Unknown 1:07

Hi, it's Rob Andy Kennedy.

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Hello Today on the Email Marketing Show we're talking to Natalie Ellis from BuzzFeed about Black Friday Cyber Monday type deals. Now when

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this episode comes to an end, we know you're going to have a bunch of questions that you want to ask and a bunch of things that you want to discuss. So that's why we created a free online community around this podcast to talk about email marketing, the stuff we talked about these episodes and how it applies to you and your business because we know your business is different. It's called the Email Marketing Show community. It's on Facebook, it's totally free to join. It will take just a moment just open Facebook, search for the Email Marketing Show community you can request to join, we'll get you approved, and then you'll be in there in the next few minutes with us and 1000s of other business owners just like you all working to grow their businesses with email, just go and search for the Email Marketing Show community

Unknown 1:46

he puts enough sugar in a cup of tea so that doesn't taste like doing anymore. It's comedy hypnotist Robert temple and

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he is throwing out all of his black coats. It's like a logical mind reader Kennedy.

Unknown 2:00

Yes, we fake T is probably the single most annoying experience of my entire life and when we used to have an office, you used to make tea and not even touch the sides of the cup. In the game where you got like

Unknown 2:14

it's irritating sound it makes I'm trying I'm trying to save everyone else's. Very reduced. I like a brass band when you're making a good deal but I got that wrong. Start Yes. Why have you decided to eliminate all black coats from your wardrobe? I know you've been on the hunt for a brown coat recently.

Unknown 2:35

It's because it doesn't go with anything. So every time I go to get me coat I'm like I'm wearing blue and we're like, Why can't wear a black coat with me. I only owned black coats. And I don't know anything that goes with a black coat.

Unknown 2:46

You got white shirt anymore a

Unknown 2:47

white shirt with a black coat. No, it looks dark especially I feel like it makes waves go on or something like that.

Unknown 2:50

Oh well. So you're replacing them all.

Unknown 2:52

I'm slowly replacing them all. Yes, it's a good time. I mean, also it's a nice excuse to go around some lovely shops isn't it and have a little strip have a little Bucha every week on the show we show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We're talking about email marketing strategy, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make more sales online making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday.

Unknown 3:18

Let's get into it. I'm very excited to have you gotta give me the play.

Unknown 3:20

We've got a game I've got the game. Okay, so we've got Nathalia let's hop on that lead in the in the wings. And one of these three things is true about full disclosure. Two of these things are bullshit. I made them about five minutes ago. One of them is true. I promise you Okay, here we go. Rob your game is to guess which one's true. David Natalie train as a pilot but flunked pilot school. Did she record a song with Nicki Minaj on her phone? Or did she sell a product to Richard Branson? One of those three things has genuinely genuinely happened.

Unknown 3:47

I can't imagine that they using the words pilot school, but I don't think that's what it's called. So I'm gonna scrap that one. I reckon the other day where possible that I put far too much thought into this. We should do content really, but I think that Natalie may well have sold something to Richard Branson.

Unknown 4:02

Natalie, which one of those is true?

Unknown 4:04

Correct Rob, I guess get in though I'm I'm really honoured that you thought two of those three could be true.

Unknown 4:12

You could have like gone into Nicki Minaj at some party or something and been like hey, I need this will be hilarious. And my friends sing into this thing.

Unknown 4:17

Maybe but not but

Unknown 4:21

I got it right. I rarely get that right by the way. You rarely

Unknown 4:24

get it you get it right. So we want to talk to you about you did a really amazing and successful Black Friday, Cyber Monday offer last year and it will be really interesting to unpack what you did with that. So to sort of give us a sort of heads up at the broad strokes of what the offer was just looking at the context. Yeah,

Unknown 4:41

I'm excited about it because I feel like there's so many of these holiday moments throughout the year and there's so many ways to capitalise on it and I think this strategy specifically you can really rinse and repeat with a very low lift, it doesn't need to be seen as a big launch. So my main focus in my business is my membership and we have different levels to it. So at the minute you can only join the membership annually, so it's 997 per year. That's the only way that you can join. And what we did for Black Friday, Cyber Monday was we opened up the doors for people to join monthly so they were able to get in at the $97 mark. Or if they were already inside the membership we give them 50% off an annual upgrade. And then if they were already in and they were already an annual member, we give them a chance to buy an additional bundle. So it was a very segmented offer. We wanted to think about our audience not in terms of just this big audience but in terms of we have non members, we have monthly members and we have annual members. How do we do something that really targets each one of them in a way that would make them feel really seen and supported.

