The Email Marketing Show Smash Your Flash Sale Black Friday Campaign, With Natalie Ellis from BossBabe
Want to know how our friend Natalie Ellis from Boss Babe ran a super successful flash sale Black Friday campaign using a combination of social media chatbots and our email marketing campaigns?
If right now you're thinking that Black Friday is far away, just know that this strategy can work for any other holiday or promotion you decide to run throughout the year. It’s something you can rinse and repeat for anything that isn’t a big launch in your business. It doesn't require creating any new content, and if Natalie's story is anything to go by, it'll also be quicker and more profitable than anything you've ever done.
Shall we get into the good stuff?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:09) Join our FREE Facebook group.
(2:43) Did Natalie really sell something to Richard Branson?
(4:08) What did Natalie's Black Friday promotion look like?
(6:55) What was Natalie's strategy with her Black Friday promotion?
(9:11) How did Natalie implement our Black Friday email campaign?
(12:49) When did Natalie start to promote her offer?
(15:06) Why tell people what the offer is about (in advance).
(17:30) How did Natalie keep her audience warm?
(19:21) How to replicate Natalie's success with her flash sale Black Friday campaign.
(27:13) Subject lines of the week.
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What did Natalie’s Black Friday promotion look like?
Natalie’s main focus is her membership. While she has different levels to it, at the moment, you can only join annually for $997. But for her Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion, Natalie opened the doors for people to join monthly at $97. Or, if they were already inside the membership, she offered a 50% off annual upgrade. She also had something for existing annual members, which was the chance to buy an additional bundle.
You can see here that Natalie created a segmented offer with the different types of people in her audience in mind. She put together different things for non-members, monthly members, and annual members that made them all feel seen and supported. It’s also worth pointing out that Natalie didn’t create anything new content for this promotion. Even with the bundle she offered her annual members, she put together existing content.
What we think Natalie did brilliantly here is to target the most profitable segment of her list - her existing customers. We see a lot of people putting together flash sales or promotions and ignoring the people who are already paying them money! So if you’re putting together an offer, what can you sell to your most profitable customers? These are the people who are going to pay you the most per head.
What was Natalie's strategy with her Black Friday promotion?
One of the biggest ways Natalie markets her products in the front end is through social media - mainly with reels on Instagram. She asks people to comment and then puts them through a sequence in their DMs. This is similar to an email sequence, but instead of being via email, it’s through people’s DMs, where the open rate is super high at about 90%.
So what Natalie and her team did for Black Friday was to combine their chatbot strategy with an email marketing strategy. For this promotion, Natalie wanted something that felt easy and fun, so she set out to make Black Friday her biggest and most fun mini-launch of the year. And something she'd never done in the past was to use an email campaign template. For the first time in her business, she decided to grab our Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaign, and (in her own words), she said the result was freaking phenomenal and incredibly successful!
How did Natalie implement our Black Friday email campaign?
A couple of weeks before Black Friday, Natalie started creating some hype through her Instagram reels. She specifically targeted this content to the segments of her audience who were already interested (i.e. warm leads who had an awareness of her offer). This wasn't for the cold audience out there, as, Natalie said, people who don't know you don't pay attention. She created a trailer to tell people that something was coming on Black Friday and asked them to join her waiting list about the offer.
She then popped into their DMs and asked people to share their ‘status’. Were they a member? Were they a monthly or annual member? Or were they not a member? And then Natalie asked for their email address. So inside her mini-chat, she created three different segments.
In the space of a couple of hours, her team then scheduled the posts that people would get sent on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and she started making sales from the people who were on the waitlist and her email list as a whole. She took our Black Friday email campaign template and plugged in all her copy.
Creating a separate page for the flash sale
Something we suggest in our template is to have a flash sale-specific page with a video explaining what’s coming and what the offer is. This is something Natalie loved and hadn’t done before. She'd normally use longer pages, but for this promotion, she created a specific page. And that, she said, was incredibly successful.
When it came to the Black Friday weekend, Natalie didn’t do much. She spent time with her family for Thanksgiving and said this was the easiest Black Friday promotion she’d ever done! She even made the same amount of money she had made in a previous Black Friday/Cyber Monday launch when she went to town. But this time it was recurring revenue, so it felt like more of a success. And she spent about one-tenth of the amount of time on it. Guess why? Because she used our Black Friday email marketing campaign!
When did Natalie start to promote her offer?
Natalie started talking about her Black Friday on social media two weeks before Black Friday. At that point, people started engaging with the chatbot and joining the waitlist.
