BFCM Prep Guide
We break down ABO vs CBO, budget pacing, offer architectures (sitewide %, tiers, gifts, bundles), landing-page quick wins, and the email/SMS cadence that stacks revenue—plus day-of MER guardrails and intra-day pacing.
Key Takeaways
ABO or CBO: When each campaign structure can win and why
The simples offer architectures that won’t wreck margins
Pacing budgets so you don’t blow learnings (or spend) before the big days
The landing-page tweaks that move the most revenue during BFCM
Can a small site-wide + stacked gift be smarter than a deeper discount?
How shipping cutoffs should be shaping your promo calendar and messaging
The day-of MER guardrails and hourly checks that will keep you on target
This episode is sponsored by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love here at Scalability School. If you’re ready to cut through the noise, stop guessing, and actually see which ads are driving your business, book a demo at northbeam.io/demo, and tell them Scalability sent you. Join the club.
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM.
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community head here to learn more.
Full Transcript
Transcript:
(00:01) The weekend is always something to be afraid of. I personally, many years ago, I've learned since then, but definitely had harder returns on the weekend. So making sure that you're aware of where it is on an hourly basis through the weekend, I think is really big. And then knowing that it's gonna be a bigger push on Monday because people are ready to drop.
(00:23) I kind of chat about Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that people kind of think it's this retention play where you're running discounts to get people to come back and you're gonna make a bunch of margin. I think that's absolutely true. But I think this is one of the best times a year to acquire new customers at a discount. You get them at better efficiency because everybody's in shopping mode.
(00:40) And I don't think enough people realize that. And then there's also this kind of like grape that these are discount customers and they might be. But you should go look for yourself. It's really easy to build a cohort of people who bought during that stretch on those discount codes and see how they reacted. The point you need to remember though, is you need to factor into that acquisition cost.
(00:56) When you do that, you can't just look at revenue. That's not fair. Yeah, I see it as like an AOV lifter, like in like a progress bar type of situations. Spend next morning, get a free gift and spend even a little bit more, get free shipping and then whatever. I've seen that do okay, but I have never seen that as like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday offer crash.
(01:13) I will say like the biggest contention I have with that, and I think this was a point that Andrew is making as well, is that if it needs any amount of volume to get some signal from Meta because otherwise Meta just won't put anything behind it, that gets really tricky. Even if you're using a CBO with minimum spend, for us we are launching a lot of new creative in an existing ad set, just because we want to consolidate the learning into that existing ad set.
(01:42) (upbeat music) And now let's take a listen to the Scalability School Podcast. All right, welcome to the Scalability School Podcast, episode 380, I'm just kidding. I think it's episode. Whatever it is. (laughing) It's a lot of guys. About the podcast. It has a number at the beginning. It has a number, per usual, got a lot of good feedback. We actually are getting a lot of good feedback on the podcast generally.
(02:07) Spoke to somebody yesterday, brand owner, started this brand with his wife, there's a side hustle, spending $1,000 a day now, which is pretty cool. Came from zero, listened to all of the episodes twice, which I was like, dude, appreciate you. And also why? (laughing) But we had a good time chatting and was really, was incredibly kind person and helped him out, gonna get him some audits, gonna get him some people, looking at stuff.
(02:32) So like, that's why we exist, right? We're here to help you in a real way. And people, I've had some other chats with folks about like, you know, helping them with their brand or hey, I need a creative audit or what do you think about this or that? And like, I'm happy to source those to the guys or send them to different places to resource you.
(02:48) So, you know, reach out, right? Andrew at foxwaldigital.com. I'm happy to help source you into where you need to because we're here to help you get good information. Today's podcast, we are talking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but we're starting off the show because we got such good feedback from the tens of listeners with beefs.
(03:06) Once again, who do we hate? I'm just kidding. All right, this episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love here at Scalability School. We know that there's a lot of attribution solutions out there, but you know, Zach and I wanna talk about what makes Northbeam a little bit different and why so many e-com legends like Zach, Zach, why do you love Northbeam? I mean, we've been using Northbeam now for almost four years. So I think the initial thing where it kinda got started was we had kind of from
(03:35) Ridge kind of told me, he's like, "Hey, days of last click are gone and we need a new solution to kind of take a look at this." And this is before all of the crazy Facebook updates. He was already kind of thinking ahead about this. So that's how I initially got introduced to it and just started using it obviously, you know, as a customer and, you know, as a recent, I think the biggest thing is that it's not just last click and it never was just last click and it spreads the credit of the purchase across the entire customer journey. So like, you know, it's gonna give credit to each piece of the funnel that had its, you know,
(04:09) touch point. And I think that that's what's allowed us to really decide and spend ad dollars appropriately based on what's actually working. So we use it across all of our brands, across all of our Homestead clients that are paid clients of ours and Northbeam one day click, Northbeam seven day click are kind of like the golden North star on how we're making decisions on a day-to-day basis.
(04:33) But I mean, that's the main reason is I feel like the data is very clear and it's not just, you know, it's not just a click basis. It's proper allocation across the entire customer journey. Yeah, I think all of those things are true. And you know, there's things like the Northbeam Apex. It's awesome. It's integration with ad platforms like Meta and AppLovin and allows you to, you know, those ad algorithms to actually drive your ad delivery based on first party performance data.
(04:56) So for the things you talked about, things like Northbeam Apex, you know, it's big and Northbeam doesn't inflate revenue. It's just the real numbers that actually line up with Shopify, which is really nice. So the Northbeam difference, better data, sharper decisions and more profitable growth. And you know, everybody's using Northbeam, right? Dollar Shave Club, Hexclad, you guys.
