Black Friday Has Changed. Has Your WooCommerce Strategy?

Katie Keith: Welcome to Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce.

James Kemp: I’m James Kemp, and I’m the core product manager for WooCommerce.

Katie Keith: And I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2. And we’re laughing because I forget to say that every time.

James Kemp: Everyone knows who you are. Um, today we’re going to talk about Black Friday, uh, specifically we’ve brought on Chris. Um, Chris is an awesome person to talk to about this because he significantly puts a lot of effort into Black Friday, uh, and LifterLMS, which is Chris’s product, is, uh, hosted on WooCommerce. So Chris, please introduce yourself. All right.

Chris Badgett: I’m Chris from LifterLMS. I’ve been using WooCommerce since about 2008. And for the about 13-year history of LifterLMS, we’ve always sold the premium versions of what we do as software subscriptions using WooCommerce.

Katie Keith: Yeah. Impressive. And you were saying to me last week that you have planned Black Friday already and it’s going to be great. So perfect timing for this episode. But before we get into it, anyone who’s watching live, please ask your questions and share your own experiences and advice about Black Friday in the comments wherever you’re watching.

James Kemp: Yes, please. And you can do that, um, on, like Katie says, wherever you’re watching it, but also you can follow us on, uh, X @DoTheWoo, uh, on YouTube at Do The Woo Podcast, and you can find some more information on dothewoo.com.

Katie Keith: Okay. So, um, let’s get into Black Friday then. Um, Chris, let’s start off by learning a bit more about you than what you gave in the introduction. So, how did you end up running your own WooCommerce store in the first place for LifterLMS? Uh, why did you choose WooCommerce?

Chris Badgett: One, it was a native solution to WordPress and we’re in WordPress land. Two, WooCommerce Subscriptions is just a super solid plugin. And the tricky part was we had to build our own licensing system. I feel like there’s not like a default WooCommerce licensing system like there is with Easy Digital Downloads, which is something very needed in the WooCommerce ecosystem. And there may be a solution now that exists, but besides having a custom licensing system, it’s pretty much just WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions out of the box. And over the decade plus, as those products have evolved, they just get better and better. And it’s just been the backbone of everything we do and it’s super reliable. We’ve never had any issues. And, you know, I know sometimes people have issues with their site or their store, but we get like pretty high traffic, decent amount of transaction volume. And over 14 years, we’ve had very little actual issues where something didn’t work correctly. So it’s just been rock solid the entire time. And it’s great to stay natively in the open source WordPress community with WooCommerce as our backbone for software sales. And we also, our plugin LifterLMS also has a WooCommerce integration. So we’re very familiar with Woo from all sides.

James Kemp: That’s really cool. I think by the sounds of it, you’ve been using WooCommerce longer than I have, which is a significant amount of time. So that’s—

Katie Keith: Yes, not many say that.

James Kemp: Yeah. I’m interested to know, cuz my understanding of knowing you is that you do have some sort of quite highly customized aspects of WooCommerce, right? Is that primarily the licensing?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, the licensing is the most complex customization, but we’ve added other things over the years. For example, like custom order bumps on the checkout. The way we do WooCommerce product templates is a little unique. I noticed recently WooCommerce is, I think, getting into potentially doing bundled products in core. That’s something we built a custom solution for a long time ago since LifterLMS, similar to WooCommerce, has a free version on the WordPress repository. And then we have something like 28 different add-ons. So once our add-ons started stacking up in quantity, we developed the concept of bundles and built our own bundling solution. And then there’s other little integrations, like for example, making sure our Help Scout customer support system is checking in with the WooCommerce subscription status being active to make sure the right people can get into the support system and so on. But yeah, there’s little tweaks here and there.

Katie Keith: Well, it happens, doesn’t it? A store just grows over time. As your business is successful, you end up tweaking things to meet your needs and it does become more bespoke. Now, one thing I hear a lot about WooCommerce, which I consider a myth, but we need to tackle, is that it doesn’t scale as your business grows. And that’s particularly important on Black Friday when you might get spikes in traffic. So can you tell us a bit about your hosting setup and how you allow your store to scale, particularly with spikes? Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I agree with you that that is a myth. And you’re asking the right question. WooCommerce can scale just fine. It’s really just a hosting resources thing, which we’re very used to at LifterLMS because LifterLMS itself is a heavy plugin like WooCommerce. You have logged in users, dynamic pages on your websites like accounts, orders, and so on. So it’s really important to have good hosting. That doesn’t mean you can’t start on a very affordable, economical host, but once you start scaling your business and your traffic, it makes sense to upgrade your hosting. I have a podcast called LMS Cast where I actually recently told the story of 12 years of our hosting journey as our company, LifterLMS. But essentially about 6 months ago or so, we switched to Rocket.net for our hosting. Previously we were on Pagely and Pagely was great. Pagely, we were there for approximately 7 years. But recently we’re having some issues with speed and whatnot, but we switched to Rocket.net and our site more than tripled in speed and it’s just been a fantastic experience. So that’s where we’re at today. And from a pricing standpoint, you know, you kind of have to know where you are. Are you just beginning and validating and seeing if somebody can buy? Then you’re fine on pretty much any WordPress host. Are you like starting to get some traction? Maybe you need some kind of managed host around the $30 or $40 a month plan. But when you get to where we’re at, where you’re getting ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 hits a month in traffic, and you know, you’re running sales and multiple people are in the cart and everything, you’re really looking at an enterprise plan at that point where you’re getting into the multi-hundreds per month, but that’s just a cost of doing business and having the right host for where you’re at.

