How Bedre Nætter boosted sales & VIP sign-ups with Black Friday early access

A better night’s sleep changes everything. That’s the slogan of Denmark’s largest DTC mattress and bedding company Bedre Nætter (which translates to “Better nights”).

When Bedre Nætter launched, the bedding market was dominated by large brick-and-mortar brands. They set themselves apart and made a splash in the Nordic market with competitive prices, contemporary branding, and unparalleled convenience and customer service.

Free delivery. 100-day returns. Free mattress exchange. Bedre Nætter makes buying a bed simple and stress-free—and their 20,000+ positive reviews prove that.

Beds and mattresses may not seem like the types of products to generate website-crashing levels of demand. But Bedre Nætter isn’t your typical bedding brand. Their standout branding, captivating campaigns, and scarcity marketing strategies attract huge interest.

Discover how Bedre Nætter used Queue-it to achieve their first Black Friday without crashing, incentivize thousands of member sign-ups, and reward members with early access.

“2023 was my sixth Black Friday with Bedre Nætter,” says Marcus Forsberg, the company’s Head of Ecommerce & Performance. “It’s also the first one where we didn't face any site issues.”

Before their successful Black Friday with Queue-it, the Bedre Nætter team tried just about everything they could to handle the huge demand for their Holiday Season sales.

“We filtered out traffic from known bots. We stopped automatic services. We ran a cache warmer. We streamlined our order confirmation process. We restructured our servers to allocate enough power and lower pressure on non-essential operations. We ran load tests. But nothing fixed the problem,” Forsberg says.

“One year, we ran tests beforehand where we got up to 15,000 simultaneous checkouts before the simulation crashed. Then in real life, when people were checking out, we crashed at something like 600, but that’s when the tracking also crashed. Pings to the server were way higher. Every year, we’d make changes and optimizations and enter the month completely confident, and every year, Black Friday demand caused significant site issues.

“Eventually,” he continues, “I realized, we’re losing well over an hour in peak traffic and sales time every year and we need to do something about it. Especially where we’ve run flash sales and limited-edition releases, we’d get a lot of complaints from people who couldn’t access the site. Some people would get access, add the product to their cart, add their information, they’d get so close to completing their purchase, and then just hit a 500-error page. It was creating frustration and potentially sending customers to competitors.”

Bedre Nætter’s goal for Black Week 2023 wasn’t just to keep their site online. They wanted it to be their biggest week yet. They wanted to create demand, boost conversion rates, and lift average order value.

To achieve this, they had a new strategy in mind: early access for their VIPs.

“We used Queue-it’s invite-only waiting room for Black Week to give early access to customers who signed up to become VIPs,” says Forsberg. “Then we used this exclusive access angle as the call to action in a lot of our ads to drive VIP sign-ups, saying ‘Become a VIP to get first access to Black Friday deals and bundles.’”

The build up to Black Friday, Forsberg explains, involved months of work. “All the hard work is done before. We produced around 100 different videos for Meta, just warming people up and telling them the event was coming. We spent a lot of effort making sure to capture the in-market demand. Luckily Black Week, and I guess November in its entirety these days, is a period of the year that moves a lot of consumers not necessarily in the market for a specific product to suddenly be in-market due to the savings.”

But the team’s hard work paid off, says Forsberg, “These campaigns drove thousands more sign-ups than we were expecting, driving a significant portion of our Holiday Season revenue. Compared to previous years, our customer acquisition costs were a lot lower.”

Ahead of the early access event, Forsberg took the list of VIP sign-ups Bedre Nætter had collected and uploaded them to their invite-only list in the GO Queue-it Platform.

Then on the Sunday before Black Friday, Forsberg explains, “we put our entire site behind Queue-it, so visitors just saw the countdown to the sale and an email form where they could sign-up for early access.”

Protecting the entire site gave the Bedre Nætter team “the time we needed to make all the changes for the sale and encouraged more people to sign-up for our VIP program. The sign-up form on the queue page alone drove another 2,500 sign-ups.”

At 5 p.m., Bedre Nætter notified their VIPs the sale was about to start and activated their invite-only waiting room in pre-queue mode.

While non-members saw the queue page above, VIPs used their verified emails to get into the early access queue, which flowed them to the site hours before the general queue.

Thousands of verified members were waiting in the pre-queue before the sale went live. When 8 p.m. hit, the VIPs were randomized and flowed to the website at the optimal rate for Bedre Nætter’s systems.

“All the members that came through the invite-only queue had a very high conversion rate. We hit our sales target for the night in the first 11 minutes. In just three hours, we hit the sales target for the whole week.”

Marcus Forsberg, Head of Ecommerce & Performance

“We had one piece of limited-inventory stock which sold out in the first minute of the sale,” says Forsberg.

Over the next few hours, several thousand verified VIPs entered the sale. As the chart below shows, the Bedre Nætter team only opened the general access queue once all members had been served, ensuring VIPs got a fair shot at getting early access deals.

“The VIP sale was a great success. The site stayed online, we hit our targets. And with invite-only, we delivered on the exclusive access we’d promised our VIPs.”

They’re fans of a good night’s sleep, but the Bedre Nætter team doesn’t rest.

"After the success of Black Week, we're already mapping out how we can reward members and incentivize signups in more ways. With Queue-it in place, we're confident we can not only handle the extra demand, but also capitalize on the traffic with exclusive access."

Marcus Forsberg, Head of Ecommerce & Performance

“Going forward we’re launching a range of exciting new products to make sure our appearance varies from competitors. You might not believe it, but it can be pretty hard to differentiate your product when all you’re selling is basically a comfortable rectangle with legs. It’s just storage space for a human body,” says Forsberg. “Our main mission is the same—to highlight the awesome perks that you get from great sleep. It’s essentially a superpower in day-to-day life. The most honest cheat code, if you will.”