BFCM Recap & Tactics To Pull Forward
This bonus BFCM episode is a full debrief on what actually worked over Black Friday/Cyber Monday with real numbers, not theory. Zach Stuck comes out of paternity leave to break down his most recent Twitter "Beef" on why most Google agencies have their incentives completely misaligned (especially when they’re charging % of spend on branded search). He also goes over how his team engineered a BFCM weekend that drove huge revenue without torching margin.
We walk through this offer that took hourly revenue from ~$50k to $142k and then again to $172k while still holding around 9x MER. We cover the exact structure of the offer, how it affected AOV, and why time-boxing the offer beat running a gift-with-purchase the entire weekend. You’ll also hear how they built daily and hourly pacing models out of Shopify and ad platform data so they knew by midday whether they were ahead, behind, or needed to push harder.
From there, we get into the channel and creative side: how much budget actually went into BFCM-specific ads vs evergreen, the retention structure that printed 10x+ ROAS and the specific ad concepts that spent over Black Friday and held strong through Cyber Monday. We even talk about total amount of emails and sms messages that went out on Black Friday alone, and why the list didn’t revolt.
If you’re a media buyer or e-com operator looking to turn BFCM from “hope and vibes” into a repeatable system, this episode is basically the playbook you’d normally only get inside a private Slack group (like the Foxwell Founders Community).
Key Takeaways:
What actually happens when you time-box an offer to a single hour on Black Friday.
How many emails and texts you can really send on Black Friday before you burn your list
The importance of building a BFCM pacing sheet to know if you’re behind and need to push.
How much budget actually went into BFCM-specific creative vs evergreen ads.
What a “creative diversity” roadmap for BFCM actually looks like in practice.
How you can structure a Meta retention campaign that prints a 10x+ ROAS without lying to yourself (or clients) about incrementality.
How to let creative do the targeting and still keep accounts manageable through the BFCM chaos
The specific BFCM ad concepts that actually spent $90k+ and worked.
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn more about Andromeda and GEM as Andrew breaks them down on the Perpetual Traffic Podcast.
Full Transcript
(00:00) The plan was like, we're going to run it Friday morning for an hour. We're going to give a free beanie. It's like a $50 product with every purchase over 100. So like a good value for the price that you have to spend. And it was at like 10 a.m. And I'm like, if it goes well, then we'll plan to do it again in the evening.
(00:14) And then we'll plan to do it again on Cyber Monday. And the first time that we did it, we were averaging like, I'm not trying to flex by any means. I'm literally just trying to give you guys numbers so you can understand these things. We're doing like 50k an hour between the 8 a.m. hour, the 9 a.m. hour. The first drop that we did this, we jumped up to $142,000 in that hour.
(00:31) So we went from like 50s to 142k in an hour. And in that hour, we ran it at 9.2m. They basically trained the algorithm to be like, look for specific assets that are talking about this and amplify them. Like in a normal instance, it would not show some new shit over like pre-existing stuff that had a bunch of social proof, right? So like, that's why they're showing this because it's under basically the new like intramatum slash gem.
(00:55) And it's a different asset and they cranked them that way. And it was built to show new. One, which is like very simple, but I saw across like solid gift giving brands. It's like the exact same shot, but like across several brands is like people holding the product in front of a Christmas tree. Like up, just in front of a Christmas tree.
(01:11) Very simple to do. You could probably do it with Gemini in four seconds. So if you still need, I don't know when this is going up. I think there's still a little bit of time before the shipping cut off, but like slap it into Gemini and get in front of a Christmas tree. Damn it. It's working. It's working. And now let's take a listen to the scalability school podcast.
(01:32) Welcome to another episode of the scalability school podcast. Your favorite podcast that you listen to while you're biking, gardening, walking your dog, driving, rowing. I don't know what else do people do when they listen. Shoveling last week. Shoveling in the Midwest. You know, what else do people do when they listen to podcasts? Well, wherever this finds you, we're glad that you're here listening to us in your ears.
(01:57) So we're grateful for all the tens of listeners that we have. And surprise, surprise, those of you that weren't watching on video, special guest Zach Stuck on the podcast. I don't know if you've heard of this guy. Zach Stuck on the podcast. Pretty successful. Does great at a Twitter beef. Very famous in that realm.
(02:18) That's how most people know him. Loves to kind of stir the pot and get things going there. He is coming back off of paternity leave temporarily for a special Black Friday, Cyber Monday recap and tactics to pull forward episodes of what we're talking about today. Zach, I don't know if you've ever been on a podcast before, but welcome.
