Black Friday Debrief

The Momentum Marketing Podcast

This is my Black Friday marketing debrief.

Hey, every time I run a new campaign or I run some kind of like a marketing push, I always like to look back just for myself and debrief. I wanna know what worked, what didn't, what are the metrics? What are the numbers? What did I track? What did I not track? Where did things meet my expectations and where did they fall flat? And then I realized that you would love something like this too.

I think I actually promised in one of my last couple of episodes that the next episode was going to be my Black Friday debrief. Last week's episode regarding the email authentication is just, it's something that's coming up and it's really, really big in the industry right now. And so I had to get that out, but let's talk about Black Friday debrief.

So I always like to look back, but I thought you would want to come along for the journey with me because this is really important. I've worked with thousands upon thousands of clients in my 13 years in business, in my decade of being a certified partner with Keap. And the number one thing that everybody wants to know when it comes, really, when it comes to anything, when it comes to automation, when it comes to marketing, when it comes to running a business, when it comes to, like you name it, it's applicable. They want to know what other people are doing. That's what's really important. And honestly, I feel the same way, like if I'm really, really, truly honest, I keep tabs on other influencers, I keep tabs on other marketers. I wanna know what other people are doing in my industry so that I can stay up on the latest trends so that I can know what's going on. And that's why I think doing this debrief with you is so important.

So let's break down the debrief in a couple of segments. First I wanna talk about how I selected the promotion to run on Black Friday. Next, I wanna talk about when I started and ended. Next, I wanna talk about other promotions and things that I saw other people doing and that were working. So that you can use those as ideas for launches, live launches, promotions and even for Black Friday next year. I might even rerun this episode before Black Friday next year to give you like a head start on everything that could be really cool. Ok.

Next, I wanna talk about the results that I got and the numbers where those results came from. I want to talk about what's next and of course, talk to you again about what's happening with email authentication because it's just we cannot get away from this. The email authentication stuff is just as important as you having a driver's license if you're gonna go drive a car, Period. But we'll get into that.

So, first Black Friday promotion number one, how did I select the promotion that I wanted to run? So to give you some context for Black, the Black Friday promotion that I ran was for my Ultimate AI Formula. My Ultimate AI Formula is like a seven or eight prompt system that I built and created to get Chat GPT and other AI systems to write content. That sounds like I wrote it. I've been using this a lot. I knew for sure that this was something that people needed. I knew for sure that similar to the way I felt six months or a year ago in using AI that it just wasn't giving me the results that I really wanted. And wasn't living up to the hype and the expectation that so many people had said, oh, I get this great content out of Chat GPT and using AI is amazing. And I just thought, well, I'm not getting that. What are they doing differently? So I knew that it was necessary. I knew it was something people wanted. I wanted to make it as accessible as possible. But I also wanted to prove that my system worked and that my seven prompts were easy to follow. So when I created the program, I went on my Facebook page and I said, hey, I need like four or five people to beta test this with me. If you're willing to do the work, you can have access to this program for free. But in exchange for the program, I need a testimonial from you. And that worked out really well because that gave me feedback on the program that I was able to then tweak before launching it to the masses. It also gave me the testimonials and feedback that I needed to use to like tweak my marketing message as well as utilizing those testimonials on the sales page in my sales emails everywhere. And it worked out really well. Some people got some amazing, amazing results. And those testimonials gave me the social proof that I needed to be able to sell. So the Ultimate AI formula was something that I had been using myself. It had been working. I proved that it worked. I got the testimonials I needed and really like that was kind of the initial big launch and, and, and the proof of concept or the proof of whether or not somebody wanted to buy this thing from me. Was that Black Friday sale? So that is how that promotion got selected.

Next. When did I start and end my Black Friday sale? I started hinting towards and promoting the fact that this thing was coming out the week before Thanksgiving. So then I think it was that Thursday or Friday, I actually like opened the cart and officially launched the program. And because it was a relatively easy program, everything was already done. I launched with it fully formed. It had a sales page, a landing page. All the automation was set up, the emails were set up, the delivery was set up, the membership page was set up like the PDF was created and inside of our membership site like everything was done. And so it launched fully formed, which doesn't always happen, but in this case, that was great. That was a really good feeling and that was a good test of my team to be able to watch them work and know that we can get this stuff done and do it that quickly.

