Post‑Black Friday Strategies for Growth and Recovery

Robbie: Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair, your host, and today I’ve got three great guests that we’re going to introduce in just a moment. But first, let me just tell you what we’re going to dive into today. We’re going to talk about Black Friday sales, doing them, not doing them. We’re also going to talk about Cyber Monday and Thanksgiving. These are all things that have affected all of us this month. First of all, let me introduce these guests before we dive down that rabbit hole. I’ve got Lesley Sim from Newsletter Glue. Lesley, tell us a little bit about yourself. Also, just tell me yes or no. Did you run a special on the Black Friday? Excuse me.

Lesley: Yeah, hey Robbie, and hey everyone, thanks for having me on. I am Lesley. I’m co-founder of a plugin called Newsletter Glue. We turn WordPress into a newsletter publishing system, I should say. You can connect your email service providers like MailChimp, active campaign to WordPress and use us to build and send your email newsletters. That’s what we do. The answer to your question is no, we did not run any Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales.

Robbie: All right, Lesley’s our wild child and we’ll talk about that in a little bit. We also have Mark Westguard, he’s from WS Form. If any of you have never seen WS Form, you should check it out, it’s awesome. Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself and did you run a special?

Mark: Hey Robbie, thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m the founder of WS Form. We’re a WordPress form plugin. Yes we did. So we ran Black Friday, Cyber Monday and we didn’t run it for the whole month, but we ran it around that period, so ready to talk about that.

Robbie: Awesome, awesome. Great. Then we also have Katie Keith, Barn2 Plugins. Katie, tell us a little bit about yourself as well as did you guys run a special?

Black Friday sale or not

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie at Barn2. We do WordPress and particularly WooCommerce plugins. Yes, we did a sale this year. We have done every year since 2018. We started the Monday before Black Friday, and ran it for eight days, basically.

Robbie: Cool, cool. Good. Well, and that kind of goes into one of the first questions I was going to ask you guys is how long did you run these specials, and what made that decision for you? Because we did see out there this year some people who literally just did Black Friday, the more traditional approach or they just did Cyber Monday. But we also, I think to alleviate traffic is what a lot of these people decided was “I’m going to run this special longer. I’m going to run it for a week,” or “I’m going to run it for the entire month of November.” Lesley we know did not run one, which we’ll come back around to, but since you guys did, and Katie you’ve already said you did it for eight days, let’s talk with you first about why eight days. Why not the whole month? Why not just those days?

Katie: Well for us, Black Friday’s very much about experimenting and trying different things each year and then getting the data to see and learn from the following year. We’ve started off in maybe 2018, our first sale doing just the Friday to Monday, so it’s like four day sale. Then we experimented with the Monday to Monday, and then last year in 2021, we started a full week before Black Friday. It’s like a week and a half sale effectively.

Those first three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we tracked about $3,000 worth of extra sales that we wouldn’t have expected, but it wasn’t hugely significant compared to the increase elsewhere in the sale. We brought it back to a bit shorter this year, but I would be interested to try the whole month of November, because there is a drop off in sales for basically the whole of November because people are waiting, aren’t they? If they can see you are already doing the sale, I don’t know whether that would get you more revenue overall, or at least bring it earlier so they’re less likely to go to a competitor. It would be interesting to see.

Robbie: Yeah, absolutely. Mark, so did you guys run it just the Friday to Monday or what did you do?

Mark: We promoted it as November 24th to 30th. I think that’s, what, a day or so before. Then we ran it until just after Cyber Monday. I’ve noticed more and more that, particularly in the retail sector, they’re just doing the whole Black Friday, November, I think because of the lull they get. The people are like… There’s this huge deep breath in until Black Friday where people don’t buy anything. To Katie’s point, that’s interesting, because I notice that some of my competitors were running before me and I was like “Hmm, are they grabbing sales before us,” kind of thing.

It’s like a big complicated puzzle, isn’t it? As to when you start it, when you finish it, what are you offering and everything else, because everybody’s doing different stuff. One of the things that we did this year that was different is we also promoted on a bunch of different websites that were promoting Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, which I hadn’t done before. I need to look into those stats to see whether we had sales from that. But we definitely had a big increase in sales this year on Black Friday. I don’t know whether it was noise or whether it was just generally the plugin getting bigger and bigger each year, but our sales compared to last November was 75% up.