As Natalie explained, this wasn't about educating her audience about what she does. One of the biggest mistakes we see a lot of marketers make is to educate their audience on the noisiest and highest email send day of the year. Black Friday isn’t the time to try and educate anyone on anything! It’s all about encouraging people to grab your offer.
It's not the time for long webinars and getting people to know you and your business. Just focus on the people who are already aware of your world and keep the momentum going. Because that’s key in any flash sale you’ll ever do - you want people to buy based on reflex reaction.
With that said, if you were to create a new product that people didn’t know about yet, you’d need to start talking about it around two months in advance. You'd first want to make people problem-aware, then solution-aware, and only then present your offer. But this isn’t what Natalie had in mind for this Black Friday – she wanted fun and easy.
Why tell people what your offer is about (in advance)
When Natalie told her audience about her offer, she hinted it had to do with her membership. And she did that for a couple of reasons. First, she wanted people to start doing their research about the membership to decide whether they wanted to be in it. But also, she knew some people would be on the fence about joining, and she didn’t want them to join before the offer and then realise they could have saved some money by waiting for the promotion.
To share her offer, she batch-created a bunch of reels in Canva (5-10 seconds long) and then posted one a day on Instagram on the days leading up to the promotion. She always made sure she picked the audio on the day she uploaded the reel based on what was trending on the day. This is a super easy and effective process that Natalie uses, and it allows her to get her reels out in a timely way even though they're not scheduled in advance.
Every day, she also showed up on Instagram Stories answering the questions her audience asked about the membership, and in each of them, she'd remind people about joining her waitlist. This is how she created the hype for her offer.
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How did Natalie keep her audience warm?
To keep people warm in the lead-up to Black Friday, Natalie kept sharing screenshots of testimonials, and sometimes she'd even create a carousel out of them. She wanted to 'sell without selling', by simply showing what happens inside her membership. And that was enough to get people excited.
The strategy of sharing testimonials works a treat because when people know there’s a deal coming up, they prepare and do their research in advance. They want to decide whether they'll buy when the time comes.
Something else that gets people excited is reminding them about the promotion and effectively warning them not to buy in the days before the flash sale. You don't want them to miss out on the deal, right? By doing this, you may see a small dip in sales in the period leading up to a promotion, but you're getting your engine revved up for when it’s time to take the breaks off on the day of the flash sale.
How to replicate Natalie's success with her flash sale Black Friday campaign
Natalie told us that this promotion did so well that she didn't even close the cart on Cyber Monday - she kept it going for an extra day! She not only found that the offer was converting amazingly well but also, her members were buzzing with the best energy and even consuming more of her content inside the membership.
Data shows that people who buy from you once are 50% more likely to buy from you again in the future. So, to replicate some of this success, you can use Black Friday (where people typically have their credit cards in their hands and are looking for deals) to get people to buy for the first time. It doesn’t matter how noisy you think this time of year is. That’s not a reason to miss out.
You can also manufacture these types of events and flash sales at any point of the year - it's not just about Black Friday. You can use any holiday or occasion. The key, Natalie says, is to think about how your ideal client is feeling during that time of year and create offers that tap into that. You can create big moments in the summer, for example, especially if you know that sales in your industry can be a bit slow then.
And you don't need to have a huge audience to do this either! Just try and think of ways to differentiate yourself and stand out. That’s how you’ll create an audience of customers who learn to buy from you on these exciting manufactured holidays. And remember that when everyone’s doing a particular thing, you can cut through the noise by doing the opposite of that. Play a 'game of opposites'!
The key to Natalie's success with her Black Friday promotion
So, to recap, here’s what Natalie did for her Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion.
- She created social posts to build the hype and get into people’s DMs using chatbots.
- She asked her audience simple questions to segment them into what type of customer (or non-customer) they were and presented them with offers that were relevant to them.
- At the same time, she followed up with emails (using our Black Friday email marketing campaign) to the rest of her email list.
Natalie was able to target her audience inside their email Inbox and their social media inbox at one of the busiest times of the year. This proves that even at a time when there’s a lot of noise, you can cut through it to make sure people see your offers. And let's not forget that this promotion took a fraction of the time it normally takes Natalie to run, and instead of working, she got to spend quality time with her family. Isn't that the goal?
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Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “Sending these to your list (10 emails)”. This subject line got a massively high click-through rate - probably around double what we normally get. The reason it worked so well is that the subject line tells people exactly what’s inside the email. It doesn’t say that the email is valuable or that you'll find a link inside it. It tells you what’s in it - and that’s 10 emails. The open rate and click-through rate were amazing, so check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
About Natalie
If you want to connect with Natalie, check out her podcast or you can join her amazing membership and community.
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How To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.
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