James Kemp: Yeah, I think, um, like you say, I think there’s different stages of a business, and hosts can be pretty suitable to most stages. And I think that’s one of the actual plus points of WooCommerce is that you can move it around quite freely and customize, you know, what your setup looks like and really dig into how to make it super performant. I think we as a product, WooCommerce, could do a lot more to make it more apparent when we know that there’s an issue, like your hosting doesn’t support XYZ. I think we could make that more apparent to the store owner in some way. But yeah, I think, like you say, typically the myth of WooCommerce not scaling is because people stay on these, you know, lower-end hosts that they started on and expect it to continue to perform at the same level, regardless of how much traffic they’re getting.

Katie Keith: Yeah. Well, let’s get into the Black Friday side of things. So the title of this episode is about how Black Friday has changed. Uh, have you noticed any changes in it over the years, Chris? I know you’ve been running Black Friday sales for many years.

Chris Badgett: It’s been over a decade of Black Friday sales. So I’ve been around the block. Some things change, some things don’t. The things that don’t change are there is increased demand, at least in our niche in terms of WordPress software products, every year there’s just a buyer psychology where people look for deals on the Black Friday period. So that hasn’t changed. You can throw Cyber Monday in there so you can kind of do it twice really close together or potentially do a different deal on Cyber Monday. And I can get into the mechanics of how we do all that, but the biggest change I would say from the early days is just noise. So everybody is kind of on the Black Friday train, and even outside of software sales, it’s just Black Friday has just grown into this phenomenon. In my understanding, historically it was a retail shopping event where after Thanksgiving in malls and shopping centers, retail stores would get a jumpstart on Christmas shopping basically, but the online world for online businesses really jumped on the bandwagon. And so it’s just, when I say noise, there’s just never been more competition for Black Friday attention. So you kind of have to think outside of the box, add more value, get more creative so that you can kind of get ahead of the demand and also have such a great deal that it becomes a true no-brainer and not just a small 10% off coupon or something like that. And I think that could apply across all product types, like try to make it as big and compelling and as cheap as you can possibly afford.

James Kemp: How do you break through that noise? Because like you say, it’s, it’s, you get a ton of emails. Um, I wonder what the audience looks like now, because I, in the past, I guess you could send out an email to your own list, you know that they’re kind of a warm audience. They have an expectation to receive emails from you. They’re interested in your product in some way. So maybe they would be good candidates to buy at Black Friday. But do you think, is that approach still the same? Because they’re getting so many emails now from different companies at the same time. Like, what does that look like?

Chris Badgett: Well, I’ll give you my biggest tip, which is to go before everybody else. So we actually do Black Friday all November. So that allows you to get your message out when there’s not as much competition for that attention. So going early is a huge advantage, and that’s something we’ve been doing for about 5 years and we won’t stop doing because it just works. So you can kind of get ahead of the noise. The other thing is, I’m a big fan of as big a discount as possible, which in software is much easier to do in terms of having a quite large discount that you can’t necessarily get away with with retail goods. But in some ways, I almost recommend, even if you’re losing a little bit of money, you’re making a bet on the future to get a new customer in the door who’s going to buy more stuff later. So even if your sale is a loss leader of some kind, it may pay off in the long run. And then the other thing to really break through is to not just focus on your product, but provide other bonuses that you can do. And that’s an area where you can get creative. You know, with regular retail goods, this is an example of, you know, maybe losing a little money to get a customer, you know, the 50% off plus buy one, get one free kind of thing could work. And yeah, you might lose a little money, but you could get a rush of customers. And if your product has repeat purchases, whether that’s subscriptions or helping somebody fall in love with your brand, and then they stay a customer for years to come. So there’s lots of different ways to do it, but the bonus stack, the heavy discount, and expanding the time of your Black Friday sale. And one more thing I would say is, a lot of us as prosumers or pro-internet users and people who are like inundated with too many emails in our everyday lives, we tend to project our own frustration with our inboxes blowing up on Black Friday on our customers. And I’ve seen a lot of founders and store owners who just kind of give up on the sale. And I think that’s a big mistake because you’ll get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So it’s definitely something to just do. People read the promotions tab in their Gmails, as an example, way more during Black Friday because they’re looking for deals. So just because you may not be a Black Friday shopper yourself, the market is out there in every niche looking for deals around that period.