(02:38) Thanks for having me here, guys. It's great. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. Big fan of the pod. So excited to get into it. One of 10. Yeah. Everybody is. It's all it goes, right? A lot of high ratings. Yeah, that's right. We should talk about, do you want to do a 25 minute intro like people do on podcasts all the time? Yeah.
(02:57) Why don't you tell us your entire life story about how you got into digital marketing? And every time that happens, I'm like snooze. I'll gas you guys up for the next 25 minutes after that then. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. You should be like, all right, this intro is going to take, people should say that on the podcast.
(03:12) This intro is going to take 35 minutes. And then just fast forward until you want to hear real shit, 36 minutes. Okay. So we're talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, tactics to pull forward, how it was. There's a lot of stuff that we can get into. You know, Zach, I think, first of all, you had this very cool, before we get into that, there's a discussion about, you know, the flat fee thing that people have been talking about quite a bit.
(03:39) Let's get into talking about this. Flat fee versus percentage of spend as it relates to Google. Why do you not do branded search? Everybody's wondering. Let's talk about this. And why you wanted to get this going, why you want to talk about it, because clearly you're passionate about it. Okay, so the context is, I usually just go on Twitter to complain or bitch about things that I can't say directly to people that I'm working with.
(04:04) So that's where this started. So we have a Google agency that we hired for one of the brands that started on a 15K flat fee. So pretty solid flat fee out of the gate. Wanted 8% of ad spend. And I said, no, no, no, let's start with the flat fee, see how the first month goes. Came back after Black Friday, right? Which is the great time to come back to your clients and ask for a bunch of money.
(04:27) And basically it was like, yeah, we crushed. We scaled spend. We doubled spend. And we should move over to this 8% fee. And I'm like, you know what? That would be like, I don't know, 40 grand, 45 grand. We're not going to do that. So also explain how this spend scaled so much. It's all branded search. It's all branded search, basically.
(04:47) So that prompted me to basically go on Twitter and rant about how I think, specifically Google agencies should be flat fee based. Because yet to right now, I mean, it's Friday the 5th at 4.14 p.m. And I've yet to receive any real proof from any Google agency and DTC that they can run prospecting at scale at profitable on new customer acquisition.
(05:14) So my point being that Google is not as much of an incremental channel. And I think that because of that, agencies should not charge a percentage of spend. And they should be on a flat fee. So that's kind of my take. Kevin Simonson, whenever you're ready to share some results, you don't listen to our podcast, but I'll make sure to clip this section and send it to you.
(05:39) So I'm ready. I'm ready to see this case study that we've been waiting on for 48 hours plus now. So that's where it started. I'll just say, I'll say that since I've known you for a long time, Brad can maybe chime in on this too, but like, this is not a new thing. This has always bothered you, for the record.
(05:56) Like, I remember you and I have talked about this. This is like maybe seven years. Like we've talked, minimum. Like this has bothered you for a while. So I'm just saying, this is a thing that you've- It's very top of mind this week. Yes. Yeah, of course. Especially, yeah. By the way, I'm the owner of that agency.
(06:14) I just haven't told you. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm the one that's right. That's what I call that the Foxhole percentage. Yeah. Brad, any take? Yeah. I mean, I think I largely agree. I'm not against like percentage-based structures for different types of things. But, and we have very few of them. But at the same time, I agree.
(06:38) Like the issue with the more than average Google agency in particular is like, that's not what's scaling. I mean, we've had instances where Google has been incremental. And I'm sure there's actually people who are legit who have had a couple of those cases as well. But I think, and maybe you could say it's about Meta and other channels too.
(06:55) But like the average Google agency, which is maybe the average agency, is like, it is brand. Every time we do a Google audit, it's like, holy shit, this says non-brand. It's all brand. It's like, come on, what are we doing here? So yeah, I just, yeah, I largely agree. But what I was curious about, I was like, did anybody say anything like useful back? Like I know there's a lot of back, there's 100,000 views right now.
(07:17) There's a lot of replies. Did anything like spark your gesture? No, like, okay, nobody changed my mind. Nobody said anything useful here. I'm just curious. No one changed my mind. No receipts. I think there's no receipts. I have like, one, a couple of voice notes from an Australian agency owner. I have a bunch of DMs basically of people just saying thanks for the entertainment over the week.
