The Art of Selling Online Courses

Watch This Before Planning BLACK FRIDAY 2025

• John Ainsworth

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In this episode, Josip Belina, our head of funnel strategy, reveals why September is the make-or-break month for Black Friday success and what happens when you wait until October (spoiler: it's not good). We dive deep into a counterintuitive email strategy that has our clients sending way more emails than you'd expect on the final day, and why that actually increases revenue without destroying your list.

You'll discover the bundle strategy that consistently outperforms the lazy "50% off everything" approach that most people default to, plus how to handle your best customers who've already bought everything you've offered before. Josip also shares the two-promotion framework that maximizes Q4 revenue and why this quarter is absolutely critical for your business.

This isn't about sending a few discount emails and hoping for the best. This is about systematically planning and executing a Black Friday strategy that turns November into your biggest revenue month of the year. If you've been treating Black Friday as an afterthought, this episode will completely change how you approach it.

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If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Speaker 1:

If you don't start in September and you then start maybe something in October, it can happen that you don't do the email promotion or that you don't do it. Well, that's the most important thing. Just do Black Friday and then, if you are going to do Black Friday, do the prep. Q4 for most businesses is the best quarter in a year. You are here to maximize revenue for Black Friday In terms of pricing. It's Black Friday, so you want to give the one important thing make sure to do Black Friday.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, hello, and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Jon Ainsworth and today I'm joined by none other than Josip Berlina. Now, josip is our overall head of funnel strategy and he does all the work with our clients in terms of planning out Black Friday, and that is something that we are going to be talking through today and this episode is coming out in September that we are going to be talking through today and this episode is coming out in September, and we are going to be talking about why you should be starting to plan early for Black Friday, why that's a really big deal. We're going to talk through what the planning steps are in terms of how many email promotions to send, who to focus on, what your strategy should be in terms of number of email promotions, how many emails to send, what kind of emails, pricing for them and tracking everything that you need to know to have a monster Black Friday this year and make bank Josip welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Happy to be here again, all right, so why should people start preparing so early? I bet a lot of people are not really started thinking about Black Friday in September. Why does it matter so much?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I started mentioning Black Friday even in August, but September is basically when most people start their prep if they are planning to do Black Friday, because if you don't start in September and you then start maybe something in October, it can happen that you don't do the email promotion or that you don't do it well. So, yeah, that's like the most important thing, let's just do black friday, uh, and then, if you are gonna do black friday, do the prep to do it okay, so what are the planning steps?

Speaker 2:

what's? What steps do people need to do to plan out?

Speaker 1:

yeah to. To start with, um, you need to know how to start that prep right. The most people are trying to maybe use what they have in the, what they have done in the past successfully, which is the best strategy in my opinion, because for Black Friday, you don't really want to run tests. That's the time to monetize your audience. Q4 for most businesses is the best quarter in a year, so you don't want to run tests For Black Friday. You want to go with something that you have proven works before. So your best email promotions, your best products, your best engagement that you've seen on social media posts stuff like that Do that, run that, make sure to get by far the most number of people to see the offer and just run with your best promotion. The way to do that is simple you review what you did before, you review what you did over the last 12 months and you pick the winner. You pick the one thing that worked and you create an offer around that. You create a promotion around that. Now, that's one thing. The other thing is thinking about your best customers.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so a lot of people will do the email promotion that was very, very successful. However, if it was successful before. If you ran it once or twice before, people will already have bought that product. So what do you do then? You need to be aware that your best customers have paid a lot of money to you in the past. They are ready to buy again. So create a dedicated offer, ideally for Black Friday, for them. For those people whether it's cohort group, coaching, bundle, maybe even something new I wouldn't call it a big launch, but something new that would appeal to your best audience, to your best customers, would be a good thing to add, because that way you don't get revenue from just people that haven't bought before. You also get it from people that have paid you by far the most amount of money.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so take your best existing email promotion, the one that has worked the best in the past, made the most money, and you're pretty much going to run that again. But then you're going to segment off the people who who bought it already and you're going to offer them something different. Maybe something more expensive, like group coaching, or maybe a new product yes, or an add-on to that.

Speaker 1:

And when we say, run the same email promotion again, run the same offer, don't repeat the email promotion. Email promotion changes here because you are focusing heavily on scarcity, urgency and the idea of black friday, which is not always heavy discount, but heavy discount works, but also a lot of value, value stacking, making sure that people see that now is the time in the year when they should act because it's in their best interest.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so we've talked for a bit about planning out what offers you're going to make and who you're going to be focusing on. How many email promotions are you going to send? Nearly everybody, I think, if they don't know that much about this, is going to assume that they'll send out some emails on black friday itself. Yeah, but talk story like what's the? What's the actual plan in terms of number of email promotions to run in november?

