🏆 SHOPIFY 1% WINS: Throw Away Your Old Black Friday Playbook. Do This Instead!

We just had a webinar and we got such amazing feedback during it, and so many questions that I wanted to actually share it publicly so that I think everybody can benefit from it. The topic of the webinar was throwing out Your Black Friday playbook because what everyone's doing isn't working, and here's why, because in a couple weeks.

This is gonna be what every single customer sees. They're gonna have an inbox flooded with all the same types of emails, storewide sale, 25% off, 50% off the savings on now. They literally all look the same, and they blend in and they don't work. Here's why. Because there's no exclusivity. They're boring.

Customers don't feel special. Do you feel special when you look at these? No. I mean, you're probably just looking for a store that you wanna buy something for anyway, and then once you see their sale is on and you go buy it, but all these other emails aren't driving you to go and purchase from them.

It blends in with all the noise. They actually have a very low conversion report, showed that. Black Friday emails have 25%, the regular conversion rates because people are just going through and closing them so fast. 'cause there's such a influx of emails during that season. So it's the same old blah, blah, blah.

They don't work, but don't feel bad if you're seeing this and don't feel bad if you've sent an email like this. Everyone does it. You're not alone. We can fix this. So. Here's what we know. Storewide sales blasts. You can do them. You can run your storewide sale, but they don't stand out. And here's the problem.

Last year, or sorry, in 2023, Omnis Send did a report that there was 1 billion emails sent from. Sunday before Black Friday to the Tuesday after Black Friday, and then just on Black Friday alone, 194 email million emails were sent. Generic offers don't work. They get buried. So the traditional Black Friday playbook, which treats everyone as a new prospect, it's flawed, it's inherently inefficient, and you can do better.

Now, I could tell you a whole bunch of stats. You probably know most of the things, but why customers wanna be treated special, why they wanna feel like a loyal customer, why they wanna perceive something as rare, why they want special treatment, why they wanna feel valued. How the emotional connection helps drive more sales, repeat purchases, um, why gated offers convert better.

Maybe some of you know that, maybe some of you don't. Gated offers convert a lot better. In fact, the gated offers convert around 11%, where non gated offers convert around 2%. So again, there's a lot more stats I can put here, but the bottom line is this Black Friday, if you really wanna stand out, forget the old playbook.

You need to turn your customers into VIPs. Okay? And I'm gonna show you how to do this. It's easier said than done, but. This way, you're gonna go from these subject lines that just blend in and get deleted. Deleted. Now imagine these subject lines instead. Imagine your Black Friday price is live. Log in to see it.

This Black Friday. This Black Friday sale, you won't see on our website. Not public. Your VIP pricing inside you're in. Everyone else is still waiting A price we can't publish. Log into reveal. Something special was added to your account. Log in to see. You're starting to get the idea here. They feel exclusivity.

They feel special. They feel like a VIP, and on top of that, you're peaking their curiosity. They wanna see what is my special price? Oh, I gotta actually log in to see it. That makes me feel like my account has some value. Why do you think those surprise boxes and surprise toys at stores sell like crazy to kids versus when you can see a toy?

That you can just buy and the kid can see what toy it is, but they don't want it. They want the surprise. People want, people love surprises. So turn your Black Friday sale into a surprise, peaks their curiosity, but then also makes the customer feel special, feel valued, which has a huge impact on their how they feel loyal towards your brand.

And then they're buying behavior down the road. So now there was a study done two years ago that. The bottom subject line. Log in to see your VIP price versus every other Black Friday email. That subject line converted 26% higher on open rates than every other Black Friday email. It's not even really like a promotion, like 50% off.

It's just. Log into see your VIP price. Think about that for a second. People want curiosity. They don't want to be told 50% off. They wanna have to log in to see what they're saving. And not only did it get 26% higher open rate, it had double the clickthroughs of people that opened it. So, takeaway from this here is people want curiosity.

They wanna be treated and felt like a VIP. Okay, so how do you actually do this? This is easy to say, treat your customer like VIPs, but how do you actually do it? Well, you could create a coupon code and it does kind of work. Um. There's some problems with coupon codes. They're messy coupon codes get leaked.