(07:43) But no, I've not seen anything. I would love to. I would love to be wrong here. And I mean, for what it's worth, like going back to what I said is, where is it? I think I said most. Where is it? Google is should be a flat fee is paying a percentage of spend. Yeah. I mean, like, show me the, show me the receipts.
(08:02) Show me YouTube. That's incremental. Show me non-branded search. That's incremental. I would love to see it. I'd love to be proven wrong. I just haven't seen it. We've audited. I don't know, 700 to 1,000 brands at Homestead over the last seven years. Ever seen it done successfully prior to us even like looking at things.
(08:20) Homestead doesn't even run Google anymore because it wasn't a channel that we felt like we could move the needle. Like basically most brands just put it on autopilot and we were just charging extra fees for it. We didn't feel like that was fair. So yeah, I don't know. That's my take. I think it's just a tricky channel.
(08:36) And there's people, I mean, like there's the team over at House that had some feedback. I haven't seen any receipts from them yet, but again, I would love to. There's some people in the Foxville Founders membership that are agency owners that run Google. And again, like I'd love to see, I guess that's all I'm really trying to say.
(08:54) I would love to see. House, feel free to sponsor Hollow's next incrementality test for free. You know, I will happily. Yes, House, if you're listening, I will send this to you also. If you want to give me a hundred grand to spend on Google and try and prove that it's incremental, I would love to do it and would love to share the numbers.
(09:15) Happy to be the guinea pig. But yeah, that's where we're at. Interesting. Yeah. Well, let's transition to talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And if anybody has thoughts on this, you know where to find us. So you did a flash sale strategy that you were texting Brad and I about over the weekend. Free gift over a certain dollar amount, additional percentage off.
(09:42) How did this work? And I know that it crushed for you. So what were the details? Okay, so the thought was, how did this even come up? I think I saw some random company doing like an hour giveaway. I don't know what it was for. It wasn't a DTC brand. It was just like a, I don't even know. Something I saw on Facebook or like Instagram as I was scrolling.
(10:05) They're like, oh, for the next hour, we're giving away this. It might have even been like some apparel brand. I have no idea. I can't remember where it came from. But I reached out to Max, our CMO of Hollow. I was like, yo, we need to try a flash sale. Where we timebox a free gift to purchase. Versus just like saying we're going to do a free gift to purchase for all of Black Friday.
(10:25) Which that margin hit is pretty substantial when you basically bake it out over the course of those 24 hours. Because really what you're trying to do is you're trying to offset how much you're going to spend and add spend in that hour. Versus like the revenue that you might get versus the cost of that free gift.
(10:42) So to kind of like run you guys through it, we ran a flash sale. The plan was like we're going to run it Friday morning for an hour. We're going to give a free beanie. It's like a $50 product with every purchase over $100. So like a good value for the price that you have to spend. And it was at like 10 a.m.
(11:02) And I'm like, if it goes well, then we'll plan to do it again in the evening. And then we'll plan to do it again on Cyber Monday. If it goes really well the second time even. And the first time that we did it, we were averaging like, and again, I'm not trying to flex by any means. I'm literally just trying to give you guys numbers so you can understand these things.
(11:20) We're doing like 50k an hour between the 8 a.m. hour, the 9 a.m. hour. The first drop that we did this, we jumped up to $142,000 in that hour. So we went from like 50s to $142,000 in an hour. And in that hour, we ran at a 9.2 MER on Shopify. So like we spent whatever that ends up being, right? So like we spent $20,000 and we did $140,000 in one hour.
(11:47) What happened to new customer in that? Like can you see new customer revenue? How did that change? New customer revenue went from averaging in the morning. So let's see. It went from averaging like 77 down to new customer was 61. So returning customer definitely came through and took advantage of it. And then because that went so well, we were like, let's run it again.
(12:15) Why not? So we like did it again at 6 p.m. central and we did $172,000 in that hour. In the previous hours before that, we're like in the 60s. So again, like we ran that hour at like a 9 MER. So for us, profitability, because we can look at it on an hourly basis, we did $70,000 in profit in that first one hour chunk.
(12:39) And then we did another $84,000 in profit in the second one. So when it comes to like cost of delivery, contribution margin, you know, offsetting like your kind of goal for the day. This like flash sale, one hour only email SMS, absolutely crushed. So we did it again on Cyber Monday and saw some more results.