(05:13) So if you're ready to cut through the noise and stop guessing, go ahead and book a demo at Northbeam.io forward slash demo and tell them that Scalability School sent you for a little surprise. So join the club and check out Northbeam. Once again, who do we hate? I'm just kidding. Brad. No, actually. Leave someone.
(05:38) Yeah, who don't we hate? Yeah, actually what we're gonna start off is with another one is X tweets where, sorry, a post on X, not a tweet, about the playbook that works 99% of the time, which was a response to the Daniel O'Con, legend and friend of the pod, incredible human being actually. But talking about, Zach, your playbook that works, that kind of you go through, we obviously have an episode on the zero to eight figure playbook, but you know, what do you wanna call out here in terms of what you went through with Daniel? I mean, I think Brad and I can kind of go back and forth here a little bit. So Brad's a big cost control person
(06:15) and I'm a sometimes cost control person. So I did call that out in this tweet and kind of just talking about what's working for Mediavine Playbooks right now and what's working like 99% of the time when we look across brands that are working at Homestead, our own internal brands, friends of ours.
(06:33) So I think like just kicking things off is, I wrote, "Keep things consolidated." That said, the more products you have, the more campaigns you'll have. So the way we think about this is, we prefer to break out, and Brad, I'm curious if you agree with this or not, breakout campaigns basically by funnel. And by funnel, in theory, you're breaking it out also by product, because usually you'll have different funnels for different products.
(06:54) It doesn't mean necessarily just by funnel though. So like if you're gonna be running, let's say you have one product. If you're running a bunch of different landing pages, like we'll usually keep that consolidated in one campaign. We're not breaking down each new funnel for that one individual product.
(07:12) But for like Holo, for example, we have a bunch of different products, and each one of those products has its own funnel that we push towards. That's like hiking, running, hunting, whatever. That's where we start to break up more campaigns. We feel like that does a better job of finding the consistent person. The messaging is consistent across the ads and the landing page for that campaign.
(07:30) I feel like it just like hones in on the problems that we're addressing in the ads and the solutions that we're kind of like heading out into the landing pages. So it just like stays concise. So keep your account consolidated. You will have more campaigns if you have more products. Yeah, Brad.
(07:47) We generally follow the same rule of thumb and you can kind of use campaign and ad set interchangeably here depending on if CBO versus ABO. But generally speaking, keep, yeah, things consolidated. One product equals one campaign. When we start to deviate from that, it's because we've introduced a new offer alongside that existing product and the unit economics are different, which is I think is, it's primarily a cost control thing.
(08:10) But even if you're not using cost controls, if you're optimizing for two different price points and AOBs or even if they're not that different, you do have two different margin profiles if the offer is different that you need to hold to different standards, at least keeping those separate when the economics are different helps at least kind of tell meta what it is that you value in that way.
(08:33) And then at some point, it's just like when, so you kind of mentioned going from like, you know, hunting and running and all the different ones, the way that we do that kind of in the short term is it stays within the existing campaign. But at some point when those prove out to have enough volume to stand on their own, meaning they consistently stay out of learning and push volume, then yeah, totally makes sense to just split it out.
(08:50) If for nothing else, like organization and keeping it all clear of where is, you know, what is this for and where is it going to? Yep, yep, same page, same thoughts. The next point that I kind of get into here is like, ABO is usually preferred for creative testing, but CBO with minimum spends per ad set can work well too.
(09:09) Especially if you have a ton of creative launch. So we run both. I mean, honestly, we run both. If you have the budget to spend $200 to $300 per ad set per day behind each new creative test, which is usually like somewhere between three and six ads per ad set for us, I mean, some other people run more than that, but that's usually like a concept.
(09:34) And then there's going to be different variants with different hooks or different bodies within that, but it's the same concepts. That's kind of how we break out and how we treat creative testing. In an ABO setting, we do the same thing with the CBO, but then we'll put minimum spends behind them. So the nice thing about the minimum spend set up for CBOs is at least you're going to get the dollars that you want spent through those ads to make sure that some, all ads get some spend, which I know is a different theory than cost controls. We like to do that because then when at least we know,
(09:58) okay, this ad spent or these set of ads in this ad set spent $500, $800 over the course of a couple of days, they're working, they're not working, but then because they're, it's in a CBO with the additional budget beyond the daily spend budget, it can flex up really nicely.
(10:16) So it allows ads, which we now internally call breakout ads to really grow really quickly. So like we had one for one of our brands, not Holo, but one of our other brands that we launched and it was like a creator whitelisting ad and we dropped it in the account and it went, the minimum spend on the ad, that's whatever, that ad set was like $300. And then within a couple of days, now that individual ad is spending like five, six grand a day.
(10:38) And the only reason it was able to do that is because it was able to flex up beyond just the ABO, just the individual ad set budget with that minimum spend, it was able to take the whole budget for the CBO and what was left over, eat up a bunch of that spend. So I like that set up for us.
(10:56) And I'm gonna say the next thing, which is kind of two part and then I'll let Brad go cause he's gonna probably wanna talk about cost controls. Cost controls can work great. And I fully believe in them. If inventory is constrained, the brand is a smaller brand where like other things are constrained. It can even work for an eight figure brand, but it will limit the scale. And the other part that I mentioned is like, it can break frequently.
(11:13) So don't expect it to be less work than lowest cost. That's what we found is that there's still a lot of breakage. There's still things that can happen. So it's not like you can just like set it and forget it. And it just works. The last point that I want to call out here on like the bidding strategy set of things, of this like playbook that we've seen work most of the time is that if your goal is to scale from 10K a day, which this is now getting into bigger brand ecosystem, but 10K a day on meta to a hundred K a day on meta in less than six months,
(11:41) the best way that we've seen to do that is by using lowest cost, not using cost controls. I've not ever seen that happen from all of the hundreds of ad accounts that I've seen over the last few years. Yeah. So that's the last thing I want to call out on kind of bidding strategy.