James Kemp: Yeah, I guess I have 2 comments. What happens when everyone starts shifting towards doing it earlier? Does it just get earlier and earlier?

Katie Keith: Sounds like Christmas. Yeah.

James Kemp: Yeah. Christmas starts pretty soon.

Chris Badgett: I’ve done that too. Like when everybody shifts early, you know what we do? We also do a similar Black Friday style sale, uh, 6 months later in the year. So just do it there. So, I mean, eventually there are diminishing returns where, you know, there’s only so many sales and promotions and sales events that you want to do per year, but it’s always good to do it and just try to be different. Look for holes and gaps in the market. It could be a marketing channel that’s underused. Like as an example, you know, there’s not a ton of WordPress activity on TikTok, but if maybe you and your niche could leverage TikTok on Black Friday, so it could be try a new channel. Maybe it’s crowded in the email inbox, but TikTok is wide open in your niche. So it’s all about looking for gaps where you might be able to get outsized return on your efforts.

Katie Keith: Yeah. For me, one thing that’s changed about Black Friday is that we are getting more and more sales from existing customers and lower and lower from new customers. I don’t know if that’s just a general market force thing, but it’s literally and consistently gone down every year since 2019. So in 2019, for new customers, we were getting 2.5 times new customers compared to a normal week. In 2025, it was 1.6 times new customers. And every year in between, it went down on a sliding scale. And yet with renewals, um, we get loads and loads from existing customers. Um, 40% of the total comes from people that have made a purchase from us before. So for me, the emphasis is kind of changing and this brings us to the wider WooCommerce principle of retaining customers rather than finding new ones as well. So we need to really be focused on how to get those Black Friday sales from existing customers more and more.

James Kemp: Are you targeting them with different products or like renewing their existing products?

Katie Keith: We have different campaigns on email depending on whether they’ve purchased before. So there’s the new customer flow, which is just recommending whatever plugins, the existing customer flow will kind of give them a few pathways because they might want a different product and we try to recommend a related one to what they’ve already bought. They might want to upgrade their existing license to cover more sites or go to lifetime, or they might want the all access pass. So we do have completely different calls to action depending on their status with us. What about you, Chris?

Chris Badgett: I’d say, um, the money is made in the planning. So we’re recording this in September and I’ve already been working on the Black Friday plan for a week and even before that. So what you’re talking about, segmentation of, there’s a lot of buckets. So there’s existing customers, yes, and there’s new customers, but I kind of sub-niche those down deeper. So when an existing customer buys, I call that expansion revenue. So we have like a ladder of products. We have individual add-ons, 3 bundles, and a lifetime license at the top. And in those areas, those each require different marketing communications and, you know, how to go to the next level. Within prospects, you know, there’s different niches within that too. So for example, we may not even get a customer, but we may get a new free user from all our Black Friday promotions that are like, oh, well, this looks great, but I’m not ready to buy, so I’m just going to get the free thing and then they’ll buy later. There’s also what I call LTD shoppers. It’s really interesting. LTD stands for lifetime deal. So one of the things that we do is on Cyber Monday, we do a 24-hour lifetime deal special, heavily discounted. And that’s our highest revenue day of the year. Every year it’s been that way since we started doing that. And so in the month of November, just to put some numbers on it, we’ll do 4 to 5 times our average monthly sales in November. And a lot of that revenue comes from that lifetime deal that only happens on Cyber Monday, which sometimes falls in November, sometimes it’s in early December, but that kind of ends our sale period. And then if you look at lifetime deals as an example, about 60% of those are existing customers upgrading from an annual license or to lifetime, and then 40% are brand new people we’ve never seen before. And my advice with lifetime deals, ours is not cheap. When it’s on sale, it’s around $3,000. So it’s a big purchase. So we have a spread of products all the way from $3,000 to free. So there’s like options for a lot of different people in different scenarios and situations. But I would agree with you, Katie, overall, getting new customers has never been harder, but the opposite is also true. Expansion revenue or existing customers upgrading has never been easier in that. So what I’m finding, at least in our niche, in our space, you know, the serious professionals who’ve been around for a while or a new entrant who is pretty well established with what they’re doing, they don’t have a problem with the pricing or getting new products, but getting brand new customers, it is, it’s never been more challenging. And AI, you know, has an impact on that. There’s been SEO things going on, the general noise and competition and crowdedness in the market, the economy. It’s a lot of different things.

James Kemp: I think it’s interesting to know how do you go about figuring out what your sale is going to look like? Like, I know you’re a big spreadsheet guy.

