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BFCM Retention: Buyers vs. Customers · Frankly eCommerce

• 0:00
  Big deal coming. Get ready for our big, big savings opportunity. And it just killed [laughs] the e-commerce store sales. Totally unnecessary. So basically, don't do that. Don't tell people the big sale is coming.
• 0:15
  Once somebody develops a discount dependency, or if they're just inherently that kind of buyer, there's very little you're going to be able to do to really shift their psychology.
• 0:24
  The playbook, what to do before, during, and after a BFCM, like I delete, delete, because part of that best practices is sometimes so disconnected from the brand's actual context.
• 0:37
  But the real secret sauce for retention is how do you get more people to become two-time buyers and three-time buyers, and then beyond that.
• 0:45
  You're listening to the Frankly E-Commerce Show, candid conversations about business with host Patrick Scott Pittman.
• 0:53
  As we approach the peak shopping season, brands who are trying to figure out what their offer's gonna be for the Black Friday often consider, well, we give a discount now, and we'll make it up later.
• 1:05
  Customer lifetime value and all that. We have the expectation that we can make a profit on that relationship with the customer because we'll be able to have them come back and buy again.
• 1:15
  But as Jimmy Kim has said, the first time someone buys from you, they are not yet a customer. They are a buyer. They become a customer when they come back and purchase a second time. Well, at least that's his contention.
• 1:29
  I've got Gabrielle Pittman here to e- uh, take her take on what that means and how we go about following through on this hope that someone will come back and buy again.
• 1:39
  We're gonna talk about retention, email, SMS, and I'm so glad to have my daughter, Gabrielle, who I work with at eBusiness PROS, to bring us some understanding about how we can make this work this holiday season.
• 1:53
  Gabrielle, welcome to the Frankly E-Commerce Show. Thanks for having me. Good morning. All right. Well, when I said that someone who buys once is not yet a customer,
• 2:06
  tell me what your response to that idea is and how it might shape what's happening in terms of the automations, the follow-up after someone makes a purchase to a, a, an e-commerce store.
• 2:17
  It may be ironic, but I think it's a classic example of how much the copywriting and the words that you use truly matter.
• 2:24
  Because it was a dynamic that we've been noticing for years amongst our clients, and yet when you think about even how you classify a segment, we were frequently just using the term customer for anyone who had bought at least once or twice or three, four, however many times.
• 2:42
  And then we would use the word prospect to identify people who had never bought before, at least as far as we could track in the e-commerce channel.
• 2:49
  Sometimes we may work with a brand where they have a wholesale channel or B2B customers where they're purchasing outside of what the Klaviyo ecosystem can track through the e-commerce store.
• 3:00
  But for our intents and purposes, anyone who's never bought before would be a prospect. And the nuance between a buyer and a customer is really important.
• 3:10
  The label that you put on that type of person truly impacts the strategy with which you approach them in your marketing. So we have, across multiple industries for the last,
• 3:24
  let's see, almost 10 years s- since I've been working with eBusiness PROS, we've noticed this consistent pattern where
• 3:32
  you have a similar dynamic to a Pareto principle, where you may have 80% of your customers driving very low amounts of revenue, and yet 20% of your customers are driving 80% of your brand's revenue.
• 3:47
  And so if you look at the ratio, you could just make a segment in your Klaviyo account by anyone who's bought at least once over all time compared to at least twice, versus at least three times.
• 3:59
  And you could go beyond that. But as just a simple test, if you start with those three groups of people, you'll see a marked difference in the number of people who've bought at least once.
• 4:11
  It will go approximately in half for the two-time buyers, and then it will cut by sometimes as much as 75% when you look at someone who's bought at least three times.
• 4:24
  And you can get more precise with how you determine exactly two or three orders. But then you compare that to a large pool of prospects.
• 4:33
  For most of the brands that we work with, 80% of their Klaviyo database is actually prospects who's ne- who've never bought before.
• 4:40
  And so that's a really exciting low-hanging fruit opportunity when we first start working with a brand.
• 4:45
  But the real secret sauce for retention is how do you get more people to become two-time buyers and three-time buyers. And then beyond that, the momentum's pretty self-sustaining.
• 4:55
  But it's actually very difficult for a brand to get somebody to buy three times. Now, you mentioned Klaviyo a couple of times there. They are sponsoring a workshop which you're gonna teach in Austin on October 23rd.
• 5:09
  And this is a series of workshops every Friday in October.
• 5:13
  So today, October 16th, our workshop is focused on the e-commerce conversion rate experience and coming in together with Swim, who's gonna help us bring that together with Brian Massey.
• 5:25
  The last week's workshop was with Dan Hansfeld, all about developing profitable Black Friday offers.
• 5:33
  And there's a big question mark as to what the discount should be and how much you can afford to give away to make that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know, experience what your customers or prospects might be hoping it will be.
• 5:47
  And we talked a lot about the profitability of those offers and how much, in many cases, the scenarios we went through when we planned one scenario this, one kind of discount, one kind of offer, 5% more or less makes- In the end, a big difference in how much of an actual loss you can experience as a brand during the peak season.
• 6:07
  And so the expectation is, if there is a loss, as Dan would say, choose that intentionally for the reason that you have for your strategy, but then make sure you've got the retention plan also a part of what you're planning in your strategy to help bring them along and have that, that second purchase.
• 6:27
  So you just spoke to the idea of, of getting someone to buy that second time being the most important, and that's certainly never more important than in this peak shopping season, where it could actually be a loss in that first, first experience.
