The Black Friday That Made The Least $$ (and Grew My List the Most)

00:03This episode of the Email Growth Show is sponsored by Find CoLab, the collaboration directory I created to make growing your audience through partnerships so much easier. If you have ever thought, "I know I should be doing more collaborations, but where on earth do I find them?" This is for you. Find CoLab brings real opportunities together in one place. Think bundles, summits, podcast guest spots, freebie swaps, guest teaching, and more. You can discover opportunities that fit your business, apply to them, and keep track of your commitments without everything getting lost in your inbox. And the best part? You can get started completely free. Head to findcolab.com, that's F-I-N-D-C-O-L-A-B dot com, to create your account and start exploring. That's findcolab.com.

00:50All right, let's jump into today's episode. I'm about to tell you about the worst Black Friday sale I ever ran and why it might be the smartest decision that I made all year. Let's get into it. Are you a female business owner frustrated with battling the algorithm and looking for growth strategies that don't involve awkwardly pointing or dancing online or throwing cash at paid ads? Welcome to the Email Growth Show. I'm your host, Kylie Kelly, visibility and email marketing strategist. I grew my email list from 0 to almost 10,000 subscribers in less than 2 years, and the same is possible for you too. Are you ready to build your email list and start making more money in your online business? Let's head into today's episode. Hey, hey, my loves.

01:45Welcome back to the Email Growth Show. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. I recorded a solo episode as part of a smaller series called the Black Friday Case Files, which is live right now. It's real conversations about what actually worked and what totally flopped in other people's Black Friday sales. It's been really interesting, and I opened that series myself with the year I sold the least and grew my list the most. That was last year. I went through 3 real years of Black Fridays and what I've done: 3 completely different strategies and the honest numbers behind each one. Now, I recorded it specifically for the Black Friday Case Files, but listening back to it, I thought this doesn't belong tucked away in this micro audio summit. This belongs on the podcast too.

02:33That's what we are doing today. I'm going to press play and let you listen to this short yet powerful recap of my past Black Fridays so you can start to think about yours. And a quick heads up before we dive in: this is the exact kind of thing that I'm teaching inside Black Friday Made Simple, which is my step-by-step plan for growing, nurturing, or selling to your list this Black Friday without panicking or copying somebody else's playbook. It's opening for a few days starting Monday, so keep an eye on your inbox, or you can click the little secret link in the show notes to have an early bird look. All right, let's talk about Black Friday. This session is called The Year I Sold the Least and Grew My List the Most. 3 Black Fridays, 3 completely different strategies, the real numbers behind each one, including the year I barely sold a thing. Let's get into it.

03:24Year 1, I call this the everything approach. My first ever Black Friday was 2023, and like a lot of first attempts, I went big. I'm very much a go big or go home kind of girl. So I thought, let's just do it. I purchased a Black Friday product that taught 5 different offers over 5 days, and I followed that framework to a T. So it literally was 5 different offers: a Voxer intensive, a discounted annual membership pass, a podcast guesting program, a workshop series, and a digital product. The plan was a new offer every single day for 5 days.

04:02Build up the hype, build up the momentum, keep people excited. By day 3, I hated it. 5 sales pages, all the emails written, and it just felt like too much. It was too much for me, and honestly, it was probably too much for my list as well. So I did something that felt genuinely scary at the time. I emailed everyone and said, "Hey, we're not doing this anymore. Here is one page, all 5 offers. Go your hardest, go have fun with it, go and check it out."

04:31And people loved that. People loved the transparency of that. I got so many replies thanking me for changing my mind mid-campaign. That one honest email built more trust than the whole 5-day countdown ever would have. Now, what did this look like in revenue? What did the numbers actually look like? I sold 2 spots of the Voxer intensive, 6 spots of the membership annual pass, 2 for the workshop series, a digital product, and the podcast guesting program, the one that I was most excited about: zero. Not one single person signed up to that. I think the main reason behind that was because I hadn't talked about podcast guesting once in the months before. I just threw a $297 offer at my list out of nowhere because it was Black Friday and wondered why nobody grabbed it.

05:21A few months later, when I relaunched that exact same offer after talking about it consistently, I sold 3 spots within 24 hours at an even higher price point. Exactly the same offer, completely different runway and warm-up, completely different result. So the lesson from year 1 is it's rarely about the price, right? It is all about whether you have warmed people up to the offer first. And also, it needs to feel good for you. I'm so proud of myself for changing my mind halfway through. I know a lot of coaches and mentors probably would've told me not to do that. That feels a little bit crazy, but I'm so glad I did. It has to feel good for you as well as your audience. Now let's talk about year 2.

06:05This is the collaboration approach. By 2024, I'd learned my lesson about doing too much myself, so I tried something a little bit different. I put together a Black Friday deals page and I invited other female business owners to submit their offers so I could be an affiliate for them and share the whole roundup with my list. Instead of only selling my own stuff, I leaned into collaboration more. I also floated a few smaller offer ideas of my own and asked my list to reply and tell me which one they actually wanted. I love doing this kind of market research. I had a Kickstart with Kit mini course, DIY brand photography training, because I used to be a photographer, an evergreen email workshop, and a discount on 2 existing programs, my Summit Planning School and Bundle Like a Boss.