(11:59) It's just more flexible, right? I mean, it's just like common sense in reference to if you're looking for that scale, it's just more flexible and it's more available in auction. I think it's always a balance, right? Of like when you're scaling that up in bread, you can talk about that. Let's start with the ABO versus CBO with Minn Spens. I honestly don't have a strong opinion.
(12:16) Ironically enough, I just re-listened to-- or not re-listened to, but I just listened to Andrew Farris podcast from a couple weeks ago where he talked about his thought on creative, generally speaking. And I thought it was really interesting. There was some tactical stuff and also just thought provoking. And I largely agree with a lot of things that he said.
(12:33) So I'll check that out if you haven't heard that. That said, I have a very specific instance in mind where we split out some creative testing into an ABO. And we pulled-- we launched some ads recently. They didn't get any spend. We pulled them out and put them into the ABO. And in the CBO, they didn't spend.
(12:52) In the ABO, they suck. When you use ABO, you should be confident in the fact that you are going to make bangers and you launch mostly bangers in that. And obviously, but everybody is striving for that. And so my biggest beef since we're talking beefs here is that I think it's really hard to know what's going to work before it goes in. I think you can be confident. I think you can put in all the work.
(13:16) But that's like an example recently where we've done a lot of forced creative testing in this specific instance that I'm thinking of. And there's been some winners, no doubt. But we didn't put them in the CBO to see if they would have spent first. So I don't know if it would have gone the other direction where you launch it in the CBO and it becomes a breakout.
(13:33) I will say the biggest contention I have with that and I think this was a point that Andrew is making as well is that if it needs any amount of volume to get some signal from Meta, because otherwise Meta just won't put anything behind it, that gets really tricky, even if you're using a CBO with minimum spend.
(13:51) Because for us, we are launching a lot of new creatives in an existing ad set just because we want to consolidate the learning into that existing ad set. I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another. I generally lean towards let Meta decide, though. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things to say, which is we don't want to have dogmatic thinking. I think that's where people get caught up. It's very black or white.
(14:10) That's not the case. So that's just one general thing to think about, which is it's always a mixture, generally speaking, when we're talking about bidding. And I also think to call it the last part of the playbook that you went through, Zach, it's the biggest wins in performance. I always come from one of these three.
(14:27) One, new ad creative plus more diversity of content, mixed pages, whitelisting versus brand page. Number two, offer change, usually the fastest way to show what change of performance you said. And then number three, big swing in CRO, I think entirely new PDP design. I think we've talked about these themes over and over. And to me, what's interesting is so many people are focused on ad buying.
(14:45) And we were raised in a way to think about ad buying. And that's not where we're at now. It's obviously about so much bigger of the picture. And obviously, we can talk about ABO, CBO, and there's all these different ways to do things. Creative testing is obviously great as ample because everybody-- I feel like there's 100 different ways to do it, we talk about.
(15:07) But I think your main things that you're talking about, Zach, are don't try to add buy your way out of the problem. Like try a different offer. Pitch it differently. Talk about it differently. I mean, that's going to be helpful. A good example. So Andrew Ferris has a client right now that Andrew and the client kind of reached out.
(15:23) And we're just like, hey, we'd love some thoughts on just kind of what's going on here and just see if you have any ideas or whatever. So happily was just like, sure, take a look. See what's going on. So Andrew runs bid caps and t-row ads and all this cost control stuff. And I very easily-- and this is like kind of sometimes how these audits can go-- is just like shit on and be like, no, you got to move to lowest cost, and this is the best route, and whatever.
(15:40) Completely off of that. I disregarded that completely and was just like, OK, let's go look at the fundamentals of what's going on in this account. And all that I'm looking at is ad creatives and landing pages and offer. That's it. So if you look at the last three, I think in this list of biggest wins and performance always come from ad creative offer or CRO change.
(16:00) Everything else is kind of irrelevant above. You can find wins in both ways. I just kind of shared what we've seen work most of the time. And for us, it's-- and we've talked about this part in the past a lot, but once a brand gets big enough, kind of like where Hollow's at and where other brands are at right now, we have operating expenses.
(16:24) We have to generate enough cash on a monthly basis, to be paying our overhead. And if we're running cost controls completely, and for some reason something breaks and spend falls completely down, it can really mess with our cash. And that's one reason why we also still prefer lowest cost is just the fear of that happening, because we have seen that happen to us in the past, where we can't get cost controls to work and even just spend enough.
(16:49) That's my last point that I wanted to bring up on that reason why we chose to go that route. We had cost controls absolutely ripping last Q4, so I have no gripe with it. But yeah, looking at this account, that was Andrew's account that he's running. It was basically like, stop worrying about the media mind shit and stop worrying about the technical things that are happening, like event quality match scores and stuff at a certain degree. Everything looks generally normal. Go focus on ad creative. Go focus on landing pages.
(17:13) Go focus there. I mean, for me, the first thing that I do, when we ask to get on an account is, first of all, I just write back the agency you're working with sucks. So I just write away shit on them. And I want to make-- It's part of the template, right? You copy and paste your templates at the top of the template. It's like, they suck.
(17:29) They're bad. And then I want them, the client, to feel like they're immediately back hits against the wall. That's my goal there. No, I think you raised a lot of good points. Brad, anything to wrap it in? No, I mean, I think there's potential small counterpoints to that situation, like raise the bids, run some of those costs alongside. The main point is true, which is those bottom three things is where you should be spending most of your time.