They're hard and tough to manage. They sometimes conflict with other discounts you're running or coupon stacking. Um, most importantly, customers miss them in email. So if the customer doesn't see the coupon code, uh, then they, they don't see the discounted price when they land on your website.

They might not even know there's a sale on, or if someone doesn't get the email, they just, they don't know that there ever was a sale. It doesn't drive customers to your store the same way that that other email or login to see your VIP pricing. It doesn't actually drive customers to the store. And it doesn't feel exclusive.

It doesn't make your customers feel like a VIP. It's just this is the coupon for this Black Friday. It doesn't make you feel special, but what if you could give your customers true VIP member access? Like, uh, like a true VIP member? No coupon codes. Okay. Like they have to log in. To get their VIP pricing, so no coupon codes to get leaked.

It's actually very easy to set up. I'm gonna actually show you how no coupon codes required. It doesn't conflict with other storewide sales coupon codes. Customers instantly see their discounted price so they don't have to add a bunch of things to cart, go to checkout. Put in a coupon code, then see the discount.

They see that steep discount the whole way, which you can imagine the effect that has on conversion. No coupon codes to keep track of. And of course we know this type of an offer drives 26% higher open rate, and then double the click through on the emails and it makes your customers feel special, which has such a positive effect on long-term buying behavior.

So. This is the way to do it, not coupon codes. Now how do we actually set this up? This is where the magic happens, and this is where bold comes in. Actually, there is really no other way to, to do this on Shopify. So we, uh, a few years ago created an app called the Custom Pricing App. And what it does is it allows you to offer different prices to different customers.

It's based off the customer tag. When they log in and it's unlimited. You can have wholesale VIP member, gold, silver, bronze, uh, some people use it for drop shipping. They drop shippers, log in, and, and ship products. You can have different levels of wholesale, tier one, tier two, tier three, there's no limit and it's all tied to the customer accounts.

I'm gonna actually show you how to set this up right now. Okay, so this is obviously a backend of the store. We're gonna go into the custom pricing app right here. Now, in this particular store, I already have a wholesale price set up for 47% off the whole store, um, plus different prices on each product.

But let's go ahead and set up a new tag here. I'm gonna call this VIP one because I might want to create different VIP tiers. And I'm gonna give a default discount of 30% to anyone who is this VIP. Now, I can auto tag customers into this group by products they buy or their history, but I'm not gonna right now, I'm gonna leave that, I'm gonna come back to that in a second.

I'm gonna give this a description. So VIP level one. You can call us whatever you want. And I'm going to apply this storewide 'cause I want everyone to get 30% off. Now if you wanna do different discounts by products, we'll talk about that in a second. But now that's done. That's set up. I've created my tag my discount.

Now let's say I. Wanting to only give a different discount when they buy clothing or different categories or accessories. I would just head over here to the product groups, create a product group, and let's call this clothing and I'm going to change it as discounts. You can do dollar discount, everything.

I'm gonna select collection and I'm gonna select clothing. So anything that is in collection, clothing now that could be product type, vendor, whatever you want. I only want to give a 17% discount on clothing. You can change that here and then set it to Sync Save. And then anyone who's buying clothing, they'll get a 17% discount on clothing, but 30 on everything else.

Okay, so let's go to the front end of the store. You can see what the prices currently are. Now I'm logged in as a customer, and I'm gonna go into the Shopify admin here to that customer. And I'm just gonna add tag, VIP dash one. That's how easy it is to add a tag just like that. Hit save. Now I'm gonna go back to the front end of the store and you can see the prices are still the same.

Here. I'm gonna hit refresh right away, and because I'm logged in, it recognizes me as a VIP customer and it's showing me now the VIP pricing. Now here's what's cool. If I go back to the same customer and I add the tag wholesale, let's add that and then let's take off this VIP tag. Go back to the front end of the store.

And now, oops, sorry. Here, click over here. And now, um. You can see the tags are still, or the prices are still the VIP pricing, but let's hit refresh now because I have the wholesale tag. It's showing me wholesale pricing, so it's that easy to change pricing for a customer. Now, of course, if you have thousands of customers, how do you do this for BL for Black Friday?

Well, you just head to your customer section, click select all. Now, this store only has a few here. It's just a demo store. But if we go to a store here that has a ton of customers. You select up at the top, and then there's gonna be a little option to select all customers, 50 plus that'll select your entire store.

