forgetting what we have't haven't talked about but um Chris badet came on and did that one because lifter have
38:49
done a$1 trial for a long time and found it converts a lot better than free trials thank you your historical
38:56
knowledge of our episodes is better than mine that's great um let's talk real
Emails
39:01
quick about emails um what emails to send um and different wording potential
39:07
stuff like that um I'll uh uh I'll kick off um with another tip that came up um
39:16
also in conversation with Katie uh Katie was on Twitter asking about emails for Black Friday and how many do you send
39:22
and things like that uh we have a fun um I say fun we have a strategic initiative
39:27
with our emails for for Black Friday that has worked for givewp for a long time the thing that I hate about the
39:35
Black Friday sales is you really do have to send a lot of emails in order for it to be effective and helpful but you have
39:41
so many people in your list who are not yet customers and aren't going to be customers in November either and if you
39:47
just send a like a just a ton of emails in that time you're going to lose them as subscribers so we really didn't want
39:54
we we wanted to have our cake needed to too so and this was actually a tip that Chris Lemma gave us that we've used a
40:01
lot um and it's essentially from day one we say hey by the way we're going to be
40:06
sending a lot of emails over the next while about our Black Friday sale that's coming up and the first thing that says
40:12
really clearly is if you are not interested in this sale at all click this button and all that button does is
40:19
it takes them to a page that says okay you you won't get our sale emails anymore but you're still opted in that
40:25
that's what that page says and what it does is it tags that customer uh or that that not non-customer that that email
40:32
subscriber as um not interested in sale something like that um and then every
40:38
email that we send out after that is our general list minus anybody who says not
40:43
interested in sale that way they stay subscribed to our to our email but they don't get all those emails either um and
40:51
so it's kind of our have our cake and eat it to kind of situation um we've we've seen good success with that um not
40:58
a ton of folks uh click on the the link uh but those who do stay subscribed and
41:03
we get a chance to sell to them later so we do that as well uh don't forget to
41:10
date those tags so it's not just a permanent tag it's uh doesn't want Black Friday sub Monday emails
41:16
2023 uh because you don't want to just have it be generalized yep absolutely good point um but with that said we send
41:24
a lot of emails um for sure and we try to segment them to different uh folks who are interested in our product for
41:31
different reasons or different ways um and um generally speaking um as soon as
41:38
we usually send one or two emails before Black Friday but as of Black Friday it's usually two emails a day Friday Saturday
41:46
Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday um to different segments so and I would it be
41:54
helpful if I went through our email calendar yes sure okay uh so here's what we're
42:03
doing at gravity kit uh November 1 we're doing a save the date email where we're
42:08
uh attaching an IC attachment where people can uh save the date and also linking to uh ability for people to add
42:15
it to their calendar uh and then we're emailing on November 7th for Early Access um for
42:24
people who have expressed interest already um we are then sending out an affiliate
42:29
email on November 9th which we haven't talked about yet but that's something that um that we try to push a little bit
42:36
it hasn't been very successful in the past because we don't nurture our affiliate program well enough um we're
42:43
doing uh a gravity forms uh Summit that I'm not necessarily able to talk about
42:50
I'm not sure you just did though now more I didn't say when or where soft
42:56
announcement is that that's a soft announcement that I'm not able to make we're
43:02
live hi Matt um November Monday so the Monday of
43:08
uh of Thanksgiving we're sending out our sales start email we're sending out another email on Tuesday another on
43:14
Wednesday we don't send out anything on Thanksgiving because some things are sacred uh and then we send out an early
43:23
uh we send out an three emails on Black Friday um one of them is early one of
43:30
them is late and one of them is specifically uh targeted toward the thing that we're going to be pushing
43:36
this month uh which I'm not going to leak early and then Monday we do the same
43:42
thing where we have uh early and late emails giving Tuesday we have another email and then we don't email until
43:49
Friday where we have a last chance email and I we decided not to do a like