(17:55) The media buying stuff is important to get right, but there's ways to get it right within both of those frameworks. Well, let's talk about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, right? There's a ton of different things that we can talk about here and get into. But let's talk about the beginning of getting into it.
(18:14) As we're walking into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, anything that you guys want to say from the outset about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and how you prepare for it leading into that time frame? Two things that come to mind. One is that it'll be really nice that Cyber Monday is also in December again this year.
(18:34) So the year-over-year comps are less ridiculous to look at, because 100% of brands probably looked at November. And it was like, why is it so much smaller year-over-year this last year? And December's like, oh, we killed it. What did it do differently? Cyber Monday was in December. And it will be again this year. So I'm excited about that. Although it's a slight shift in how it rolls.
(18:50) There's one more or one less day in December that falls in the BFCM range. The other thing that I've heard often from clients and also just people who chat about Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that people think it's this retention play where you're running discounts to get people to come back and you're going to make a bunch of margin. I think that's absolutely true.
(19:08) But I think this is one of the best times a year to acquire new customers at a discount. You get them at better efficiency because everybody's in shopping mode. I don't think enough people realize that. And then there's also this kind of like grape that these are discount customers. And they might be. But you should go look for yourself.
(19:25) It's really easy to build a cohort of people who bought during that stretch on those discount codes and see how they reacted. The point you need to remember, though, is you need to factor into that acquisition cost. When you do that, you can't just look at revenue. That's not fair. So those are my mentality. Dropping some bombs, Brad. I love it.
(19:41) These are all things-- These are all things that piss me off when I get feedback on all of them. So yes, I think the biggest one that you brought up is the lifetime value of these customers and shit. It's not. OK, Homestead has-- I don't even know. It's been like 150, 200 brands that we've managed paid acquisition for over the last five years. We have looked time and time and time and time again. And the LTV is the same.
(20:04) It's like rarely, rarely. I don't even think one brand that we acquired customers over BFCM weekend, that the LTV cohorts of those customers was worse than their average year-round customer. So I would completely disregard that shit. I would also go as hard as you can on acquisition during that period.
(20:23) And if customers show back up and buy again, great. That's awesome. Use own channels to do that. Don't spend a bunch of money to do that. I mean, of course, spend some, but focus your efforts on own channels to absolutely rip through those customers and bring them back.
(20:42) Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing-- if I can drop one piece-- don't change your offer that-- don't make your offer that crazy. We're not changing our offers. We run an offer, and we're keeping it consistent. I'm not changing it. And you can get away with that. We're going to do mid-eight figures this year. Get away with it.
(21:00) Go look at all the brands that are growing extremely fast, health and wellness brands, some of these individual brands. They're not changing anything fundamentally about the way that they discount. It's just a positioning standpoint. So as long as you're-- maybe you add a free gift, or maybe you add an extra 5%, or maybe you add an extra $1 from $50-- Or volume discounting. 51. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we can definitely talk about offers.
(21:21) But I just think everyone gets so obsessed about the offer. If you have an offer that is working right now, don't feel like you need to come up with something so dramatic that's going to absolutely derail your margin and just crush your profitability.
(21:38) Probably think about just running the same thing you're running now and just positioning it as your Black Friday sale. That is my one piece of advice, and that I feel like a lot of brands in the homestead ecosystem and have run that playbook has always worked out. The last piece, Byron Tent, is just absolutely insane during this period. So the brands that are saying, oh, we're in health and wellness and we're not going to grow, you're just doing a bad job.
(21:55) That's my harsh take. We've seen health and wellness brands absolutely rip during Q4 if the offer feels strong and it feels like it has high urgency to take advantage of it if you're bringing in new customers. So those are my gripes. Beefs with the entire health and wellness industry.
(22:14) Good thoughts, right? So let's say that you're getting things together and you're scheduling out the way you are going to do this. Let's talk about calendars. So October, November, December. What does this look like for successful brands? When are you generally starting promotion? I would say that founder members that are running ads for their clients, the wrap up we did last year, it seemed to be that most people actually started November, and that was generally fine.
(22:43) And then they may have increased the deal or some sort of changed the offer slightly during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday timeframe. But it wasn't this, you do this, you do this, you do this. And also the deal, the offer is the same generally throughout the whole weekend, with the exception of sometimes people will put an exclamation point on the Cyber Monday deal or change the offer.
(23:07) I'm just wondering about when you guys are helping clients prepare or Zach, you're going through with the brands, like what are the calendar, what are the key dates you guys are thinking about? Yeah, I can rip on like very general things for a second. And then Zach, I'll be curious to hear how you are feeling about it.
(23:24) So looking at, I'll just go chronologically, it's a big word, October, there will be a Prime Day in some capacity. Now, I don't even know if it's called Prime Day, it's like Prime Big Savings or whatever they do in October. July was later this year, so it might be later this year for October, we'll have to see what that does.
(23:42) But that's probably the kickoff to proper Q4 for a lot of people, call it mid October until it's full actually released. We see gifting for gifting heavy brands start to pick up the last week of October. Now, I'm not gonna say like pick up, but they just start, you know, like you start to see some movement there. If you've got some gifting messaging, you might see some movement starting in October.
(24:00) So I don't think it's too early to start that, like honestly, I don't think it's too early, especially if you're using cost controls, because they just won't spend, you know? Anyways, November, so then going into November, we will recommend to brands if they feel comfortable starting November 1st or something, feel free.
