It is the middle of October. The Black Friday creative is in review, the discount is set, and the email calendar has six sends blocked out for the last week of November. The list those six emails go to is mostly decided already, and almost nobody thinks of it that way.
The list gets built before the sale, not during it
Everyone who hears from you by email on Black Friday has to be on your list before then. The sale does not build the list. October does.
Say your store gets 30,000 visitors this month and 2% of them buy. That is 600 orders and 29,400 people who looked and left. A good signup form might catch 3% of those, about 880 email addresses. The other 28,500 are gone unless an ad happens to find them again.
October browsers are early shoppers
A lot of October browsing is November shopping. People research gifts and bigger purchases weeks ahead, check the price, and wait for the sale they assume is coming. They are not lost customers. They are early ones, and the only question is whether you can reach them the morning the sale starts.
Reaching them with ads in the last week of November is the expensive way to do it, because every store in your category is bidding for the same people that week. Reaching them by email costs close to nothing and arrives exactly when you want it to.
The arithmetic of six weeks
Black Friday this year is November 27, which leaves about six weeks. If your site adds 30 subscribers a day from now until then, you go into the sale with roughly 1,300 more people on the list than you have today. Get that to 60 a day and it is closer to 2,600.
Neither number sounds like much on any single day. Together they decide how many people your best email of the year actually reaches.
What to do this week
- Give October visitors an October reason to sign up. “Get our Black Friday prices before everyone else” fits what they are already thinking about. A generic 10% off does not.
- Put the signup where the browsing happens. Product and category pages, not just the homepage. That is where people researching a purchase spend their time.
- Send something before the sale. A list that last heard from you in July is cold. One useful email in early November, a gift guide or a preview of what is coming, means the sale email is not the first thing they have seen from you in months.
- Count the list every week. Track how many subscribers you add each week between now and the sale. That number tells you more about your Black Friday email revenue than October sales do.
Where we land on this
A lot of Black Friday gets decided in October, by whether the people browsing now can be reached when the sale opens. The ones who sign up are the easy part. The tens of thousands who leave without a name are the harder part, and that is the part we work on.