Chris Badgett: What does that look like? Well, lately I’ve been working with our AI agent to build like all kinds of reports and analysis. But in general, like mapping out your sale, it’s a lot of work. I mean, it takes a long time, but AI actually makes that a lot easier and you can do more with less time. But first you gotta divide out your segments, like a prospect, somebody with this type of product who we want to promote the next level. There’s a lot of segments. And so basically what you’re doing is you’re actually doing like 10 different marketing campaigns at the same time. But one of the ways you avoid contributing to the noise is by doing really good segmentation so that like we may send 50 emails during the month of November, but that’s not one person getting 50 emails. Each person may only get 5 because they’re segmented. And then there’s things you can do too, particularly with expansion revenue, where you can analyze your existing customers and identify expansion opportunities and personalized outreach where you can reach out one-on-one to specific people with an offer and explaining like where they’re at and what makes sense for that person individually. We also do a lot of things besides email. We have, you know, a main landing page on our site, which gets a lot of traffic. We use the SiteWide Sales plugin, which works great with WooCommerce to promote sales and drive traffic to where we want to. We do ads, we do social media marketing, we do live events. Like my favorite thing to do actually, and I highly recommend this for any type of WooCommerce store, is on the last day of your sale, whether that’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or whenever, is to actually host a live event. So event-based marketing is really powerful. And there’s like a segment of your market who really appreciates being able to connect with you in person. So I call that the Cyber Monday Gathering, and it’s just fun. Like we demo some of our favorite features in LifterLMS. We talk about what’s new, what’s coming, and also answer people’s questions. I mean, it’s kind of a sales call, but where you handle objections and you pitch and you make offers, but you’re also just connecting with your community, having fun, sharing your favorite things, celebrating customer success stories and so on. But to go back to your original question, all that takes an incredible amount of planning. So yes, I use spreadsheets. I also use Google Calendar heavily during Black Friday to make sure I schedule things. I’m using Google Documents to, or Google Docs to get my emails ready that are segmented, which is a lot of writing. And then I try to get that pre-staged in our CRM, which we currently use ActiveCampaign. So it’s just a ton of planning and project management, and we use Trello to make sure we just keep an eye on the ball. But the cool thing is, even if you mess up one part, you have all this stuff going on that it doesn’t really matter because something, even if something doesn’t work perfectly, you have all these other methods of marketing and channels and offers that it all works out in the end.

James Kemp: I think it’s important to say as well that I think you do Black Friday the most in-depth that I’ve ever seen anyone do Black Friday. And I know from experience that doing Black Friday sales can be very, very time-consuming, quite intimidating. It doesn’t always work, like whatever you’re doing. But I think even at minimum, just having a coupon code that people can use and emailing your existing users about that is better than doing nothing. I think there’s a range of what you could do from nothing to what Chris does. And I think doing something is very valuable. Like, yeah, Black Friday or the month of November was always my most profitable month. And we didn’t do that much. We had like a landing page for all of our products. You could see them all in one place. And we would send mildly segmented emails, not to any great level of detail, but maybe, you know, existing users and users that haven’t bought anything ever. And I would say we probably doubled our usual monthly revenue every November with not doing too much. So I do think it’s valuable to do something and you don’t necessarily have to do everything. And if you’ve never done anything, definitely don’t try and do everything. Just choose one thing, one channel, and see how that works for you, and then iterate on it.

Katie Keith: About the channels then, um, because we’ve tried them all, uh, we know what has worked for us. So let’s go through different marketing channels. What works and what doesn’t? What one stands out for you, Chris?

Chris Badgett: I mean, I would say email is the best, but like James mentioned, sometimes you don’t do that much and it still works. So let me just give like a minimum. If I was going to do, if this was my first time, no matter what niche or industry I’m in, the core of it all is a discount, right? So figure out what discount you can do, create the coupon, timebox it if you need to. And then send one email to your customers or your prospects or both. And then also you can leverage other people’s marketing. It’s pretty saturated now in WordPress in terms of what’s known as a Black Friday roundup post, but in all kinds of niches, there are brands that kind of promote good offers. So one of the most important things we do, which is a lot of work, is we have a list of like at least 100 websites that put the best in our niche WordPress Black Friday deals. They kind of have a directory of all the best deals, and a lot of those people are affiliates, so they will make money if somebody clicks on their link and buys. So that’s why they’re incentivized to do that. But in that way, create a coupon, do your own email marketing, and then just take a day and look at the prior year. And no matter what niche you’re in, maybe you sell running shoes, the best running shoe Black Friday deals 2025, find all those people and then just send them information about your deal. And many of them aren’t even affiliates, they’re just doing a service to their community. So that’s like kind of the minimum. But I’ll hand it back to you, Katie, for the different channels. I do find email is the most important.