(24:17) Like I'm not gonna hold your feet to the fire and say you have to start November 1st, because maybe that feels a little early. I think we progressively see people start earlier, in earlier, but if you feel comfortable starting November 1st with anything, I think that's a good time to do it. Otherwise, we are strongly recommending, do not wait until Black Friday, probably don't only start the Monday before, but maybe go the Monday before that or before that, which is not the first week of November, it's the second week of November, start that. I have not seen it cause issues with your ability to then also continue to rip
(24:47) into the actual week of Black Friday. We have very, very few people who will just start on Black Friday and then end on Cyber Monday. So start mid-November if you can, if you wanna change something about it going into Black Friday, maybe do that.
(25:04) Let it rip through Cyber Monday, maybe we can talk about changing the promos, and then immediately, if you can, flip over from Cyber Monday into some kind of gifting messaging, but you might not even need to change your offer that. All legal things aside about consistently having the same offer will sidestep that for a second, but I think you can roll with out of Cyber Monday into gifting basically that Tuesday, and then run that through December 15th when shipping starts to cut off, and then again, through maybe move over to Amazon to close it up. So anyways, that's my general calendar. I'm staring at my calendar as I say all this.
(25:42) Zach, your opinion? This episode is brought to you by the Foxwell Founders membership that Andrew and his wife, Gracie, run. It has been absolutely pivotal for not just the Homestead team but the Easy Street Brands team. We've had, I don't even know how many members are currently in there that are part of our ecosystem, but when it comes to anything from learning ads to understanding what's going on, to building an agency, to knowing retention, it's been absolutely useful for our team when they get stuck or they need help to just go there and resource all the other experts.
(26:11) So definitely would recommend it for anybody that's looking to take it a step deeper, try to get a little bit more knowledge on growth marketing and all the world DTC is. Yeah, I think one of the most incredible things about it is you can just open up the Slack group every single day.
(26:27) You can pin your favorite channels for the topics you care most about, and every day there's gonna be somebody who just, because they want to contribute something valuable to the group, you can go learn something every single day and it's gonna be extremely useful. There's some ballers in there that you just get the benefit of learning from that for the cost, you couldn't pay them that for their time, but through the membership, you get access to some incredible people and tons of resources.
(26:51) Yeah, I think the biggest resource to me too is the events that Foxwell Founders does. They've been able to do some, even in Wisconsin, even in the boring state of Wisconsin, which is pretty awesome, getting people together in person and able to have really just honest conversations of what's going on, what's working for them now, where they're at in their business, and knowing that there's gonna be, like Brad said, some real killers in this space, in this membership that can help and are willing to take the time and help.
(27:14) So that's been a huge part of why a lot of our team have really enjoyed it as well. And the applications are now open if you're looking to join, so make sure you-- Foxwell Founders, yeah, foxwellfounders.com. Go check it out, cool. All right, so my calendar is Labor Day, into fall sale, into primetime sale, into anniversary sale, into Black Friday, into Cyber Monday, into back to, no, into holiday sale, sorry, anniversary Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday sale, New Year's sale. That is the rest of our year for Easy Street Brands.
(27:52) So, I mean, this is how we think about it. We run promos, it works. We've seen brands do this same playbook. I mean, the one brand I always like to reference that did this six years ago, seven years ago, I helped work on one of their ad accounts is Nectar Mattress. Nectar Mattress was the first, I think, billion dollar in revenue D2C brands.
(28:13) Their playbook was sales all year round, baby, and it was just rinse, repeat, make slight adjustments, tweak things, your performance gets weird, shift it around, maybe go from a buy more, save more, to a buy X, get Y free, generally the same promotion, just slightly reworked throughout the year.
(28:32) So, I completely agree with Brad, just like your thought, on kind of just like keep rolling. We are essentially a rinse and repeat and maybe slight reworks throughout the year, but that's how we roll. So as far as launch day, I have Monday, 11 10, flip over to Black Friday, and then run Black Friday all the way up until Sunday before Cyber Monday, and then on 12 four, flip over to holiday.
(29:00) So, yeah, I mean, pretty much the same playbook. We historically for homesick clients will launch November 1st, but because we, Hollow, have a true anniversary during that like first week of November, which is always really helpful, or end of October, I should say, we usually just like roll with our anniversary sale and then roll that straight into Black Friday for Hollow.
(29:18) So let's talk about the, so we talked a little bit about the schedule. Let's talk about offers. Let's talk about as people are crafting this, like what have you guys seen that works? You know, to me, the general consensus is like, it has to be a good deal also, though. It can't just be like some run of the mill thing in terms of like 10% off, unless you never discount.
(29:40) Like it needs to be meaningful and feel meaningful, and volume discounting is actually attractive, and free shipping tends to be quite attractive. I mean, you guys can tell me what you think, but those were some of the themes from last year, the last couple of years from founder members. What do you think about when crafting an offer the right way for this period? Want me to go, Brad? Yeah, I'll go.
(30:03) Yeah, go ahead. Well, the first thing that I will say is I don't like dropping an offer just over this period of time. I think that you should have two weeks, kind of to Brad's point, to have an offer that's strong that you can ramp up and figure out what creatives with that offer are resonating, and then those ones you can hammer, along with your Evergreen ads, which we always talk about every year, that Evergreen ads usually crash over the BFCM weekend, but I think those weeks leading up to it, like this is why I like dropping an offer sooner. So I mean, like I know it's tied to calendar and offer, but I definitely would run it,
(30:38) that same offer that you're gonna run through that Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, I would try to run that two weeks leading up to it at a minimum. So you can get validation that it's working, because you might launch that offer above and beyond your Evergreen offer or no offer, and it flops hard, and you're like, "Shit, now at least you have two weeks to shift," versus just saying, "This offer better work on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
(31:00) " That way you at least you have a little bit of time to kind of shift if needed, which we've done. We've done that at Homestead before for clients, we're like, "We'll launch a BFCM offer early, and just it's crickets, just bad, and we should see some signal." And so then we just rework it within the first week, and usually see a lift in performance right there. Yeah, I agree with all that.
