My Anti-Black Friday Strategy

0:00All right, I got a question from Joanna. I've been trying to record this episode a few times. It hasn't really worked out, but I think I got my ducks in a row and I want to talk about it. So, the question is, I'm curious about your Black Friday strategy in 2025 and the results. I don't think you've talked about it on the podcast, and if I'm not mistaken, you tried something different for this Black Friday and not a regular percentage off all purchases. Also, if you have some reflections regarding running sales for swimming diversity moving forward, she wants to know. Okay, so yes, in 2025, I did what I'm calling my anti-Black Friday sale. And this is what we ended up doing. In 2024, we sold, by the way, for context, I'm talking about swimming diversity. We were promoting our book, our one book, our pool care handbook. So, in 2024, we ran a sale on the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. So that's four days,

1:05Friday to Monday. And the sale was $10 off the pool care handbook. And we had a discount code, like a BFCM discount code. I think it was BFCM 10, something like that. And we ran it with the actually, it was a real discount and it ended on those days, the whole nine. We did this through Shopify, et cetera. And we at the time were the ones shipping the books. So we were shipping these books out of our home. We no longer do that, which you can listen to the last episode about that. But we ended up shipping. I remember around 400 books that weekend. That is a lot of books. Okay, especially in November. So it was, and it was so many books that, Stefan, I were like, we're not doing that again. Now, fast forward to 2025. In 2025,

2:07we were like, you know, in 2025, we decided as a company, we are not going to discount our products anymore. So that's some, that's sort of a creative constraint, a guard rail that we put on ourselves because what we didn't want was everyone to wait until there was a sale to buy the book. Now, in hindsight, some reflections, this could be a problem for us. And the reason I think it might be a problem, and I've heard this like no discount thing, and I'm, and I really resonate with the like no discount thing, mainly because like as a consumer myself, I don't really care about discounts. Like discounts don't make me go out and buy anything. You know, if I happen to catch a discount, you know, while I'm at a store or something, I'm like, okay, great. But like, honestly, I don't like, I've never been a coupon clipper or anything like that. I'm just more of

3:09a convenience person. And so this is why the whole no discount thing resonates because I'm like, well, yeah, then we don't have to run sales. We don't have to like discount our book. And then, you know, the whole idea was like, oh, but you're training your audience to expect a discount. You know, it's sort of like, why did bad bath and beyond go out of business? Well, because it's like basically they had to jack up their prices by 20% because they issued these blue 20% off coupons in the mail all the time. And it was, it was stupid to go to bad bath and beyond without one of those coupons that you would get in the mail. So it's like, you are training your audience to expect discount. And so what happens with that is, you kind of lose the sense of urgency in that, you know, if someone needs something, they're like, yeah, I'll just wait until they do their next sale. Because again, you've trained them to do that. And so you end up only making sales on the days where you have these sales. And so your cash flow

4:14kind of gets weird. So I'm like, okay, I agree with this. But what I hadn't considered, and some reflection on this. And I'm not saying that we're changing our direction or anything, but just just a thought, which is we run a seasonal business. And I always forget that seasonal businesses have a very different structure to them. They have a different emotional or a different psychological cadence. Because there is already urgency built into what we do. So, for example, if I run a discount on our books in the off season, right, like November, the reason to do that is because in the moment, no one is thinking, oh shit, I need to buy this book right now because my pool is green and I need to fix it. Or we just got a new pool installed

5:15and the kids want to swim in it and it's cloudy. Those things don't occur in the off season, right? So in the off season, what's the incentive for people to buy? There really isn't one. Now in the summer, why do a discount? People are going to buy anyway because there's a sense of urgency in that my pool is green and I need to fix it. And this company offers a solution. Right? It's like, don't discount your pool chemicals in the summer, discount them when they're not being sold in the off season. So it's not that you can't discount them. And here's the thing, if someone's watching one of our YouTube videos and they're a new customer or they're a new viewer and they're like, hey, they have a book. They're not going, oh, I hope they put a discount on this book. And it's like, okay, if you're willing to wait until the off season to buy this book,