Unknown 5:33

I love this. You know what I like about this? I think a lot of people think of having a Cyber Monday, a black friday offer instead. I love I love love, love the fact that you went when we got three macro segments of the list. How do we make sure we convert from all three of them with this special offer? And also can I just confirm like so the first two bunches of people were you basically often upgrades that was honestly nothing new for you to create to create the bundle for people who were already on that level. Did you have to create anything new? No,

Unknown 5:58

it was already content that existed that we pulled together because we knew would have been relevant in a bundle.

Unknown 6:02

I just want to put a button on that because there's one really important thing we see people do a lot with Black Friday weekend type sales is that they will they'll basically take their main offer like their room offer, in your case, the membership, and they'll take that and I'll do some special deal on it. They'll offer it to their subscribers who are not members yet and basically what they're doing is at the most profitable potential weekend of the year. They're ignoring the most profitable segment of the of that list. So just the fact that you it's a really, really, really important lesson to pull from this for anyone listening is to take it and figure out whether it's done exactly this way but figure out something that you can sell to the people who are already the customers or the members of your main thing because they are your most profitable customers. They are the people who are going to pay you the most per head. And so I think it's really important you don't kind of like rule them out as people they've already bought. What I've got, so I'm just gonna offer this to everyone else. So that's really great. I love that. So you want to really get into how you did it. So

Unknown 6:42

what was the sort of format of the of the campaign?

Unknown 6:44

Yeah, so one of the biggest ways that we market is on the front end is on social media. We do wheels normally on Instagram, and we plug in many chats or people comment a word based on whatever we share on the reel and then they get put into a sequence in the DMS. So it's very similar to an email sequence. If anyone listening hasn't heard of it, it's it's very similar to the way you would set up an email sequence. But instead of it being an email, it's in people's DMS, where your open rate is over 90% It's really, really high. And so what we did specifically for Black Friday, Cyber Monday is we combined a many chat strategy with an email marketing strategy. Now I haven't told you guys this but I've been keeping a little secret I go into overtime

Unknown 7:17

we speak to you like I haven't told you this until the cameras on you like drop something. So here we go. I know