43:54
surprise it like guess what we're extending things because in terms of like brand value I
44:00
think that the surprise we extended our sale thing is insincere and I I I've we
44:05
did it last year and it didn't feel good so I wanted to not like trick our customers because that's never like our
44:11
goal so we're just doing a late act like a last chance email uh December 1st and
44:17
that I believe is our summary of emails that we've planned I would love to know
Engagement rate
44:24
the engagement rate of different emails particularly sending was it three on
44:29
Black Friday um whether there's a trigger where unsubscribers go up or conversions go down or up or whatever
44:37
last year the late Black Friday email the late emails and the last chance
44:42
emails were our most successful uh with out of all of them uh
44:47
which was wild for me so uh I think people you know I don't also like to promote fomo and like fear missing out
44:54
and like time urgency like now now now we all we have so much stress in our lives and there's so much people are
45:00
shopping for their families it's there's so much to do I don't want to promote that but like seems like it works we
45:08
don't we don't push that too hard but that's that's one it seems like it does work yeah yeah I I will say I I don't
45:16
think anybody who receives the surprise we extend our sale is like oh of course you did like yeah so why bother the the
45:22
the farce it's like uh let's just say what it is which is like listen is the last chance but it's not the majority
45:29
yet so they won't know you were going they didn't know you were going to do it they wouldn't have banked on that would
45:34
they if they wanted to buy at a discount yeah true and two years ago we actually didn't know we were going to do it it's
45:40
like it really was like well wow it was real
45:45
exactly that's fun well let's wrap it up with some of our uh best advice huh um
45:52
we have um gone a bit beyond our normal time I think I think we can spend a little bit more time on bested bu stuff
45:58
um let's say uh imagine WordPress product owner who has had good sales
46:04
this year it's their first year of doing uh of selling their product and this is going to be their very first Black
46:10
Friday Cyber Monday sale what is your best advice to them right
46:16
now um so my best advice would be to do
Best advice
46:21
it try all different strategies um and yeah maybe we should think about um what
46:28
har sheet was saying earlier about um if you're I think it was them anyway um if
46:34
you're new then maybe you're not quite so established and it might be Matt actually um and you haven't got the
46:41
existing mailing list so maybe you should do roundups maybe you should pay a little bit for advertising and just
46:46
try everything but the key thing is to evaluate it and my top advice and I do
46:53
actually follow my own advice and I don't know know anybody who does is to evaluate it immediately after the sale
47:01
finishes and write a plan for next year based on what you learned so get the
47:07
data write your kind of conclusions about what the data means and then based on that write a project plan for next
47:14
year and I do I promise I do this every year um and then it makes it so much
47:20
easier the following year because it's not fresh in your mind then is it you just want to yeah maybe you some changes
47:26
based on evidence that you've heard since then podcasts you've listened to whatever but having that basic plan for
47:34
next year in place does make a big difference Zach what about you uh I
47:40
would put up your email capture uh popup right now start if you haven't done it
47:47
do it like the build your email list is my best advice and um if that means
47:53
doing a giveaway now or something like try to bring it try try to get as many signups now as possible um because that
48:00
really is the pulse of the Black Friday sale for us is our newsletter list um and I don't do a good enough job we
48:07
don't do a good enough job throughout the year of promoting our newsletter and uh it really pays off at the end uh of
48:13
the year with Black Friday um my second best advice is don't worry too much about it like yes it's a big deal and no
48:21
it's not the end of the world if your sale isn't huge um it's it's uh I think
48:28
177% of our total revenue in the in the week that's that's that's a lot right
48:35
but it's it's there's 83% that isn't there so like uh try something try
48:41
something try something and don't worry if it doesn't work because there's always next year yep uh I totally agree
48:49
Katie took almost all of my best advice already uh I agree with all those things although I am not one who does the very
48:56
next day uh and does all the analysis that's really good advice and I should take it um but I won't I probably won't
