Hey friends, BFCM is just under 100 days away. If you're not taking time to prepare now, you’re falling behind. The good news is that there's one other major sale period coming up before BFCM that can help you prepare and that's Labor Day. Labor Day is the time that you should be testing a lot of your strategies for your offers, creative, copywriting, landing pages, opt-ins and email and SMS flows. Obviously, the promos will be different, but you can still test all of the core mechanics during Labor Day to make sure your funnel is as dialed as possible. If there's anything wrong, you still have time to fix it before BFCM.

So let's get into it. I'm going to give you the playbook to crush Labor Day, get super dialed, and do even better during BFCM this year.

Why Labor Day?

As I mentioned, Labor Day is the last real sale on the calendar before Q4. You can technically A/B test anything anytime but running tests during slow weeks lie to you. Your traffic is low, so tests take forever to reach real significance. Intent is low, so the shoppers in your test don't behave like the shoppers you'll see in November and you end up optimizing for the wrong behavior.

Labor Day gives you the closest thing to BFCM conditions that you'll get before BFCM itself. You are going to have urgency, real discount expectations, strong buying intent, and quite a bit of traffic. The shoppers moving through your flows that weekend look a lot more like your BFCM shoppers than the ones passing by on a random week/weekend in September.

And critically, the stakes of messing up are a fraction of Q4. A miss on Labor Day costs you a big weekend. A miss during Cyber Week might cost you the majority of your profit for the year, plus it's going to lead to three months of "what happened?" meetings with your team that follow.

And by the way, the tests only work if you start now. A test needs time to run and time to review and iterate. If you test over Labor Day, then you have all of September and October to get super dialed and locked in for BFCM. That's two full months before Cyber Week. If you wait until October to start, none of this really helps.

The 6 things to focus on:

1. Your abandonment flows, starting with timing and incentive.

Your abandonment flows (cart, checkout, browse) will carry more Q4 revenue than almost anything else you do. They're also the most neglected asset in DTC. Most brands set them up during onboarding, watch them work "well enough" and haven't touched them since.

IMO, you need to be doing a few things here. First, you need to look at the timing of the first email a prospect receives after they abandon their cart. The gap between abandonment and first touch is one of the highest-leverage variables in your entire email program, and the right answer varies by price point and consideration. A $30 impulse product and a $300 purchase should not have the same delay, but at most brands they do.

Second, is the incentive placement. Does a discount in email one beat holding it until email three? Leading with the discount can lift immediate conversion but trains your list to abandon carts on purpose. Holding it protects margin but may leak buyers who actually need a small push to complete the sale. You don't know which trade-off wins for your brand until you test it, which is why Labor Day is the perfect time to figure that out.

2. Auditing your tech and tools

When it comes to winning in e-commerce more broadly, the most important leverage you can get is from technology and tools. Obviously, running on Shopify is a no-brainer but there are so many other phenomenal software products that can help you get ahead. Specifically for email and SMS, I always recommend that brands use Instant. They take care of your follow-up flows automatically, they figure out the ideal time to send each message and they personalize the copy one-to-one for every shopper. It’s 10X better than having a human run your email and SMS program, simply because no human can handwrite every abandonment message or make every campaign relevant to every shopper. Instant does both at scale by using all of your shopper, product, and store context and that will help you accomplish a lot of what I talk about in this email today.

3. Where in the flow people actually convert:

The next thing you need to do is pull up your flow analytics and look at revenue by message position. If most of your flow revenue comes from email three or four, the reflex is to celebrate email three and four. That is the wrong approach. Instead, you should be looking at that as two or three emails of cost, friction, time, and unsubscribe risk sitting in front of every sale.

The goal of a flow is not to eventually convert people. It's to convert them as early as possible. Every position you move conversion up is money you stop spending on sends and list fatigue and it becomes revenue you capture before a competitor's retargeting ad gets there first. So the main test is, what gets email one to do email three's job? Stronger social proof up front? The review snippet that currently sits in email four? A different product angle? This is the single most underrated lever in retention, because understanding what is actually getting people to buy compounds across every shopper who enters your flow. Instant identifies more high-intent shoppers, gives each shopper a more relevant message, and increases the chance they purchase earlier in a flow. Ultimately that reduces the number of follow-up emails a brand needs to send and it generates way more revenue overall.

4. Whether email and SMS are working together or fighting each other

Most people know Instant as an email platform, but they recently launched SMS flows, which now means you can handle all of your email and SMS together in one tool with the same AI superpowers which allow you to send perfectly timed custom messages to each list. The problem is that if email and SMS run in separate tools, I can almost guarantee one of two things is happening. Either your best customers are getting hit on both channels with the same message minutes apart, or your channels have non-overlapping blind spots and some shoppers are getting missed entirely. Neither shows up cleanly in a dashboard, which is why most brands don't know it's happening. This generally shows up as elevated unsubscribes, SMS opt-outs after big sends, and an annoying sense that these two channels are cannibalizing each other.