Katie Keith: Yeah, email is the most important. And I feel sorry for the people doing a Black Friday campaign that don’t have a decent email list yet, because that naturally takes time. So we need to look at what else works. For me, you did mention that the roundup niche in WordPress is saturated. For me, it does not get sales. It is the biggest way you can waste time on Black Friday. We have done the same. We have emailed hundreds of people our deal. We’ve got featured in dozens of their articles. We have not tracked any sales. One year, about 5 years ago, we tracked one sale from a roundup, and that is the only one ever. So now we don’t do anything proactive. It’s also not good for SEO, partly because SEO is largely dead, but mostly because there are so many links in these articles, it dilutes any authority you’re going to get from that link. So it’s not a link building play and it doesn’t really drive sales in most cases in the WordPress space, but maybe if you’re selling running shoes, then it would. Um, so I’d say, yeah, what would we do if you don’t have email? Stick a deal on your site. And one thing I’ve done before is partnered with other people to like email each other’s customers. I used to do that with James when he ran Iconic because we had such a complementary customer base, uh, both selling WooCommerce add-ons. So I would email some of his customers, or he would email about my products, and he would specifically mention which ones were relevant to his customers, and I would do the same. And I’ve done that for other tools like the Satori Bulk Editor, which I now own half of, but it’s a separate company that will email each other’s customers, and that gets more sales actually than Satori does from its own mailing list because our list is bigger, for example. And so that’s one way in if you don’t have your own established list.

James Kemp: That makes sense. Yeah, I agree. Email was always our best channel. Another one that did work, and I think they changed it and it may not work as well anymore, was retargeting. So we used to do that mostly through Facebook where if someone had looked at your Black Friday landing page and maybe not made a decision to buy at that point, you could retarget them later on with an ad that they would see to kind of keep reminding them that this thing that you were interested in is still happening and you can still get in. But I know they changed something in the way that they serve the pixel or their ads or something that kind of destroyed that mechanism. But I never found that ads in general worked that well, probably because I was trying to run them myself and they take a lot of skill and time and effort to actually, you know, make them work really well. But retargeting was always something that worked quite well for us.

Chris Badgett: I think that multiple touchpoint thing is important. So like when you think about Black Friday, just think about it through time. So whatever you’re gonna do, like don’t just send one email. Like, I’m a fan of a 3-email cadence, which is number one is heads up, this thing is coming and here are the dates. The second communication is it’s live. And then the third communication is the last call, like it’s closing soon. So when you do social media or email or any kind of communication, think about it through time. And the retargeting is just another way to like, it’s another touchpoint. So it’s kind of frustrating as a marketer that we take like this shotgun approach and, you know, marketing attribution or getting credit for like, where did this lead come from? What was the buyer’s journey? We’re kind of flying blind a lot of the time, but the multiple touchpoints, particularly across multiple channels, does help.

James Kemp: I think I read somewhere that you need to have seen something relevant to the sale 9 times before you make a decision, which is interesting. Could be made up, but I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.

Chris Badgett: I’ve read that too.

Katie Keith: Yeah. Abandoned cart emails work well as well. We always run abandoned cart emails, but we pause them and have a whole different set of emails that we reactivate every Black Friday. And they convert really well, better than our normal abandoned cart emails. So that fits with the multiple touchpoints thing that even if they didn’t buy when they were intending to, you can still win them back.

James Kemp: Yeah, I think another thing that we lightly touched on was the amount of discount that you’re putting out there. I know, Katie, I think you have, I think Iconic did at some point, we had this kind of staggered discount approach, so maybe uh, if you get in early, it’s some amount of discount. If you do it on the day, it’s a bit more or a bit less. Um, I can never remember which way around worked best. But I think there’s a lot to say about how much you offer on Black Friday, because I think something like 20% discount is quite typical of a sale. And I think people looking for products on Black Friday are looking for these really deep discounts. Um, we’re talking like 30 plus, and I think that is quite a valuable thing to get right. What’s been your experience on discount amount, Chris?

Chris Badgett: Well, just with the caveat that software companies and digital products, we have more room to do bigger discounts, but basically when we do Black Friday every year, we kind of do a postmortem and there’s a lot of stuff that just always works that we carry forward, but we always, you know, look at what didn’t work and what are some upgrade ideas for the next year. But for us, we found that a 60% discount really works well. And I should caveat that we’re an annual subscription business, so that discount only applies to the first year. So I would be happy to do even a bigger discount because I want to get a customer, prove to them that the solution is a good fit for them, and then they’ll renew the next year at the regular retail price. So that’s sort of that loss leader phenomenon. And just to go into the retail space a little bit, I use this — these shirts are called Poncho. I’ve had like 10 of these. I have a black one, a blue one, a white one, and I’ve multiply replaced them. So if I’m looking at this t-shirt or this shirt brand called Poncho, they could have lost money on me my first shirt purchase, but I became a super fan and I come back every year. If somebody ever asks me in my family, what do I want for Christmas? I get a new Poncho shirt. By the way, I see Poncho advertising hard on TikTok. If you do have clothing brands, it seems like TikTok Shop and all the TikTok ads and everything is really working well these days. But yeah, the discount, go as big as you can. Think about the lifetime value of your customer. Even if you don’t have a subscription business, if you get ’em into your world, will they likely rebuy in the future for themselves or for a friend? That’s something to think about. But we, that’s what we do. We do 60% off. And then the 1-day lifetime deal we do on Cyber Monday is actually 70% off, which is huge. And most people buy the lifetime deal during our sale. But we have had full price buyers buy it as well.