• 6:42
  The ad costs are much higher this time of year. There's a lot of factors that go into making this a pivotal moment to make sure your retention program is dialed in.
• 6:51
  So one of the things that I know we do in our work is in Klaviyo, there is an automation or a flow that happens after the order is placed.
• 7:03
  And you've made a particular point of wanting to distinguish in that post-purchase flow whether they are a new customer, first time, let's say. Let me correct that.
• 7:15
  A new buyer, first time, or whether they are a repeat customer, that second purchase, and then also making the distinction between whether it's a third purchase.
• 7:27
  Why is that important to you to have those distinct flows set up, acknowledging each step in how many they've made a purchase? Well, fundamentally, you need to be able to speak to each person distinctly. If you go into--
• 7:43
  Well, just take an example from my own personal shopping experience. I really love the store Aritzia. I'm a little bit addicted to their clothing designs.
• 7:53
  So I have shopped at that store enough times that I have qualified for VIP access to their early Black Friday sale. The women in that store know me, and not everybody on that team has met me before or seen me before.
• 8:09
  Not everybody knows my purchase history. But at the moment they check me out, they have that history they can reference, and they can give that context to say, "Oh, hey, you have this offer available, and welcome back.
• 8:23
  You're a VIP." And I am not subscribed to their emails at all, but I'm a very loyal customer of theirs.
• 8:35
  And so you have that in-person experience where you acknowledge the different tiers of loyalty, and you need to be able to translate that digitally.
• 8:43
  And the absence of that kind of in-person local store where somebody knows you, maybe your favorite coffee shop, they know your coffee order, or they know your dog's name.
• 8:54
  How do you scale that kind of personal touch digitally? At the minimum, you should be aware and acknowledging when somebody is a first-time buyer, second-time buyer, third-time buyer.
• 9:07
  And we would also recommend you address somebody's fourth purchase separately.
• 9:11
  But if a brand's thinking about the minimum viable things they need to have ready before Black Friday, just starting with those first three makes a big difference because majority of your customers aren't going to make it past that third order.
• 9:24
  So that is something that also impacts the timing with which you ask somebody to buy again. You should wait longer or shorter depending on
• 9:40
  your product price point, depending on how much of a discount dependency you wanna create among your customers, as well as how many times they've bought before.
• 9:52
  And one thing that's been really surprising to a lot of the brands that we work with is we have a frequent pattern of when you simply send an email that thanks somebody for their order, and for a first-time buyer, you might kinda educate them a little bit again about the history of the brand, the ethos of why the products are made or designed a certain way.
• 10:09
  You kind of reorient them to why they should care about the brand, why it was worth them taking that leap of faith and placing trust in you and clicking buy.
• 10:18
  And then for a second-time customer, you don't need to give them that re-education. You just acknowledge, "Hey, we're glad to see you again."
• 10:24
  And you might prompt them to just engage deeper with the community, have them bond more with the people like us that have chosen to shop with your brand and that they see themselves as a shared group of people with.
• 10:36
  And then for the third-time buyer, that's when, if you have a loyalty program, you might encourage them to join it.
• 10:42
  The second-time buyer actually should not get a loyalty program call to action, and that's one of the misconceptions around subscriptions and loyalty, is when is a customer truly ready to take that next step with your brand?
• 10:55
  So separating the flows in that way, it helps just simply with your reporting. You could do it all in the same flow, but if you have separate flows, it just gives you a little bit more consistency and control.
• 11:08
  And particularly if you have different collections of products that one day you may want to have a branch that personalizes content to specifically for a first-time buyer, specifically for a certain collection of products.
• 11:19
  It just makes the logic more resilient overall, but that's a little nerdy anecdote alongside the more fundamental concepts. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that brands have a post-purchase automation.
• 11:32
  If they're doing any kind of volume online, they've already got a post-purchase flow if they're using Klaviyo or another platform. But you do have this intention and dividing things up into multiple flows.
• 11:47
  Now, you just spoke to what you would say differently based on whether someone's bought first, second, third time.
• 11:52
  But let's just dig a little bit into the flow automations because this is the kind of thing that makes a big difference.
• 12:00
  In my experience, a lot of brands have these email automations set up, and they're a little bit wary of touching them. They may not understand how they all work.
• 12:10
  Maybe they had a consultant come in and do it a year or two ago, and these flows then kind of sit there in a brittle way.
• 12:17
  And part of it, I think, is because they're constructed in such a way that may be a little too clever, with one flow trying to do three different things with branches and logic and conditions.
• 12:28
  Why is that problematic, and what's your point of view on the specific example of the post-purchase flow? How many do you need, why do you separate them out, and why does that matter?
• 12:40
  Well, fundamentally, I think there is wisdom in simplicity. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that you should do it.
• 12:47
  And so if you, it takes you an hour to kind of reorient yourself, or if it's somebody joining a team for the first time and they're trying to get acclimated to how the existing system of flows works,
• 13:00
  the more complicated the logic is, the longer it will take you to do that context switching every time you're trying to optimize that flow or evaluate if something's broken and not working correctly and needs to be fixed.
• 13:14
  So partly it's just a kindness to yourself of making it really easy and clear of, for this particular type of customer, this is the flow we're working on.
• 13:23
  But also it comes down to timing too, and really leveraging what Klaviyo is best at, which is knowing when to send the right message to the right person at the right time and on the right channel.
