Fri 9/25 | Ed 423 | You have until October 8th to fix this

⚡ The end of the year means a lot of writing and none of it has to start from a blank page. 25 AI prompts we actually use, free. → Grab the prompts

Right now your Q4 plan probably looks pretty good, the calendar’s clean and everybody agrees this is the year it runs on time.

Then November shows up, and the welcome flow is still thanking people for joining a community they joined for a sale, half your SMS numbers have no opt-in date anybody can explain, and the segment you meant to build is still a Slack message with 2 thumbs-up on it.

So here’s the whole plan between now and Cyber Monday, email and SMS together, in the order the work needs doing. 👇

Also inside:
→ Why your email would get laughed out of a media buying meeting
→ 1.5M+ real Shopify emails to steal structure from
→ 2 days in San Diego, and the 2027 dates
→ A win worth reading from the DTC world

Think about how you run Meta.

You upload a pile of creatives, let the system learn who responds to what, then get out of its way. That’s the whole reason the channel prints.

Then you switch tabs to email and undo all of it with a straight face.

45 minutes debating 2 subject lines. 1 hero image for 50,000 people. And your best customer opens the exact same email as someone who signed up yesterday.

Nobody would buy media like that, if you ran a single static creative to your whole audience on Meta you’d get laughed out of the room.

But in email, it’s still somehow the gold standard.

Allan fixes that. You hand it blocks the way you’d hand Meta a batch of ads (heroes, copy, offers, product blocks) or let it's AI design for you and it builds the best email for each subscriber at send time, learning from every send. It sits on top of Omnisend & Klaviyo, so your stack stays put.

Your ad account got smart delivery years ago. Your email’s been waiting for the upgrade.

→ Start your 30-day free trial at getallan.com

*Sponsored

Commerce Roundtable San Diego wrapped this week, and this recap video is the closest thing to being in the room.

And if you missed it this year have no fear... 2027 shows are already in the works.

→CR Ausin is next, check it out

Every brand has a version of the same November. The calendar looked reasonable in September, the creative got built, and then somewhere in the 3rd week the whole quarter turns into 1 long day of sending emails you wrote that morning.

It doesn’t go wrong in November though, it goes wrong in October, when the unglamorous work either gets done or doesn’t. Black Friday lands on the 27th this year, so here’s everything between now and then in the order it actually needs doing, email and SMS together.

Start here, and finish by October 8th: fix the pipes

Nothing you build in November matters if your sends land in spam or your SMS gets filtered, so this part is plumbing, and it’s the most valuable afternoon you’ll spend all quarter.

• Pull last year’s BFCM sends and rank them by revenue per recipient, not open rate. Most of the time the winner wasn’t the biggest discount, it was the email that went to the right 8,000 people.

• Check your authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passing, a subdomain you actually own, and one-click unsubscribe live in the header. Gmail and Yahoo want spam complaints under 0.3%, and November is exactly when you find out you’re over it.

• Clean the list before you scale it. Anyone who hasn’t opened in 6 months either gets a real win-back sequence this month or gets suppressed, and doing that now means your November sends go to people who want them.

• SMS: audit your consent. Confirm every number came in with clear opt-in language, your 10DLC registration is current, and your quiet hours are set by time zone rather than by your own. Nobody wants a carrier issue on the 27th.

• Fix the checkout path on a phone. Open your own cart email on your own phone, tap through, and count the taps to buy. Most of Q4 happens on a screen the size of your hand.

October 9th to the 22nd: build the segments and the offer ladder

This is the part most teams skip, and it’s the part that decides whether your Black Friday feels targeted or feels like a megaphone.

Build these 5 segments now, so they’re populated and tested before you need them:

• Bought during BFCM last year but not since, who are your single best audience in November and almost nobody emails them differently

• Top 10% by lifetime spend, who should hear about the sale before anyone else

• Lapsed 90 to 180 days, who need a reason to come back that isn’t 10% off

• Browsed in the last 30 days, never bought, who are your warmest non-customers

• SMS subscribers who aren’t on your email list, because they’re a separate audience and they’re often your fastest to convert

Then write the offer ladder down on 1 page. Early access for VIPs, the main offer, a mid-sale bump, and last chance. Decide now what SMS gets that email doesn’t, because “the same message, twice” is how people unsubscribe from both. A good split: email carries the story and the product, SMS carries the deadline and the link.

