Better Digital

Applications for the Black Friday Build close today at 5pm.

One Shopify store gets its whole Black Friday planned, built and run by us, and pays nothing for the work. If you've been meaning to put your store forward, this is the morning to do it. It's a few minutes and one honest answer about why your store.

Winner announced Monday. Apply here: https://betterdigital.co.nz/pages/apply-to-win-a-black-friday-build?utm_source=social&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=bf_build_competition&utm_content=fb

Run 2 of our masterclass cost $978 in ads and brought 23 registrations. Run 1 cost $852 and brought 62. That's the wrong direction, so here's the whole thing.

Run 1 was five campaigns and came in around $14 a signup. Run 2 was two campaigns, and cold came in at $40.72, warm at $46.61.

And I have to be careful about what that proves, because this morning I nearly told you it proved something it doesn't. Two things changed between the runs. The ads went live five days late, and we raised the bar on who we were asking for, to stores doing 200 or more orders a month. Both at once, so the cost moved and I can't tell you which change did it.

What it does show is inside the run. One audience of five brought 14 of the 16 signups at $25.79 each. The other four spent $290 between them and brought two. The average describes none of that.

There's a verdict I said I'd have by now and I don't. The lead form came in cheaper than the landing page on cost per signup, but the number that matters is cost per person who turns up, and I can't split attendance by source yet.

So run 3 changes one thing, not two. Short window, money in the last three days, audience bar left alone.

The last one runs Tuesday the 22nd at 12:30, it's free, and there's no replay. The link's in the bio.

We paid 54 cents a click to send 812 people to our own Instagram profile, and that's roughly where it stopped.

And the traffic half of that genuinely worked. Fifty four cents is cheap, the click-through rate ran over three and a half percent, and by every number a media buyer would show you in a report, the campaign was doing its job. Which is exactly why this is worth saying out loud, because a report full of green numbers is the most expensive thing you can be handed.

The profile those 812 people landed on is the part nobody was grading. It had to explain who this is for, why it's worth following, and what happens next, and it had to do all three in about two seconds on a phone. Ours was mostly neat educational squares that looked like everybody else's, so people arrived, had a reasonable time, and left.

I get why it happens. The ad account is measurable and the profile isn't, so the ad account is where the attention goes, and you can spend months optimising the cheap half of a problem while the expensive half sits there untouched.

This is the same shape as a store getting more sessions and the same number of orders. The traffic isn't the thing that's broken. It's the page it lands on, and the page is harder to fix, which is why it keeps getting skipped.

If you want the wider version of this, there's a quiz in the bio that tells you which layer your growth is actually stuck on. It takes about five minutes.

Five flows, and the thing that should actually set each one off.

Welcome fires on the signup itself, not on the next scheduled Monday, because the moment they're most interested in you is the moment they just typed their email in.

Abandoned checkout fires on the checkout and stops the second they buy, which sounds obvious and is still the one I most often find sending after the order already went through.

Browse fires on the same product twice, not on any visit at all, because one look is a browse and two looks in a week is somebody deciding.

Post-delivery fires on the delivery, which your store already gets told about and almost certainly does nothing with.

And win-back fires on their own order gap, worked out from what your customers actually do, rather than on a round number somebody picked once because it sounded about right.

Save this one and hold it against your own account tonight.

A win-back email that opens with a discount isn't winning anybody back. It's buying the same customer a second time, at a worse price than the first one.

The usual one turns up after a few quiet months with a code in the subject line, and it works often enough that nobody questions it. What it's actually doing is teaching the people who liked you most that a better price turns up if they wait, so the next time they nearly buy something, they don't.

And to be fair, a code does get orders, it just gets them at the price you've now trained them to hold out for.

Most people who stopped buying didn't stop because your price was wrong. They stopped because nothing ever brought them back, and the reason to return never turned up. So a discount is answering a question they weren't asking, and it puts a number on the one thing they used to like about you.

The ones that work give them something that has changed since they left. It's back in their size, or you fixed the thing they complained about, or there's a newer one and you say what's different about it, or you ask them what happened and then you actually read the replies.

Save this before your next win-back goes out, then go and read the subject line on the last one. If the number is in it, that was the whole offer.

If you're not sure this is the leak worth fixing first, the Bottleneck Quiz will tell you: https://betterdigital.co.nz/pages/bottleneck-quiz