Speaker 1:

um, in an ideal scenario you would do two. Oftentimes we've preached that doing two email promotions a month is like the holy grail of email promotions. It's not always. It can hurt your email deliverability long term so it might not work all the time. However, for November, if you're trying to maximize revenue, doing two email promotions is ideal and starting early is ideal. So, basically, if you can do a Black Friday promotion in the first week of November I've seen people do that in like mid-October going to November, but we do it normally first week of November we run the Black Friday campaign.

Speaker 1:

The Black Friday promotion focus on the idea that Black Friday is coming and that's why we have that promotion, and then we repeat the same or a similar email promotion. When I say the same or similar, it does not mean that those emails are the same. The offer is the same, the emails are different. So it's a lot of copywriting but it does make sense and it is worth it because it maximizes revenue. So, in an ideal scenario, two email promotions, one early Black Friday offer, one Black Friday offer going into the weekend of after Black Friday, going into Cyber Monday. This year Black Friday is on the 28th of November and Cyber Monday is on the 1st of December, which means that you'll have that promo going into December with Cyber Monday, Basically two email promotions.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so one early November and then one late November over Black Friday into Cyber Monday. So what's the Cyber Monday one then? Is that just the same offer as you've had, or is there something different there?

Speaker 1:

We like to do a different offer, maybe a light version of what we had for Black Friday, because if people haven't taken you up on that offer and if you do two email promotions one for early Black Friday, one for Black Friday money can always, or oftentimes, be the issue as to why people did not buy. So go with something cheaper, maybe give them options, maybe allow people to buy whatever they want on your website for a certain discount, or introduce, as I said, a light version of the offer. One other thing to mention that's more tactics than strategic. For Black Friday, not everyone will want to do two email promotions and it's not going to be technically possible for them to pull that off because it is a lot of work. In case it's not possible, then obviously do one for Black Friday. You start on a Monday before Black Friday, it culminates on Black Friday. You then prolong the promotion throughout the weekend, you extend it and then you end with a Cyber Monday promotion. One thing here if you are doing that, the easiest way to make more money is to send more emails Okay, Well, it is the case, but it can hurt your email deliverability. But for Black Friday, if you send, we normally preach gain, logic, fear, ethic, future proof going, going, gone. So sending a couple emails on the last day of the promotion For Black Friday, on the last day of the promotion you can send three, four, five emails.

Speaker 1:

Send it every two or three hours, it's fine. And as it culminates towards Black Friday, you can allow yourself to send two emails a day. Send two emails on Monday, two emails on Tuesday and so on, and then on Black Friday send five. It will significantly increase the revenue that you're seeing. You will have more people unsubscribing, you will go on some people's nerves, but that's fine. You are here to maximize revenue for Black Friday. It's not going to kill your list, it's not going to kill conversions. It's going to maximize revenue output that you get. And then it's going to allow you to then maybe even take a breeder in december, because in december generally people are not that willing to buy. And then you can prep for new year, new me that's coming in monday, in january all right, cool.

Speaker 2:

Now you mentioned the whole thing there about like what email, uh, what emails to be sending out to people. Could Could you run through that again for everyone? It's like a top level. Here's the types of emails to send.

Speaker 1:

So, before Black Friday, feel free to send warm-up emails, maybe up to a week, three a week, just mentioning that the email promo is about to happen. One week before Black Friday, an agitate solution always works in terms of warm-up, and then on Black Friday, you can do a regular pay, an agitate solution going on. However, double down on that. Have two emails a day and then on the last day of Black Friday, three, four, five emails should be good. Those emails are quite simple. We're very heavily focused on scarcity and urgency, or urgency if you don't have scarcity.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So as a reminder for anybody about what's in those emails. So the gain email is like an announcement one. The logic one is more talking about the logic and the data and statistics and facts about why someone should be getting something. The fear one is more emotional. Future-proofing is about how can their life change once they've got this, once they buy your course, once they buy your product FAQ is a very long email with just all of the frequently asked questions and then going, going, gone, all about scarcity and urgency. Now if you want to listen to some other podcast episodes to kind of hear more detail about each of those um, episode 131 from april 4th 2024.