October 23rd to November 5th: flows before campaigns

Your flows will handle more traffic in November than anything you schedule, and they’re the only emails that go out while you sleep.

• Write the Q4 version of your welcome flow. Somebody who joins on November 24th shouldn’t get a 5-day brand story, they should get the offer in email 1.

• Cart and browse abandonment get a seasonal pass. Same structure, new copy, with shipping deadlines in the second send and the sale terms where the discount normally sits.

• Post-purchase is your December revenue. Somebody who buys on the 27th is your warmest lead on the 3rd, so build the cross-sell now while you have the time to think.

• Turn on the popup you’ll want in November. Early access to the sale is a better trade than 10% off, it grows both lists, and it costs you nothing in margin.

• SMS: build the 2-message cart flow if you don’t have one, keep both under 160 characters, and make the second one a deadline rather than a nag.

November 6th to the 19th: ramp, don’t leap

If you normally send 3 emails a week and you jump to 12 on Black Friday week, the mailbox providers treat that like a stranger shouting, so the ramp starts now.

• Add 1 send a week and lean on your engaged segments while you do it, so your volume climbs on the back of good signals

• Start teasing. A “something’s coming” email to your VIPs in mid-November does 2 jobs, it warms the list and it tells you who’s paying attention

• QA the whole thing on a phone, including every link, every discount code and the SMS preview, and have someone who didn’t write it read it

• Write the last-chance emails now, while you’re calm, because you will not write good copy at 9pm on Cyber Monday

The week itself: send the plan you already wrote

By now there’s nothing left to decide, which is the entire point of doing all of the above in October.

• Early access Tuesday or Wednesday to your top 10%, by email, with SMS reserved for the moment it opens

• Black Friday morning is 1 email, 1 offer, 1 link, no maze, and 1 SMS when the sale goes live

• Saturday and Sunday are not dead, they’re just quieter, and a mid-sale reminder to non-openers with a different subject line picks up the people who missed Friday

• Cyber Monday gets 2 emails, morning and a genuine last call in the evening, plus 1 SMS with hours left in it

• Then stop. December 1st is a thank you, not another sale, and your list will remember which one you sent.

The 3 things not to do

• Don’t email your whole list every day. Your engaged segment can take the volume, your 12-month lapsed cannot, and complaints from the second group hurt delivery to the first.

• Don’t send the same message on both channels. If SMS is just email with fewer words, people pick 1 and mute the other.

• Don’t save your best offer for Cyber Monday. People who bought on Friday at 20% off will find out, and they’ll email you about it.

None of it is clever, and that’s sort of the point. The teams who coast through Black Friday week are the ones who did the dull stuff early, so pick the first bullet on this list and go do it before lunch.

Between now and Cyber Monday you’ll write more emails than you wrote all summer, and every one of them starts with the same question: what should this look like?

Inboox answers it with 1.5M+ real Shopify brand emails, searchable, with an AI breakdown on each one explaining why it works.

See what the brands you admire actually sent last Black Friday and steal structure, the layout, the offer placement, the order of the blocks, and strategy.

It’s the difference between a blank page on a Tuesday morning and a brief you can build from in 10 minutes.

→ Explore Inboox

Spot & Tango spent $0 on brand marketing, then $3.5 million

The fresh dog food brand grew more than 70% year over year to roughly a $200 million run rate without a single top-of-funnel dollar, and now it’s putting $3.5 million into subway cars, billboards and TV, per Modern Retail. The cheapest thing they ran worked hardest though, a “worst dog breath” contest that lifted site visits 34% week over week, and their in-house PupGum line passed $10 million in recurring revenue in 7 months.

Ugg is having a year and just gave itself a slogan for it

Ugg did about $278 million last quarter, up roughly 5%, inside a Deckers quarter that cleared $1 billion, and it’s following that with a global brand platform called “Born to Feel” rolling out across 100+ North American stores plus Paris, London, Tokyo and Beijing, Glossy reports.

Annnnd that’s a wrap for this edition!

Thanks for hanging with us today. If this gave you an idea for your next send, share ecomemailmarketer.com with your favorite DTC marketer.

Remember: Do shit you love.

🤘 Jimmy Kim & Chase Dimond

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