I haven’t had a chance to study all the stats on that to see where that came from or if I could even do that, because Google Analytics just sucks nowadays.

Robbie: Well, we are talking to you guys right after… I’ll call, you’re in the hangover phase right now probably. We didn’t give you a lot of time to get your information together. But we did see, just in general, if you look at the metrics that are out there and they’re different. If you look at Adobe’s metrics, or Nielsen IQ, or if you look at Salesforce, all these people put out information. Everybody’s trying to come close to what was being really done on the web this year. It was amazing, because last year, I don’t know if you guys remember, but we actually saw a decrease. 2020 was better than 2021 Black Friday specials.

Mobile metrics

But this year we saw an increase across the board, by the way, this was in store and it was online. But online we were seeing over 9 billion on Friday, and over 11 billion on Cyber Monday.
These are big numbers and depending on who you look at, it’s a two to 5% increase from last year. That’s a big increase, as well as, we even saw an increase, I think it was a 5% increase on Thanksgiving Day itself, which was over 5 billion on Thanksgiving day. Now, and I know you guys don’t have all your metrics yet, but with this being said, one of the biggest things they said that there was an increase this year was mobile purchases. Was this something that you guys took into account when you were getting ready for these sales, was making sure that you were available on mobile, easily purchasable on mobile devices?

Mark: My product is predominantly desktop because it’s developers building forms. We are, obviously, we’re mobile compatible and everything like that on our website, but I don’t really check our mobile stats that much. Honestly, probably 80, 90% of our traffic is desktop. For us, it wasn’t a big factor.

Robbie: Okay. All right Katie?

Katie: Yeah, same. Whenever I’ve looked in the past, it’s a tiny proportion. We test on mobile, always we check we’re fully responsive, mobile friendly, meet the best practices, but it’s never been a priority. It seems unusual that people buy a plugin specifically on mobile, I think.

Robbie: Yeah, I do think you guys are both right, that I think that a lot of what those numbers were the traditional “I’m buying some a sweater. I’m buying some boots. I’m sitting with my family at Thanksgiving and pretending like I’m listening, but I’m really buying myself a sweater.” That kind of purchase.

Katie: Yeah, it’s retail, isn’t it? Yeah.

Robbie: Yeah, it really is.

Lesley: I was just looking at my stats really quickly, and I don’t have a single mobile purchase in November. I’m a lot smaller than you guys, but yeah, worth mentioning I guess.

Mark: Yeah, makes sense.

Lesley: It’s like 50/50 split between desktop and laptop.

The choice of a no Black Friday sale

Robbie: Yeah. That’s very interesting. Lesley, we know you did not participate in the sale. Was that a “Oh my gosh, I just don’t have time to do this,” or was this a real conscious “I don’t want to participate in Black Friday, Cyber Monday,”?

Lesley: I guess it’s a combination of both. In previous years, it was always kind of like the week before I get formal… I see friends posting their Black Friday stuff and I’m like “Oh yeah, I guess I might as well do something. It doesn’t hurt to just throw something up then.” I always kind of like half ass it, and it never really goes well ,because I passed half-assed it. This year I thought, “I’m just not going to do it.” I don’t think there was any difference between this year and previous years, really. Maybe a few more sales but not significant. The other thing, also, is when we do get sales from Black Friday, those people tend to either not activate and then churn shortly after or just not activate at all.

Because it’s kind of obvious that they’ve just impulsively bought something and aren’t that committed to it. Our plug-in involves you having to change the way you write newsletters, instead of logging onto MailChimp, you have to log on to WordPress now. If people aren’t kind of wanting to make that change then, it’s not a t-shirt or something. You get it and you just wear it at some point. Yeah, I’ve actually found that the hassle that it comes with, it’s not necessarily worth doing it I guess.

Robbie: Yeah, interesting. I think we probably all have been guilty of buying a plugin or a software that we are just like “It’s such a great deal, and I know I’m probably going to do that. I’m going to buy this podcasting software because I just know I’m going to become the next best podcaster out there.” Then you buy it and it sits there, you never do anything with it. Yes, Lesley, I do think that when you have something like what you’re saying is a disruptor in their normal routine, that they really do have to be committed to using that. Yeah, interesting. We also at OSTraining, we did not run a Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We almost always do, but last year we really had terrible results from it. Now, everybody was down in Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year. This year we decided we were going to try something different, not doing it, and we’re going to offer a sale after the fact.