6:18there will be a discount. But otherwise, like, do you need the book right now because you kind of do? Then, you know, it's now or never. So what I'm saying is is that this whole idea of creating this urgency through some sort of like short term discounted sale doesn't make sense for us, which is why I was like, yeah, great, no discounts. But it doesn't work in the off season because that urgency doesn't exist. So what we did in 2025 to test this and turned out to be not that great is we just said, okay, instead of doing a discount, let's just run sales. Or sorry, let's just send emails at a higher frequency because everybody else is going to be doing this, right? Every other company on planet earth or at least the United States is going to be sending black Friday emails during this time. So we're like, hey, let's just do the same thing. Like,

7:20we're just, let's just be a part of the noise. You know what I mean? No one's going to get pissed at us that we're sending a bunch of emails, you know, over a holiday weekend because everybody is. So we ended up just sending promo emails, which are just emails to let people know that we have a book. And the offer was basically like, you know, buy the book and we'll send you the, you know, if you buy a physical book or ship it to you in the mail, we'll send you a digital copy, which is, which is our, you know, forever offer. No urgency, no like, hey, the sale ends, you know, black Friday, we didn't do any of that. We just sent, you know, four or five or six emails through that weekend. You know, and we did just by doing that, okay? We did make more sales than we would have if we sent no emails. And I think that's pretty obvious. Also, the entire United States is in a buying frenzy. It's like when you're out in the middle of the ocean and you

8:24get, you see like a bunch of birds circling, you see a bunch of fish jumping out of the water, you get a feeding frenzy, and that's a great time to start fishing. So that's kind of the way we approached it. So what happened? Well, I, this was tough because 2024 is not a good comparable year to 2025. And the reason is because in 2025, we actually have two books now. So we had two products to sell to a bigger audience. So technically, it is possible that we would have made more sales in 2025, regardless. So what I ended up doing and the other part, the other part of this too was in 2024, we were not really sending emails consistently to promote our products. And so when we did send the Black Friday email emails, like people had not heard about this for a long time. So it felt

9:27like kind of a surprise, which when you do something like that, when you, you have that sort of novelty, you are going to get more sales anyway. So what we decided to look at was all of November and all of December, because this year in 2025, Black Friday spilled over into December because Cyber Monday was technically December 1st. So we just wanted to say, okay, did we make more sales or did we make not even sales? We don't really care about that. It's revenue. Do we, do we earn more revenue in 2025 than we did in 2024 by not discounting and still running an anti sale by sending emails, but not offering any sense of urgency. And the results were revenue was down 34% year over year.

10:27Now, that's big. That's big. Revenue. So profit technically up a little bit only because we didn't discount. So the money that we made, we kept more of it. So again, still less, but not, it wasn't a good, it wasn't a good showing. And so we, we analyzed it and we're like, okay, what else, what other factors played into this? Well, I hate to admit this, but yeah, traffic goes down. Traffic has been going down since 2020, every single year, by like between 30 and 60% year over year. And that is, that sucks so bad. So we are combating that by creating more content

11:30and trying to bring our traffic back up to 2020 numbers. It's going to take, it's going to take time and because our business is seasonal, I normally, like we, like we started creating consistent articles weekly, starting in like October of 2025. So we really won't see the benefits of that until next year. If, if we see any benefits. So we, however, I am looking in Semarach, which is what I'm using for SEO and the articles that we are creating are ranking number one. So we are getting more visibility on Google and also AI because now Semarach has, you know, an AI thing. So we are getting more visibility by creating more content. So it's happening. It's just going to be incredibly slow. We're a small team and, you know, we can't crank out the articles that we were cranking out prior to 2020 when we had a team of like four people doing it. All right.

12:36And I, and yes, we have AI now. So we're a little faster with a smaller team. But it may be, maybe just as fast to be honest. Actually, probably, you know, we were maybe creating like three to four articles a week. Now we're doing two with one person. So yeah, I mean, if we really wanted to push that we could, by the way, if you hear anything noises on outside right now instead of instead of in the brewery. It's nice out. It is February 16th. And it has been like 65 to 70 degrees almost every day. And there's no snow. And I've not gone snowboarding that all this year. And it sucks. It sucks. The weather is, I mean, it's nice. And I am taking advantage of it by walking outside and getting sunlight. But yeah, it's weird anyway. So the reflections are, no, we will not be doing this anti-black Friday nonsense again in 2026.

