The BFCM Email Playbook I Shared on the Checkout Champ Podcast (After Sending a Billion Emails)

I recently sat down with Matt Martorano, founder of Checkout Champ, for a long conversation about ecommerce email. The full hour, no filler. Matt runs a checkout platform used by thousands of high-volume brands, which means he sees conversion data most people never will. So this wasn’t a surface-level “send more emails” chat. We got into why CAC has exploded, why 99% of email marketing is done wrong, and the exact Black Friday Cyber Monday sequence we run across our client brands.

The full episode is below. If you’d rather read, I’ve pulled out the parts that matter most, with the reasoning behind each one.

One housekeeping note before we start: early in the episode Matt quoted our $180M attributed revenue figure. As I told him on the show, that number is out of date: it’s now past $250M across 800+ ecommerce brands. The playbook below is what generated it.

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Why your CAC went from $5 to $80 (and what it means for email)

Around 2015–2017, the golden era of ecommerce, brands were acquiring customers for $2 to $5. Today that’s ballooned to $70, $80, $100+ in some verticals. Two forces did that, and neither of them is “the algorithm changed.”

Trust eroded. When hundreds of thousands of sellers, some good actors and many not, spent a decade targeting the same two or three hundred million high-disposable-income shoppers, bad experiences accumulated. Orders that never shipped. Products that weren’t as advertised. Every one of those made the next purchase from any brand harder. The loss of trust can be tied directly to rising CAC, and almost nobody talks about it.

The subsidy ended. In the early days, Silicon Valley money was effectively offsetting your acquisition costs. Investors were pouring billions into social platforms to buy market penetration, and cheap ads were the bait. Once Meta, Google, and TikTok hit their growth thresholds, the discount ended and the rules tightened.

Here’s why this matters for email: when CAC was $5, nobody needed CRO, nobody needed retention, nobody needed email. You could run an inefficient engine and still print money. At $80+ CAC, every dollar you can pull from your existing database is a dollar you don’t have to hand to Zuckerberg. That’s the entire reason retention marketing went from afterthought to survival skill.

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DORTA: the five checkpoints every email has to pass

I’ve compressed everything I know about email into five words: Delivered, Opened, Read, Trusted, Acted: the DORTA Method.

It used to be four. I added the D after Google and Yahoo made the biggest change to email deliverability in 20+ years in 2024–2025. Because here’s the brutal ordering: I don’t care about your offer, your copy, or your design. If the email doesn’t get delivered, nobody sees it and nobody buys. Then it has to be opened, and contrary to what most people think, opens don’t depend on your subject line. They depend on the relationship the reader has with your brand. Then it has to actually be read, trusted, and finally acted on.

Most email audits start at the bottom of that stack (“let’s A/B test subject lines”) while the top of the stack is on fire. When we audit a brand, we work down the checkpoints in order, because a failure higher up makes everything below it irrelevant.

And one thing I told Matt that surprises people: no email marketer on earth can fix a broken customer experience. If the ad over-promises, the shipping takes three weeks, and the product under-delivers, the list goes cold and it’s not a copywriting problem. The email list is a living, breathing organism, and how it behaves is a direct readout of how the whole business is run. It’s the same reason you never go back to the restaurant that made you wait 45 minutes for an overcooked steak. No follow-up email was saving that relationship.

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Your partials list is a goldmine missing a catalyst

Checkout Champ captures “partials”: people who started entering their details at checkout and stopped. Matt asked whether that list has value. It’s arguably the most valuable list you have, but you have to understand why those people stopped.

I think about it with what I call the priority curve. Every human is making dynamic priority decisions all day long, and ads are static, dumb messages sprayed at a smart brain. Your product might genuinely be wanted, but it’s sitting at priority #7 behind the kids’ school shoes. Then a catalyst event happens (the car engine dies, the last bottle runs out, the season changes) and something jumps to priority #1 instantly.

Partials aren’t “lost.” They’re people whose catalyst hasn’t fired yet. Your job is to either wait intelligently or engineer the catalyst: a deadline, a reason-why offer, a restock, a seasonal moment. That reframe changes how you write every abandoned cart and checkout email you send.

Pick up the damn phone

The single most practical tactic from the whole episode, and it was given to me years ago by Justin Christensen: call five abandoned carts, five partials, and five new customers every single day.

Not to sell. To collect data. “Hi, I’m Pete from XYZ. We’re a small family business and noticed you didn’t finish your order. Is there anything we could have done better?” Do that daily and in 30 days you’re sitting on 150+ live data points about why people don’t buy from you. Feed the spreadsheet to AI and ask for the top three reasons people abandon, the top three reasons partials stall, and the top three reasons buyers actually chose you. Now your CRO tests, your ads, and your emails are built on real customer language instead of guessing whether to change a blue button to pink.

If you’re doing over $1M a year, I’d go further: that’s a dedicated local person’s job. Meanwhile most brand owners are asking ChatGPT how to reduce their CAC. Pick up the phone and talk to your customers.