Advertising and marketing the sale

I think that there were some other people we saw, because I was actually looking for some Black Friday sales on some sites and they weren’t running them. I think that Lesley, you and I, we’re not alone in not doing Black Friday, Cyber Monday this year. I think that is interesting. Now, although when I see the increase in sales I think, “Oh did I make a mistake?” I don’t know. Maybe next year I will go back to that. Let’s talk about marketing for these sales, though. Lesley, we’ll just go with past experience for you since you didn’t do it this year myself. I did see that most people out there marketing or… On the analytics, I should say. That they said that 43% of people got their Black Friday sales as direct traffic, which I think is interesting. 43% was direct, about 40 was online ads, and about 38 were newsletters that they sent out. Katie, we’ll start with you. What all paths did you guys use for advertising your sale?

Katie: Yeah, we’ve always found that it’s generally our own efforts that get us sales during Black Friday, and we found the same this year. Annoyingly, so far I’ve done my stats in numbers rather than percentages, which isn’t much use, but the biggest referral was Google, organic. Next was our own email marketing. Then you’ve got direct traffic. That’s fitting quite closely with what you are saying. Our own blog, our own abandoned cart emails, and then after that it’s very minimal. We always submit to roundups. Obviously every site goings publishes a hundred best WordPress Black Friday deals article and we do submit to them, but we have known for years that does not generate sales or even clicks. I don’t even know if anybody reads these articles, but I don’t think that’s how they’re shopping for deals. We did actually track one this year, which was from Codeable, and that’s the first one in three or four years I’ve tracked, actually. But it’s good for SEO I think even though there’s loads of links on the page, I feel it’s an opportunity in there somewhere, but it’s not for sales.

Robbie: You didn’t mention social media, but when you were saying blog and such, were you including social media in that?

Katie: Well, we did track sales from social media but they were lower than all the sources I just mentioned. But we had a couple of sales from YouTube, Facebook, nothing from Twitter. I did a video on YouTube, which we shared on social of myself talking about the sale, which we haven’t tried before. We’ve had a couple of sales that way, but not loads.

Robbie: Oh okay. Cool, cool. Yeah and I definitely do think you’re right about those articles, because they’re extremely long. I hit a couple of those articles looking to see who they were mentioning for them, and they’re so long, I maybe made it a quarter of the way through. But my thought was exactly what you said. I think that this is probably helping with the organic searches out there for everyone. Mark, what all did you do this year?

Mark: Pretty much the same stuff. We do some email communications, I mainly do that to people that have signed up for our newsletter or a demo and I exclude customers from that list, because I’m not a fan of sending customers about a Black Friday deal. They’ve already paid for the product and they might be like “Well…” One of the things we did this year, just as a side note, I was a lot stricter on not doing amendments to pass transactions. I did a lot of that last year and got into a right old mess with Easy Digital Downloads, because it doesn’t like doing that kind of stuff. I was a lot stricter on the parameters around the offer and made sure that someone came to us and said, “I’d love to be able to do it, but every time I do it, it costs me money in credit card refunds and all kinds of stuff.”

We were a lot stricter on that this year. Yeah, we did social media. I have a lot of influencers that just love our product, and talk about it on groups. If I can get them to talk about it’s a lot more effective than me going and spamming a Facebook group about it, so fortunate to have that network and we went through those people and got them to talk about it. We don’t do any paid online advertising in terms of Google AdWords or anything like that. We just steer clear of that a hundred percent, anyway. The only thing I did pay for this year was a slot on WPBuilds. Nathan did a great job of talking about that quite a bit, and it just got us to the top of the list in case anybody did see that.

WPWeekly we did, I think that was it. We only did a couple just to try them, just to see how it went. Then, yeah, it was just a basic social media post, but we really didn’t do a huge amount of shouting about it, but definitely a big spike on Black Friday in terms of sales. It seemed like people were waiting for that day to go in and actually buy it. By the time I had woken up, we had a big, big spike in sales on that day. I obviously, need to go through that data and work out where that came from, if I can. I’m terrible at doing that kind of stuff, I’m not a marketer, I’m a developer.