(31:20) I would say there's three cohort themes that I've seen that work consistently pretty well. It's gonna be percentage off, up to X percent off, and then the bundled savings are the three biggest ones. Give with purchase, I think, I'm sure it works. I just haven't seen it personally work in any meaningful way that I can remember off the top of my head, but percentage off discount, probably need to start at something like 20%.
(31:43) It might be tricky if you have some tariff concerns or things coming up, so you might wanna probably start thinking about your actual MSRP pricing today, and if it makes sense for Black Friday coming up, we just had a conversation with a client about their pricing and some tariff stuff, and how they probably need to start adjusting now to be ready for that.
(32:00) So percentage off, I think, can work really well. The up to discount stuff, it's kind of maybe tacky for some people when they have the loss leader kind of pricing where things are aggressively discounted, but we have plenty of people who will do up to 50%, 60% off, and they have a good range of stuff in the 20%, 30% range, so they're not pissing a bunch of people off, and then they have a decent mix of stuff in that 60% range, but it's nothing, it's not your hero's skews, and obviously that big percentage off can be pretty compelling,
(32:29) and then, yeah, the bundled stuff, which is, I guess, kind of similar to the up to, in a way, just slightly different. When I say the up to, I really mean you have different skews marked down at different prices, versus bundling is buy more, save more, in a way. Yeah, and I think the buy more, save more, you can always position as up to as well.
(32:48) We've done that for hollow, consistently, right? So if it's buy two, get 20, buy three, get 30, buy whatever, four, get 40, you can always run up to 40% off, and I think that that's completely fine. Yeah, I mean, same with us. We've never seen a gift of the purchase, Rit. It can work to increase AOV. I've never seen it as an offer crush, though. It's like standalone, right? Maybe combined with something else, it works.
(33:11) Like with a discount, it might work. Like it's a sweetener to the deal. Yeah, I see it as like an AOV lifter, like in a progress bar type of situation, spend next morning, get a free gift, and spend even a little bit more, get free shipping, and then whatever.
(33:28) I've seen that do okay, but I have never seen that as like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday offer crush. No, I didn't have an either. It also just feels very like, you know, not, like what is it? Do you know what I mean? It feels cheap. It's also like what's the real value of this, and it feels cheap, unless you really know what it is. Yeah, and the main reason you're going to that store-- Huge surprise gift.
(33:46) Totally, the main reason you're going to that store is to buy the hero product, anyways, that you're gonna get a free gift with. So you don't really give a shit. Yeah, I would probably stay away from that if you can. Same with Brad. Percentage off, up to buy more, save more. Those are the three.
(34:03) You know, the BOGO is obviously the other one, which that's always gonna work really well, depending on like your product margin, and all that good stuff. But those four, I should say, are like the top. And you guys have, so you're having, you know, the, all of the ads, even Evergreen, are going to the redesigned lander, or like the homepage that's being modified, right? Like with talking about the deal. So that's number one.
(34:26) Then you also have-- I don't change the landing page. All that I change is like the top bar, or if there's like a section-- That's what I mean, that's what I mean, the top, like a tiny thing. Yeah, you're not like totally re-doing anything. Right, okay, that's what I mean. Like some sort of call out that it's a holiday period. But like other than that doesn't have to be anything.
(34:44) When you're launching the offer ads, which again, I think are always an uphill battle against the Evergreen ads that you have running, do you typically launch a corresponding lander for those as well, that's like a specialty thing, or are you just driving it still to the, is the ad to leave, just driving it still to the homepage for them to work? I prefer to still run your top landing page.
(35:08) If your top landing page is five reasons why, listicle, or if it's your homepage, or if it's your collection page, or whatever it is, your top page, that you've kind of identified between Q3 and Q4, the start of Q4, that is where you should push the ads to. I wouldn't build like a big promo page necessarily.
(35:26) I know like there's some brands that will run like a very promo heavy, like land on a page and like scratch off a discount, and then it pushes you over to like a shoppable page. But the majority of traffic from what we've always seen is pushed your top landing page, pushed your top PDP, top clutch, whatever's working top destination URL that you're pushing traffic to now is where you should go.
(35:43) Have you ever seen success with like taking your, taking the format of like a five reasons why page and making it like way more giftable? So like, you know, you have a bunch of gift shoppers between December 1st and December 15th. Have you ever seen any success that I have it? That's why I'm asking. We tried it and it flopped hard last year.
(36:01) So we just kept pushing to our top listicle and making the ads very gift heavy and then adding a little bit of like holiday vibes to the website, right? You know, you put a Santa hat on your logo or whatever little shit like that. Well, cause you still need to sell people on the product, right? Like it's, they might love the discount, but like the discount is not the only reason they're there. Yeah, that's like the, you know, like the extra add on for them.
(36:24) Yeah, you just have to persuade them. So how do you coordinate across all channels? Ads, email, right? Like for me this year, I'm recommending everybody just blast only Texas with SMS. That's like the number one thing. That's my number one recommendation. Same. But like, how do you coordinate it? We talked about that a little bit, but is there, let's talk about it as a relation to email.
(36:49) We haven't talked about that as much. Just same messages generally that you've seen in the offers that are working. And then rip a plain text email as well. Yeah. Okay, so I would make a checklist of all the things you need to update and then look at it every single day. And it's probably gonna give you a little bit of anxiety.