• 13:38
  It was the fundamental promise that got our team so excited about Klaviyo in twenty seventeen. And just simply saying, "Are we sending a message based on when an order has been placed or when an order is delivered?"
• 13:51
  is a small but meaningful shift that can make your engagement and conversion rate significantly better for a post-purchase experience.
• 14:01
  But that, you're saying basically you're expecting another order to come out as a consequence of the post-purchase flow. Is that right? Well, you should have lower expectations of that happening from a first-time buyer,
• 14:15
  and it is especially critical that you be careful of asking them to buy too soon or too late, because that first-time buyer is your highest churn risk, especially during the Black Friday season.
• 14:28
  So you may have a different approach to post-purchase for a first-time buyer during Black Friday compared to just kind of standard business throughout the year.
• 14:37
  But what's most important is when that first order is delivered.
• 14:40
  If you're selling a high price point luxury gift item like fine jewelry, or maybe they bought some really cool gear for camping, or they bought a really nice set of kitchen knives for their home, with those kinds of
• 14:59
  more expensive products, the likelihood of somebody having buyer's remorse is actually often higher. And so it's more important that you not ask them to buy again too soon.
• 15:10
  You should give them a chance to receive the product, to evaluate the quality, and feel confident and excited that what they bought was worth it.
• 15:17
  Whereas a second-time buyer or a first-time buyer of something that is relatively cheap, like maybe a fifty dollar makeup palette, and there was one more thing they were thinking about getting and they just weren't sure if they were gonna spend the extra money, for a first-time buyer, that's a great time to show up with an extra discount if you want to before their order's been delivered.
• 15:39
  And if your fulfillment team can handle it, you could even say, "Hey, we'll just add it to your existing box. Throw this in now before we ship it." Or you could do that for a second-time buyer, and you could say, "Hey,
• 15:50
  you got this. We're glad to have you back. As a reward for your loyalty, here's some incentive to add this additional item to your order," or have a second, third order come very shortly after the initial purchase. So
• 16:04
  the price point has a big impact, as well as somebody's willingness to trust your brand and feel excited and confident about the quality of your products, because that is a fundamental piece of retention as well, and it's not talked about very often.
• 16:17
  Now, what you're getting into reminds me of the workshop that we're gonna have today in Austin with Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences helping lead that.
• 16:27
  He speaks about the differences in a, a buyer being a transactional buyer or a relational buyer.
• 16:35
  And by that, he means someone more interested in being associated with the brand, um, identifying with the kinds of people who shop and buy from this brand, versus someone transactional being they're gonna get the deal, they're gonna be excited about savings.
• 16:52
  It's almost a little bit of a gamification of the shopping experience. They're just kind of in it to get the deal. Now, in that case, for someone who may be coming in in a Black Friday season more transactional,
• 17:04
  is it the case or how would it be the case that a flow post-purchase could shift them from being transactional to be more, more relational, more loyal, you know, or growing in that direction?
• 17:16
  How do you approach that kind of problem?
• 17:19
  Well, to some extent, once somebody develops a discount dependency or if they're just inherently that kind of buyer, there's very little you're going to be able to do to really shift their psychology.
• 17:29
  But what is an important lever is how you make them care. They need to become emotionally bonded to your brand. If they are a deal hunter, that's their number one priority.
• 17:44
  They're gonna be looking for what's the best price on Amazon, what's the best price on Walmart. They might even go to Temu or Shein or, you know, places like that where it's really known for getting a cheap price.
• 17:58
  So for that kind of buyer, depending on your margins, a buy more, save more offer might be really appealing. But in general, they have very little loyalty to your brand.
• 18:09
  They also have very little loyalty to your e-commerce store. So they may shop with you, but they may go to Amazon where they know they're gonna get a, a better discount and faster shipping.
• 18:19
  Whereas if you give somebody a reason to become more emotionally invested, they are more inclined to seek your emails out in a crowded inbox and not be distracted by the three to four other close enough brands that are also communicating with them at that time, and they're also more likely to come back and buy again without requiring a discount.
• 18:41
  They may be discount opportunistic instead of dependent, and that's an important difference. So for example,
• 18:47
  there is a beauty brand that's really well known called Tatcha, and they actually have one of their team members as part of the Klaviyo Champions cohort with me this year.
• 18:58
  And what they have done for the holidays is they have this really interesting free gift incentive with purchase as well as special gift wrapping that you could only get both of these things when you shop directly through the Tatcha website.
• 19:13
  So anyone who shops at Sephora, either on e-commerce or in retail, they can get the same Tatcha products, but they can't get this beautiful hand-painted silk scarf that's done as traditional,
• 19:29
  I believe it's Japanese, but I might be mixing that up. I'm 90% sure it's an homage to traditional Japanese gift wrapping where you place the gift in a silk scarf. So it's pretty, it's seasonal, it's also functional.
• 19:45
  And so exclusivity is one reason you can make people care. But your enthusiast customers, you need to go a little bit deeper to really truly build that bonding, that kind of tribal association of people like us.
• 19:57
  "I've found my people. We shop at this kind of skincare brand. We use this type of..." You know, "I've got a Fellow coffee cup. Do you have Fellow? Do you have Stanley? What kind of girl are you? Do you like Bridgerton?
• 20:10
  Do you like, um, All the Boys I've Kissed Before," or something like that?
• 20:15
  There are different taste communities that make up the customers of your brand, and leveraging those different elements are how you get people's emotions involved, and that's where discounts are less of a critical factor.