Robbie: I will say Mark, I saw WS Forms out there, I saw it, maybe it was WP Build that I saw it on, but there were a couple of places that I saw you and I wonder. I was like “Oh, I bet he’s ramping up for Black Friday here.” I do think that some of that worked for you, Mark, because I saw it out there.

Mark: Yeah, I hope so.

Robbie: Now, Lesley, we know you didn’t do it this year, but you have in the past or just in sales in general, how do you market? We’re waiting for her to say, “Well the best way is a newsletter.” No, go ahead Lesley.

Lesley: Incidentally, I really do think that. Especially email marketing, so if you have gotten a whole bunch of subscribers that are warm, they know you and you have been writing to them regularly every week, every month or whatever it is, then. Especially if you’ve also been sending product updates and kind of hyping up your product, subtly, not too much. Then by the time Black Friday rolls around, you’re definitely going to be able to convert a bunch of subscribers into customers. Yeah, I incidentally do think that. Historically, aside from email newsletters, we’ve done pretty much the same things that Katie and Mark have done. WP Weekly, WP Builds, post status, Black Friday lists, all of the things, I guess, we’ve done before. Like Mark… I can’t remember where the conversions came from. I try to be good about putting discount codes and stuff, and doing referral links and all of that, but it’s not always clean.

It’s quite hard to know where things actually come from. I can’t really say which ones really made the difference for us. Again, it hasn’t been very many either. Yeah, it’s just like for us, I think, not really worth it. The other thing that I wanted to mention also, is, I think the customer type matters a lot when it comes to Black Friday sales. Robbie, I know you didn’t ask me this question but I’m going to take us on a little tangent. Last week, two weeks ago, just for fun, did a quick poll on Twitter and asked, “If you’re buying WordPress plugins for your company, do you wait till Black Friday when it’s possible, or do you just buy it when you need it/when budget is approved,” and well, very scientific poll, but for what it’s worth, 73% said that they just buy it when they need it/have the budget for it.

I think that kind of tracks with my experience with our customers as well. Because our customers tend to be more B2B, like businesses and agencies. They just buy it when they need it. If they have a newsletter to get out the door, they’re not going to wait a month or two months for Black Friday to come buy. Those tend to be our best customers, as well. Historically the types that have a newsletter on Substack and they’re just playing around with WordPress because they also are familiar with WordPress, those types of customers tend to not be great for us. I find it incredibly difficult to stay consistent with my personal newsletter, and I stopped that two years ago, so I can totally imagine why somebody who’s messing around with our plugin on WordPress and moving from Substack also has the same difficulty. Given all of that, I guess what I’m trying to get at is part of the reason why we didn’t run a Black Friday was just because our best customers don’t follow that sales journey anyway.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Yoast SEO and LearnDash Cloud

Lifetime deals

Robbie: Well, and that’s interesting that you brought that up Lesley. Because yes, so I also have an agency and do I wait for Black Friday to buy the tools that we need? Absolutely not. I can’t. But I will say this is what I do, do and I actually bought one this Black Friday, as a matter of fact. When some of these people lose their heads and they offer a lifetime deal on a plugin or a tool, when they offer those, I will buy those even if I just bought it last month at the regular price for whatever it was. But if they offer a lifetime, I do try to snag those up with my agency. I would say that’s the only exception to do I do it just on a Black Friday. I do look for those specials out there because over the years then we accumulate a nice little package of tools that we already had bought. We already knew we used, but then we just didn’t have to keep renewing every year.

Mark: One of the things I find with offering, it’s usually when we kind of hit that 30% off, which we don’t do very often. We genuinely only do it on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and occasionally for a WordCamp event. This is probably why WordCamp EU went pretty well for us this year, was it changes your product from being a “Buy it when you need it,” to almost being an impulse buy. People will just snap it up at that price. that’s one of the things I found when we did WordCamp in Porto this year. I did a 30% off, which is the first time I’ve done that around the event. We just had people just buying it and if I hadn’t offered that 30% off, they probably wouldn’t have bought it. It does change the dynamic in terms of how people are buying your product by offering that ridiculous discount on your product. I was looking at my figures last night and thinking, “God, if I’d have had a number of sales I had over Black Friday, at a non-discounted price, I would’ve had a very good Monday.”

