things haunting your email account right now
The scariest thing in your account isn’t a ghost. It’s a discount code from last November that still works.
Halloween is tomorrow, Black Friday is four weeks after that, and somewhere in your account is something you set up once and never looked at again.
So today, seven of them. Each one takes a minute to check, most take ten to fix, and one of them is probably costing you money right now. 👇
Tomorrow night, full price climbs back out
We buried full price last week and Chase did the eulogy.
Tomorrow night it claws its way out of the dirt and goes straight back to $997.
$500 off eCom Email Certified. $997 down to $497 with code RIP500.
Halloween night, 11:59pm PT. Sunday morning the price is back, and we're not running this again before Black Friday.
Whoever grabs this course this weekend walks into BFCM with a different program than whoever starts in January. That’s the entire difference, and today it costs $497.
Recover one extra $500 cart before Black Friday and it’s paid for itself. One cart.
Go on. It’s the last night. 🎃
7 things haunting your email account 4 weeks before Black Friday
None of these are dramatic. That’s the problem. They’re all things somebody set up once, correctly, and then the calendar moved and nobody went back.
Four weeks to Black Friday is the last comfortable moment to find them.
1. Last year’s Black Friday code still works
The check. Open an incognito window and try BFCM30, BLACKFRIDAY, CYBER25 and whatever you actually ran last year. Plenty of brands never set an end date, and the code has been quietly live for eleven months.
The fix. Expire them today, before somebody posts one to a coupon site in the middle of your sale.
2. Your welcome flow is about to undercut your own offer
The check. Find the discount in your welcome flow and compare it to the Black Friday offer you’re planning. If welcome gives 15% and BFCM gives 20%, a subscriber who joins on November 20th has almost no reason to wait.
The fix. Either suppress the welcome discount for the sale window, or raise the BFCM offer enough that it clearly beats it. Decide now, not on the day.
3. The same person is in there three times
The check. Search your list for your own name, then a colleague’s. Count the profiles. Duplicates come from a typo at checkout, a second email on a gift order, a phone number captured without a match.
The fix. Merge them. You’re paying for the extra profiles, they split the engagement history that drives your segments, and that one person is about to get your Black Friday email three times.
4. A live flow still mentions a season that ended
The check. Open every active flow and read it as a stranger would. Look for a season, a holiday, a sale name, a product that sold out, a shipping promise that changed.
The fix. Anyone entering that flow tomorrow is reading it today. Strip every date reference that isn’t dynamic.
5. Your suppression rule was written for a smaller list
The check. Check what counts as low engagement in your account. Most rules say something like no open in 90 days, and most were set when the list was half the size.
The fix. Pull the actual numbers before peak. Suppressing too hard costs revenue, suppressing too softly costs the inbox, and BFCM volume magnifies whichever one you picked wrong.
6. Nobody reads the reply-to address
The check. Reply to your own last campaign. See where it lands and whether anybody is watching that inbox.
The fix. During peak, replies are people asking where their order is and whether the code works. Those are the easiest sales you will ever make, and they are sitting in a mailbox nobody opens.
7. Your abandoned cart email promises the wrong cutoff
The check. Read your cart and browse flows for any shipping promise. Order by Friday, arrives in 3 to 5 days, in time for the holidays.
The fix. Those were true when you wrote them. Carrier deadlines move every year and December volume slows everything down. Make the promise dynamic or remove it.
If you only do one, do the first one. Everything else on this list costs you money slowly. An old discount code that’s still live costs you margin on every order somebody uses it on, and you won’t notice until you reconcile.
AI prompt of the week: the flow exorcism
Number four on that list is the one nobody does, because reading every live flow end to end is genuinely tedious. So hand it over.
Copy this prompt You are auditing a live email program four weeks before Black Friday. |
Two notes on running it:
✓ Paste the actual copy, not a summary. The whole point is catching the one line in email four of a flow you haven’t opened since spring
✓ The unverifiable column is the useful one. That’s where the shipping promises hide, and it’s the list you take to whoever owns fulfillment