• 20:30
  Yeah, I appreciate the importance of finding a way to associate with the values that the, the person is bringing to their buying experience and connecting that to how the brand can help support or identify who they are as an identity and what kind of community they become a part of, and that's definitely a shift from that trans- transactional buyer.
• 20:51
  What I, what I'm also wondering about, or I guess I wanna, wanna bring up is in the last workshop we taught in this frankly e-commerce setting here in Austin, is Dan Hansel was describing as he looks at a lot of historical data, he, he gathers data across 150 brands in Black Friday sales periods in the months prior and after.
• 21:14
  He works in an analytics capacity. Uh, and one of the things he's noticed is that a brand might preview the fact that they're going to offer a big discount for the Black Friday season.
• 21:26
  And I say season because the week of, or that five-day period really is extending to be more like five weeks.
• 21:34
  You know, the, the discounts may or may not be applicable, applicable in all of those five weeks, but there is this sort of build-up and, and season more now than it ever before.
• 21:43
  But what he noticed is that there would be these big drops in purchase orders in the week or two or three or five before Black Friday.
• 21:53
  And one of the things he saw as a common pattern is that in their email marketing, they would foreshadow, "Big deal coming. Get ready for our big, big savings opportunity," and it just killed the e-commerce store sales.
• 22:08
  Totally unnecessary. So basically, don't do that. Don't tell people the big sale is coming. Do you have any reaction to that? Well, it's a common pattern we see.
• 22:20
  There's both the hold off of people waiting for the biggest deal to come. They might think it's gonna come the day of Black Friday. In years past, Cyber Monday was this time when maybe your sale might go from,
• 22:32
  you know, I remember the days where you had a Black Friday sale, like 50% on Black Friday, and then you go to Cyber Monday and it's 70%.
• 22:39
  And those kind of discounts don't happen anymore because people just don't have those margins in their businesses the way that they did in the early 2000s or 2010s. But
• 22:49
  there's still that deep-rooted psychological conditioning of waiting for the best deal. And so that's where being clear and attuned to somebody's level of loyalty, but also just their overall relationship to your brand,
• 23:07
  sometimes that simply manifests as just being clear and kind. And so you could be upfront and say, "Hey, in case you're waiting, don't wait. This is the discount. This is the offer that you've got.
• 23:20
  It's gonna be active from this time to this time. We're not gonna toy with you or manipulate you. We're not going to say the sale has ended and then come back and be like, 'Hey, joke's on on you. It's extended.'"
• 23:35
  That's where sometimes just fundamental clarity really helps guide people's shopping behavior.
• 23:41
  There's also the inverse of that where people may have a really big spending hangover after Black Friday, and so then it's the first week of December and a brand's freaking out because their sales are tanking, and the reality is people just spent a ton of money the week before, and wherever somebody is in their paycheck cycle, that may be impacting their willingness to buy as well.
• 24:01
  So the teasing of the sale is important. It is a useful lever to especially get people to sign up for something like SMS if they want exclusive early access to something.
• 24:17
  But when you say a big discount is coming- Just be more clear about that so people can evaluate, do I care about this offer?
• 24:27
  And if it's instead an exclusive free gift that's a limited edition collection that maybe only the first five hundred people can get access to, that is a useful lever.
• 24:39
  You just need to be mindful of how that's going to impact your monthly cadence of sales.
• 24:43
  So you may actually intentionally choose to have lower sales before the offer comes because you know you're gonna have a stronger response to the offer than you would have had if you didn't tease it. Yeah.
• 24:54
  Well, another thing that we spoke about also is how often, you know, you can start to raise your prices incrementally in August, September, October, going in towards setting up a bigger discount in the, in the November period.
• 25:10
  But looking ahead- I would caution against that, though, because at some point you need to be mindful of how people perceive the value of your products.
• 25:19
  And if they know that they can get something for thirty percent off or forty percent off, they're going to start thinking that's the real cost of the product.
• 25:29
  So especially for a luxury brand, it's very important to be discerning in what kind of discount or incentive you choose to offer because it's going to fundamentally shift the perception of how valuable your product is and if the quality is actually living up to that luxury standard.
• 25:44
  Well, let's talk about December. And one of the things that, that Dan's also noticed in his study across lots of, you know, of datasets is this drop in sales after Cyber Monday, that week or two thereafter.
• 26:00
  And a common explanation as he goes back and examines and say, "Hey, what happened in this period of decline?" Is say, "Oh, well, we didn't send any emails.
• 26:11
  We just figured that they were all kind of burned out and didn't wanna, you know, be bothered."
• 26:16
  But he's, he's also seen the opposite of that, where brands will send an email marketing message Tuesday, Wednesday after Cyber Monday, and while there may be some, some flattening compared to certainly obviously the spike of the week prior, there can be a continued buying habit in a way that may be a little unexpected.
• 26:37
  So I'm just curious how you would respond to thinking about that post Cyber Monday expectations and how you would imagine the campaigns playing out in some of the work you're doing.
• 26:47
  In the work that I do with Gabrielle at eBusiness PROS, we lean into email and SMS, and of course, that means a lot of work with Klaviyo.
• 26:55
  So Klaviyo has made possible this season of Frankly Ecommerce, and what is interesting to us right now is how their Klaviyo service piece can be gathering information about what people are doing, how they're interacting with you, maybe in a help desk, uh, returns, post-purchase kind of way.