But I’m sure a lot of those were because of that discounted price. I can’t prove that but it, that’s just kind of the feeling that I get. I do think that offering those discounts changes the sales dynamic.

Katie: It is an interesting difference in dynamic. In June this year, we ran a lifetime sale on a Facebook group for a lifetime tech deals basically. That was the only month we’ve done better than this month, than November, the Black Friday month. It was really interesting, because it’s a very kind of supportive, engaged community, and I learned a lot from the people that were buying because their motivations were completely different to our typical customer.

Our typical customer is searching for a particular solution, like “How do I create a document library? How do I do something in e-commerce,” then they find us on Google. They are looking for a solution. But with this lifetime deal, I learned about people that are just browsing plugins. They want to buy something, they want a good deal and that comes first before the product. It would be interesting to see how engaged that group is compared to the people that had a problem they wanted your product to solve. I wonder with lifetime retention doesn’t matter, we hope they use it, but there’s no renewal issue. But with the Black Friday ones, I wonder if they’re… We have tracked fewer renewals from previous Black Friday purchases, so that might be because they’re less interested in the product.

Mark: That’s interesting you say that. Because I’ve always been very firm on not doing a lifetime deal.

Katie: We always had, too.

Mark: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you say that, because it’s almost like there’s this lifetime deal club. These people just go out and collect lifetime deals.

Katie: They’re addicted to them.

Mark: Yeah, and I was on a webinar thing that I was invited on, on Black Friday, actually, for an hour just to talk about the product and it was great. That was actually very worthwhile doing because there were sales coming in as we were talking about the product. But in the chat log it was just “We want an LTD, can we have an LTD?” It was like 20 requests for a… I’m sitting there thinking, “Am I losing out here?” But I don’t know, I’ve just been very firm on making sure that the business, every customer is an annual recurring. I just haven’t hit that big red button yet to do that, and take that leap. It’s just for me, just do I want to annoy other customers by offering that? Or how do I go about doing that kind of thing? But yeah, it is interesting you say that, just do those people just buy it and potentially not even use it for two, three years? In which case, is the argument around lifetime deals and having to support them for the rest of their lives valid?

Katie: Yeah, I’ve never seen any evidence that lifetime customers are more demanding. They don’t come back for support over and over again or anything. Unless they have a support need, it’s not actually costing us anything to support them and to provide the software to them, because that’s all automated of course. We’re going to update the products, the plugins anyway.

Mark: We find the same. A vast majority of our customers, probably just because we’ve all worked hard on documentation and stuff for the customers, and few tools and stuff, we don’t hear from them. They just kind of get on with it. There’s a few that intensely use the product for a lot of things. We tend to help them out more. But on the whole, it’s manageable.

Robbie: When I bought OSTraining three and a half years ago, they had had some lifetime sales in the past, and so we were buying assets really. We could have said, “Well we’re not going to support that. Because we’re not going to offer it so we don’t have to support it.” But we were like “No, let’s go ahead. These people paid for it, so I feel like let’s just pull them in, too.” We watched them though over the time, and the majority of them are not very active, but there are still some.

They bought that lifetime deal and I see them logging in. Every few months they’re logging in to watch a new class or something. I do think that you’re right, a lot of the lifetime people kind of buy it because they got spun up in the moment and they’re like “Woo, this is a great deal. I’ll never have to pay for this again.” Then they even forget they have it. Actually, sometimes every blue moon we get a message from someone in our support tickets. It’s like “I bought a lifetime deal sometime in the past, but I don’t remember my login or anything.” We’re like “Okay, let us help you get in.” People do like to buy them.

Mark: Yeah, I’m guilty of that.

Robbie: They do like to buy them. Some people are really good about remembering to use them, but I think the majority are not. But I think that that may be true with just buying it for the year as well, that a lot of people buy tools, maybe they’re just buying it to see if it’s going to work and it doesn’t work out for them and so they’re just abandon it. Or they buy it thinking “I’m going to get to that,” and we’re so busy we just don’t get to it.

Let’s talk about, and we’re kind of a skewed audience is what I’m going to say in here, talking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as Lesley pointed out. We have very direct customers, they’re buying plugins, or software, or extensions or whatever. This is a very niche market, what we’re talking about, this is not “I’m buying that sweater or some new boots for the winter.”