(13:02) But I think timeboxing it when then you know that you don't have to like spend a bunch more on ads during that whole day necessarily. It's just like you're going to run ads just like you normally would. And then you're going to do these like very quick hits can work great. And it also pulled revenue forward like earlier in the day for us, which is great.
(13:20) Same thing on Cyber Monday. It pulled revenue earlier in the day. It usually hits later at night. So we're like, hey, if we can get like a pop in revenue on Cyber Monday earlier in the day, we might be able to spend a little bit more and average out to the MER goal of like three, which is our target for the days.
(13:33) So what was your inclination of like you had these beanies made already. So you had an idea that you were going to do something with them or, you know, like, well, well, they're you're not selling these or are they? So we are. Yeah, we are. So you are available. Okay. Okay. So these are the thing that this is actually the interesting part about this is we the offer that we run or we're running our evergreen offers like buy three, get three free.
(13:57) And then for Black Friday, a week prior, we jumped it down to buy two, get two. So an even better offer. And the thing that's interesting about that is people weren't incorporating in the beanie as part of the buy two, get two. Like you could technically mix and match any item on the website to buy two, get two, but they weren't really utilizing the beanie.
(14:14) Where historically last year, we ran a buy more, save more on items. And so the beanie was actually selling better last year as a percentage of sales. So we ordered 25,000 of these beanies. And I'm like, hey, like we've, they're $10 a piece cogs. They're expensive to make. They're 100% alpaca. It's not a cheap thing to do.
(14:31) Made in the US. Let's, let's try to utilize this inventory. That's not selling as fast. That's still a great gift that people will probably like because of the holidays and time of year. And the fact that we're selling to people that want warm feet, they probably don't mind a beanie either as just like the product to use for it.
(14:46) So kind of hit multipurpose on that front. Yeah. And there's like a bunch of different things that probably ended up playing into this working, right? You said the one hour urgency. And then the second time you do it later in the day or the next day, it's like, okay, it literally is an hour. Like this isn't, they're not playing games.
(15:01) Like it's an hour. I miss it the first time. I don't want to miss it the next time. Did you guys exclude existing customer, like people who bought within, who already bought the Black Friday offer? Do you know? No. No. Interesting. Because like, so we did this, we did this with a handful of brands too. And I can share some of the numbers for a couple.
(15:18) And we suggested to them like do that just to like not piss people off. But I don't know if they needed to be worried about it or not. We were going to. Yeah, we were going to. And I was like, we need to hit, we need to hit a pretty big Black Friday to hit our targets for the year. So I was kind of like full send.
(15:34) But yeah, I think traditionally that's like probably what you should do is what you just said. Yeah. Cool. I can. Okay. So here's one that we saw. We did this across a couple of people. Their average kind of, they 3x as well in the one hour period in revenue. But they saw a jump in new and returning customer revenue.
(15:53) Now, this specific example brand, and there's a couple that kind of fit this bill where they are new customers, which like hollow is pretty new customer driven, right? Or like mostly new customer driven. So they like had some cleaning out of people who have just been on the list. They've, they signed up, they signed up on the pop of and they just been there for a super long time.
(16:10) They just haven't purchased. And so a new customer for them popped as well. They both popped to a similar degree, new and returning customer. They just do way more new customer. The other thing. So their, their MER also went up like 4x, 3 to 4x over the next hour. And then the other thing that's really interesting.
(16:29) So they did an AOV kind of gating as well. Their AOV went up 30%, 30, 40% for the next like hour, which like that's, that's a meaningful, meaningful jump. Like people were willing to earn, were willing to earn the free gift. You know, if that's a 30, you know, call it a, if it's a 10, 20, $30 jump at AOV, that probably alone pays for the free gift that you're including on a, on a cost basis.
(16:55) Um, yeah, it's kind of, kind of nuts. It's really easy to get addicted to these types of things. So it's like during Black Friday, it probably makes a ton of sense. And then maybe you can think of like different flash sales. Like how are you going to pull forward this to like the rest of the year? Cause like, I think it's cool to recap Black Friday and like put this in the bucket for next year, but how are you going to use this throughout the rest of the year? Into next year.
(17:13) I'll probably just run a, like a, a longer period throughout the day. So it'll be like for the next four hours, get this free gift with purchase type of thing. Cause like the one hour time boxing crushes during that day. Yeah. Buyer intent for average consumer is obviously way up and people are getting hammered.