Unknown 7:21

I just like to keep things interesting. Like I never want you to know you're gonna get so yeah, kept this very, very quiet. So last year in my business, I was kind of like turning a ship. I was restructuring the entire company. As you guys know, I bought my business partner out and I basically restructured our entire office we everything and one thing I had in my mind as I was going through the year was I want to do things that feel really easy and fun, because this year has been a lot and I don't know about you guys we're going into holiday promos when you've already been working really hard it can feel like I don't want to do another thing. And so I put this idea to my team. I said, Okay, how can we make this the biggest and most fun mini launch of the year? Like let's throw some ideas around. And one idea that came to us was what if we use an email sequence that was already written for us something we've never ever done before. We rinse and repeat our own email sequences but we never use templates. I've never occurred to me. And I also love what you guys do. And I decided I was going to use your Black Friday Cyber Monday template, but why not? Let's give it a shot. Because if it works, this is a really cool thing that I can tell them and I can tell my audience about because I know for a lot of people copywriting and writing emails can be really overwhelming. So that's what I did and I'll get into the nitty gritty but it was freaking phenomenal. It was so incredibly successful. So thank you guys for that. So getting into the nitty gritty of what I did all of this for me started on social media. Like I said, this is generally my top of funnel. Yes, I have my email list but my top of funnel is my social media. And so I started creating some hype reels for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Now a highlight reel is something is a real that genuinely speaks to your audience that are already interested. I'm not trying to go out to a cold audience and saying something's coming because no one gives a shit if they don't know who you are. They don't give a shit. But I wanted to really target my warm audience who I knew would kind of have an awareness about my offer, because I didn't want to start for six weeks out telling people what my offer was or is so I started creating this trailer saying something's coming for Black Friday, Cyber Monday get on the waitlist, and people would comment waitlist on my posts, and then I would pop up in their DMS and I just asked a simple question. Let me know your status. I'm a member and annual member. I'm a monthly member. I'm not a member and they just selected whichever one they were that I asked for that email address and I said great. Keep your eyes peeled. Something is coming. So then what I did inside of mini chat was I created three segments. I had non members, monthly members an annual members and my team went away and scheduled all of the posts that they would get sent on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It took everyone about two hours to do that whole thing done. So all I had to do was get people on the waitlist and I knew com Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend I was making sales in the DMS then what I also did was I quit segments in my email list based on the people I was gathering from the waitlist and my larger email list as a whole. And so what I did was I took your guys template, and I plugged in all of my copy. That was something that was really cool that you suggest in your templates. is having a Black Friday Cyber Monday specific page where there's a video explaining firstly what's coming and then explaining what it is. That's something that I generally never did before I would have these longer pages and kind of a flash promo. But we did a specific page for Black Friday, Cyber Monday this time, we plugged in the templates and it was incredibly successful. So when it came to Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, I actually didn't really do much. So I had created this one poster on a Friday saying this is the offer and I deleted it and reposted it every day from Friday to Monday because I really was just taking the time off. I wanted to be with my family this time of year in America. You know we have Thanksgiving. It's just a very, very much a family time and I wanted one thing that I share with my audience a lot is I really believe that you get to have a really successful business and be really present in the things you love outside of work. And I wanted to test it and it worked. It was really really successful. So just to recap, a real that was posting to a waitlist that we kept going segmenting people in many chat with automated messages that went to them and then plugging into your templates on email. And that was it. Easiest Black Friday we've ever done. And I made the same amount of money that I did make in a previous Black Friday Cyber Monday launch when I went to town. However, this time it was recurring revenue last time it wasn't. So to me that feels like even more of a success. And I probably spent 1/10 of the amount of time on it so big thank you to you guys. The templates are absolutely incredible. If someone's listening is not in the course they're crazy. They're incredible. And many chat if you use social media I think many chat is an absolute non negotiable.

I love it. Just to sort of recap on it. Let's talk about like the timeline. of this. So at what point did the post go up for the waiting list the first time like when was the very first time somebody can engage with the many chat bot two weeks before? Okay,

two weeks before. So the post goes up saying hey, do you want to you know, do you want to know what we've got going on? We've got something special, very curiosity and what I really like about this is making the decision. One of the things we often do in our businesses, with our marketing with our email marketing types of marketing, alternative business stuff is just not making decisions. And I think that's when we really get held back and the decision you made to say, I'm not really going to do any anything to inform people what the offer is. I'm not going to teach people what the offer is. There's gonna be no content to tee people up for the offer. This is just for people who are offer aware like in one of the lowest stages of awareness, and say that that's not what Black Friday is about. And I think a huge mistake people try and make is during the noisiest, most overwhelming I mean, it's the highest email send day of the year of the year. It's not the time to tell to try and educate somebody on anything. It's a grab it's a I've got this thing do you want it and if they don't know what it is they're not they're moving on the thing they do know what it is. So you just decided well, we know this so no offer education pretty much you know, we had to like give them the highlight that there was no long webinar long VSL nothing like that. Just go for and just go for those people. So we get the post up we get the people think that's amazing. I'm gonna put a button I like if we're doing a thing as fast. Keep the momentum of fast and anything that's gonna slow it down and application form long videos or anything like that during a flash sale of any description, whether it's a, whether it's the Cyber Monday or another event that you that you create, and we're gonna be talking about that in a moment about manufacturing these events. It doesn't have to be Black Friday, of course. Then we want to make sure it is a reflex reaction. Cool. So let's continue through that timeline. So we've got the post going up, getting the initial hey, we've something cool coming it's Did you hint at the fact that was to do with your membership or did you not or did you keep that pretty blind to? Yeah,

