The BFCM Prep Checklist: From Least to Most Impact

Richard Gaffin (0:00)

You've talked in the past about media buying over the course of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, where as a rule across the rest of the year, what you've turned Chad media buying tactics basically don't work. The idea is that you want the algorithm to do the work for you, and that makes perfect sense. However, across Black Friday, Cyber Monday, buying behavior is so different, and people's behavior is so different, that what you need to be doing is basically be at the controls on an hour by hour basis and have some understanding, be tracking when things are peaking, things are coming down, and be adjusting budgets manually. This episode of the Ecommerce Playbook is brought to you by Universal Ads. Here's a question, how much of your TV budget actually makes it to the big screen? On most TV platforms, it's not all of it, not even close. Platform fees, data fees, optimization fees, it adds up fast. With Universal Ads, you can ditch the middleman. It's 100% self-serve TV advertising, built for brands of all sizes, with zero platform fees and zero hidden markups. You get your brand on premium networks like NBCUniversal, Fox and Scripps right next to brand safe content your customers are already watching. Right now, new advertisers get $2,500 in matched ad credits when they spend $2,500. That's double the TV for your first campaign. Get on TV without the fee. Go to www.universallads.com/middleman and use code UACTC when you sign up. That's www.universallads.com/middleman, code UACTC.

Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread. It's been a minute since I've been on the pod, but I'm joined here today by Joy Sharma, who heads up our seven-figure service offering here at Common Thread Collective. Joy's jumping on with us today to share, obviously, something very important. We're here, we're in Q4, it's already started.

What we want to go through is basically from an order of least to most impact, the things that you need to do right now to start prepping for Black Friday. So, Joy, what's going on, man?

Joy Sharma (2:03)

Excited.

Richard Gaffin (2:04)

Great. It's the most wonderful time of the year, of course, so we're excited to get into it. So, Joy, why don't you talk us through a little bit of what you shared with me in terms of going from the least impact things to the biggest impact things you can do to prep this season.

Yeah.

Joy Sharma (2:20)

I wanted this podcast to be just a playbook for seven-figure businesses as they're listening through. So, pretext, everything we're sharing is going to affect your new revenue. It doesn't affect your return revenue. I think Taylor has talked about this a lot, which is half of your Black Friday is built 60 days before Black Friday. So, whatever customers you acquired year over year, consider that as your return revenue growth for Black Friday.

Everything you can do for new customers is what we're going to talk through. So, let's start with, I think there's some basic housekeeping, which is make sure your ad account has a billing that is higher than what you're expecting to spend. Some tired people who this is the first Black Friday for will experience this, which is like their limit might not be high enough. Working on calling up the rep, getting an increase, pretty simple stuff. Making sure your commerce manager is up to date, is tracking well, events are firing, you have above 90% match rate on all the trucks, a lot of traffic to broach, essentially. Your pixel is firing correctly, it has no issues, no lockages, no wrong allowless domains and stuff like that. I would say those three things are basic housekeeping to start with.

Okay, so after that, let's get into offer. I think we have said this so many times across the board every year, which is number one, make sure your offer is about 20%. It's not below 20%.

Anything below 20%, people don't care. They just think it's like, people are entitled to that. I get a 10% discount by giving my email away, so 20% is not real. The second thing is make sure you simplify it. I have seen a lot of people do this where they're like, I want to ensure my, I have 10% for the first $50, 20% for 50 to 100, like just simplify it. People don't want to spend time understanding your offer. It is the highest, it's the most demanding market it has ever been in the entire year. So give people a stupid, simple offer that looks like it's really good and let people buy it. That's it. Let's simplify it as much as you can. I would recommend trying to up that AOV. A lot of businesses should do their LTV analysis on if the customers they're acquiring are Black Fire and Air valuable or not because a lot of times there are different LTVs than normal acquired customers. If that is true, do your math, how much money you make on that, and then try to do AOV bundles if you want to, if they're able to be just travel, and just make bundles and make them specific to, I would say, gifting. If that's something you can sort yourself in is actually going to be very helpful. If the business doesn't work naturally into one of those moments, try to go towards gifting, which is like, hey, people don't want to buy my product during this time period. Can I make it into something that people want to buy? That's the cultural norm that people are interested in at that time period.