Hey Reader!

I remember Tessa writing ‘Buy Nothing Day’ on the big chalkboard calendar in the warehouse at Oregon Food Bank.

I think she erased someone else's designation of the day as Black Friday, though maybe it was merely a sad blank square. Either way, she was committed to boycotting the national day of consumer delight, and so was I.

That was years ago, and I still don't like Black Friday, though at this point I think it's more about the name. Doesn’t it sound like some medieval retribution involving flames and misogyny?

A Google search tells me that the term was coined by cops in Philadelphia in the 1950's. They hated all the traffic and no doubt had to break up fights over discounted Howdy Doody dolls and Hula hoops.

Regardless! It's a thing and you might be ignoring it, like me, or embracing it, like many wildly successful business owners. If you're going whole hog and pushing for big holiday sales, I salute you.

And I want to encourage you to send more sales emails than you want to.

Maybe you're totally comfortable sending email upon email, and if this is you then feel free to ignore my gentle insistence.

But if you feel like you're pestering people, or you hate sounding "salesy", or are just uncomfortable reminding people over and over that you're running a special, I want you to bust through your comfort zone and send those emails.

Do you have a 100% open rate?

Of course you don't! No one does! Say it's right around 40%; that means that 60% of your list isn't going to even see any given email, let alone take action on it.

You've got to send several just to be sure the majority of your list sees your offer once.

And then there's all that research about how many times someone has to see something before hitting the buy button...

How many? Doesn't matter. More than one, more than two. More than five is probably even better.

Before you cancel me altogether, take heart. You don't have to pester people who don't want to buy, because you can let them opt out of your sales emails.

You've probably seen this before; at the beginning of an email is a message that says "click here if you don't want to hear more about this unprecedented sale" or whatever.

You click the link, you're opted out, you can rest easy knowing you won’t be confronted by that offer for a midwinter mindfulness retreat in Bali.

(Though that does sound kind of nice…)

Allowing them to opt out of a sales sequence is a terrific gift to your readers.

And you may be surprised by how many people don't opt out when given the chance. Are we all gluttons for consumerist emails? Maybe.

Regardless, fortune favors the bold, and you are running a business.

So this would be a good time, if you haven't already, to look into how you can provide a link that removes readers from a sequence.

You'd most likely do that by adding a tag to their contact info and then using that tag to remove them from that particular sales cycle.

Thus you keep them on your list but you don't pester them with emails they don't want.

Managing the tech side of things is easy for some and feels almost insurmountable to others.

If you're in the latter camp, don't despair.

I've found that Googling is a pretty good method for getting the answers you need, and of course your friendly neighborhood AI would love to help.

I asked Claude to explain how to do this in Kit (the platform I use) and it gave me the correct step by step instructions.

Tech is like anything else; if you tackle it slowly and ask for lots of help you'll get there.

I mean, if you could pass algebra when you were totally distracted by social drama and hormones, you can learn the ins and outs of your email marketing platform.

If you find it really migraine-inducing this might be the perfect time to hire a part-time assistant who can do all the annoying bits for you. 😁

Good luck this week, whether you're selling, buying, or sitting the whole thing out.

Yours in exercising the power of the purse,

Julia

​Tom Odell knows how confusing Black Friday is, and so does this email. Forward it to someone who has a lot of stamina.

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