Better Digital

I ordered something once that had a long shipping time on it, and I heard nothing from them between paying and the thing being sent.

It was the sort of product where I felt like I should be hearing something, and after a while I was genuinely asking myself whether it was ever going to turn up or whether I had just been scammed. It did turn up. It was completely fine. But by then I had decided something about that brand and no amount of good product was going to undo it.

Which is the part that should worry anyone selling anything with a wait on it. Nothing had gone wrong. They just did not say anything, and silence in that gap does not read as neutral to the person who has already paid. It reads as risk.

And the thing that fixes it is not an apology or a shipping countdown. Say someone buys a tent from you. There is a whole picture sitting there: the camp kitchen set up in the corner, some lights strung up, the bed made properly so it actually looks like somewhere you would want to be. Send them that while they wait and two things happen at once. The waiting stops feeling like risk, and they start picturing the things they have not bought yet.

We build this window live on a real store in the masterclass, next Thursday at 12:30pm. Message me the word MASTERCLASS and I will send you the link.

Take your last three win-back emails and read nothing but the subject lines. If all three have a number in them, you already know what the campaign is.

The test I'd run is to write the next one with no code in it anywhere and see whether anybody opens it. I don't mean that as a clever experiment. It is just an honest read on whether there's a reason to come back that isn't a percentage. Most stores have never sent that version, so nobody there actually knows the answer.

What goes into the no-code version is the hard part, and it is also the whole point of running it. It might be that something arrived they haven't seen, or that the exact thing they bought is finally back in stock, or that you made the change they asked for last time and never told them.

If the honest answer is that there is nothing to put in it, that's worth knowing now rather than after you've spent another 20% proving it.

Every store owner I talk to can tell me their repeat rate. Almost none of them can tell me when the repeat actually happens.

Those are two different questions, right? The rate tells you how many came back. The timing tells you when they decided, and the deciding is the only part you can still do anything about. If most of your second orders land inside three weeks, then everything you send after week three is arriving at people who made their minds up a fortnight ago. If they cluster at four months, then a post purchase email sequence that stops on day fourteen has been finishing before the conversation even starts.

The reason nobody knows which one they're in is that repeat rate is on the dashboard and the gap isn't. One of them gets glanced at every week, the other has never been calculated once, because nothing in the admin puts it in front of you and nobody goes looking for a number they haven't been told to want. So the sequence gets built on a schedule somebody read somewhere, and it runs for a fortnight whether or not your customers have finished thinking.

You don't need a spreadsheet to get the shape of it either. Open your five most recent repeat customers one at a time and look at the two dates on each. Five isn't a study and I wouldn't build a plan on it, but five will tell you whether you're dealing in weeks or months, and that on its own settles whether your follow-up is stopping too early.

When do your second orders actually land? Follow if you want the checks that use numbers you already have.

Black Friday is the most you'll ever pay for a customer, and it's your post purchase email that decides whether you actually keep them.

Everyone spends October on the offer and the ads and the landing page, right? Then somebody finally buys, and what they get is a receipt, a tracking number, and then nothing else on purpose until a discount code turns up in a quiet month. Which is backwards, because for a day or two after someone pays you they're still thinking about the thing they bought. A month later they aren't, and there's no campaign that buys that attention back.

There are three things worth sending in those forty-eight hours. Confirm the order. Help them get it right the first time. Then give them a reason to come back that isn't money off. The receipt covers the first one, and most stores stop there.

It's the middle one that does the real work, and I get why almost nobody sends it, because it doesn't look like selling at all. But something that disappoints a person on day one doesn't get ordered again whatever you send later, so the message that gets them a good first go at it is the one that earns you the second order. Send a code in there instead and you've just taught them the price was the point.

Save this one first, then go and open the order confirmation your own store sent this morning and read it like you'd just paid for it.

Your cancel flow probably hands a discount to people who were never leaving over price, and you still lose about 95 out of every 100 who click it.

The standard build runs about five screens. Are you sure, here is what you lose, here is 20% off, tell us why, confirm. Pause turns up on the last screen in smaller text if it turns up at all. By screen three nobody is reading any of it, they are just looking for the fastest way out.

A cancel click is usually a bad month, or a delivery that turned up too soon. Neither of those is a decision to leave, and the flow never asks. Turn it around and the first screen offers something smaller than leaving: pause it, skip the next one, swap the product, with cancel sitting underneath in plain text. The discount then comes out only for the person who said price, because offering money to someone with four boxes in the cupboard just tells them you were not listening.

Skio published the number on this in June. A cancel flow that matches the offer to the reason saves 15 to 30% of the subscribers who try to leave, and most brands save under 5%.

Go and click cancel on your own store first. Then the Bottleneck Quiz takes two minutes and tells you whether retention is even where your money is going.

Attentive surveyed 600 US shoppers in June and asked when they start their Christmas buying. 71% said before Black Friday. 46% said before November has even started.

Then they asked the same people when they expect the deals to show up, and 84% said November, most of them in the week before Black Friday itself.

Read those two together and the gap is the whole problem. The buying begins in September and October. The campaigns begin in November. So a store spends its biggest discount of the year competing for people who already spent the money, and it spends nothing at all on the two months where the spending was actually happening.

The fix is not a longer sale, and it is not a deeper one. It is having a reason to turn up in October that is not a percentage.

Tomorrow at 12:30 I am planning a whole Black Friday season on a merino clothing store, with every number on screen. Live on Zoom, no replay. Link is in the bio.

Open your own subscription box and look at whatever is printed on the card sitting on top of the product. On most stores it says thank you, or it carries a code for a friend, and that card is the only piece of marketing you can be genuinely certain the customer has seen.

It is also sitting in the one moment where you know exactly what is going on. They are holding the product, they have not used any of it yet, and the next charge is already scheduled. Nothing else you send all quarter arrives with all three of those true at once.

The thing worth printing there is the rate, whatever the rate turns out to be for your product. Something like: most people get through this one in about six weeks, and if you are quicker or slower than that, here is how to move your next delivery, with the link sitting underneath it. That sentence is doing two jobs, because it tells somebody what normal use looks like before they start assuming they are doing it wrong, and it hands the slow ones a door that is not the cancel button.

What a store gets back for reprinting that card is a customer who moves the date instead of quietly deciding, and a subscription that survives a slow month rather than ending in one. That is the cheapest way I know to reduce churn on something that has not actually gone wrong yet.

Save this and go and look at what is printed on the card in your own box one.