13:42I am willing to change my mind on the whole discounting thing. But to add a guard rail on it, it will only happen in the off season. So I can make the argument that says we do no discounting during pull season, which in hot some season, which I like to extend into October. So basically March to October, we like to call it, you know, like that's our season. So I'm willing to do discounts very early in like February. And I'm willing to do discounts in November for Black Friday and December for Christmas stuff. You know, I do think the reason I'm, the reason I'm starting to change my mind on that is because I don't think we have the same problem of training our audience because we are one, we are seasonal. So again, we have that urgency baked into

14:48our business model to we don't have products for sale. Like we're not a e-commerce store. So and we're not a high ticket product company. So here's what I'm thinking like I'm going to talk about this because like I think it's funny and it's true and whatever. I'm not embarrassed by it, but I recognize that as a 42 going on 43 year old adult white male in United States, I tend to have adult white male hobbies and interests. I am getting into very small, but I'm getting into model trains. I've always been into model trains, but I've never actually like as a kid, we did it with my dad and my brothers, but as an adult, I've never actually tried. So I'm going to attempt it mainly just to have a little bit of fun.

15:51But point is I've been I've bought a train set. That's an adult with no children off of a website, not Amazon. And this website is called trainworld.com if you're interested or at all curious, very old school, you know, very old school e-commerce platform. In fact, you know, I'm also a home brewer, which is again, an old, like an old man hobby, right? And those websites are also very dated, very, you know, old school. And so this is just the world that I operate in anyway. Point is they're sending emails, like they send an email to me today. Again, it's February 16th, it's President's Day. And so they're like, hey, President's Day sale. And I'm like, okay, yeah, 10% off orders over 100 bucks, 20% off orders over whatever, whatever. And I'm like, okay, cool. Now, this is like, I've only been doing this for like a month or two. I've already gotten like

16:58multiple sale emails from this company to the point where I'm like, well, then why would I, why would I why would I buy anything in between? I'll just wait for the next sale because their sales happening all the time. So like, and you're, and you're notifying me them about them via email. So of course, I'm going to wait. And that is the act of training your audience to wait for a discount. So basically, just in the same way that Beth bent beyond was like this, it's always on sale. So are the prices just inflated? And so like, this is the actual real price? And so yeah, then you don't have any other senses of urgency that happened throughout the year because like, no one's in desperate need of a model train right now. That's not happening. And at Christmas time, you know they're doing sales. So like, imagine like, you're going to go buy your, your, your children a train set or your adult friend, a train set or a single engine for Christmas. And

18:01you know, are you going to do it like on December 15th? No. You know when the sale is going to happen. So like, you're going to do it on Black Friday, right? Point is, we don't have a type of business where you're, you're the same customer and you're buying from us over and over and over again. And so you're trained to wait. No pun intended trained. You're trained to wait for the sale. Like I like right now, this train world company is training me to wait for the sale to buy from them because I'm going to consistently buy from them. But the business model that we operate doesn't work that way. It is a one time sale for the most part. And it's a one time big sale. And we have urgency in the pool season and no urgency in the off season. So we do need some type of urgency or scarcity in, you know, to make sales in the off season for sure. And I'm starting to think, okay, that makes

19:11sense. Now, we do have a recurring model, which I do think is important for a business now. You know, you do need it. No, like for a lifestyle business, do you need it? But we constantly have to find a new audience, which, you know, isn't the worst thing we're a small business. We're not trying to be this massive company. I get it. But you know, wouldn't it be nice to have some type of recurring model? And that's what we're doing with our app. And the thing is, we can't run discounts on that because it's being sold through Apple and Android. So that's the price is what it is. So can we offer discounts on our books and our courses? Yes. And I'm also going to probably add another caveat of like, well, let's not discount the course. Let's make that a solid price. Let's discount the book. If we do any discounts, if we do any offers, it's always going to be on the book because one, the book is our best foot forward. It's our flagship. So if somebody buys

20:14our book, they usually turn into a happy customer. Like they're like, this is, you know, we got the book fast in the mail. The book is well written, well laid out. Like we get great reviews on it. It's just like a fantastic product. And so, you know, if we don't make, you know, the full margin on it every time, I don't think that's a bad thing. If it turns someone from a skeptic into a believer. And then we have two more things to sell them, which we don't discount. One is our is our course and two is our app. And I think that that's okay. But we haven't put anything in place yet. I'm just reflecting on it as I'm recording this podcast. So Joanna, thank you for your question. I appreciate it. Let me know if this was helpful. Shoot me an email or just sign up for my newsletter at jibanesi.com. That's g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com.

21:17And I'll talk to you next time.