• 27:12
  All those signals now be collected in Klaviyo and can inform what you're doing on the marketing side. You can choose not to send an email to someone based on existing customer service incident.
• 27:23
  So for example, that's just how the Klaviyo platform is evolving. I encourage you to check it out if you haven't. It continues to grow and expand. The Klaviyo service is especially of interest. Now, back to our show.
• 27:35
  One of my favorite segmentation cards to remind people that they can play is who you take out of an audience. Sometimes that's more important than actually the bigger decision of who you send it to.
• 27:49
  So if it's a first-time buyer, and they're already in a post-purchase sequence, they most likely don't need to receive all of your campaigns after the big Black Friday sale has ended.
• 28:00
  Honestly, f- the first like three days after they purchase, they don't need to receive campaigns unless you have a truly distinct offer that they couldn't get before that they do need to be aware of.
• 28:10
  You should just leave them alone and let them focus on your post-purchase flows. And then for somebody who's bought within the last seven days, you might be a little bit more loose with what they get.
• 28:20
  If you're sending a campaign that has more of a content or editorial focus and not so product focused, you might send them that campaign because it doesn't directly conflict with the post-purchase sequence they're already receiving.
• 28:34
  Whereas if you're sending something that's just generally a prompt to buy or maybe you are a brand where you extend your sale or instead you have a December sale that's separate and geared towards holiday gifting,
• 28:49
  then there are all kinds of people who have not bought yet during the Black Friday period, and they're your best candidates to receive those emails.
• 28:58
  Because as much as there can be a spending hangover for some people the week following Black Friday, there's also just as many people who are completely overwhelmed by their flooded email inbox and now their flooded text messages, and they may have just kind of been paralyzed.
• 29:16
  They're like, "You know what? I'm gonna not even engage right now." There's a lot of people who love to shop during the Black Friday period.
• 29:23
  There are also people who want to be outside being present with their family, baking, enjoying the holiday. It is, after all, a holiday week. So
• 29:33
  you could just catch them at a moment where they're more available and more willing to shop. So there's different groups of people, and that's why who you exclude matters.
• 29:42
  You could also take out people who just haven't engaged within the last three to fourteen days. See how they do or don't churn.
• 29:52
  But on the flip side of that, if somebody's made it through your entire Black Friday sale and they've not engaged once, and especially if they've never bought before, I would be the most aggressive in targeting those people.
• 30:04
  As long as your deliverability can handle it and you can sustain that kind of low click-rate engagement, that's really critical for an inbox provider to evaluate your reputation, hammer those people until they buy.
• 30:16
  And if they don't buy, they need to leave your list because they have low engagement, they didn't buy during your biggest offer of the year, and they're not likely to be a good customer for your brand.
• 30:25
  So the sooner they leave your list, the better I'm struck in the, the last conversation in the workshop that I had with this idea of building profitable Black Friday offers at one of the outcomes of this process we went through of using a spreadsheet that was built by Dan Hansfeld to ex-examine the potential consequences of discounts in one way or another during this period.
• 30:48
  And one of the conclusions around the room, the table of people here going through this exercise with us, was that it may be better not to offer a discount at all. In other words, sit out the season.
• 31:03
  And you know something about this because you worked with a brand in Montana called Red Oxx Manufacturing for many years.
• 31:09
  Check them out at redoxx.com and sign up to their email list, but don't be expecting any coupon codes coming in that week.
• 31:17
  And so that was an example where tell us how they handled that kind of holiday season and then, you know, and what, what the concepts, what they might have done or how they had that played out.
• 31:27
  I think the important thing is you need to be aware of where you fit in with other brands.
• 31:33
  So if you're not going to have a Black Friday sale offer, you may choose to actually put more of your effort in the beginning of the month of November and catch people before their inboxes are overwhelmed.
• 31:45
  Or you may simply show up with a bold stance during the week of Black Friday, like Patagonia... Actually, no, it wasn't Patagonia, it was REI.
• 31:53
  They made waves a few years ago when they first started with their Opt Outside campaign. They said, "Hey, we're just gonna actually close the retail stores for Black Friday. We're not gonna be open.
• 32:02
  We want you to be outside enjoying nature because that's a really important part of the ethos of our brand."
• 32:09
  Some people, if they really wanted to go shop online still that day, they could, but also their enthusiast customers who are really passionate about being outside and connecting with nature, they loved that.
• 32:19
  So for Red Oxx, they have a similar attitude where we did actually tap into that kind of Opt Outside energy one year or two. But you can also say, we have a fundamental principle as a business of not discounting.
• 32:36
  And going back to the perception of quality and value and whether your products are worth it, do they live up to that luxury standard? Red Oxx makes manufactured in America luggage. It's not going to be cheap to make.
• 32:50
  It's not gonna be cheap to sell. It's definitely not gonna be cheap in quality. They're intentionally overbuilt. And so you tell that story.
• 32:58
  You remind people of, "Hey, we are intentionally fair with the price because the price is the price and it's worth it."
• 33:07
  And it may in fact be something that you hand down to later generations if you really love it that much because it will last that long. So then you just shift the focus to g-gift giving.
• 33:18
  So there are other levers you can pull outside of discounting to get people's attention, and that's where Liana Patch of, forgive me, what's the name- Punchline... of her company? Punchline Copy.
• 33:31
  She has this great suggestion of just letting yourself be a little unhinged with your subject lines, especially during Black Friday.