Preparing the site for high traffic

We don’t have quite the traffic level that a traditional retailer would have. But do you ever worry or do you ever have problems with traffic levels hitting your website. Like these few days we’re doing this special, and do you see a traffic increase, number one, we hope you do. Two though, have you had any issues with that, and have you ever had to like “Oh I need to get prepared to be able to use cloud servers and expand out.” What do you find with your traffic levels? Katie, we’ll start with you.

Katie: We use Kinsta, so it’s really managed and everything and we’ve never ever had any issues because of a spike. We learned long ago that we want to focus on our products, and our customers, and marketing, and not a hosting of our website. We don’t do anything ourselves in terms of servers and maintenance and it scales up as we need, which is great.

Robbie: Awesome. I also use Kinsta and we’re using Cloudways with them and both of those do allow us to scale. We didn’t have any problems, either ourselves or with our clients through our agency. We were very fortunate of that. Mark, what about yourself?

Mark: Yeah, we host with Nexcess and they’re, again, self-managed, so if we have any spikes in traffic, it just kind of grows with it. That’s peace of mind, didn’t even really think about that. In terms of did we see an increase in traffic? Absolutely. We see an increase in traffic every year. This is our biggest month. In terms of revenue, it’s easily double what we usually do each month and compared to last year, we actually saw an increase year or year. But that’s probably because we were a bit newer, we really had only been selling the product for about three years. We’re only starting to get some data. But we’ve definitely had an increase each year. This year sales were up 75% on the previous November, so we’re pleased with that. I think that’s just, it’s not anything that we’ve done with the product, it’s just general awareness around the product, which takes a lot of time in the WordPress community.

I always say this, but there’s no single place in WordPress where you can shout about your product. It’s a lot of little pots and I think that’s what makes Black Friday quite difficult to run up to, because you’ve got to work with this company and get your stuff posted on there, than another company, and you’ve got to set up your webinars and everything else that you’re doing. There’s a lot around it, and there’s a lot hype around it. But I think it’s a time of year where people are a lot more focused on buying something, and those WordPress people are looking out there for those deals and the best products.

For us, it’s an important time of year. If you look at our sales graph that Black Friday spike is pretty crazy compared to the rest of the month. Now, I don’t know whether that’s people pausing and waiting for that day, and this is where Lesley may have a good point to you just not do it, and just keep it flat. But we don’t really see much of a slump before, it’s fairly normal. Then there’s that spike when everyone goes crazy on that Black Friday day. You were talking about Thanksgiving Day, we definitely saw an increase there, as well. They should be with their family in their Turkey, but they’re not, they’re sneaking off and buying plugins.

Katie: Maybe it’s not the Americans that are buying, the Europeans are excited shopping.

An increase in traffic this time around

Robbie: Yeah, that’s true. Lesley, what about for you guys? Do you guys see a increase in traffic, even though you weren’t running a special, did you see an increase in traffic, I should say?

Lesley: Yeah, as everyone’s been talking, I just went and had a look, and we did not. Yeah, exactly normal as it would be. Yeah. But in any case, since we are talking about hosting and stuff like that, well, we’re on Cloudways, but we use CloudFlare as well on top of Cloudways. I’m also not really worried about any spikes, if they were to happen.

Katie: I’m surprised you didn’t have an increase. Did you have any increase in sales? Because I thought that that would happen without even doing any discounts.

Lesley: We had an increase in sales early in November, and I wasn’t sure where that came from, but not around Black Friday.

Robbie: Interesting. We did see a slight, slight increase, but again, we didn’t run a special this year like we normally do, so we didn’t see the increase that we normally do.

Mark: Lesley, do you think that you’ll do the same thing next year or do you think that you’ll go back into the Black Friday madness?

Lesley: It’s hard to say. We are actually nicheing down slightly, and focusing on larger publishers and newsrooms. If we successfully do that, then it’s unlikely we’ll run a Black Friday, because most of those types of customers require multiple sales calls and all that kind of stuff.

Mark: Right, okay.

Lesley: Yeah. It remains to be seen, I guess. But I quite liked not having to worry about Black Friday while everyone was scurrying around.