Katie Keith: Am I right that you don’t offer lifetime except for in a specific sale? And so people like get excited by it and want to snap it up.

Chris Badgett: It’s always available for $10,000 and we have had some buyers at that point, but they tend to convert it when we run the sale. And we do actually run again, like my idea around just do Black Friday more times a year is another way to kind of get outside of the noise. And, you know, there’s all these philosophical arguments like, oh, well, if you run too many sales, you’re cheapening your brand and, you know, people wait and expect discounts. And there’s truth to that, but it sort of goes back to that marketing idea of like, it’s good to do marketing and sales work. So just do more of them, not just on Black Friday. And you can build a strong brand and not necessarily be seen as a discount brand. It’s okay to run sales, especially 2 a year.

James Kemp: It’s not too much. Do you find that, um, the people that do buy at this massive discount on Black Friday tend to cancel and then rebuy at the discount again?

Chris Badgett: That’s a fear people have, and it does happen, but particularly in the WordPress niche, because we have this, you know, thing where people can keep using our software after it’s canceled or whatever. But it’s a legitimate fear, but the people that actually do that is a very small percentage. I would say like 1% maybe.

James Kemp: With your lifetime deals, I know there’s a lot of people aren’t always keen on lifetime deals in terms of people who make products. Do you limit the number of years of support that you offer to those people? I know some people say like, if you buy a lifetime deal, you get 3 years of support.

Chris Badgett: I don’t. So I have a lot of controversial opinions on lifetime deals, so I’ll share some of those. I actually see lifetime deals as recurring revenue, and I say that a little bit tongue in cheek. And what I mean is, as a subscription business, you’re not going to get that customer again. But again, keep in mind, our lifetime pricing is pretty high. So it’s a very unique segment. It’s also true, at least in our situation, where somebody really has to be at the perfect point in their business to be ready and open to it, where it just makes sense to them. And because we’re constantly getting new customers, new free users, every time we run it, it’s sort of like a new cohort is driving by the lifetime deal offer, sees it, and a certain percentage buys. So I call it recurring revenue because it works every time. And the reason it works every time is it’s a new cohort of people that for whatever reason are in that perfect spot where that offer makes sense to them. So you can run it and, you know, it always feels like, hey, this isn’t going to work. We’ve already done this before and it works every time. You know, sometimes depending upon what’s going on in the economy and other factors, it does better or worse than other times, but it always works. So that’s one controversial take. What’s another one? Some people like who are more business-minded, you know, are concerned that if you have lifetime customers for a subscription business, you’re hurting your company valuation. I think I heard from a private equity guy, like the general rule is try to keep your lifetime customers less than 8% of your total customers to not impact your valuation. But at the end of the day, because I have this belief in the recurring aspect of lifetime deals, and there are customers who would not buy if they did not get the, if there wasn’t a lifetime deal available. I also am really like customer focused. Like we didn’t even want to do lifetime deals, but people kept asking for it, asking for it. So I’m really just meeting the need that’s there. So those are just some opinions on lifetime deals.

Katie Keith: Yeah, I think I agree with most of that. People give, in software, they give lifetime deals a bad name because in the history of WordPress, there were some really stupid lifetime deals, like major plugins for $29 lifetime. That’s not sustainable. They’re going to go out of business. They’re going to stop supporting you. But if you do it in a sustainable way, like Chris is, his is very expensive. For my plugins, they are all available with lifetime, but we charge anything between 3 to 4 or even 5 times the annual cost. Um, my, the advice I’ve been given is to try to cap it to 15% of revenue, which probably is quite similar to 8% of customers. Because each lifetime person pays more upfront. And so I will change the price to manage that figure and try to keep it within. But because I have multiple plugins, a lifetime customer brings in future revenue because we can upsell our other plugins to them. So again, that doesn’t worry me because they are a customer and we can email them and so on. Regarding the wider pricing issue, I’m kind of doing the opposite of Chris this year in terms of the fact that a big proportion of my Black Friday customers seem to be people that have bought from us before and they’re just waiting for the best price. Whatever discount I give them, they’re going to buy anyway, aren’t they? As long as it’s half decent. So I’m probably going to do 30% this year instead of 40% like I did last year. And I bet that when in terms of the relationship between the conversion rate and obviously we will lose some sales, but we’re going to get about a quarter more from a third more, I think, from each customer. So that works out better, assuming we don’t lose that amount of sales, particularly since I reckon a lot of these people are just waiting for the best price, which I do myself for my own Black Friday shopping. I have a whole list that I keep all year of non-urgent things. And then I buy the stuff that I would buy anyway, because it’s probably the cheapest it’s going to be all year. I don’t think, oh, they’re only doing a 25% discount. I’m not going to buy.