• 33:38
  And so one year we sent an email for Red Oxx during that season where, I can't remember the exact subject line, but we were
• 33:46
  explicitly telling people to buy coal to give it to the people on their naughty list for Christmas.
• 33:53
  And the coal was actually just a bar of black charcoal soap that's useful as you're traveling around trying to, you know, have good hygiene. But the unhinged nature of saying, "Yeah, you have people on your naughty list.
• 34:08
  You probably don't want to give them a gift, but if you have to," it's like, you know, that distant aunt that would be super offended if you didn't get them anything for Christmas, "Just get them coal.
• 34:16
  Buy a little nice, it's made in America, high quality, good soap, but it's black and charcoal and, you know, gives yourself a giggle when you give it to them."
• 34:25
  And so that's where, again, tapping into the emotions of somebody, that's a great way to make them care enough about your brand to be excited to shop with you even if you don't have a discount during the most discount heavy month of the year.
• 34:40
  Well, you're talking about our friend Liana Patch, also in Austin. And I'm gonna pull up the email that she sent me yesterday, just on her list, not, not a personal email.
• 34:50
  The subject line, "Three weeks later, she bursts out of the tall grass."
• 34:57
  I had to open it, and, uh, I'm not gonna tell you what that's about, but you have to, you have to subscribe to Punchline Copy list [chuckles] to see those kinds of subject lines.
• 35:06
  Subject lines can make such a difference, but what's also maybe I would say as more important is segmenting the recipient list.
• 35:18
  Obviously, you wanna have people who are gonna be receiving an email show signs of engagement to Gmail and these email service providers that are trying to gauge, "Is this gonna go in the inbox?
• 35:28
  Is it gonna go in the promo tab?"
• 35:30
  And sometimes what they're ha- what they're doing is they're waiting for that initial batch of recipients to show engagement or lack of, and then make some decisions about inboxing based on that.
• 35:40
  So part of the challenge is getting the right combination of recipients for any given email campaign. And I wanna bring up then, I know what we did last November.
• 35:55
  This was for a brand that's in the firearms space. They sell accessories and supporting things, suppressors, silencers, and there was an opportunity that they had a regular weekly newsletter.
• 36:09
  And then they had section or segments that would get other follow-up emails outside of the main anchored Wednesday newsletter.
• 36:20
  But you came in and during that week of Black Friday, you did some analysis of who was engaged, who wasn't, who had bought, who had not. And this is like- Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday kind of timeframe.
• 36:35
  So right in the thick of things. And in that analysis, I know that you were able to sort of tease out recipients, subscribers,
• 36:46
  people into some unique or special segments that made a big impact on revenue during that, that busy kind of time.
• 36:56
  How did you approach that problem, and what, what was sort of the guiding idea that helped you identify really high-value segments to receive extra campaigns, resent campaigns during this sort of peak week?
• 37:12
  I'm not gonna give away all my secret sauce, but being really aggressive on your prospects is one of the best things that you could do during Black Friday
• 37:21
  because there is actually such a thing as having too low of an unsubscribe rate.
• 37:26
  And from the moment somebody first enters your ecosystem, whether they explicitly subscribe via opt-in form, or they are looking at products, they trigger a browse abandonment flow, and they get added to Klaviyo, they add something to cart, and they're kind of thinking about the purchase, but they stall out and they don't buy for the first time, that's still a prospect in your ecosystem.
• 37:46
  And the longer it goes from that initial moment of entry to their first purchase, the harder you have to work to earn their trust, both to buy for the first time as well as, in general, maintain that loyalty so that they become a second-time buyer and more likely to be a loyal third-time customer
• 38:06
  and beyond. So your prospects, if there's any stragglers on your list, that's the number one candidate for resends, opportunities to go beyond a typical engaged group of people that you might focus on most of the time.
• 38:22
  But in general, you can also get really clear around who you want to nurture to that next stage of loyalty. So somebody who's bought at most once over all time. They may have a lower level of engagement.
• 38:35
  They may have not purchased recently. Maybe you have a product where it's not actually consumable within a thirty-to-ninety-day cycle.
• 38:45
  Maybe that buying timeline for them is actually more like a hundred twenty to a hundred eighty days.
• 38:51
  So you might look at somebody who's bought a maximum of one time within the last year, and they haven't come back again recently, or similarly, they've bought a maximum of two times all year, they haven't come back recently, those are prime candidates to say, "Okay, you've been hanging around here.
• 39:10
  You've not come back yet. Maybe you are waiting for our Black Friday offer. So even if you haven't engaged with our emails within the last six months or three months,
• 39:20
  we're gonna send you these offers because we think that they're important." And there are also people who are just simply busy and distracted. [clears throat] So as long as somebody has not bought yet,
• 39:33
  you might compile a different combination of engagement with emails and/or text messages, depending on which kind of campaign you're sending, as well as on-site shopping activity, and even better, if you have grown your list using Klaviyo Social and you have the ability to track if your subscribers are tagging you on Instagram, they're following you, they're engaged in that channel, that's another factor you can use to identify somebody who's shopping, thinking about you, ready to make a purchase, and just show up again.
• 40:08
  Because the reality is, as much as it is annoying as a consumer to be absolutely bombarded during the week of Black Friday with more emails and texts than you could possibly keep up with, there are some brands that you do actually wanna hear from, and if you can't
• 40:25
  ... I mean, ideally, they are so engaged with you that Google has decided to put your emails at the top of their inbox because they know that they seek out your brand.
