During this upcoming Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Q4 holiday period, DTC brands will collectively spend billions of dollars driving traffic to their websites. But here's the bad news… 96-98% of those very expensive visitors that you just paid for will leave your site without buying anything and most brands will never see these visitors again. 

The reality is that most site visitors never convert. They see your ad, visit your site, then bounce and once they leave, they are gone forever. But there is one thing that every smart marketer reading this can and should do to make better use of their paid media dollars that they’re spending in Q4. And that’s implementing smarter opt-ins that capture more first party data even if visitors don’t buy. 

The best brands I know have email pop-up opt-in rates of 10%+. So for every 100K visitors coming to their site, they are collecting 10,000 emails and as my good friend Ben Yahalom at True Classic says, emails should be considered as assets on your balance sheet. 

Why? Because with that information, you can message these prospects over and over again until they either convert or unsubscribe. It gives you more at bats to win the sale so even if they don’t buy during BFCM, you can get them into your ecosystem and start marketing to them until they eventually do. 

So with this in mind, I wanted to write today’s article about a few tips for brands heading into Q4 so you can maximize the ROI on your dollars spent. I think total revenue and net profit should always be the #1 goal from paid media but collecting emails and SMS numbers from the other 90%+ of traffic that doesn’t buy is a close #2.

Why Every Opt-in Matters:

Think about it like this. If you're spending $200K on BFCM ads and driving 50,000 visitors to your site, you're essentially paying $4 per visitor.

With typical 2-3% conversion rates, you're paying $133-$200 to acquire each customer during peak season.

But here’s what should keep you up at night. Those other 48,000+ non-converting visitors could represent hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in missed revenue unless you find a way to bring them back. 

Whenever I looked at a brand, one of the first things that I do is try to figure out how can Instant implement really good, dynamic pop-ups with strong offers (i.e free discounts, gifts with purchase, a downloadable guide, access to a new colorway or variant, etc) that will get them to say yes and give me their email and SMS. 

As of late, brands have been using Instant for all of their needs because we have the best proven AI assisted opt in tool. Our tech is great because we have a point based system that triggers the popup at the perfect moment. It also recognizes and remembers your site visitors so it can send them emails and serve them different popups when they come back to your site later on. From the tests we’ve run with clients, they’ve seen that Instant is one of the fastest ways to 2X opt-in rates. Most brands see a lot higher than a 2X but this is what I normally see in the first few weeks and once a brand achieves this, the tool pays for itself in the first 15-30 days. The numbers here at Instant have seen a ROI are even higher and many of the brands we serve see a 10-20X ROI on the price of the software when you look at how much revenue it drives. 

The Follow Up Sequence To Make More Money: 

But getting emails via a popup is only one piece of the puzzle, now you have to engage with them and send high quality reminders at the right time. 

Maybe someone is on your site looking at a pair of coral blue joggers that you have. They enter their email into the popup but ultimately churn and exit away from your site. If you use a product like Instant, we can send automated emails on your behalf and tailor them to match the user’s browsing behavior. This works whether they abandon a cart or not. So even if they were just browsing, Instant picks up enough information based on their behavior to know which pages they were spending time on and what products they might be interested in.

With that info, we use our AI to generate emails and send them out to re-engage prospects after they're gone. From what I’ve seen, this often leads to 2-3X the rate of sales from re-enagement which, depending on the size of your brand, could mean 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per year or more. And when you get the email opt-ins from Instant, you still have full flexibility to use your existing ESP to send them other broad + targeted blasts as part of your normal list. Lastly, if an opted-in shopper does add a product to their cart, the automations get even better/more precise. 

A Simple Win Back Flow You Can Steal: 

But IMO, sending just one automated email is almost never enough to close the sale. In reality, you need to have a multi-step sequence to actually get them to convert. So in my blue joggers cart abandonment example, here’s what I’d do: 

Email 1: “Still thinking about these?”

You can send this 1-2 hours after the site visit. Here you want to show the exact joggers they viewed, reinforce the key benefits (i.e super-soft material) and then include a CTA to return to their cart.

Email 2: “Need a second opinion?”

Then the next day, if they don’t convert, you send social proof. You can have a subject line or preview text that says something like “See why 2,000+ people are obsessed with these joggers.” In this email you want to share any of the positive reviews that you have. Maybe you mention how people style them (i.e for airport fits or for weekend errands) to try to drive them back to purchase. 

And if a reminder or testimonials don’t work in the first two emails, you can hit them with a discount next. Something like: 

Email 3: “Here’s 10% off just for you”

The goal is to send something that will make their decision easier. So in this email you can send a personalized 10% off code valid for 48 hours to drive some urgency and get them to checkout. If that doesn't work, I recommend driving scarcity by sending something like: 

Email 4: “Only a few left in your size”

In this email you want to reference scarcity and say something like “This product is selling fast. Grab yours before they’re gone.” Obviously if at any point they have converted, you un-enroll them from your sequence so they aren’t getting bombarded with more emails after they have purchased. 

And then the last email I like to do is the risk reversal, talking about your return policy. 

Email 5: “What if they’re not your thing?”

Here you can talk about your return policy / free exchanges and have a CTA to try them risk-free. I think any brand can make a version of this sequence I just shared and increase their revenue. Also, Instant’s AI is getting better and better at this everyday and they automatically build out and send some of these automated flows. Their end goal is to do it all for you by driving sales on autopilot with complex multi-stage flows. 