I hinted at it. And I did that for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted people to start doing their own research about what the membership is and whether they want to be in it. Second, I also wanted to say it because I knew there would be people on the fence about joining the membership. I didn't want them to join an MC this offer come up and realise Oh, I could have hopped in for a smaller amount. So I was sharing that. And so what I was doing timeline wise two weeks out, I created a reel. Now my process of creating these hype reels is very, very simple. I don't like to put my face on them. I don't like to be the bottleneck. So inside of Canva I create all of my reels that generally five to 10 seconds, I create them in a batch. And then I pick the audio afterwards. And I specify that because for a lot of people listening who do do social media, who are generally creating reels with training, audio, things like that. I know there's a misconception that you have to have the audio first then the content. I move content first when I'm doing these kinds of reels, and then on the day that I'm posting them, I go find my trending audio and I upload them so I don't schedule them ahead of time. That's a big distinction. And that's a way that people are able to get reels of in a more timely fashion, but still have them hit those those trending lists. So I create a batch of reels two weeks before I started dropping them every other day. And then I was mentioning it very ad hoc on stories. I would do Q and A's and whenever I got questions around memberships, I would then drop a hint to make sure on the waitlist. So I was creating this hype simply to the people who were already aware that they wanted to be in the membership. Again, I think it's a really important distinction because if you're going to launch a brand new product or a product that a lot of people don't know about you probably need two months you need to make someone really problem aware, then solution aware then you present your offer. I knew I didn't want to do that I made the decision. I want this to be fun and easy. And this felt like the easiest way to do it. And a second thing is, you know, I really wanted people jumping in there that we're going to be retentive and that we're excited to be there and we're going to create a lot of excitement in the community over that weekend. So that's what we did. And then that so that was the two weeks prior people would just hop into the waitlist at any point and then on Black Friday, the morning of that's when everything went out.

Can we talk about keeping those people warm? So I think if you've got a two week window, you've got somebody who 14 days out the excitable hyper responder who's like your biggest fan just can't wait until the next thing that you're releasing for your brand is they jump in? Did he do anything to keep them warm between that day and the Black Friday? Or did you find that Black Friday was enough of an impetus anyway? Yeah,

I just kept sharing screenshots of testimonials. Almost every single day I was sharing a new screenshot or a new testimonial and I would sometimes post a carousel of them. And so it was selling without selling. I was just putting it up saying look what's going on inside of here. And I feel like that was enough to have people be really excited about it.

I love the thing about building up the hype about what it is and there's for two reasons one I love the idea that people and we don't make enough of this in our campaign but we will know about having people go and like do their own research on what the thing is inside whether I want to be in this because that's the thing I do thinking outside of the business base and outside of like digital courses and stuff. If I'm thinking about buying like a new desk or a new chair and you like thing when Black Friday comes around, I definitely unprepared for the one that I'm gonna be looking for when Black Friday comes. So I've gone and done all that research. So I like the idea of that. And secondly, it takes a thing that we do due to like the enth degree in this where we like the email that goes out to our people like the day or two before Black Friday says it did our campaign but the bulk of the email is basically don't buy anything from us today. Because Black Friday morning there's a thing and I like the fact that even in that two week period if you build up all the excitement that the membership is going to be on your Black Friday sale, then obviously people will hold back from buying intentionally like for that two weeks you might see sales dip not completely because some people wouldn't see that content and they'll just go and buy but like you will see a dip in sales but I think it's a bit like you know revving up the engine ready to go so that when you take the brake off on on Black Friday, like the sales complaining, I think that's I think it's really cool.