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The non-negotiable flows (and the one everyone misses)

Matt asked for the flows every store needs before BFCM. The list:

• Welcome series
• Abandoned cart and abandoned checkout (they’re different flows)
• Browse abandonment
• Upsell / downsell post-purchase
• Review collection
• A flow built to get replies

That last one is the one everyone misses. Most brands run a one-way signal: promotions, offers, content, blast, repeat. But look at your own inbox: 15–20 emails per screen, thousands unread. The game isn’t “send the right offer.” The game is becoming one of the two or three brands a subscriber would actually search their inbox for. Replies build that relationship, and as a bonus they’re one of the strongest positive signals you can send Gmail and Yahoo for deliverability.

While we’re on what to remove: if you’re under $100M a year, stop building elaborate branded email templates in Figma. Your email system has one job: pull cash forward from your database so the marketing team has a war chest to buy more eyeballs. A jewellery client recently showed me their three best-performing competitor emails: all plain text, all under 250 words, all a single CTA. Microsoft and OpenAI could afford the world’s fanciest email designs. Look at what they actually send.

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Monetisation lag: the metric that quietly kills brands

The thing that kills most ecommerce brands, regardless of size, isn’t ads or creative. It’s not understanding the gap between purchase one and purchase two. I call it monetisation lag.

If your average customer takes 80 days to buy again, you’re front-loading all your acquisition cost and waiting 80 days for the payback while payroll, vendors, and ad platforms all bill you in the meantime. That’s the “where’s the money?” moment: every dashboard is green, 120% year-on-year growth, and the bank account is empty at 3am. Subscription models work precisely because they compress this gap, though subscription can also hide an unhealthy lag if you never measure it.

The target: get first-to-second purchase under 30 days. Forget “build an 8-figure brand.” Build a 100K, 1M, 10M-profile database at 20–30% net margin, maximise repeat purchases, and compress the gap between purchase one and purchase two to under 30 days. That’s the holy grail of ecommerce, and it’s the engine the Profit Loop is built around.

Two timing rules that support it:

• Respect the shipping window. If delivery takes seven days, we suppress campaigns to that buyer for seven days. Don’t ask someone to buy again before they’ve held the first order.
• Match subscription offers to the front-end offer. If the ad was “buy 2 get 1 free” (a 90-day supply), you cannot pitch a subscription on day 14. Educate on the usage timeline instead, then make the offer when it’s actually relevant.

And timing isn’t just about days. It’s about state of mind. We had a Korean face mask brand where nothing worked until a survey told us the list was mostly mums. We moved sends to after the kids’ bedtime: dishes done, glass of wine, couch. Sales tripled. Same list, same offer, right moment.

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The BFCM playbook: start 30–45 days early

Here’s the part Matt made me promise to get to. Our Black Friday sequence, compressed:

1. Offers locked and tested by October. You should know your best offers (from history, this year’s data, and seasonality) before the season starts. Not decided in November, tested by October.

2. Build the VIP list now. August through October is for list building and two-way engagement: surveys, replies, calls. You’re building anticipation the way a film releases trailers months out. Your list should be waiting for the drop.

3. Start Black Friday 30–45 days early. Not a teaser drip, a real early Black Friday sale to segmented audiences. The logic: your customers are saving their budget for Black Friday. If you wait for the actual weekend, you’re competing for that budget against every brand they’ve ever bought from. Start early and you capture the early-intent buyers and still catch the middle and late waves. You’re not shrinking the window, you’re expanding it.

4. Run it on a hidden VIP lander. The early offer lives on a hidden landing page that ad traffic never sees. Only the email and SMS database gets the link. Easy to do with a subdomain or unlinked slug. Cold traffic sees the normal store; VIPs get the early price. The exclusivity is real, so it works. (This is the point in the episode where Matt said I blew his mind, so I’ll take that.)

5. Every promo email carries three things: the offer, the reason why, and a defined start and end date. “Sale starts, here’s why. Sale ends soon. Sale ends today.” The end date is when the scramble happens. People can plan around a deadline, and a deadline is what moves your offer up the priority curve. An extension is optional; an open-ended sale is not a sale.

6. Don’t exhaust the list in Q4. Most brands strip-mine their database in November and wonder why January is dead. We design the system so revenue drips back into January and February. Catalyst events don’t stop existing because the calendar changed. Our brands’ January retention numbers are the receipt.

For the full week-by-week campaign calendar and segmentation setup, the companion piece is here: BFCM email marketing strategy. And if you want the live version, including how AI inbox summaries will rewrite your BFCM sends before anyone opens them, we’re running a free training: The Great Black Friday Ecom Massacre.

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One ratio to take away

If you’re spending $1M on ads, roughly 20% should fund the bucket nobody talks about: creative strategy, email and retention, CRO, and an analytics person. That’s the team that turns a 1:1 blended return into 1:5. And measure it on MER (marketing efficiency ratio across the whole business), not platform-reported ROAS, which is a vanity metric that will happily tell you everything is green while the bank account says otherwise.

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Get a pre-flight inspection before you fly into BFCM

As I said at the end of the episode: get your site and your email system inspected before peak season, not during it. We call ours a pre-flight inspection: my team goes through your store against every checkpoint above, finds the gaps and the holes, and hands you the list. You don’t need to work with us afterwards; the point is that you fly into Black Friday knowing the aircraft is sound.

Request your pre-flight inspection, and thank you to Matt and the Checkout Champ team for the conversation. If you’re on a platform that’s capping your conversion rate, Checkout Champ is worth a serious look; the partials data alone changes what your email can do.