So we officially launched and the cart opened, I would say like the Thursday before Thanksgiving and then the promotion ran from that day the entire week leading up to Thanksgiving through Black Friday and ended. I chose to end it officially at 4 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday or I guess small business Saturday. I completely forgot it was small business Saturday and actually had, I remembered that I would have left the cart open for Saturday, and then closed it for Sunday, but that's ok. And then I actually, I didn't promote this early on in the week. But when Cyber Monday hit, I reopened the cart and made the program available like one more time, kind of a going out of bed, going off sale sale and made it available until 4 a.m. eastern time on Tuesday and the 4 a.m. is so that people on pacific time it would have ended for them at midnight, which would have given just kind of a buffer window. I doubt that anybody is buying, you know, programs like that at, at midnight. But I wanted to make sure that it was available until midnight and then anybody who was in a different time zone could, could get in if they chose. And actually reopening was great because I had, I think I had two extra sales from the reopen. I had one person that emailed me and was like, hey, oh man, I totally missed out on this, I thought I had through Saturday or Sunday to get in on the program. I didn't realize it ended Black Friday even though I said that it was and that's ok. And they were like, oh man, I totally missed out and then I was able to email them back Monday morning and say actually you didn't miss out. I'm relaunching just for these 24 hours. So that felt really nice and actually gave me two extra sales that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So that felt really good. And it seemed like a bunch of people, at least in my world were kind of doing a similar thing of, you know, a promotion through Friday or Saturday and then reopen for Cyber Monday is like a last minute, hey, if you missed it, this is available kind of thing that seemed to work really, really well because it gave people the sense of urgency that they needed in order to buy. But it also was able to capture those people who, who felt like they missed out or might have missed out other promotions and things that I saw working. So obviously mine was a $37 program discounted from $197. So it was like an 82% off discount. And actually, if you go right now to automated mama.com/ai-formula and you look at the program itself. It's all 197 like we raised the price because you have to be congruous, right? You can't say that you're having a promotion, create that sense of urgency, build, build, build and then say, oh, well, we're gonna keep it at $37. Like, well, why did people buy it? Right. Why did you hype me up to have to buy it the specific date and then change your mind about it. So, be consistent with whatever promotion you're making. If you're making a promotion and it's 50% off until Friday, that's fine. But make sure come Saturday morning, that that promotion is done that you're not able to get that deal anymore. And you need that consistency to show people that you mean business. Like I'm sure on my list right now there are a handful of people who are like, oh, man, I wish I would have bought at that $37 price because now I've totally missed out. But guess what? That's ok because those people are primed to now get the next thing because they know when I promote something and I give it a deadline that, I mean, business. So did they miss out? Yeah. And that sucks. But I know that they're ready for the next thing and now they understand how to do business with me and that when I make a promotion and I give it a deadline, I really do mean that thing. It's so important.

Other promotions I saw people running. Not only did I see people running a steep discount for different programs, but I thought this was really brilliant. A lot of people were selling a, like a two for one or like a buy one bring a friend kind of thing. So if you bought into XYZ coaching program and you paid 50% off or 75% off, well, you could also bring a friend totally free or you could split the cost with the friend. So not only do you get the steep discount, but then you only need to pay half of the total purchase price. So that was also a really cool thing that I saw people doing and promoting. Another thing, a coach that I follow and I'm in her program. I like it a lot. She was doing like a five day five program thing. So the week before Thanksgiving, she sent out an email saying, hey, come next week, I'm doing, I'm gonna sell these five products on these days. Here's all the details of the products. Here's all the details of the programs if you want in. If you want in on program a, you have to buy on Monday. If you want in on program B, you have to buy on Tuesday, you want in on program C, you have to buy on Wednesday, et cetera. And so throughout the week of Thanksgiving through Black Friday, she sold one product or program a day. And then through the weekendmshe reopened everything on Cyber Monday and it was all five of the programs at like a last minute deal that if you didn't get in or like you wanted it, but you didn't buy on Wednesday, you could still buy com Cyber Monday. So that was really cool to watch her promotion as well.