Robbie: Yeah. The more niche you are, though, Lesley, to your point of that, the least likely you are to run a Black Friday special or any special at all really, quite honestly. You might do some occasional ones, but you won’t do consistent sales and it means discounts, I should say, not just sales, discounts off your sales. If you’re very, very niche, one, you typically have a smaller base and so it doesn’t make sense. The bigger and bigger and bigger your base of the less niche you are, you’re selling sweaters and boots or whatever, the more sales you tend to offer, because you have a very broad base, it’s quantity.

WooCommerce plugins and how they faired in the sales

Mark: I have a question for Katie, if I may. I know Katie, you do a lot of WooCommerce plugins, we have a WooCommerce extension, and we don’t sell a whole lot of it, but it’s been a great sales channel for us. So essentially we have a WooCommerce extension for WS Form and if they buy the extension they have to buy WS Form, because the two gel together. I know that WooCommerce do a special offer, a Black Friday deal on their website, but I didn’t see an increase in my WooCommerce sales. I just wondered if you saw any differences this year?

Katie: No, the increase seemed to be across the board. Whatever is our best selling plugin continued to be, but at a higher rate. But overall, I’d say it’s really interesting if people that didn’t do a sale didn’t see an increase. Because we always see about a hundred percent increase compared to an equivalent period the previous month, for example. That’s how I tend to compare it. We had that for all for our WooCommerce plugins, just as our non WooCommerce plugins. It was 109% increase this year compared to a similar period.

But the thing I’m really interested in is average order value because it goes up when you run a discount. It’s really weird. It’s because when people are getting a deal, they actually spend more per customer, because they go for lifetime deals, more sites, bundles, that kind of thing. Actually our average order value before the sale was like $111 and then it went up to $114, which isn’t huge. But given that the number of customers went up, that’s how we had that 118% increase overall. I think that’s useful to know, because this year we actually did 50%, we normally do 30, and we still had an increase in average order value.

Mark: Oh wow. Yeah, so that’s quite significantly higher. Yeah, so we have three versions of our product. We have the personal, the freelance, and the agency, the agency being the all inclusive. We sold so many agency licenses over that period, it just turned on its head. Usually we sell majority just personal licenses. Then during this period, I would say easily 80% of our sales were the agency license. I guess just because it just became more affordable and there’s so much value in there because you get so many add-ons with it.

Robbie: Interesting you said that Mark, because with my agency, like I said, I looked for those deals that were agency or lifetime. Those kind of deals, I did look for. A lot of times our customers, we have them purchase their own or we set up accounts that they’re are purchasing through, but we could get a deal where “Oh, we can get a thousand licenses for X for an agency deal.” We’ll do that, and then we supply those to our clients. I think that agencies do look at those times. It’s the tools we already know and we use with our clients that we look at, I don’t think is just all of a sudden we’re like “Oh well I never thought about using that. I’ll grab that.”

Pushback from customers who recently purchased

I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that we’re looking for the tools that we use to find a great deal, so that we can make more return on our money, too, when we’re selling licenses to clients or just providing services to them. I do think that’s interesting. For the last thing that I wanted to ask you guys, and Mark kind of talked about this when he was talking about. You would start running a sale and someone’s like “,”I bought yesterday at your normal price and you’re like “Oh, okay, I’ll give you a discount,” or “I’ll give you the same deal or whatever.” Katie, do you guys see that where once you start the sale you get some pushback from customers that had just recently bought?

Katie: Absolutely, yeah. If they’re in the refund period of 30 days, we will always honor that and do the part refund. We also messed around a bit with prices as an experiment. This year we did 25% for a few days, and then we increased it to 50% on Black Friday, and we were well aware and I had briefed the support team beforehand. If anybody complained that that’s not okay, then just refund the difference. I would be frustrated as a customer and I see the other side.

Robbie: Absolutely. Mark, so how did you change? You said you made a change this year about how you do those?

Mark: Just a little bit firmer really, because same as Katie. If they’re within that 14 day period that we have for refunds, then absolutely we honor it. But sometimes we get people that have bought it back in July and they’re like “Can we get the Black Friday discount?” By that time, as well as paying our credit card fees on the initial transaction, you’ve then got to do a refund. It’s just a time and effort to do that. Easy Digital Downloads, that we use as our platform, can be a little bit frustrating. We have a lot of people that maybe buy, let’s just say they bought it in July, and then they want to extend their license for a year by buying it in November. But Easy Digital Downloads doesn’t let you do that. It will restart the subscription from the date that they purchase it again, which then means admin for us to then adjust all the dates and everything else.