And what was the period of so you open the car on Black Friday itself? Yep.

on Black Friday, and then we closed it. Probably Tuesdays, right? We were gonna close on Monday, but you know, it's very hard to turn off a sales page that is working so well. So it's like midday Tuesday.

Okay, okay, cool. That's nice. And did you and what was the hype like from these excitable buyers? When they got inside?

It was incredible and the community it felt like it just exploded with the best energy because they had this hype. Because normally when I go into a launch you know I'm promoting I have my content that's making people problem aware solution aware I have a big conversion event like a webinar then we put people straight in and yes, there's this huge hype, but then we're selling and it kind of dies down a little bit. This time around. We had this hype going for a couple of weeks, and then all weekend people were jumping in and so it felt like it just was extended even longer. So it was amazing to see. And I also believe people because they were so excited they were diving into the curriculum and actually consuming more than they would have just on any given day if they joined like they could see all the testimonials they wanted to be in it. Wow.

I love that idea of using the fuel of energy that comes from the Black Friday because people have got their thought about you but I was there Rob and I were texting each other actually I think it would come by I've got the credit card um, yeah, I want to buy sell me something somebody please. You know, so you take I mean, we were we were like man, I was gonna go yeah, what's now the dealership doing this. He was really good. You know that kind of thing. And you will be ready to buy and you know, I think the big opportunity with Black Friday, we will always be like anybody's not not doing one of these events. Because you think Oh, it's too crowded. You know, it's okay. For now. He's got like a whopper of an audience. Here's my advice for anybody think about anybody who buys from you for the first time is 50% more likely to buy from you in the future. That's the that's the data, right? That's just not from us. That's from the big people. You know that. Therefore, if you can use black Friday with that people have got their credit card in their hand as the moment as that time to stimulate a first time buyer, then do it. You've got a sea of people with their credit card amount texting each other what's happening each other saying, Hey, have you seen this what I can buy? And if that's the moment that causes them to buy because you're the buyer for the first time, then let's do it. Let's take advantage. It doesn't matter how noisy you think it is. One of the things you're brilliant at Natalie is manufacturing these events. We don't have to wait till like five I was thinking of flipping back. It's the beginning of the year. Black Friday is a whole you know, almost a year away. Can we just share some of the things that you've done and that you plan on doing and you've seen work for not waiting until Black Friday?

Yeah, you can manufacture these throughout the entire year. And I really think you should. One thing we did. We're thinking about this time a couple of years ago was okay, we have Valentine's Day. But what about for the single women who want to celebrate on the 13th with their friends, we did a buy one get one free on your membership. So there's all these moments throughout the year where you can think about how is your ideal client feeling in this moment. And we knew for a big chunk of our community, they were seeing all the special Valentine's posts going out and they're like I'm single I don't have anyone to celebrate with and so we jumped in with hey, let's you know we put all the independent woman quotes up and we're like, let's do this together. Why not focus on you and growing this year and that was a really awesome moment. And we also create these moments throughout the year just when we have a launch coming up. We'll put something out. We'll put a date there and there'll be a bit of mystique around it. And people think you need a huge audience to do this. But I think what comes first the chicken or the egg, right? If you never do are you just waiting for this huge audience to start creating those moments around your brand or do you want to start those moments even with a small audience so that your audience gets gets used to excitement and your brand new things coming out? We do them over the summer when you know people say a lot of sales in our industry slow over the summer. We make a really big moment of it. We create a brand new newsletter just for the summer and we got people really excited about Boss Babes summer school and we just think throughout the whole year. How can we make things fun? How can we make things different exciting because the industry that we're in there's a lot of the same, the same, the same and often the same does work but I think if you can differentiate a little bit between that performance marketing with some really fun brand marketing, that's how you will create an audience of buyers that learn to buy from you on these exciting manufactured holidays.

