Before you head off to Mexico

👋 GM. Paperboy here.

Golden Nugget of the Week: My favorite welcome email template

For Pearly, we AB tested the template below against 6 other template designs and this one far outperformed the others (click & conversion rates were 30% higher than the next-best design).

Remember, your first welcome email is your opportunity to set the tone for your customer’s lifetime journey with your brand. Make it your own and your customers will reward you (and occasionally email you about how much they love it).

This Week’s Front Page Story:

With BFCM over and shipping cutoffs about to pass, your team is probably getting ready for some much-needed rest… but wait.

The best marketers don’t just check out after Dec 18th. They analyze and reflect.

I put together a simple checklist you and your team can go through to evaluate how you did during BFCM 2024. I also listed my key takeaways at the bottom of this email to give you some initial ideas & jumpstart your brainstorming.

It may seem daunting, but this is a crucial building block for 2025 growth.

The Pre-Vacation Checklist

Strategic Checklist:

1) Read through recent customer reviews, support tickets, Facebook ad comments, and anywhere else customers provided feedback. Note down key positives & negatives.

2) Note down operational learnings:

• What offers and promotions worked?

• What emails worked?

• What subject lines worked?

• What do you wish you had tested?

• What are you glad you didn’t test?

3) Note down strategic learnings:

• Do you think your product assortment was enough?

• Was your holiday messaging hitting the mark?

• Do you have enough margin room to discount properly?

• Why did people switch to competitors?

4) Capture inspiration:

• Screenshot the emails you liked from other brands.

• Screenshot the emails that made you purchase something.

• Screenshot the subject lines you wish you had written.

• Screenshot the emails that explain things very simple and clear.

5) Create a list of 2025 tests based on things that worked above. A few examples that we’ve had big wins from:

• Pricing tests

• Shipping threshold tests

• Offer tests

• Landing page tests (wrote an article about this)

6) Were you well prepared?

• Did you have backup emails ready if things went south?

• Were you planned ahead or scrambling 1 day before Black Friday?

• Did your team feel overworked?

Tactical Checklist:

1) Downgrade Klaviyo - you’re probably 2 or 3 tiers too high. Drop it even lower if you want to be safe.

2) Update any flows with holiday callouts.

3) Update any holiday-related callouts on your website. Popups, announcement bars, hero images, etc.

4) Remove the apps you don’t need - discount apps, banner apps, etc.

5) Schedule a list cleaning in January to remove people from BFCM 2023 who haven’t been active all year (including BFCM 2024)

6) Most importantly: Send a box of chocolates to your 3PLs, agencies, and friends who helped you get through December. You might not realize it, but they did a lot of work behind the scenes that they may not have even taken credit for.

Paperboy’s Key BFCM Takeaways:

To help inspire your reflection, here are a few of the top takeaways from my team:

1) Use the Labor Day sale period in September as an opportunity to AB test lots of offers. Doesn’t have to be Labor Day, can be any offer period in Q2/Q3.

Real example: We did this with one of our brands - tested 25% off, BOGO 75% off, Free Gifts, etc. The BOGO offer was the winner by far, and the brand ultimately had a 70% more profitable BFCM this year.

2) Tier offers didn’t perform well this year (despite seeing lots of brands using them). I think it’s too confusing for customers. To be tested.

3) Image-based emails outperformed text-only emails. There was a diminishing return as we sent more text-only emails, while I didn’t see that with image-based ones. We’ll keep a lower ratio of text-based to image-based next year.

4) Rapidly test popups at the start of the holiday to optimize signups. We’re using Alia popups for most of our brands and are very happy.*

5) Implement snooze buttons for all our brands above the unsubscribe buttons. Give loyal consumers who don’t want to shop right now an out. e.g. “Snooze 30 Days” button

6) Test build your own bundle offers more aggressively for loyal customers who have purchased 2+ times. We use an outside agency to implement this on top of the FoxSell Bundles app.* FoxSell makes the tech behind wicked bundle pages like this one.

7) Run more offer segmentation between first-time and returning customers. More tests giving deeper discounts to first-time customers to drive trial. AB test offers for each segment separately (see point #1).

8) Do more Segment Stack testing right before the holidays, and half-way through the holiday period (I’ll talk about this in a future email).

That’s all for now. Good luck planning 2025 and make sure to take some time off to recover from the BFCM madness 😎

Ecommerce Meme of the Week

Happy Holidays,
Paperboy 🗞️

p.s. Was this a good newsletter? Reply to this email and let me know if you have any feedback! I read each and every response.

*Disclaimer: both Alia Popups and Foxsell Bundles are newsletter sponsors. They are both small indie app teams that help me keep this newsletter alive. I used both of their apps with several brands before reaching out and asking them to sponsor. The founders & dev teams are super cool and top notch👌