The thing about Instant is we’ve already done the hard work of figuring out what actually drives email revenue at scale. We have battle-tested abandonment triggers across the fastest-growing brands in DTC. Our team will actually block you from going live if your flow strategy isn’t strong enough to convert. So not only do you identify 10x more shoppers but you also get a second, expert set of eyes on every automation that goes out.

Why You Should Start Early: 

I’m writing about BFCM now because Q4 will be here sooner than we all think. Why wouldn’t you want to start building the biggest email list that you possibly can and start testing tools that could help you re-engage visitors to turn them into customers for your brand? 

Basically, If you start with Instant now, by BFCM you'll have 3-4 months of identified visitor data. That could be 10-100,000+ emails to activate during peak season. If you start in October, you're beginning with zero identified visitors while your competitors who started early have databases of qualified prospects to reach out to. 

And here’s another thing most brands don’t understand. There is a compounding effect to all of this. Let’s say in month 1 you identify 5,000 otherwise anonymous visitors. In month 3, you're retargeting those 5,000 while identifying 8,000 new ones. 

In month 6, you have a database of 35,000 identified prospects. In month 11, you're sitting on 100,000+ identified visitors who've shown interest in your brand. Now you’ve turned email opt-ins into a revenue generating machine because they are all getting hit with automated email sequences like the one I shared above. 

That's why brands like The Collagen Co are generating $750k monthly from their Instant email list but it took them 11 months to build and reach that scale. 

The LTV Hack No One Talks About

Most of this email has focused on opt-ins and for good reason. You can’t convert what you don’t capture. But what happens next, retention, is the second half of the game and too many brands are dropping the ball here. I feel like most people assume that “If we get them once, they’ll come back” but the thing is, they won’t! Especially not without a real system in place.

Here’s what actually happens: you spend months spending a ton of money to acquire new customers but once they get in the door and buy, you stop nurturing them. Then November hits and they get a bunch of “Happy BFCM” emails but they don’t convert. This is because you haven’t treated them the right way from the beginning. 

IMO, good retention is all about making every returning shopper feel like they matter, like you actually saw them walk back through the door. The best brands have flows that activate the second a past customer revisits because their behavior gets tracked, and the messaging and comms goes out and it’s all personal and it all performs better when the shopper has been identified by Instant. At Instant, I’ve seen firsthand just how powerful this can be from our past data.

• Brands that launched with Instant at the start of Q3 saw 85% more Q3 shoppers return for BFCM than those who launched in January.

• Shoppers indefinitely identified by Instant repurchase 50% more often than other traffic.

Ask yourself, if your returning customers buy 50% more often… what’s that worth to your bottom line?

No Double Counting: 

Another interesting thing about Instant that we don’t talk enough about is how incremental our revenue is. When running Audiences, Klaviyo's abandonment flows always take first priority to guarantee that the revenue from Instant is entirely incremental (users identified both by Klaviyo and Instant don't count) This is really powerful and I think we are one of the very few SaaS brands in the space that do this. We don’t take priority and double count the sales. This makes our case studies hit a lot harder when you know we don’t double count. 

AI & Personalization: 

I think the writing is on the wall here. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, AI is coming for every workflow that exists in your business. The future state of tools like Instant means they will know who your visitors are, what items they are looking at, and then they can build out fully automated, highly complex, multi-step sequences that hit people with the perfect copy, subject line, preview text, offer, and designs at exactly the right time. The thing is, you want to get on this train now. You should start testing these tools because as they get better you will get the benefits long before your competitors do. 

Full Funnel Attribution & Closing The Loop:

As a company, here at Instant we are on fire lately, launching new products at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. For example, We just released our full funnel attribution tool which makes everything a lot more interesting. It makes perfect sense that we would do this to tie everything together. Now you get opt-ins, audiences, AI powered email flows, ad targeting enrichment features and their most recent release, attribution. You can think of attribution like another all in one dashboard that incorporates email and all of the detailed metrics about a customer journey alongside what’s happening with ads all in one place. I just started testing this and it’s very cool. 

We are quickly positioning ourselves to be involved in every point of the customer journey. We have first touch opt-ins, ad data, and all of the nuanced metrics around email sequences and re-engagement/retention efforts all in one place. We are covering the entire lifespan of the customer relationship which makes the tool a lot more powerful as your brand grows. 

The Bottom Line:

Look, I get it. Adding more tools to your stack feels like work. But here's the thing, while you're debating whether to implement smarter opt-ins and AI email flows, your competitors are already 3 months ahead building their databases for Q4.

The math is simple: If you can capture 10% opt-ins instead of 2%, you've just set yourself up for a much bigger revenue opportunity over the next 12 months. That's not something you want to miss. I've seen too many brands treat email capture as an afterthought, then wonder why their CAC keeps climbing while their LTV stays flat. It takes 15 minutes to set up and it actually works. If you are interested in checking them out, you can do that here. I am giving anyone who reads this 50% off their first month with Instant audiences and 3 months free for Instant AI. So, the choice is yours but remember, your competitors are reading this too and they want to beat you so I bet they are going to try this and see if it works. 

Okay, that’s all for this week. It’s time to get back to work.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you soon.

Liam.