Black Friday Breakdown

I ran two offers during Black Friday:

• The Black Friday Bundle
• The Writer’s Roast

One went well, the other less so. Let’s chat numbers.

Offer 1: The Black Friday Bundle

This included:

• High Impact Writing
• The Viral Inspiration Lab
• The Writer’s Business Bundle

Together, these products cost $795. I ran the offer for $197 with a view to upsell the Writer’s Roast.

Importantly, the offer felt good. During Black Friday, I saw people claiming interviews worth $500 a pop and writing courses that could be $50,000. I know this stuff works for revenue, but it’s terrible for relationships. I’d rather be honest and invite my audience to invest.

The results:

Total new customers: 107

Total revenue: $23,608

Last minute, I added my email swipe file as an order bump. This generated $1,372. Plus, 17 new customers joined the Magnetic Content Masterclass—a $19.70/month subscription.

Regarding traffic:

I sent 6 emails and posted on social media 12 times across 4 platforms.

According to Fathom, 72% of my traffic came through email and the rest was evenly split between social media and direct visits (I think Threads and IG contributed to the direct visits as they didn’t show up on my sources, but I promoted the links there).

As always, this is a good reminder that email is king.

With 1387 unique visits, the sales page converted at 7.72%. It took around 10 hours to prepare the marketing material and there is no fulfillment cost: a great hourly rate.

But the point of a lower discount was to make money in the upsell.

Onwards to my next blunder.

The Writer’s Roast

This offer was inspired by Olly from Senja, who used to roast landing pages. I had no intention of selling my time. But after discussing it with him over some thai food in Chiang Mai, I enjoyed the idea of working closer with customers.

The offer was simple:

You pay $497, and I do a detailed roast of every touch point with your customer, giving video breakdowns containing immediately actionable advice. This includes your social media pages, content, lead magnets, newsletter landing page, welcome email, and newsletter.

I was apprehensive about commitments, so only sent 2 emails and capped the number at 30.

For the upsell, I put it in the post-purchase emails of the Black Friday Bundle.

On day one, three customers picked it up. Promising.

On the final day, that number soared to… four (total).

This means the total revenue was $1,988.

Let me be honest, I was relieved. I’m on a tropical island in Thailand with a clear calendar. It didn’t feel like a move I would look back on fondly.

I’m looking forward to working closely with a small group instead of drowning in client work.

But as my VA and I closed down our Black Friday offer on Tuesday, I asked her to remove the promotion from the emails in post-purchase sequence.

She asked:

“Which sequence?”

Suddenly, all became clear.

For some reason, I have two post-purchase sequences for High Impact Writing. And Einstein over here (me) put the links on the old one—which was inactive.

My upsell was, in fact, not upselling.

This is the second time this year I've screwed up my automations.

Although the last one was a 5 figure mistake.

We’ve since built an SOP for offer launches to make sure I am less of an idiot going forward.

And speaking of going forward…

At the start of November, my business crossed 7 figures! It’s a crazy milestone and I’m massively grateful for your support—thank you. We’re just putting the numbers together for a special business report, which should be ready early next week.

Appreciate your attention,

Kieran