• 40:34
  But in the absence of that, you might take something that somebody received the day before or earlier that day, and six to eight hours later, you might come back and say, "Hey, we know you were basically sniffing around.
• 40:47
  You haven't purchased yet."
• 40:48
  You might change the subject line slightly, use an existing campaign, and that kind of getting more juice out of the work you've already done could help boost your Black Friday sales by ten to a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the size of your brand.
• 41:05
  You mentioned the unsubscribe, and I know there's, there's hesitation often to say, "We don't wanna send too much 'cause people might unsubscribe."
• 41:14
  And we've talked before about the work that Brandon's done at Montana Knife Company, and I think it's safe to characterize their approach as, "You get on our list, we're gonna, we're gonna message you and message you and message you until you either buy
• 41:29
  or unsubscribe." And I also n- you know, I, I'm reminded of a study that I know we saw earlier this year of the highest unsubscribe rates in terms of campaigns have also yielded the highest revenue per recipient.
• 41:49
  Mm. How do you... H- what's your approach to this question of unsubscribing, of brand identification and making a stand, taking a stand for something in terms of your point of view?
• 42:03
  Um, is there a correlation between those two? Absolutely.
• 42:06
  And fundamentally, this is why AI slop is so frustrating to consumers as well as people in the industry who were marketers and we start seeing it absolutely everywhere, and we know what to look for because we're also the ones working with the AI tools every day trying to say, "Okay, this is unacceptable," or, "This is fit to publish."
• 42:25
  And the core root of it comes down to simply you have to make people give a shit. You have to make them care
• 42:34
  They either have to be excited, laughing, feeling like they're getting some exclusive perk, and so they're kind of feeling some warm feelings like you gave them something valuable that they care about.
• 42:47
  Or you have to make them say, "Oh my God, I do not like these people. I do not like this brand. I'm gonna go shop somebody else."
• 42:55
  Because if they're just kind of lukewarm and apathetic, they are more likely to be dependent on discounts than any other customer, and they are more likely to be a one-time buyer and leave. So
• 43:09
  you talked about Montana Knife Company, and I'm gonna pull up some of their recent texts because I am a lurker on their list. An important thing in addition to the unsubscribe rate
• 43:26
  is also coming back to the clarity of your offer. Sometimes you may have somebody unsubscribe because they just don't want to read that much. Maybe they don't like that channel.
• 43:39
  More and more people are developing clear preferences around whether they want to hear from you from email or they want text messages, or if you have the shop app or your own app that's maybe powered by Tapcart, if you can send them a push notification, they might actually prefer that.
• 43:55
  And so Montana Knife Company sent a text message that kind of broke the internet on September twenty-fourth. It was like fifteen hundred characters. It is so long.
• 44:12
  Like, I, I could not believe how long this text was. But it was important because they had a new product that was dropping, and they have that exclusive lever that not every brand has.
• 44:24
  But maybe you have something special that you're doing for Black Friday.
• 44:27
  Maybe you're pulling a card out of your book like Pop Flex, and you're saying, "Only email subscribers get the secret password to access our Black Friday sale."
• 44:35
  I think it's days or hours before it's open to the public, and you wanna make sure that works. You wanna make sure people have minimal customer service problems.
• 44:44
  So Montana Knife Company had a ton of first-time buyers join their list over the past few weeks, and they thought it was worthwhile to kind of reorient these people because it was such a huge volume.
• 44:56
  That's another thing you should be thinking about in terms of proactive customer service, making your marketing better before this busy season hits.
• 45:05
  And so they literally sent a list of instructions to make sure that you can access the drop page, your cart will load, and your purchase will be able to be completed as fast as possible.
• 45:18
  So they literally tell you, "Create an account, have your billing shipping information pre-saved," because this thing's gonna sell out so quickly, those crucial two minutes of adding your shipping information might lose you the product.
• 45:33
  So some people may have hated that, and they left.
• 45:36
  But the people who wanted to buy, they were grateful they got a message like that, and you better believe they had their carts ready to go so they could [fingers snapping] purchase in less than ninety seconds.
• 45:46
  Well, a, a text message that long breaks all the best practices for what SMS mobile marketing would typically do. And I think this brings up the question of how many best practices there are just banging into...
• 46:01
  I know my inbox gets, um, the playbook, what to do before, during, and after BFCM. Like I delete, delete, because part of that best practices is sometimes so disconnected from the brand's actual context.
• 46:16
  Montana Knife Company has a unique relationship with these dropped products that sell out shortly, and another brand might have a different circumstance.
• 46:24
  We work in a lot of restricted industries, whether it's firearms or cannabis or areas where the, the meta ad opportunity is very constrained or limited altogether.
• 46:34
  And so email and SMS is really critical to those kind of brands. And a lot of these best practices may not directly apply.
• 46:42
  So one of the things that I think I love about the workshop format that we're gonna be doing here in the coming week is when you're in the room in a small group setting, you can get into the specifics of your context,
• 46:55
  your constraints, and really have practical discussions about what you can do in a way that's sort of setting aside that what I, what I called the other day best practices barf. Do you have any response to that?
• 47:09
  Well, that's why I
• 47:11
  keep reminding people to be aware of their own price point, their own value perception, whether or not they identify as a luxury brand, because those are some of the most important factors that determine how soon they should ask somebody to buy again after they just made a purchase.
• 47:29
  And that's honestly one of the biggest missteps I see during Black Friday is not sufficiently excluding your recent buyers.
