Four Things That Doubled Our BFCYM Sales

What We Did To Increase Our BFCYM Sales by 60%

What we learned from our 2022 Black Friday sale.

We just completed our biggest sale of the year for Rugby Bricks and almost doubled our previous best result.

Last year we did $38,100; this year, we did $60,200.

We followed our usual Black Friday Formula (which works for any business if you're interested). We also tested a few improvements that produced outstanding results.

Here's what worked.

1. We hired an email marketing specialist (Ben Seelan - a Method reader) to optimise all our Klaviyo (email marketing platform) flows, improve our copywriting and manage the black Friday email campaign.

Last year we generated 5% of our Black Friday sales from email marketing; this year, 26% of our sales came from email marketing.

Our ROI on this investment was a crazy 9x ROI.

Hot tip = Hire Ben if you need help with email marketing.

2. We leveraged social proof to drive signups to our early access email list. In the video linked to above ^ we announced our early Black Friday sale access email list by showing a reel of well-known professional players using our products.

This helped us triple the number of people who signed up for our early access email list compared to last year.

3. We set up a fulfilment centre in the UK using a company called ShipBob.

The UK is our largest market, but we used to serve them from our fulfilment centre in NZ, which meant the shipping costs for people's orders from the UK were prohibitively high.

Setting up this fulfilment centre dropped the average shipping cost per order for our UK customers from ~$35 to ~$15. And it helped us triple our conversion rate from UK web traffic.

4. We paid two Rugby influencers to promote our Black Friday sale, which drove another 500 customers to our store within 48 hours.

If you ran a campaign this year and achieved good results - tell us about it, and we'll feature you and your tactics in next week's edition.

Notes: Email is still king, and shipping costs have an outsized effect on conversion rates.

Eating The Frog - Doing The Difficult Thing First

How I choose what job to do next

Faced with these two options, what would you do?

Option A will take 5 hours of intense effort and pay you 100 doubloons.

Option B will take 3 hours of mild effort and pay you 10 doubloons.

On paper, option A is the obvious choice, but I've found IRL I often go with B.

Because B is easier to do, will take less time, and I'm more likely to get it done, I perceive B as the better choice even though the payoffs of the two tasks are an order of magnitude different.

In a game where player one always takes option A, and player two always takes option B. It's easy to imagine over time how different those two lives look.

Mark Twain's solution to this problem is called eating the frog.

As a general rule, he proposed that the difficult option will almost always be the better option to take for your life because your mind tricks you into thinking the easier option with far lower payoffs is at least as good as the difficult one with higher payoffs.

So when I'm struggling to decide what to do next, I try to be player one.

Notes: When two options look the same, do the difficult one first.

False Lessons From The Past

Why history doesn’t predict the future

"History is merely a list of surprises; it can only prepare us to be surprised yet again." - Kurt Vonnegut.

History teaches us surprisingly little about the future.

The mathematicians amongst us love to use data to infer things about the future.

There's a whole industry developing off the back of this motion called Big Data - Fortune 500 companies now pay well into six figures for people called data scientists.

And the sole purpose of the data scientist is to look at data from the past and tell us how we should operate our business in the future.

But what gets forgotten by these people, and probably more so, the people applying the insights from this data, is data is a snapshot in time. Even in time series, data looked at across sequential periods is still a snapshot from that time.

The hundreds of external factors that produced that specific result during that period can completely change overnight. One scientific breakthrough, a supply-chain problem or a bad decision by an egotistical leader can render all that data-meaningless and all insights from it completely useless.

And the further into the future we try to transpose these inferences, the worse or less valuable those insights are.

Outside the fundamental laws of physics, it's very hard to know what causes what - hence the fallacy of economists - I doubt all the insights combined from every economist in history have produced a net positive for society.

The same goes for data scientists - their insights are incorrect or, luckily, right more often than any would care to admit.

All this is to say that random events in the past that have changed the course of history will continue to occur in the future, and where they pop up and who they affect is impossible to know. No amount of data will change that.

Which is why I like to keep two things in mind when making decisions for my business's future.

Only count your chickens after they hatch.

Think in probabilities rather than absolutes and know that these are probably wrong. Lowering shipping costs will likely increase conversion rates for any business, but not always and not when you run out of stock.

Notes: Data is a snapshot in time and not as good of a predictor of the future as we think.