James Kemp: I guess it depends on the product as well. Like if someone is selling the same product, one person’s doing 30%, one person’s doing 20%, like you’re more likely to go for the cheaper one unless you have like a deep trust in the brand selling for slightly higher. Um, Chris, I wonder if you have any sort of horror stories from Black Friday, like, you know, an influx of people visiting the site and the site going down or, uh, anything that you now prepare for.

Chris Badgett: Well, I definitely proactively make sure we have the hosting we need before that surge in traffic and, uh, concurrent users on the site making orders and things like that. I really haven’t had any horror stories beyond maybe sending the wrong email to the wrong segment or like one of the things we do, and we should probably get into it. One of our unique things is the bonus stack that comes with a Black Friday purchase. But I’ve had things where I forgot to turn off the bonus stack fulfillment. So even after the sale is over, we’re getting emails from people like, hey, where’s my t-shirt? Where’s this and that? And I’m like, oh man, I forgot to turn off the bonus fulfillment. But none of that is like a true horror story. I’ve never had the site go offline. Yeah, I mean, but there’s all kinds of weird stuff that happens in business, particularly in the tech. Like, you know, I’ve had like a spammer spoof our email and then our email sending service, we use something called Mandrill by Mailchimp. We got like turned off for sending emails, but that hasn’t, if that happened during Black Friday, that would be bad.

Katie Keith: Oh, wow. Yeah. I just had that with Mailgun a few weeks ago. Imagine that on Black Friday.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So that would be bad. Uh, the other thing too is, um, I’m a big fan of having multiple payment gateways. So, you know, on our WooCommerce store, you can check out with Stripe or PayPal. And I haven’t had a Stripe or PayPal issue really during Black Friday, but I think it gives me peace of mind to know even if like one of those goes off, the other one’s still available. So that’s a good thing to, you know, have redundancy for.

James Kemp: They’re also in different, uh, regions as well, right? They both don’t sell completely to every region as far as I’m aware. Well, that’s good. Good that you don’t face those issues. If you’re comfortable sharing, I’m wondering what sort of size email list you’ve had where you found, okay, this is a good channel now. Because I imagine when you first started doing this, your email list was a lot lower than it is probably today.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, and the good news was in the early days, it just wasn’t as competitive. So even if you had a small email list or, you know, you’re submitting your stuff, your sale information to deal sites that people actually visited and so on. But since the beginning of LifterLMS, which is about 12+ years old, our total people that have opted in is around 140,000. Currently, we maintain an email list size, an active email list size of 38,000 or 39,000. I forget the exact math, but there’s something like, there’s an equation that’s actually I found to be true, not just looking at Black Friday, but it’s something like $1 to $2 per email subscriber is sort of like how big your business is. And I found that to be like really accurate. I don’t want to discourage people with small email lists. It can still work. In fact, that kind of equation I’m talking about, I can’t remember exactly, maybe it’s $4 per subscriber, something like that. But the email list is important. That’s why I’m saying, even if somebody comes and doesn’t buy our deal, we still get a ton of free users, which grows our email list. Another pro tip with a Black Friday offer and really any campaign, I call it a news item where you need to have a central place to send people so they don’t get confused. A landing page works for a Black Friday offer, but I like to actually do a blog post that has the offer details in it. So all the traffic funnels through that one blog post and it’s got the dates, it’s got why this product’s awesome. It has all the bonuses you get. It has, you know, calls to action if you have questions, what to do. So like having a central piece of content is super important. And if you have a small email list, there’s other ways to get people to that news item, as I call it, than just email. So that’s where you can try things like ads or getting on the directories or doing social content that points to it or working with affiliates. I have found affiliates to become less and less effective over recent years, but they’re still a very valid channel. I do have a belief that AI agents are going to become top affiliates in the future. And I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think, you know, we could see a resurgence of affiliate-based businesses. So if your email list is small, you know, you can also get traffic to your central message through other channels. So it’s good to, that’s where it’s good to kind of do what we do, the shotgun approach. Here we are established, been doing this a while. But in the early days, try it. You never know. And leveraging somebody else’s audience, whether through an affiliate or through collaboration or guest content, there’s lots of ways to get traffic.

