288: How to Run Black Friday Without Cutting Your Price
For a long time my Black Friday campaign started with a discount, and then I built every email and countdown around that number. Over the past few years I've changed how I do this, and now most of my Black Friday campaigns in Creator's MBA and HobbyScool don't have a discount on them at all.
In this episode I walk through what a discount really costs you and five ways to structure a Black Friday offer that work better than a price cut, with real examples from both of my businesses and which kind of offer each one fits best.
In this episode
- Why a 30% off sale on a $397 course means you need 43 more buyers to hit the same number
- How a $70 gift card on a full-price membership got more sales than our 50% and 40% off days
- How we bundled holiday workshops worth $1,545 into a $69 offer without marking anything down
- How we presold a full year of summits that didn't exist yet
- How early access and tiered memberships give your best customers more without lowering the price
- Three questions to ask before you pick your Black Friday structure
Resources mentioned.
- Plan your whole holiday season with the 10-station Claude skill vault: Black Friday Profit Party
The Black Friday Profit Party helps you choose your offer structure, checks your plan against the hours you really have, and writes your emails, social posts and sales pages with you one campaign at a time. If you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included.
Get the Black Friday Profit Party →Episode transcript.
00:00Hi there, and welcome back to the Creator's MBA Show. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I'm glad that you're here with me today. In the last episode, I walked you through how Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple plan their whole holiday season. And today, I want to get really practical and talk about the offer itself, because I want to show you how to run a Black Friday holiday sale without cutting your price.
Now, for a long time, my holiday campaign started the same way every year. I'd pick a discount, maybe 40% off, 30% off or even 50% off, and then I would build all the emails and countdowns around that number. And over the past few years, I have changed how I do this. And now,
01:00most of my Black Friday campaigns in both Creator's MBA and HobbyScool don't have a discount on them at all.
I still run one here and there, but it's the exception and not the rule. And I want to tell you why, because there are two things a discount costs you that people don't always think about. The first one is the math. Let's say that your course is $397 and your goal for Black Friday is 100 sales. If you hit that, you're bringing in $39,700.
Now, let's say that you run a 30% off campaign instead. To bring in that same $39,700, you need 143 sales, which is 43 more buyers than you needed at full price.
02:00And with the size of list that a lot of us have, finding an extra 43 buyers in one week is hard. The second one is what you're teaching your list.
Every time your price moves, your list learns something, and what they learn is that waiting works. If people know you do a big price drop on your membership or your course every November, then they're going to hold off on buying the rest of the year, because your regular price starts to look like a starting point.
And then you're stuck running that sale year after year, because that's what everybody's waiting for. So today, I'm going to walk you through five ways to structure a Black Friday offer that work better than a price cut, and I'm going to give you some
03:00real examples from both of my brands, mostly from our 2025 Black Friday campaigns. And for each one, I'm going to tell you which offer it fits best.
Structure number one is free gift with purchase. And this one, honestly, is one of my favorites. I've been doing it for several years now, and your price stays exactly the same. You just add a little something on top of it, so people are getting more for the same investment, and you're never sending that message that your offer is cheaper this week.
Here's what it looked like in Creator's MBA for Black Friday 2025. One of our deals was for my flagship offer, which is a bigger investment, and the gift was two private strategy calls with me,
04:00plus a flywheel strategy session.
I love giving calls as the gift, because when I can sit on Zoom face to face with somebody and really dig into their business and help them put together their growth flywheel plan, I can figure out what they need to work on really fast, so they get results sooner. I always set specific dates for those calls so people have a reason to decide and get them scheduled right then.
For HobbyScool, which has very different price points, we sold an annual access pass to the Craft & Create Club at the full price of $70. And then we gave people a $70 gift card to our Shopify store, which is mostly low-cost digital products. So in their mind, the annual
05:00membership was basically free.
Now, that email went out to over 37,000 people and got over 1,300 clicks, and we had more sales that day than any other day of the week, including our 50% off and 40% off days. So let's talk about who this fits. I would say anybody who has something valuable to give that doesn't cost much to deliver, like a template, a gift card to your shop or a bonus session.
It works especially well on higher-priced offers, where the bonus feels big and you're only going to have a handful of buyers. The one thing to watch is a gift that eats up your hours when lots of people buy it. I knew that with my flagship offer, I could handle the calls for however many people signed up.
06:00The second structure is a bundle, and this is another one I love because we have a big library of past offers to pull from. Old workshops, past summits, even products that we've retired that are still really useful to people. In this case, you pull a group of those together, and you show people what it would cost if they bought each piece separately. So for HobbyScool, we put together a bundle of holiday workshops, and if somebody had gone to our Shopify store and bought each of those workshops on its own, it would have cost them $1,545.
The bundle price was $69, and that's an easy yes for people. And none of those workshops ever got marked down on their own. So let's talk about who
07:00this fits. Anybody who's been at this for a while and has a back catalog sitting there, like old workshops, replays, templates or past recordings. If you've only ever made one or two things, this one's a little bit harder, so I would skip it and head on to the next one, which is a presell.