The Labor Day test for you to run is to map every message a single shopper receives across both channels during the sale, in order, with timestamps. You need to actually write it out and review it with your team. If the sequence reads like two teams that don't talk to each other, that's because it was built by two tools that don't talk to each other. You want to find that out now, not on November 28th when it’s the most important moment of the year. Also, if you want this to be 100% automated and all under one roof, Instant is the tool. They will make sure that the messages are unique and timed correctly so that no one is getting the same text blast a minute after they received a similar email. Instant AI SMS works across abandonment flows and one-off campaigns. In flows, Instant writes the SMS, picks the send time, keeps the copy within a single message, and varies the content when a shopper enters the same flow again. In campaigns, the brand writes the message and Instant personalizes the send time for each recipient. Managing both channels in Instant means using fewer tools and less headache to drive automated revenue for your brand.

5. Whether your personalization is actually personal.

In 2026, a first-name tag in your emails or SMS texts is not personalization. Now that we have AI superpowers to custom write messages, you need to be focusing a lot more on relevance to the end consumer. So with that in mind, I want you to pick five real customers with different histories i.e a first-time buyer, a lapsed VIP, someone who only buys when there is a discount, someone who browsed one category exclusively, someone who left a review etc. Now look at the emails and SMS flows each of them received last month. If all five got basically the same messages, you don't have a personalization program.

Real personalization means the message changes based on what someone browsed, bought, or said. The product featured, the review quoted, the send time, the channel, even whether they get the message at all. It's hard for me to explain how much personalization actually matters. When I started using Instant to have their software handwrite one-to-one personalized messages for every single prospect, the conversion rates went up dramatically. If you aren't doing this for Labor Day or Black Friday, you absolutely should be.

Can't I just do this with ChatGPT?

When I talk about Instant, people ask me if they can do this with other AI tools. And the answer is no. Generic AI tools don’t know your Shopify data, so it can't tell you where in your flows people convert. It doesn't know which shoppers are high-intent right now, so it can't decide who should get a message and who shouldn't. It doesn't know what your last 50 campaigns converted at, so every draft it writes is disconnected from every result you've ever had. It doesn't know what your customers said in reviews, so its "social proof" is a placeholder you have to fill in by hand.

Tools like ChatGPT or Claude can write a great one off email, but they can't run your entire retention program. That's why it’s worth testing Instant before Labor Day. Instant does more than generate copy. It runs personalized flows, builds complete campaigns, and coordinates email and SMS using real Shopify data, proven retention frameworks, and your brand’s actual products. No other AI tool does that for DTC like they do. Their software has also been trained and improved on performance data from 2,000+ Shopify brands, including Liquid I.V., ThirdLove, The Collagen Co and many others. They’ve done more than 50 million A/B tests for brands so they know what actually works to get people to convert.

6. Making a plan for campaigns:

The other thing to be thinking about is campaigns. Your automated flows should be driving 80% of your email and SMS revenue (i.e., cart abandonment, browse abandonment, back in stock, price drops, etc). But campaigns should drive the other 20%. Campaigns are when you want to get a special message across, or you have a theme that's going live for two or three weeks. In the past, you'd have to have a creative director and email/sms marketer working together to come up with the content and cadence of when to send out these campaigns to your lists. Now you can do this 100% with AI. Instant launched agentic campaigns which removes the weekly campaign production work. A brand chooses a goal and a product or collection. Instant then plans the strategy, drafts up to five emails, writes the copy, pulls real product details and customer reviews, and checks that the full sequence works together. Every campaign follows your brand’s voice and includes personalized send times and AI subject lines by default. Everything remains editable, and SMS steps can be added If you want. This basically takes the time down from a few hours per week planning and executing campaigns down to a few minutes per week. If you haven't tried it yet, you should.

The results speak for themselves:

As you have probably seen me write about before, the results from Instant are pretty incredible. They use shopper, product, and store context to make each message they send significantly more relevant to the end consumer. In Q2 2026, Instant clients saw a 22% lift in click rates, an 8% lift in conversion rates, a 12% lift in AOV, and a 2.4x overall revenue lift. Open rates increased by 18% as well. Because Instant is priced based on sends, getting a shopper to convert on email 1 instead of email 3 also reduces unnecessary sends and makes costs easier to forecast.

If you want to go live before Labor Day in order to learn exactly what works before peak season, Instant is giving everyone 50% off the first 60 days, plus a $100 gift card just for attending the demo.

Just book time here, and they will hook you up.

All right, that's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you back here soon!