How do you run Black Friday when your DTC brand is already hooked on discounts? Split your customers into new and repeat, keep the coupon-trained cohorts on their deal, and use the Black Friday offer to bring in new customers who have never seen your 30% off.

On the second DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jordan Gordon, who leads email and retention at Pilothouse, and Rafael Gi, who works on partnerships and client strategy there. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with a brand that has run 30% off sitewide five times this year, move to why Meta keeps spending in the markets you have already saturated, and finish with the worst things Pilothouse finds when it audits a brand’s email program.

Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your customers only buy when there is a coupon. Jordan separates the coupon-addicted cohorts, keeps showing them their price through email, and controls the offers new customers see so they settle on a new normal.
• Your Black Friday offer is the same one you ran all year. Push it to 35%, or lead with an “up to” offer on a door buster that is not your most important product.
• You treat your discount as a flat rate. Rafael budgets discounts like media spend, with a goal for each offer, such as a one-day drop on your best seller to capture new customer emails.
• You give away margin in Q4 and get nothing back in January. Set an AOV threshold that earns a gift card customers can only redeem in Q5.
• Your early access list waits weeks for the deal. Give them the Black Friday offer the day they sign up, then use the flow to sell them on buying from you all year.
• Meta keeps spending where you are already strongest. In one Pilothouse audit of a nine-figure brand, two regions near where the company was founded held 8% of its addressable market, produced 40% of its revenue, and were being over-delivered by 20 to 30%.
• Every region carries the same ROAS target. Set targets by market maturity instead: higher efficiency in saturated markets, break even or a small loss in new ones, and something in between for markets that are emerging.
• Your email program is turned up to maximum. Jordan found one brand with 700 live flow messages sending up to four campaigns a day, and another using 30-day open attribution that credited email for sales driven by ads.
• You do not know what email earns on its own. A control group that only receives the first welcome email shows you the incremental revenue.
• Your SMS budget looks expensive. At one brand, email click-through sat at 0.09% while SMS reached 2.5%, and an SMS click cost 25 cents against roughly $1.30 for Meta and Google retargeting.
• The algorithm narrowed your brand to one message. How a testosterone supplement ended up with a site built around libido, and why the fix meant rebuilding creative, site and email together.
• Your pricing sits behind a quiz. At one subscription brand, only 3% of people who went through the quiz checked out.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Jordan Gordon leads email and retention at Pilothouse and hosts The World’s Best Email and Retention Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-worlds-best-email-and-retention-podcast/id1772940578

Rafael Gi works on partnerships and client strategy at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency. https://pilothouse.co

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

00:26 Raf’s hamstring and Jordan’s white belts

04:49 Budget your discounts like media spend

07:15 Do bundles and gifts with purchase fix it

16:06 How a market matures

27:16 The supplement the algorithm turned into a libido brand

33:08 The subject line typo the investors saw

34:20 Budweiser Red Light and the Bud Light UFC promo

37:36 The $10,000 retreat ticket paid in Bitcoin