06:49Here's the real number. My own new sales that month, the stuff that actually came from Black Friday specifically, sat around $946. Not the flashy "I made $5K this Black Friday" headline that you might assume. Most of my income was actually my membership renewing like it does every single month, Black Friday or not. That honest split matters: $940-odd in new sales, and then $4,000 in normal recurring membership that would have landed anyway. And then on top of that, there was about $1,100 in affiliate income from that Black Friday deals page, from being a part of the collaboration. I always look at Black Friday as a bonus. So getting $1,100-odd in affiliate income? Great.

07:35I didn't have to deliver a thing. It was all done. I really, really loved that. Now, if we go to last year, the year that I almost sold nothing. 2025, and this is the year that actually inspired this conversation, because I decided not to run my own Black Friday sale at all. Instead, I opened up 5 sponsored email spots in my own inbox and I let other business owners pay to get in front of my audience. I told my email list flat out, "Hey, I'm skipping my own sale this year, send me your deals instead." Because of that, my new sales that month were the smallest that they'd ever been.

08:10I made something like $688 from actual new sales, and most of that was from those sponsor spots themselves, and then a handful of Business Breakthrough sessions. So there was no big offer of my own that I sold during that month. That was intentional. Last year I was still all about list growth, so I decided to focus on growing my email list instead. I was invited into a Black Friday bundle with a group of other business owners that year, and from that bundle alone I grew my list by hundreds of subscribers. I was doing that with the intention of setting up 2026 with a much larger email list to make more revenue, right? So even though that was the year that I sold the least, it was the year that my list grew the most, which was really cool. Now here's where it gets interesting, because I also pulled my overall revenue across all 3 Novembers, not just new sales.

09:07I wanted to look at the whole month. 2023, that month I made $8,257. 2024, $8,146. 2025, $8,387. Basically freaking identical. 3 completely different strategies and my November revenue barely moved. That tells you something on its own, right? The specific strategy you pick for Black Friday matters a lot less than we all think it does. But then I went a little bit deeper and I looked at December, which was really interesting.

09:42In December 2023, I brought in $11,729. 2024, $13,350. 2025, only $8,953. That's a real gap, right? $11,000, $13,000, down to $8,000. And why I'm highlighting this is because the 2 years that I actually asked my email list to buy something in November, December came in noticeably stronger. The year that I mostly sat out and let other people do the selling, December dropped. Again, I want to be honest with you, this is not a controlled experiment. Other things shift year to year, of course they do.

10:21But my read on this is that asking people to buy in November seems to keep some kind of buying muscle warm going into December, going into the end of the year. Even when the November offer itself might not be the thing that changes everything, the act of asking might do more work than we give it credit for. So the takeaway here isn't to never do a sponsored roundup or to always run 5 offers. It's to know what you actually want out of Black Friday this year. List growth, revenue, or a bit of both. Build your plan around that on purpose. Not because everyone else is doing something, not because you feel like you have to. Because when you look at those 3 years, they all come down to the same 3 lanes. Years 1 and 2 were mostly sell.

11:08Year 3 was almost entirely grow, right? Before you decide what you're doing for Black Friday, I want you to ask yourself one question first. Are you trying to grow your email list? Do you need to nurture the people already on it? Or are you ready to go and wanting to sell? Pick one focus, because that will become your lane and everything else can follow from that. But even if you have an intention to grow or nurture your list instead of selling this Black Friday, please still try to sell something. Why? Because you just saw the evidence that if you sell something in November, your December has more of a chance to come back strong, to make more revenue, to end the year stronger with more income. So I would really encourage you: yes, if you want to grow, if you want to do a bundle or a collaboration or something to grow your email list in November instead, awesome. Still try and sell something on the side. The same goes for that nurture muscle. If you're doing something to nurture your audience instead of selling, still sell something, even if it's in the PS. Still try to sell something, so you're giving yourself the best possible chance to end 2026 strong, making more revenue.

12:14Okay, my loves, thank you so much for listening to that one. I hope it landed the same way it did the first time around. And again, a quick heads up before you go. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm getting into inside Black Friday Made Simple, my step-by-step plan for growing, nurturing, or selling to your list this Black Friday, which is not very far away, 6 weeks away. The reason that I created this simple course is I don't want you to be panicking and I don't want you to be copying anybody else's strategy. I want you to evaluate what your business actually needs this Black Friday. Black Friday Made Simple is opening for presale starting Monday. It will be open for a couple of days at an incredibly low price.

12:53But if you don't want to wait until next week, click the link in the show notes. It's a little secret link just for my pod family so that you can go and check it out and grab it early if it speaks to you. Thank you again for being here. I can't wait to see you next week. All right, bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Email Growth Show. I hope you found valuable insights into the next steps you can take to grow your email list and boost your business without relying on social media or paid ads. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show and share it with others.

13:26Your feedback helps me reach more female entrepreneurs just like you who are ready to say goodbye to social media and leverage email marketing to grow their business and make a bigger impact. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.