So that's what you'd wanna select. Even if you have, if you have 10,000 customers, it'll select them all. Then you just head over to right beside the bulk edit button, click on more actions, click add tags, and this is where you're gonna add a tag to every customer that you've selected. So we're gonna, uh, you can create a tag here if it doesn't exist.

But for us, this tag already exists, so I'm just gonna select it and then when I hit save, this will add this tag to all those customers. It'll keep their existing tags, but it'll just add that tag. So now if I go and I look at a customer, see, I can see it added. So this customer had a tag already, but it added that tag.

If I pump won't put another one here, I can see. There it is. This customer didn't have a tag, but it was added this tag. So now every customer has that tag. That means when they log in, they will get that via big pricing. But what if someone just bought something like right now, after I added those tags?

Well, here's where this auto tagging feature comes in really handy. So if I go back here and I select auto tag by history, I can auto tag. Products, they've purchased their country. But let's do history Now I could do either one here. I can do money spent is equal to, that's good. Let's do greater than a dollar.

So if money spent is greater than dollar they've purchased from us, so let's auto tag them. Or I could do number of orders is greater than I probably wanna do zero on this one. So this is like any money of that places an order. They become a VIP customer. Now what's really cool is the second they place that order.

We can actually notify them. Now you can have your own email automations using Omnis send to like good news, you're now a VIP customer. Or you can do it through our app as well too, where you can do this actually for D each tag. So I wanna set it for the VIP one tier. You've unlocked VIP status. Now you can see here good news, you're now a VIP customer and you get 30% off our entire store.

Log in to get your discount. Super simple. So that will actually get sent out. The second, well, it's within a few minutes of when they place an order, they'll get the emails notifying them that they're a VIP customer. That's how easy it is to do. So what you're gonna want to do is. Apply it to all the customers in your store, and if that's 20,000, that's fine.

And then email them all and say, Hey, we've you, we've made you a VIP customer. We're treating you like a VIP, this Black Friday, or your VIP pricing Act. Log in to see your VIP pricing. So that, like everything I just did there is exactly how you would set that up. Now, this is so easy to do, but what we actually want to do is make this completely free for people until the end of 2025.

No strings attached. I'm tired of seeing all the same old, boring sales every Black Friday. So if you'd like to run VIP pricing exactly like I just showed you our custom pricing app. Is completely free until 2025. You just need to, depending where you're watching this, shoot me a DM or email me j y@boldcommerce.com.

Or message me in the chat here, and I will get that set up for you. We just have to enable it for your store in our backend, and it will be completely free for you until December 31st end of the year. So hopefully this helps you now. If you did wanna go one step further, the best thing to do to keep these customers year round is we recommend you know, the value of these VIP customers is so great that it's not.

Good to just do it for the holiday season. You wanna keep them year round. We, like I always recommend then making, driving your VIPP customers into your subscription program. And so both subscriptions and custom pricing work really well together when someone subscribes tags them and so they can become a VIP customer.

And paid loyalty has a huge, much bigger. Impact on buying behavior than free loyalty. Free loyalty is more, it attracts the wrong types of customers. Actually, I'll throw out the stuff here. It's discount hunters. It's people just using the points and when they earn them, it doesn't actually affect buying behavior that much.

They just earn the points anyway. But paid loyalty because there's sunk costs there. It actually has a big impact on people's. Purchasing behavior. So, um, the best brands actually combine a little bit of both. They have free loyalty and then a way to move into paid loyalty. So what we would recommend is after the holidays, message all your customers and say, if you'd like to.

Enjoy VIP treatment all year long. All our subscribers, this is the VIP treatment they get all year. So become a subscriber and you're always a VIP, you know, however you wanna message something along those lines. So, hopefully this helps message me if you're interested in using it. We will onboard you, we will set it up.

We'll set up your VIP pricing, we'll do it for you. It's very easy to do, but we have an onboarding team that's very hands-on in-house and they would love to help you set up. How to treat your customers like VIPs, this Black Friday and Cyber Monday to really stand out and honestly to maximize revenue over the holiday season.

So thanks everyone. Hopefully this helps some of you.