(17:30) Dude, we send so many emails and SMS on Friday. We send nine emails on Friday, uh, which is absolutely absurd for hollow. So yeah, like nine emails, four texts. It was crazy. We've never done anything to that scale before. Um, obviously it worked. So whatever. Cladio stock price is pumped right now. They're like, yeah, brother.
(17:49) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the, I mean, I think a lot of it is that intent of, if you're going to get, it's a gifting time anyway. Right. Especially it's like, it's easy. I think it's an easy thing to do with the sale. If, if you know, there's a sale coming around, you know, it's good. And yeah, the complimentary product.
(18:07) Like I think that's it. That can have absolutely massive impact as you, as you saw. So I think that's a good thing that people can take. Did you like design the emails out or were they just like a plain text ripped together super quick? Out of curiosity. All nine of those or the ones for the giveaway? No, the free, yeah, the gift, the gift.
(18:23) Those were plain texts that we ripped together. Cause the idea basically we put together that week. And like, we did the same thing for my other brand too. Much smaller scale than, than, than hollow. But those we threw together the day of black Friday. Cause it was like plain text and SMS because it did so well for hollow that morning.
(18:40) We're like, oh shoot, we should try this again for another one. Yeah. Same. But yeah, plain text and SMS. That's the nice thing about those channels is like, you can just cook on them day of if you really want to. Yeah. So with the, with that, you know, you were obviously utilizing hourly pasting forecast tracker, like trackers and everything.
(19:01) So how, how do you, during this period, how are you keeping track of it? What does it look like? What are the things that you're paying attention to that you feel like had the most impact for you and that will have the most impact as, as it goes forward for the, for the business? I can share how our sheet came together.
(19:17) If that's helpful. I'd love, I'd love to hear, Fred. So we, we, we have an, an idea of obviously we have a goal of revenue that we set revenue and spend that we set for clients on, on the month. And then you break it down kind of by expectation of the day, uh, for the entire month of Friday or sorry, uh, the entire month of November through December.
(19:37) And the way that we do that is you take the goal and then you go grab Shopify revenue, uh, by, by day for, um, November through December. And then you just basically like what percentage of, what percentage of sales for November, uh, happened on black Friday. Okay, cool. That's, that's, that's, you just use the multiplication there.
(19:56) Um, just match up the percentage of sales. Um, it's not perfect from a spend perspective because like spend might precede revenue and the same thing is true on an hourly basis. But what it does is it gives you, gives you a bit of a daily expectation for both revenue and spend and how you want those to occur.
(20:09) So we start by doing that daily. And then for the, for the black Friday stretch specifically, um, we broke down particularly Thursday through Monday by hour. So same thing. You just go to an, you go to Shopify, you check by the hour, uh, and the columns that we had was literally by hour, then spend by hour revenue by hour cumulative spend cumulative revenue.
(20:30) And then MER, the really nice thing about cumulative is you could go look at, okay, on my sheet at noon, I'm supposed to be spending $6,000 and supposed to have whatever in revenue, $30,000 in revenue. Where am I actually at? And if you are ahead, cool. You can literally open up your bids. You can add budget.
(20:45) You can do whatever you need to do in that moment. Um, or if you need to pull back, you need to do something else. You need to change your offer. You need to do whatever you could see literally by the hour, how are you repacing? And that's based on the previous years. If you want to get real fancy with it, you could grab like the previous several years, uh, to like average it out a little bit more.
(21:01) But, um, that's kind of how we did it. The one caveat to this is, um, you need to be careful about like when you were sending emails and SMS. Cause like Zach, if you do this next year and you're like, oh shit, I forgot we did this free gift thing. Like you're not, you know, you're not going to 3X spend for one hour.
(21:14) Um, so just, you just got to kind of keep, keep those things in mind, but that's how we broke down our, our sheet. Yep. We do the same thing. It's basically forecasted revenue spend MER, AMER by hour. Um, so same thing, same thing. We try to automate it if, if, if we can. And then, uh, if that breaks, which it did for us, we have, we have our, our head of growth just like filling it out every hour and staying up till like 2 AM.
(21:42) So, yeah. There was a big topic about people saying that, you know, on this podcast, we have, we suggested that people use evergreen. And then the big narrative I heard was actually like separate BFCMS. That's worked better. Do you guys see that as well? Yeah. I remember very specifically, I pulled up before, when we did that episode, I went through like nine to 10 brands and I said, here's the breakdown.