I also saw people. This was really interesting. I don't know that I would do this unless like you have a massive list. You have an audience that really, really loves you and like buys from you super consistently. But something else that I saw another influencer doing, I thought this was interesting was they announced five or six different programs, whatever it was. In order to get into one of these programs or to get access to one of these products, you had to buy like a lottery ticket, so to speak. And so everyone who bought in was guaranteed this one thing. But then the influencer was gonna bonus in extra special stuff that normally costs like $2000, $5000, $10,000 that people would never be able to buy on their own or, you know, would have to save up a lot or would have to do a payment plan to get something like this. But if you bought one of these like lottery tickets, quote unquote for, I don't know, I don't remember how much it was like $350 or 500 bucks, whatever it was. If you bought one of these lottery tickets, you automatically got whatever their new like mini course was. But then you also got the lottery ticket to potentially be given one of these other programs. And so of the people who bought, you know, six of them got some really, really, really cool deals. And basically for free got an amazing amount of value that they probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Again, I think that kind of tactic works really well for somebody who's like a big influencer who has a massive audience who has a really wide reach, who has an audience that loves them that regularly buys from them that follows them unconditionally and you just, you really have to know your audience to know that something like that's gonna work. But I thought it was really cool to like watch that. And then every single day they would announce who was getting what prize and then it became this whole thing on social media of like this hashtag and it was really cool to watch. So those are some of the other promotions that I saw happening. The Bring a friend was a big deal. The Buy One get one was a big deal. Like lottery buy this thing and you get a ticket to get something even better. That was really cool. Discounts work. Period. Argency and deadlines, work. Period.

Next thing I want to talk to you about what were my numbers and my results? So I actually sold five of, I sold five units of my program now while that's not a ton of money, I think I made like 200 bucks. I am actually really, really proud of that and I'll tell you why because this was a brand new program. I just launched this, I didn't tell anybody I was doing it. I didn't tell anybody that that it was coming out. It wasn't something I was super vocal about. I've been, I will. Well, that's not entirely true. I was on, I was on two AI summits this year. So one that happened back at the the beginning of the summer in 2023 and one that actually just happened a couple of weeks ago. So I've been kind of in the AI space for a little while and, and if you're on my email list, you've gotten those announcements. But I wasn't telling anybody that I was like working on stuff behind the scenes or that I was coming up with my own methodology or my own program. So it was really cool to see the response from my own audience. And again, while you know, 200 bucks in sales and five sales doesn't sound all that amazing to me. It's, I am honestly like I'm floored. I'm so excited because this, for me, this was proof of concept. This is, can I do this thing and can I sell this thing? So now the goal is how can I sell it ongoing? And what do I have to do to make that happen? Because now I've proven the concept that it's something that people need, they want, it's useful, it's beneficial to them. I also wanted to see within my own list. I wanted to know who was buying. So it was actually really cool to see that of the five people who purchased. One of them was actually a client of mine. One of them had been on my list for a while. And consistently opens my emails. Thank you very much. One of them was a brand new person. I don't know them yet. I hope I get to know them very well. And the other two were leads from a promotion I had run like a couple months or a year ago. So it was cool to see the amount of time that they were on my list versus them actually buying. Right. And then it was really cool to see of the people that didn't buy, who were clicking on my emails, who was kind of on the outskirts, you know, keeping tabs on things. That was really neat as well. So, so on top of making money, I got a lot of really good data out of that launch. And honestly, my goal was just proof of concept. I wanna get one sale. If I can get one sale, I'm gonna be so thrilled. If I can get two sales, I'll be ecstatic. But the fact that I got five was amazing, like really, really amazing because now I've proved my concept and I can go scale this thing done. So that was my numbers and my results. Yeah. Say something about where.

Oh and then the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was what's next. So really like what's next is scaling that offer and figuring out how to do that, preferably on Evergreen. We'll have to play around and tweak it a little bit, see how that goes. But I'm excited to see what comes of it.

And before I let you go, I want to reiterate last week's podcast episode about email authentication was so good and it's so important. It's something that you need to know about. You need to incorporate it into your business. Absolutely as soon as possible. And not only do I break down what that is, what it means and why you need it, but I've also created a brand new program called Inbox Success that will walk you through, step by step. All of the things that you need to do to make sure that your URL, your domain and your emails have been authenticated by Google Yahoo and Microsoft because big big changes are happening over there. The level of which they haven't made a change like this in 20 years. So this is big important stuff. It affects everyone who sends emails and does email, marketing, check out that episode and head over to automatedmama.com/authentication and you can learn more about it.

Thanks so much. I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my entrepreneur’s survival kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully, it’s a five star review and you love it, then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to [e-mail] Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode.

All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

The Momentum Marketing Podcast By Jillian Kendrick Episode: #44 Topic: Black Friday Debrief Contact: [e-mail] Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama https://jilliankendrick.com/link-pineapple/