Yeah, we advise customers about that. I said, “Look, if I could do it, I would absolutely love to be out of one of that, but it’s just a logistics thing with the plugin that we use for selling.” But yeah, absolutely, we honor the discount with people within that period and try to be fair with everybody that we can. There’s just a few exceptions. This time, rather than trying to get into a big communication with customers about these things, we just had a copy and paste response that said, “Look, here’s the terms of the deal. If you’re within this period will do it. If you want to renew your plugin and maybe your five days around your renewal date, I would recommend using the Black Friday deal to get the year discounted.” We definitely encourage people to renew that rate if we could.

Robbie: Cool. Lesley, when you do sales, do you get pushback like that?

Lesley: Yeah, we always get pushback, and basically I just give it to them. It’s easier than arguing, I think very, very rarely if someone’s particularly rude about it or something, I might say no, but I think over the years it’s maybe twice or something like that.

Robbie: Okay. Yeah, not much. We have to, but we’ve always done exactly what Katie and Mark said, we do it as if you’re in your refund time period, then yes, we’ll do it. Sometimes we run specials just for non-members. Sometimes we run specials for members. Do you guys ever split your specials that way, too, where you’re offering something to current customers and that it’s not offered to the public?

Mark: We don’t.

Robbie: You don’t, okay.

Mark: Yeah. Our coupons, again, this kind of comes down to the software we’re using, we tend to keep the coupons first year only as an incentive to buy the product. Then it renews at the full rate, which is not unusual. One of the things that we don’t do, without a coupon, we don’t discount the product for the first year and then full rate the next year. I see that with some companies and they’re a little bit under the radar with that. They keep it very small print, that it’s going to renew at higher rate. But the coupons, we say coupons first year and then full rate afterwards.

Who will do a Christmas / New Year’s sale

Robbie: We do sales both ways. Sometimes we say this isn’t ongoing, as long as you don’t cancel, as long as you keep renewing, you will keep that price. We literally have some people that are on the low rate from five years ago, or six years ago, because we did that. Every now and then though, if we have a really, really deep sale, then it’s just for first year and then it’s regular price going forward. I think it does depend on the amount that we’re doing. All right, so let’s wrap this up with one single question that is, are you going to run a Christmas New Year’s special, Katie?

Katie: I hadn’t planned to, people don’t expect it quite as much as Black Friday, but it might be something to consider. The world is going that way, isn’t it?

Robbie: Yeah. Yeah. Mark?

Mark: It’s interesting, I’ve been looking at other people and how they’ve been doing stuff. We’ve always kept the website quite clean. It’s like, you come in, here’s the price. There’s no countdown or 20% off for the next five minutes stuff. Because it’s not true. We’ve tried to be quite honest with that, but my wife said to me this year, she’s like “Why don’t you just constantly run an offer? Should there be a banner there that just offers 10% off with some type of coupon?” I may consider doing something for Christmas. I’ve never done that before, but I may consider that this year.

Robbie: All right, Lesley?

Lesley: Nope. Same reason as why we didn’t run a Black Friday deal.

Robbie: Yeah. Awesome. Well, we do, we typically do. We typically do a Christmas or a New Year’s one, or the one or the other. We like to do the New Year’s just because we’re training. We typically… That’s when people will start thinking about “I’m going to have my New Year’s goals, and I’m going to learn this, and I’m going to do this.” so it kind of pairs nicely with the time of year for us to do a special at that point. Anyway. Well, thank you all so much for coming on, and sharing your knowledge, and your results from either running a special or not running a special. It was really actually interesting, Lesley, to hear your results of not running one, as well. Hearing your traffic levels, and sales levels, and things like that, it’s great. Thank you all. Really quickly, tell us where people can learn more about you or your company. Katie?

Katie: The best place to find us is our website, barn2.com, so that’s barn and the number two.com.

Robbie: Perfect. Well Mark?

Mark: WSform.com.

Robbie: All right. That’s easy. Lesley?

Lesley: Newsletterglue.com.

Robbie: You guys have really easy domains. This is fantastic. No, everybody can find you. All right. Great. Thank you so much again for being on here. We appreciate it. For those of you listening, catch the next Do the Woo.