Test like a customer

Not like a marketer

Author

Fil from Bedford
September 16, 2025 • Reading time: 7 minutes

GM! Paperboy here 🗞️

Here’s some fall emails I liked:

PSA: It’s Prime Time

Amazon just announced Prime dates. Most markets are Oct 7-8.

First off, if you’re running a sale, don’t call it the “Prime Sale”, “Prime Big Deal Days Sale” “Prime Time Sale” or anything that puts you at risk of Bezos coming after you. This is not legal advice but have heard of brands getting in trouble.

Amazon is effectively inventing a holiday. Whether you buy into it or not doesn’t matter. Hundreds of millions of people around the globe do. And it’s no longer Prime Day. It’s “Prime Big Deal Days”. So now you really know it’s a big deal.

What to do as a brand?

If you don’t usually run sales as a brand, nothing. You could AB test sending a regular email during the sale and the day before, and seeing if your consumers are more or less present on those days. Will be good data on how to behave for future Prime days.

If you run sales as a brand I have some ideas:

  • Use this as an opportunity to run ABCD offer tests for BFCM. This can be your BFCM dry run. BOGOs, % offs, GWP, Gift Card offers. Try things you haven’t before.

  • Consider starting your sale a day before and ending it a day after Prime to get ahead of the demand and capture people who missed Prime (a lot do).

  • Test sending multiple emails on one of the days and see how your list reacts (once again, preparing for Black Friday/Cyber Monday). I suspect they won’t care.

  • Use messaging that pokes fun at Amazon. Punch up. Talk about eco-friendly shipping options. Mention your small business journey. Offer things Amazon can’t like gift with purchase, giveaways, refunding every 6th order, etc. Give your customers a reason to go off Amazon.

  • If you decide to send traffic to Amazon, AB test it. Setup an affiliate link to Amazon through the brand portal (if you don’t know what this means, talk to an expert asap) and track sales via the link vs. via your website’s sales. A little part of me dies every time I see brands send traffic from email to Amazon, but for some bigger brands there are strategic benefits of doing this (getting lots of reviews, inventory position, signaling volume to retailers, etc.).

🍁 Note to my Canada people - for some reason Prime is Oct 7-10th in Canada. Don’t ask (it’s likely something to do with the maple syrup reserve).

Happy Prime® Big Deal Days Sale™ Day everyone.

USA Prime Day Sale Dates

This fall, take a walk in your customers’ shoes

This is your pre-BFCM reminder that your core flows probably have at least one of these issues:

  • Old products

  • Dated messaging/photography

  • Broken dynamic tags

  • Overlapping send times

  • The list goes on…

Yes you could (and should) manually review all your flows. But I’m a proponent of actually experiencing your flows first-hand too.

Not only will it tell you what’s broken, but it will inspire you and give you ideas for how you can improve it.

So here’s what I suggest you do:

  • Give 3 strangers (ideally somewhat within demo) who don’t know your brand a gift card for 2x your store’s AOV to shop on your site.

    • Tell them to buy whatever they want. Give them your burner emails (e.g. [email protected]) so that you get all the marketing communications.

    • Tell one of them to use the popup discount. Tell one of them to use no discounts. Tell one of them to search the web for discounts (and ignore the popup).

    • Ask them to record it all on loom and talk out loud about their experience.

  • Place an order to your own store with another burner email

  • Place an order on 3 of your competitors’ stores (just don’t be suspicious)

For the next week, watch the emails trickle in. Watch the loom recordings. Document everything.

Like magic, you’ll identify all the opportunities to improve your flows. This should give you peace of mind going into the biggest spending period of the year.

Most of you reading this will probably ignore this advice because it takes a little bit of work and you’re busy. I understand. But try to do this even in the smallest way possible. Pick up your phone, text your best friend, tell them to go shop on your store and that you’ll refund them 100%. And next time you’re on the toilet, instead of doom scrolling TikToks and Linkedin thought leadership posts, place an order in your store with a burner email. Even that is better than nothing.

Less than 75 days left…

Until BFCM.

Sorry to scare you, but it’s coming.

And if you haven’t already, it’s time to start thinking about your strategy.

I’ll be writing more about BFCM strategy for our different clients over the next few weeks.

But before I do here are a few thought starters:

  • How many emails do we send on every day in BFCM?

  • How many more emails will we send in November than usual?

  • How many more emails will we send in December than usual?

  • What types of offers do we want to run?

  • What worked and didn’t work last year?

  • What risks do we want to take?

  • Are we building enough pre-hype ahead of our big sale?

  • Should we do anything special for VIP customers?

  • What’s a campaign concept so great that PR would write about it?

Talk these questions with your team.

And if there’s some question you have about BFCM, reply to this email please. I’ll reply to you or turn it into a newsletter. I reply to every message.

Meme of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

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