The Tactics Behind Our Biggest BFCYM Ever

Rugby Bricks, our e-commerce business, generated nearly $25,000 on the first day of BFCYM.

Here’s the 6-point checklist we made for changing our website (sorry, cell phone readers; you'll have to go landscape for the full picture).

Each number on the screen correlates with the bullet point below :

1. Free Shipping On Orders Over $100.00

Customer Win: Any orders that combine $100 worth of stock have enough profit to warrant free shipping, which is the second highest pain point of our customer

Business Win: Any combination of orders that have over $100 warrants enough profit to cover shipping and increase the value of our average order

2. Make The Value You Are Giving Obvious (20 - 70% Off)

Customer Win: Customers know what they can buy

Business Win: Increased conversion rate on slow-moving stock and still profitable

3. Free Gift

Customer Win: Free gift with purchase

Business Win: Increased conversion rate

4. Call To Action (CTA)

Customer Win: Makes it easy to find what they want without scrolling endlessly

Business Win: The average time someone spends on our website is 36 seconds during BFCYM - the simpler we make it for them to get to a buying page the easier it is for us to collect cash

5. Visible Discounts

Customer Win: Show the immediate value of the product on site

Business Win: Drives a customer to the product page

6. Social Proof

Customer Win: They can see who is buying what and take them to that product immediately

Business Win: Show that others are buying and creates fear of missing out on product

Our conversion rate is up by 24% from the same time period a week ago.

Shout out to the two e-comm superstars on our team Rekha and Ben for pulling this together.

This doesn’t happen without A players.

Our 3rd Attempt At Black Friday

Before I get into it there’s a good lesson from above. I’ve watched Rugby Bricks do BFCM from afar and as part of their team over the last 4 years. And with minor tweaks/improvements each year, they keep doubling their BFCM return.

Just a few years back, $37,000 was a crazy success for them, now I’m hearing they’ll piss through $200,000. And I expect they’ll learn from this years campaign and double their results again next year.

$400,000 sounds insane. But I’ll take the over on that all day.

Do - learn - iterate - do.

Anyways…now to what we did for Black Friday.

In hindsight the "brand" approach, like RB’s above doesn’t make much sense for our gym. Our audience is tiny and we don’t have mass produced products to sell.

Last year we tried it and brought in only $2500 from about 30 hours of work.

So instead this year we changed up our approach, while using Black Friday as an excuse to do a capital raise of sorts. We needed $10,000 to replace our spin bikes.

So we hand picked 100 ex-members who fitted our “cashed up” target avatar and emailed them about the bikes we want to buy and how they could help i.e. “you can have a 50% off membership if you’re willing to pay upfront”.

This took us all of about 2 hours and we’ll end up netting ~$6,000. 1/10th of the effort for 3 times the reward.

RB tried the brand approach to Black Friday and it worked, so they doubled down every year since and keep doing it better.

We tried the RB approach to black friday and failed, so we tried something different. And I suspect we’ll go a lot bigger next year.

There’s no right or wrong way, just the way that works for you.