(37:06) And that's good because you need to feel anxious over making sure everything is consistent. So make a checklist of all the things you need to update. Ads, emails, landers, website, whatever, everything that you need to work through, just make a checklist. I'm sure some person on Twitter will have a checklist list for us in the coming weeks.
(37:22) And you could just borrow. Make a list and just kind of work through that to make sure it's updated. Quick hits on ads, leave your evergreen as is, duplicate your evergreen ad banners on the top of the top evergreen performers, and then do the rest of the promo stuff from there.
(37:39) I think if you're gonna do promo specific or gifting specific content, you gotta really lean into it. Be creative with a reason that you're making those ads. The big discount text stuff works, but it works for people that are familiar-ish. And it's like, you're not gonna push a ton of acquisition by doing that. So I think you just need to be really creative when you're doing the ad side.
(37:56) In the emails I have a couple of quick points on that I would do differently-ish from ads, but Zach, do you have anything on ads that you'd drop in there additionally? Not really, no, same thing, keep going. I can always comment on it. Are you gonna be in the warehouse with a Santa suit and socks in the sack or what? (laughing) I've been there, I've been there. This is Zach from Holo Socks.
(38:17) Yeah, yeah, it does work, it does work. We should all make a white listing page for Santa wears holo and then see if we can-- Free ideas, baby. Hey, I'll send the invoice. For emails, something that we like to do a little bit differently, if you can swing it, I like to do a little bit of an early bird kind of discounting for people who have maybe purchased before, there's competing thoughts of like, okay, are you giving away margin to people who might buy anyways? But I think it's cool to send an email that says, hey, our Black Friday sale is gonna go live tomorrow. When it goes live on the website,
(38:47) you're gonna see this discount. I'm gonna email you again and I'm gonna say, use this discount code and you'll get an extra 10% off. If you will not see this on the website because you're special, you're unique, we wanna treat you because you're a customer, you're on the list, whatever, that works really well. Plain text versus not, I think is fine either way.
(39:04) Plain text can really work well for that, especially if it's like from the founder message. So if you wanna offer an additional discount to people who are already on the list and you don't wanna try to require them through ads or, and they haven't purchased, right? So this is not new customers, but on the list, I think you can do that.
(39:22) And then if you wanna try and get people who haven't purchased in a while to come back or existing customers to maybe buy quickly before they go spend all their money on everything else, I think that that can work really well. So that's something I would do differently from ads to email. The other thing for email, for email and SMS, I guess, is incorporating the new discount into your flows.
(39:39) So we always do this, Homestead obviously runs a ton of email and SMS. It's like our biggest service offering that we offer. I think it's like 80, 90 brands that we run every year. We're always like, give us the offer as soon as you possibly can. So we can go make these custom sections that we replace in your flows, which will always help with email performance, right? So when people are dropping into these flows, they're not seeing like an evergreen discount, they're seeing your holiday discount in there.
(40:02) So I would definitely make sure you're taking a look at your flows too, so that those are up to date with the best offer that you can showcase. But yeah, Brad, some more thoughts, nothing really too different over here. We should get a special segment like overlaid on this from Jacob and just like, how many emails are we sending and what is too many? Because he's probably gonna say more.
(40:26) I mean, truly though, like that is one thing that we can probably talk about for a second is, yeah. I mean, we will send between Black Friday and Cyber Monday for Holo, like 12 emails in four days. No, more than that. That's probably, it's gotta be more. Yeah, 15, 16 emails. We'll send four emails a day and probably two to three texts a day on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Some people are like, we'll send two.
(40:47) Like we're afraid to send two. We'll like send more of them for sure. Yeah, I think four is kind of like the sweet spot for brands that are 10 to 100 million maybe. I would definitely try to send more throughout that period of time. Okay, so you're coming into this and now it's game time, right? And there's always a pacing document that everybody has that you're trying to look for and the days that are really the hottest days.
(41:16) How do you guys look at this? What are the things you recommend looking at in terms of pacing? I feel like a lot of the success of those that do really well is that you're scaling up, that's one. And so how do you scale up, I think is a good question. I mean, obviously just increasing spend is one thing, but like by how much and how is it going to your forecasts? And then are you spooling out new creatives, net new concepts in this period, or like what other pieces are you doing to amplify during that time when it's really hot? Yeah, I think pacing is really difficult last year,
(41:57) kind of like what I started with because we had to kind of combine what November and December did last year and then figure, or in 2023, and then figure out how it was gonna be spread across both of those months in 2024. And there was just like a compressed time period from the start of Black Friday to the shipping cutoff. Like it was just fewer days.
(42:18) And so I think that made it really difficult. Now, thankfully this year, and I think it changes again the following year, thankfully this year will be really similar to last year. So I think you can kind of use last year as a guide. You should go and look at every single day of revenue, new customer revenue and spend by day from the start of November through the end of December and just look at how your spend and efficiency looked. And then you can just start to kind of map it out that way. And you can kind of determine for yourself
(42:42) if you're happy with how it pays or not. But we just kind of start with what is the total budget for November and December. And then we use kind of daily pacing from the previous year as a guide for how to like actually allocate that across the days. And then usually scaling up, I mean, going into Black Friday, your budgets can easily double the day your sale goes live.
(43:01) But I think you should anticipate budget going up 20, 50, 100% from the Sunday before into the Monday before. And then again, there's a different step function, the week of Black Friday. And then again on Friday through the weekend, it dips a little bit and then Monday it pops again. So that's kind of like the general theme is I would expect the weekend, actually last year the weekend like didn't dip as much as it normally dipped, which maybe was kind of that compressed timeline, but expect a little bit of a dip.