Speaker 2:

Um, how to send more emails without sounding too salesy is probably going to be good. Episode 118 make three million dollars using good email copy and urgency that's probably a good one as well. Mastering the art of warm-up emails is from june 30th 2023. That's episode 94. I think those are some good ones to go check out. I'm trying to see if we've got any that are Black Friday specific. That we've done before. If you check out, actually October 6th 2024, 348, our clients did 400,000 on Black Friday. Here's how I think we're breaking that down. Last year and kind of taking you through that. So that might be useful as well as an overview of what we've done. Okay, how about using AI? There's a lot of emails to write. What are some of the places people go wrong when they start using AI to write these emails?

Speaker 1:

I think the biggest issue is just telling AI to hey, this is the offer, write me an email that sells it. It generally doesn't work, so you need to do a lot of back and forth to make sure it works, but definitely use AI. You need to do a lot of back and forth to make sure it works, but definitely use AI. We use AI for our copywriting, but we have a lengthy system that has been tested and proven on thousands of emails that we know works. We have a track record there. But definitely, if you're using AI, just make sure to double-check what it's outputting. Check it yourself, update it a bit, make sure you follow a structure that you like, that worked before in your past emails, and you should be good yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think one of the things people go wrong with is they don't give enough inputs into the AI in terms of, like, actually explaining properly who the customer is, what the product is, what kind of emails to be writing, etc. And I think that that causes people to have some, some dodgy outputs because the ai doesn't know enough about the strategy of this to just kind of do it all for you. Okay, let's get into pricing a little bit. What kind of discount should people be offering or how? How should they think about pricing?

Speaker 1:

yeah, in terms of pricing. It's Black Friday, so you want to give the best offer that you've given in a calendar year. People expect that. They literally expect from you to give them the best deal that you can give them at that point. That does not mean it has to be the cheapest, it needs to be the best. It's very different. People think that, hey, I'm just going to put 50% discount on everything and it's going to work.

Speaker 2:

That's the most common thing I think I see from people who aren't working with this is just give a discount on every single product across the line.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it does work and it is probably the easiest approach they can do. However, if you are heavily focused on revenue from that particular source, thinking about the offers, thinking about structure, value, value stacking does make sense and it's going to make you more money. So you don't always have to just slash the price in half and run the offer like that. You can think about adding bonuses, adding more things and doing a reverse discount. So instead of saying okay, I have a $500 product, here is 50% off, so you get it for $250. You can tell people hey, I have a $500 product, you know that I've been selling it for that much, but I now have these five bonuses that are worth $3,000. So now this whole bundle is worth $650. So you go up in value instead of down in value, but you add a lot more bonuses. Bundling generally works well for Black Friday.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So instead of heavily discounting something down so it's dirt cheap and they're just hardly spending any money at all, you offer a great deal by having something similar-ish, actually maybe even more expensive than the normal price, but with five extra things that they could get as well. Basically, offer a big bundle and then that's the thing you offer the discount on.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. And then for Cyber Monday you would take one part of that, or a light version of it, or a part of the course, or one part the bonuses, and sell that as a standalone for less.

Speaker 2:

So people who couldn't afford to get the whole bundle can just get that one thing, but they can get that as a discount. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, what kind of tracking should people put in place for Black Friday?

Speaker 1:

Make sure to track everything. It doesn't have to be super fancy. Just make a simple tracking spreadsheet and make sure to know how much money you are making on a daily basis from the product that you're promoting for Black Friday. If you use coupon codes, you can use that for direct tracking. Just make sure to have Google Analytics enabled Nothing fancy.

Speaker 2:

And what should people do if they're like man? This sounds like a lot of work. I haven't got time to do all of this. I could do with some help with it. What should they do then?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely get in touch with us. You can email us at john at datadrivenmarketingco or joseph at datadrivenmarketingco. We can also go on our podcast, listen to other Black Friday episodes from last year and the year before. You can read some of our blog posts on our website. But yeah, definitely get in touch with us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if you want to help with this, that's what we're here for. Uh, we do a lot of work around Black Friday, so just hit us up if you want to help with it. Um, okay, anything else that people need to know for an overview of planning out Black Friday this year?

Speaker 1:

One important thing make sure to do Black Friday.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So even if this sounded like my god, that's too much work, at least do something, exactly perfect. All right, there you go, a short episode taking you through the overview of black friday. I've linked you off to a bunch of other episodes. If you need more uh resources, need more information, then go check those out as well. If you want more help, just drop us an email, john at data-driven marketingco or joseph j-o-s-iI-P at datadrivenmarketingco, and we'll have a chat with you and see how we can help. Otherwise, as always, thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time. See you.