James Kemp: And maybe in terms of preparation, like having methods of collecting people’s emails that aren’t customers is a good thing to be doing year round.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think I, we haven’t done it recently, but this did work really well. At the time we were using OptinMonster. Now we use Popup Maker, but before Black Friday we had a popup. I think Angie Meeker at OptinMonster may have figured out this strategy, but it was like a popup where enter your email address to be notified when our Black Friday deal goes live. And I remember when we ran that in advance of our sale, we did get a lot of opt-ins and that helped us build like a targeted segment of our email list that is actively interested in deals, which means you can email them more. So there’s lots of little tricks like that.

James Kemp: Where did you run that? Because I imagine that could also, like, if I ran that now, it could also put someone off buying now who would’ve bought at full price knowing that, okay, there’s a sale coming, I can wait a month.

Chris Badgett: That goes back to that philosophy of like, are you training your buyers to be discount buyers and so on? So like, I always try to find the middle way. So in that case, I think we ran it 2 weeks prior. Knowing that we would take a hit and like put the brakes on some people that would have bought in exchange for, uh, having that segmented list for active promotion. So everything’s kind of a trade-off.

Katie Keith: Yeah, I like that idea because we don’t do our sale for the whole of November. We do like the week before Black Friday up to Cyber Monday and, um, our sales for the first half of November go down to practically zero, presumably because people are waiting. So if you are collecting their email addresses, at least you’re less likely to lose them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you may not, that you may get an email address that doesn’t convert, but then next year they do. So you’re just building your email list.

James Kemp: Very true. Do you have any last pieces of advice for Black Friday?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, my favorite piece of advice is just to try to make it such a no-brainer offer. And there’s different ways to do that. One is having a big discount, but my favorite is actually doing what I call a bonus stack, which is other bonuses that people get no matter what level of purchase they make. And if you make that bonus stack even more valuable than your product, you can start getting into the no-brainer territory. And there’s a lot of things you can do that don’t necessarily take too much time or money to do. One of the simplest things you can do is an event, like a virtual event, a group event that people get access to. So for example, we have our top customers get access to a live weekly Zoom with some of our team for support and strategy support and community. We give every Black Friday buyer access to a special one of those that happens after the sale’s over. And that, all that costs is an hour of time, but some people really like that. We throw in courses that we normally charge for. We do swag items. So you’ll see this sometimes, like when you buy something and you open it up and there’s a sticker in there, that’s like a piece of swag. We use services like Printful to deliver t-shirts and mugs and things all over the world. So that’s a cool bonus you can do if you can afford it based on your pricing. One of my favorite new bonuses we’re throwing in this year is I was actually really inspired by Jason Cohen from WP Engine’s Hidden Multipliers book, how you bought the book, but then it came with a set of skills that you could plug into your AI systems. So last week I just finished creating like 13 skills for course creators that they’re going to get as bonuses. So you really have to, if, when you put your customer at the center of your business, not your product, and you think about all the pains and desires they have, you can start to envision bonus ideas. And I recommend like doing multiple bonuses, different types, because different bonuses may speak to different people. Like if Poncho gave me a free Poncho t-shirt in addition to the shirt, I’d go buy one right now.

Katie Keith: You’re going to go and buy one anyway, right after this.

Chris Badgett: I am. See, they got me. They could have charged 90% off on my first one and they would’ve had it. But yeah, that’s, I would definitely encourage thinking about bonuses and all of this is, like you said, is a lot of work. So you kind of have to just commit. And the cool thing is you can do this every year. So maybe just try one new thing this year and then another new thing next year and keep what works and change what didn’t, but just definitely keep doing it because there is a, you know, a buyer psychology and momentum that just naturally happens that time of year. You just have to tap into it.

Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s key is finding what works, measure it, do that evaluation, um, the debrief that you mentioned. Because then you can improve every year and keep making Black Friday better and better. So thank you so much, Chris. That’s been amazing. I think people will just be watching you to see how you’re doing it and learning for next year as well.

James Kemp: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot you won’t see by just watching. There’s so much that goes behind the scenes, right?

Katie Keith: Sign up for their mailing list.

James Kemp: Yeah. See what happens. Um, next episode is going to be on the 9th of October. We’re going to be talking about WooCommerce themes, uh, with Colm Troy and Simon Tompkins from Commerce Gurus. Uh, and we’re also gonna look a little bit at WooCommerce’s new purple theme, which will be coming out around that time. I think it’s slightly after, but it’ll be cool to talk about that.

Katie Keith: Yeah. And if you don’t already subscribe to Do the Woo, then go to dothewoo.com and that has links to all the different places you can subscribe wherever you like to watch or listen to podcasts. Thanks for watching. Bye.

James Kemp: See ya.