(43:30) I don't know if I explained that well, but that's kind of the overview. I mean, thematically- Just double budgets. I mean, there's just not this every day. I'm scared about it. The weekend is always something to be afraid of. I personally, many years ago, I've learned since then, but like definitely had harder returns on the weekend.
(43:53) So making sure that you're aware of like where it is on an hourly basis through the weekend, I think is really big. And then knowing that it's gonna be a bigger push on Monday because people are ready to shop. Yeah, the other thing to keep in mind is if you're not using a MTA tool, like Facebook is not gonna be caught up with what you're doing for pacing, you have to use AMER or something else to do that because it's gonna look like garbage and platform probably most of the day.
(44:18) But if you're using a North theme or a triple offer attribution, you might not have that issue necessarily. I wouldn't, it can go either way, but I generally lean on AMER and then just bump as things continue to look efficient. So looking at Holo from last year, basically where we're at here is the day before Black Friday. So the 28th, we were at about 40K.
(44:40) And the next day on Black Friday, yeah, we scaled up to like close to 80. So about double. And then we actually had a really strong Saturday Sunday where we basically baselined. Usually we'll pull down Saturday Sunday, like a decent amount, but we just had pretty consistent days there and then actually pushed up a little bit more even on Cyber Monday.
(45:12) Brad, have you seen that historically where you'll basically go a lot, whatever, push up Friday, kind of see what happens. Are you usually pulling down Saturday Sunday? Yeah, historically, usually more than this last year. And I, I don't know if that was because shopping timeline was kind of compressed and people were, they didn't realize that, okay, I started later than I thought because it's already almost December, but yeah, it was much less pullback last year into the weekend.
(45:37) Yeah, but I also think some of it is, the sophistication of an advertiser, like if you guys are at a certain level or the people that you're advertising for Brad are at a certain level to spend. And if you have been properly prospecting at a high spend over a period that's leading in, you're gonna see less of a dip because typically what's happening is, for a normal seven to eight figure brand, I think a lot of what's, is they're spending, a lot of what's happening is that they're spending more into an awareness phase in October. And then they're hoping to convert a lot more of those folks
(46:10) versus somebody like, you know, that's spending, let's say a 500K a month or whatever, right? Is a much bigger brand and the awareness is a lot higher just all the time. So you're gonna see less of a dip. And so I think that's good.
(46:28) I think that speaks to the consistency of like being, you know, being aware of what's happening. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think if you have the right offer, thinking that you can spend three times what you were earlier in the week on Black Friday, or even four times what you were is definitely possible. And we've seen it happen time and time again. So yeah, I mean, to Brad's point, pacing is a huge thing.
(46:51) So Facebook will not know how well things are going. So having some type of like hourly or even every two hour pacing check to be like, where are we at? Are we past the goal? Like if I, I mean, again, this is where like, I think a lot of brands will say, this is our revenue number and here's our, you know, MER target for the month.
(47:08) Kind of know where you need that to land going into that weekend. Cause like if your MER is low and your revenue is right in line, like maybe you don't have to gas as much in like returning customer will help lift that MER up and your month will balance out.
(47:26) But if your month is already looking good and you're really ready to gas it, be prepared to like double budgets and double them again two or three times on that Friday or Saturday. I mean, this is something we've talked about on this podcast before that there, a lot of currently, if you have a good foundational funnel built under you or, you know, meaning you have multiple good funnels, you have ads that have, you know, the things we talked about, right? Especially, you know, you have great performing ads with good social proof, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you have all those pieces that are together,
(47:55) spending more is something that's gonna help improve during this, I mean, it's just like doubling it is gonna help. Like, you know, not even doubling, but like increasing spend generally is a big lever that I, you know, I think you can help if you're an agency listeners or like, if you're a brand, this is like, you can walk yourself through that, like we're gonna be okay.
(48:19) We have a good foundation, it's been working, we're gonna double it and we're gonna see what happens. And generally, like the market will hold that if it's good. Do you guys agree with that statement? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's something that I, okay. That's something that I personally have like, I feel like been more conservative on and I feel like that's a big lesson, which is just like, if it's working and it's good and you have a big foundation there, then more.
(48:42) Yeah, I mean, I'm just going back to look at even the previous year for Holo and even in the previous year when we were much smaller, we went from, you know, 20 to 60 day over day, right? So it's, I mean, if the funnel is working, you can definitely hit the gas in those days. The previous year though, we did need to pull down on Saturday and Sunday because performance wasn't there as strong.
(49:03) Again, this is where like, having a good team, having a good agency, like taking the time that weekend to just like, stay chill and kind of lock in is usually worth it because buyer intent is just so high during that, you know, four or five day period. All right, well, tons of actionable insights here.
(49:20) Obviously, more to talk about and more that we can get into. So feel free to share your thoughts, andrew at foxwelldigital.com. And we likely will be talking about Black Friday even more. We'll get into this, but we hope this has been helpful to give you a little bit of a playbook in the way that we think about it. And we'll look forward to your reviews and your feedback and hearing from you.
(49:38) And we really appreciate you listening to this podcast. So have an awesome day. (upbeat music) Yeah, we're pretty close. I mean, I think it changed your mic, by the way. Sorry, pause. Shane, clap. Yeah, it was really intense. You were like breathing into it. It was very like-- It's actually, it's better. It's very vampire. Yeah, it's much better.
(50:06) Okay, it was maybe your, oh, I don't know why I did that. It's weird. It's good. Okay. Shane, we're back. (upbeat music) The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends, honestly. Like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast.
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