Grade last year's BFCM emails

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📊 Which of last year's black friday emails deserve another run

🔍 Google warns against fake authors and reveals how long SEO changes take

🏆 Ad of the day

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📊 Which of last year's black friday emails deserve another run

Ask which BFCM email performed best and most teams point to the one with the highest revenue. That campaign often gave away the deepest discount and lost the most subscribers doing it.

Score every campaign on what it actually left behind.

The formula

Net value per 1,000 sends = (revenue − discount cost − unsubscribe cost) ÷ sends × 1,000

Unsubscribe cost is unsubscribes multiplied by what one subscriber is worth. Divide last year's email revenue by your average list size. If you earned $600,000 from a 150,000-person list, each subscriber is worth $4 a year.

Discount cost is the total markdown buyers received on orders from that email, which your order data reports line by line.

A worked comparison

Both campaigns went to 100,000 people.

Campaign A: $42,000 revenue, 9,000indiscounts,600unsubscribes(2,400). Net value: $306 per 1,000.

Campaign B: $51,000 revenue, 18,000indiscounts,1,500unsubscribes(6,000). Net value: $270 per 1,000.

B looked like the winner in the dashboard. A left you with more.

Pulling these numbers by hand takes an afternoon. Omnisend connects with Claude or ChatGPT, so you can ask for last year's campaign results in the chat and work through the scoring there, and its BFCM AI playbook has ready-made prompts for this audit. You can try the BFCM prompts.

Compare like with like

Black Friday morning sells itself. Score each email against others sent in the same slot, such as Friday mornings or Cyber Monday evenings, and not against a Tuesday warm-up.

Attributed revenue also includes buyers who would have purchased anyway. Use the scores to rank campaigns against each other.

The rerun rule

• Top third: rerun with the same offer and timing.
• Middle third: change one thing, usually the offer depth or subject line, and rerun.
• Bottom third: retire it, unless it was the only email in its slot.
• Any campaign with unsubscribes above 0.5% of sends: retire it regardless of score. That cutoff is my judgment.

Make next year's audit easier

On October 1, Shopify added notes to Shopify Analytics. Teams can now pin context, such as campaign launches and promotions, directly onto time-series reports.

Use it this season. Log each send, any offer change and any site slowdown as it happens. Next October, a revenue spike comes with its explanation attached.

Pull last year's five biggest BFCM sends, calculate net value per 1,000 and sort. The order will probably differ from the one in your head.

🔍 Google warns against fake authors and reveals how long SEO changes take

Google has updated its helpful content guidance to address deceptive author profiles, while new insights from Search Central Live reveal how long crawling, indexing and SEO recovery can take.

The Breakdown:

Fake Author Profiles Signal Low Quality - Google now warns against AI-generated headshots, invented names, and false credentials used to make content appear written by human experts. Such deception signals low-quality content to Google's automated systems.

Fake Expertise Can Hurt Content Trust - Google's quality rater guidelines already instruct reviewers to give deceptive author profiles the Lowest quality rating. The new guidance extends this warning directly to site owners, although author bylines themselves are not a ranking factor.

Crawling and Indexing Take Time - Google typically discovers new URLs in 20 hours, refreshes known pages in around 30 days, and processes sitemaps within 24 hours, according to a conference attendee's recap. These timelines are estimates, not guarantees.

SEO Recovery Can Take Months - Title updates typically take 1–2 days, canonical changes 1–3 weeks, and site migrations 1–3 months. Recovering from a core update can take 3–6 months, sometimes extending to a year.

Google's guidance puts greater emphasis on authentic authorship while providing clearer expectations for SEO changes. Publishers should verify author credentials and avoid misleading profiles, while SEO teams need to account for crawling delays and longer recovery periods when evaluating results.

🎥 Ad of the Day

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Benefits Scan Fast - The three bottom callouts quickly communicate barrier repair, hydration and under-eye support, reducing cognitive load while reinforcing the serum’s multi-benefit positioning.

Open with a negative command, then immediately reveal the desirable outcome. Contrarian framing can increase thumb-stop ratio while making familiar product benefits feel less predictable.

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