Black Friday and the weeks around Christmas are one of my favorite times to get a new offer out into the world. If you have an idea or a curriculum outline for something that you really want to build, preselling it is how you find out if people want it before you spend all the time building it. And if you put it out over Black Friday and 20 people buy it, that tells you a lot.
And people aren't buying it at a discount. They're buying early. You can
08:00call it founding access, so the first group gets in and gets that behind-the-scenes entry while you build it. Now, I've done this before, and it has worked very well.
In HobbyScool last year, we sold our 2026 Annual Workshop Pass, which covered 12 summits that didn't even exist yet. So people bought a full year of events because of how good the year before was. So two things on this one. Only presell something that you know you'll finish, because the delivery date is the promise that you're making.
And if you presell something and only two people buy it when you needed around 20 to make it work, it's okay to refund them and say you'll try it again another time. So let's talk about who this fits. I would say anyone with a new offer that they want to test, or anyone who
09:00runs events or programs on a calendar and can sell next year's pass now.
Now, structure number four is early access for your best customers. These are your active members, your past buyers and the subscribers who open and click on everything. They've already shown you that they trust you, and they're the most likely to buy. You aren't lowering the price or giving them a deal.
You're giving them first look. I did this in both businesses last year. Before any of our five Black Friday deals opened, we sent a preview email that laid them all out, and I gave people a bonus just for opening that email and putting the dates on their calendar. In HobbyScool, that preview email went out to over 39,000 people and got a ton of
10:00clicks, because people wanted to know what was coming down the pipeline.
They had already contacted us and said, "What do you have coming for Black Friday? We want to know." So say you're adding something special to a membership or a group coaching program, and you only want 10 people. You can send it to a small segment of your list, tell them it's part of Black Friday and that you're only taking the first 10 people who sign up, and then you're done.
So let's talk about who this fits. I would say anybody with members, past buyers or an engaged segment of their list, and anybody who's selling something that has limited spots. The fifth one is tiered offers, and I use this in every one of my membership programs. People get to pick how much they want to commit.
And for Black Friday, you can
11:00give the bigger bonuses to the higher levels. So for HobbyScool, the Craft & Create Club has three ways into it. There's monthly at $7, annual at $70, and we have a lifetime option. For Black Friday, we still offer all three at the regular prices, but we put really strong bonuses on the annual and the lifetime so people have a reason to go for the bigger commitment.
Nothing gets discounted. People just get more when they commit to more. So let's talk about who this fits. I would say anybody who has memberships, subscriptions or anything with recurring payments. If you don't have tiers yet, Black Friday is a good time to add an annual or lifetime option to a monthly membership.
So let's talk about how to pick the right one for your offer. You might be thinking, "Okay, Destini,
12:00all of these sound good, but which one do I pick?" Here's a quick way to match them up. If you have a higher-priced offer, start with the free gift with purchase. If you have a back catalog of past workshops or products, look at a bundle.
If you have a new idea or a calendar of events for next year, presell it. If you have members and past buyers, give them early access to something. And if you have a membership, use those tiers and put the bigger bonuses on the bigger commitment. Then I want you to ask yourself three questions. The first one is about margin.
What can you actually afford to give? I want you to think about your time, the access you're giving and any real costs. With my memberships, there's a real cost to serving every single member, so it's different than a one-time
13:00self-study course. The second one is about your list. Is your list cold, so the offer has to do all of the work, or do you have an engaged audience? If your list hasn't heard you sell anything this year, Black Friday is going to be hard no matter what structure you pick. So start selling in every email you send out now. In Newsletter Profit Club, I teach this as the Teach & Pitch Method, and when you do it every week, your list is ready to buy by the time Black Friday gets here.
The third one is about what you already own. I don't want you building a bunch of brand-new offers just for Black Friday and putting all of that pressure on yourself. Go back through your old lead magnets and your old courses, and see what you can update. Inside Newsletter Profit Club, members have gone through a few years of their old lead magnets and
14:00low-priced offers.
They've used AI to update them and add AI into them, and they started selling things that they used to give away for free. So let's pull all of this together. You have five ways to run Black Friday without cutting your price: a free gift with purchase, a bundle, a presell, early access for your best customers and tiered offers.
You can run one of them on its own, or you can run a few of them across a multi-day event, the way we ran five deals in five days last year. If you want help picking which ones fit your business and putting them in order, that's what the Black Friday Profit Party is for. I've run this program for three years now, and this year it's a self-paced program with a 10-station Claude skill vault that plans your whole holiday season with you
15:00from November 1st into the new year.
It helps you choose your offer structure, it checks your plan against the hours you really have to spend on this, and then it writes your emails, the social posts and the sales pages with you, one campaign at a time. And if you want to run a discount, it does the math on your numbers first so you can see what that costs you.
I'm going to put the link for it in the show notes, and if you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included, so you don't need to buy it. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll chat with you next week.
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