Yeah, I love I love the idea of leading into just looking at what is it okay, it doesn't necessarily fit for us to do Valentine's Day. Can you do celebrating the the independent woman I think just having that. It's a really good thing that we do in improv comedy. If you've never seen an improvisation show, it's a game of opposites. You know, like everyone's doing this. What's the exact opposite of that? And how do we do that is one of the one of the creative techniques that we can use to stand out during the time if you're a little bit worried that it is, but it is a little bit more of the same of the same of the same. Yeah, for sure. I

love this idea of being able to especially when one else is doing one particular thing if you can cut through the noise and do the, as Kennedy said, do the opposite of that. That's really really powerful. So this is awesome. Let's recap we're going to do a mini chat, Instagram or social posts in order to build up hype driven them driving people to a mini chat bot, which I've been playing with recently and I love it. The technology is really great. Ask them some simple questions so you can segment them into whether they're a customer or not and what degree of customer they are. And then off the back of that read them through different offers that are relevant to them and gonna be useful to them. And then at the same time, follow up with email with them and the rest of your list too. I think it's, again, segmented and I love the fact that you said all the right words, you know, like I took that basically I work less than I normally would over that weekend, did a 10th of the work and still got you know, same results technically better results. That's That's what we'd love to hear.

Is there any part of that was missed out like you think is not clear? No, I

think it's really clear. And I would just reiterate one thing you said about there is a lot of noise. It's the biggest email Sunday of the year. We partnered it with many chat because yes, some people are discovering many chat. It's still very early. And I know because I'm on a lot of people's many chat lists that the DMS were not filled on Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend. So we were able to target them in their email inbox and in their social media inbox. And, you know, on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, were really hoping to get those email open rates, but I was guaranteeing myself you know, 99% open rates in the DMS as well. And so I think that's just a really great differentiation. If you are thinking about your promos this year. On a time where there might be a lot of noise. Just think differently think how could I circumvent the noise to make sure people see what I've got going on?

I love it. I love it. I love it. Wow. Absolutely. If someone for everybody who's listening and is thinking I want to know more about what Natalie is up to what most people got going on. What's the best places for folks check you out?

Well, we have a podcast called the mastery podcast that is definitely the best place to dive in and find out more where we share a lot of the freedom based business method and then we also have a membership@buzzfeed.com Awesome

stuff, boss baby.com Thank you so much. This is absolutely amazing. I can't believe I'm just like, wow, I've just absolutely absolutely Manson has ever what was a golden how to have a conversation. Wow, okay, we're gonna transition into this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Rob have you got for us

this one had one of the things we talked about quite a lot is that when you email every day and you email about the same thing and it's very clearly the same call to action to the same thing. You will see a sort of a dip in click through rate but when people do click though, they're clicking with massive intent and that the conversions are really super good. But there's one subject line we sent an email and it got a whole it wasn't particularly like different to most of the emails we said, except that it got a massively high click through rate probably boosted by like double what we've normally get. Anyway, the subject line was sending these to your list in brackets 10 email, the number 1010 emails. So we've been really, really hyper specific about take this thing, whatever is inside this email that they want to know about and send these specific 10 emails to your email list. And again, it like doubled our click through rate from a normal email on a normal day to day basis that would send normal stuff. And

I think the reason that worked I think it is because it's saying that the thing that's inside of this very email, not the thing I'm going to link you to the thing that says that this email is valuable. It's fast to implement and you're being split. It's like it's just send these emails like there's 10 of them. They give us a real picture of wanting to drive to drive that click and open and then get the clicks through as well. And so that's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Amazing. Well, thank you again to Natalie Ellis from Boss babe for sharing what she did on her amazing Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign. Thank you like to be on the show and taking the time. I really appreciate you.

Thank you for having me. This is awesome. You're welcome you

welcome welcome. And remember if you haven't already good and gone and check out Natalie's boss pay podcast honestly phenomenal. I consider myself a bit of a boss babe myself, because I listen every single week. And I think Rob does do some amazing stuff. Cool and we back it on the show next week. So thanks again for listening the entire thing. Really appreciate you. If you haven't already, make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player because we back next week with another bloody beautiful episode. I promise you see that bye