49:04
at the end of a big sale like that I'm tired um but my best advice would definitely be when you are new and
49:10
you're doing your big first uh Black Friday sale I just think you have to have you have to go big you have to go
49:16
really big and have fun with it uh because you have no idea what's going to happen and there's no way to predict
49:22
exactly how successful or not successful it's going to be um so you really have
49:27
because there's a lot of noise there's a lot of people doing a lot of big things everybody's waiting for the divy sale
49:33
everybody's waiting for the Elementor sale um like that all that stuff they're G to grab all the attention but if you
49:39
do something fun and different and interesting and weird and just attention grabbing for for fun for the fun of it
49:46
it might actually drive a lot more than you think and this is your one chance to do something really different um that
49:52
honestly at give we did zero zero discounts for the first like three or four years of give WP never discounted
50:00
anything and then we decided to do our very first Black Friday sale and we had so much fun with it we made these fun
50:06
videos it was me and Devon being ridiculous um the page was fun and it
50:12
was huge it for us it was a huge deal so um I think have fun go big uh don't just
50:18
kind of like if if they build it they will come kind of situation uh try to go
50:23
out there and and make something that people will remember um it's a good opportunity I also I love that and I
50:29
absolutely go big be fun do something outrageous that's also e ethical and safe uh but don't like I would advise
50:38
against spending too much time on it it can be an NeverEnding black hole of just
50:44
doing more doing more work video production for example is a great way to to lose a week just right there if you
50:52
spent that amount of time building up your Standard Market marketing plan you're improving your SEO working on
50:58
your products communicating with your customers finding out what new features they want that could result in a way
51:04
better uh result for your business depending on the stage where you are so like don't obsess because it's so easy
51:10
to go to spend too much time and then feel burned out and regret it so I've done that five years in a row except for
51:18
last year uh so I'm like I'm taking we're just copying last year's campaign
51:24
this year like all the graphics are the same we're updating the year because it's such a burden to make something
51:30
fresh and new every year I don't know if the customers know the difference uh I
51:36
hope that they understand that like the the communication that we give them is like is what we can do best this year
51:43
like it's as best as we can do sorry yeah not not everything's going to be
51:49
groundbreaking and and Earth shattering yeah absolutely um we have a special
51:55
comment here I have to say absolutely we are blessed to have Katie on this podcast she is everywhere lately and
52:01
doing so much great and amazing stuff I love the way that people build in public and Katie is a great example of that um
52:08
over the last year um and I appreciate this comment here P Peter ingersol says
52:13
has anyone noticed that Katie is everywhere not only in podcasts but at this very moment Katie's in my Twitter
52:19
feed and in a search result for w Commerce challenge congrats congrats to Katie thanks for being with Kitty as
52:26
always well I'm actually on Matt's podcast tomorrow Matt mados who's watching so there you go there you go
52:34
absolutely uh let's close it out uh what do we got going on next week right well
52:39
next week for our Halloween episode we're going to discuss a topic that I haven't seen discussed in the WordPress
52:46
Community before which is how to plan what will happen to your business if the worst happens and you're not around to
52:52
run it anymore not just if the worst but when the worst happens when the worst
52:59
death and taxes oh my gosh I hope I'm not there next week but I hope you guys show up in H costumes is that is that in
53:06
the works is that no I was thinking of coming in costume yes I don't know if it's inappropriate when you're talking
53:12
about a sensitive uh comment but maybe it will lighten the mood so I've only
53:18
got one costume and it's the one that I wore to word Camp 2019 in St Louis so maybe I'll wear that one
53:25
M yep cool cool well thanks so much everybody special thanks to post status
53:32
as we do every week for being our Green Room we continue to organize there and appreciate their time and support of what we're doing uh if you are enjoying
53:39
this we'd love your subscription we' love your like we'd love you to share this with your friends and family um and
53:45
uh we'll see you all next week have a good one thanks