30+ Black Friday Tips to Win the Holidays Like a 9-Figure Ecommerce Brand

Sean Frank (0:00)

What's up everybody, welcome to the Operators Podcast. We have an amazing, action-packed, tip-filled Black Friday, Summer Monday episode coming at you. We're gonna talk about upsell offers, bundles, AOVs, how to paste your calendars. Really, I can't even unpack all these tips right now because there's gonna be so many of them. They're gonna come fast, they're gonna come loose, they're gonna come ready for you. We have the core four, me, Jason, Mike, Matt. Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Bertulli (0:24)

Dude, I'm loving life right now. It's great, I went to Vegas for 36 hours this week. It's hot as hell, now I'm back in my cold ass place. It's great, life's awesome.

Sean Frank (0:35)

Dude, and you're slinging Winx. We want the Winx Black Friday Playbook, man.

We got to figure out how to actually scale that thing. Mike, how are you doing, brother?

Mike Beckham (0:43)

I'm awesome. It was 115 degrees last week at this time, and it is a cool 100 outside right now. So I'm doing great. I'm fired up to talk about Black Friday with you guys.

Sean Frank (0:56)

Okay. Well, Jason, how's the weather where you are?

Jason Panzer (1:01)

The year of crazy weather, and we're going to talk about weather. Actually, there was a map in Florida right now, and there was an insane thunderstorm, and the street out there is totally flooded. So whatever, glad I'm here.

Sean Frank (1:13)

Well, dude, it might be storming outside, but it's about to be storming in our businesses, guys. It's Black Friday. I hope everyone has a hot and heavy tip for these people. I'm going to go first.

Here's a tip for everybody out there. Black Friday is coming up. You want to make sure you're set up for success, but sometimes things don't go to plan. Have a backup promotion. Okay. We've had to do this maybe three years ago, maybe 2024 We had a hard Black Friday. We wanted to go out there with $76 wallets. We had a midway through market run of $69 to make the ads work. So have a, what I call like first tier promo, the promo you want to go out there and actually hit. But if things go bad, have a backup promo. Something else to throw on the fire, something else to sweeten the pot, the juice. Have you guys ever had experience doing that?

Jason Panzer (1:57)

Yes. I mean, like this happened to us very recently actually, where I don't know what the team decided to do. Like, I mean, it literally wasn't even involved. Like we have a process and I don't know, they were like yoloing, trying something new and it did not, it was not good. You know, it was not good. So we went back to one of the old, you know, one of the greatest hits, right? So you got to have your greatest hits, so to speak.

You just be prepared. If you want to try something new, that's fine, but like be prepared to revert to one of your greatest hits. And, you know, on top of that, like pivot fast if you have to, right? Like because you just, you're just wasting days if you don't.

Matt Bertulli (2:36)

We build out two full sets of creative for Black Friday offers. So like two different campaign offers, full set of creative just in case we, and we load both into our ad accounts. Sean, I'm sure you guys do the same thing. We keep one off, so that it's all approved creative, because that's a big thing. Like make sure it's all in there and it's approved, because you know, it gets slower to approve. I don't know if AI changes that this year. And then the other thing, Sean, if I could piggyback off what you're saying, if you're going to make ad creative for these peak moments, it's usually a good idea to make a bunch that don't have the actual offer in the creative. And that makes it a little more evergreen, a little more reusable. So like you get a banger Black Friday ad, and it's for a $74 wallet, and now you're selling them for $69.

Don't put the number in the ad, just make a better ad.

Sean Frank (3:22)

When we had a pivot, maybe it was 2022, 2024, I can't remember, we did not have backup ads. We were late night photoshopping, Thursday night, Thanksgiving, trying to be like, okay, well, we got to change the offer or whatever, trying to figure out how that to work. I think that's a great idea. With AI, it's super easy. You have statics, statics are going to perform really well. You just have a couple of different variations in there.