• 47:37
  So I'm not saying you take them out of every single message that you send during that time period, but being discerning around who gets what and when
• 47:46
  of the recent buyers is one of the biggest thing that's going to impact your overall customer retention after the Black Friday period.
• 47:53
  Because you may have somebody who buys for the first time during Black Friday, and they may get such a strong ick from how you communicate with them after that purchase, they may just kind of throw their hands up in disgust and be like, "Um, my first order hasn't even arrived yet, and I'm not gonna shop with this brand again."
• 48:12
  Or your product is so amazing that they're annoyed with your marketing, and they just never subscribe to your marketing, but they come back and buy again.
• 48:22
  But really, the most valuable customers, the ones who are going to come back and buy at a faster rate than the ones who would just do it of their own volition, are the people who are subscribed to at least one of your marketing channels, whether it's email, SMS
• 48:37
  Social's a whole other ballgame that I won't touch at this moment. But just those two channels, if you can communicate with people without being mediated by an algorithm, it is hugely valuable to your business.
• 48:49
  So best practices do serve a purpose. They are there for a reason. There are some fundamental principles you can't ignore.
• 48:56
  But your judgment around how you treat somebody who's just bought for the first time, second time, third time, one of the most valuable things that you could do.
• 49:05
  And being aware of your unique context, of your products, your brand, your value proposition,
• 49:11
  that's gonna make it more valuable than any generic framework I might say around how you should structure your post-purchase flows or even segment your campaigns.
• 49:20
  You described the significance of knowing the customer and the stages they are in, and one of the things that I'm interested in is how, you know, with the Klaviyo platform is what we're using, there's a social aspect to it.
• 49:35
  There's also a service aspect to it, and there's this customer agent capabilities.
• 49:41
  What I understand as the real opportunity is when you have that post-purchase experience and that customer service interaction, that kind of data now within the, the Klaviyo service piece of their platform can also inform the follow-up marketing.
• 49:58
  So it gives a whole nother dimension of awareness of how that customer is engaging with you that can then influence what you do, say, after the Cyber Monday in a marketing context because you're aware now of the customer service dynamics playing out.
• 50:15
  Absolutely.
• 50:16
  I think one of the most easily overlooked pieces of personalization in terms of how you cater to different audiences, how you send them the right content or not, is simply making sure you have the data and that you have the data in a format that's actually usable.
• 50:33
  Because even the most amazing AI system out there is going to be ineffective if it can't properly ingest and interpret and leverage attributes like what kind of collection somebody really prefers and how that relates to their interest in certain types of content.
• 50:49
  Or maybe for a mom, do they have children at home? Are they actually a grandma now? We have brand that we work with where that's an important distinction.
• 50:58
  So having your customer service insights directly integrated to Klaviyo is really valuable, and there are ways that you can start doing this in small steps using tools like Customer Agent without having to sacrifice the entire customer service system that that team is really excited about.
• 51:16
  So you could have Gorgias, you could have Zendesk, you could have that ecosystem that is as important to your customer service team as Klaviyo is to marketers, and you could still use something like Customer Agent to bridge the gap between the two and help you have better awareness overall so that you could do true proactive customer service in your marketing, which is that edge that will make your marketing more effective.
• 51:39
  Well, I think we're really looking for m- uh, a level of communication and relationship with the customer that doesn't fall into a category of marketing and customer service. It's just a brand.
• 51:51
  It's just you as a customer relating to it. And so when we think about that kind of follow-up communications after the purchase, whether it's from marketing over here or customer service over there,
• 52:03
  that's not a meaningful distinction, at least not in the way that the customer wants to be perceiving their communications with you.
• 52:09
  So when that platform of Klaviyo has the service component, it blends that messaging, helps you be attuned to what the triggers might be to when to send that message or, maybe importantly, not send that follow-up message because there's a return in process or something.
• 52:27
  And so I think that's, that's really the thing we're gonna get into in our workshop in Austin, is how to think about that relationship after the Black Friday period, both from a customer service and marketing experience.
• 52:40
  They're really one and the same, and that's where that platform sort of capacity, marketing, service, even social, makes a real opportunity. Absolutely. So if you're in the Austin area, come to my workshop on the 23rd.
• 52:57
  We'll get into the nitty-gritty of your retention system and what's gonna help you succeed during Black Friday, and we can get specific to your context so you can go deeper and more helpful than just a generic b- best practice.
• 53:09
  Thanks, Gabrielle. I look forward to it, and thanks for being on the Frankly Ecommerce Show. Thanks for having me. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Frankly Ecommerce with host Patrick Scott Pittman.
• 53:19
  Read episode notes and get links to learn more at franklyecommerce.com. Next time you're in Austin, check out the Austin Shopify Meetup. It's open to all.
• 53:32
  There's a good chance you'll meet just the right person, as it's one of the longest running meetups with 2,600 participants going on 15 years.
• 53:42
  If you'd like to get more involved beyond the meetup, then Frankly Ecommerce pass holders participate in workshops and special invitation-only events. Subscribe to our newsletter at franklyecommerce.com to learn more.
• 53:56
  This episode is sponsored in part by the friendly team at eBusiness PROS, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas. If you're a brand seeking to connect with an enthusiast audience and hold their attention,
• 54:08
  if you want less discounting and more story, if you're curious about what we might mean by attuned marketing as contrast to behavioral trickery, then contact us at ebusinesspros.com. Ask for Abigail. That's me.
• 54:22
  [upbeat music]