(22:05) And I gave the breakdown and like, there was a decent, some, some were more black Friday heavy and some are more evergreen heavy. And I think the average was evergreen spent more. But what I remember, I said something along the line, we can go back. We got receipts, but I said something. I didn't make a direct suggestion, but I said something along the lines of if you're going to do black Friday ads or you're going to do promo ads, like you got to lean into, lean into the moment and send them into the warehouse
(22:26) to record something, you know, put them next to a Christmas tree and make it look like it's gift wrapped and packaged. VO3 is going to probably have some crazy, I'm sure Santa doing crazy shit this year is going to be very popular with VO3. You're probably already cooking something up and like nano banana, you can, it probably makes it really easy to get some, some holiday photos that are relevant.
(22:44) But like, I think you got to really lean into that moment. Cause that's what I saw was the top spending stuff was like really leaning into. Those moments with something unique, not just like slapping it over like for our clients. Like we made, um, our creative strategies put together this like awesome board of like, here's all of the ideas across a creative diversity, like spectrum that we can do.
(23:02) So it's like the whiteboard ugly ads to the really pristine, like product lifestyle stuff. And it was just like this grid, this matrix of like, here's what creative diversity could look like, uh, from a static and a video perspective. And they just like pumped it out. Like a lot of our clients had this stuff two weeks in advance.
(23:17) Cause we were just super prepared for that black Friday. Um, I, I think almost all of our clients had more spend into black Friday specific assets than, than last year. One of, I have two examples pulled up. One of them spent 50% more into black Friday ads this year. Uh, well, another one spent 300% more like as a percentage of the total spent.
(23:40) So like their aggregate spent went up, but black Friday spent so much more than evergreen did this year. Um, which I thought was really interesting. Um, I don't, I don't really have a thesis as to why yet, but, uh, yeah, my, so here's my thesis on this. So, you know, I did a podcast, um, which I, you know, I can send anyone if you email it to me or whatever.
(23:56) It's also on the fox digital.com forward slash blog. There was an episode, uh, on perpetual traffic where I talked about, uh, gem and basically them coming out and talking about this and like the new ad serving system. And, uh, one of the theories that I have is that like, they basically trained the algorithm to be like, look for specific assets that are talking about this and amplify them.
(24:18) And it's obviously like what we're that that's so, because there's no reason that it would show some new, like in a normal instance, it would not show some new shit over like preexisting stuff that had a bunch of social proof. Right. So like, that's why they're showing this. Cause it's under the, basically the new, like Indromeda slash gem, you know, ad serving and it's a different asset.
(24:39) And they, they cranked them that way. And it was, it was built to show new. Interesting. The, the, we did Friday to Monday, like 900, 900 grand is what we spent on meta over that period of time for hollow three, 184,000 of that 900 was BFCM specific creatives. 42%, 43% of the spend. That's way higher than it was last year.
(25:02) I think it was like closer to like 20, 20%, 17 to 20%. If I recall, right. I could pull it, but yeah, insane. The one, the one thought I had, and you might've hit on this just now. And I might've missed you saying this reels content, no social proof, no ad copy. Like, yeah, I think that's some of it too. I think that, yeah, absolutely.
(25:21) Like inventory shifting. Yeah. I think it's like inventory type of asset. What's serving. So yeah. Also, if you're shooting more nine by 16 content now than you were three months ago, you might've had more nine by 16 reels format content for BFCM, which is why I'd favored it. So, um, for sure. For sure. Did you guys pump out way more black Friday? Like you, like you, you have your baseline where you've probably been up on assets and you've probably, whatever, you've probably three X the output year over year in content,
(25:51) probably more. Did you do, did you create even more? Cause like, as I'm looking at it, there is an obvious, there's a correlation. I don't know that that's necessarily the thing to draw it to, but like we made way more black Friday specific assets this year as well. So that could have helped. Um, and like I said, I think we nailed the diversity in a lot of cases, but, um, did you guys end up producing more for black Friday specifically? Trying to look at, we have 315 black Friday ads that we launched.
(26:16) So yeah, that's wild. Yeah. I mean, and I think that's, I think that's a smart thing to do. And I think that's a huge takeaway that the system is smart enough to look at this in terms of that diversification. The placements are there. Reels inventory is, you know, at least five, 5% of inventory, 10% at least now climbing.
(26:32) And especially in the highest value users in the U S. So it makes sense that they're going to continue to show things more there. Um, and I think that obviously, you know, going into the creative diversity that we all talk about under the Andromeda ad serving, like it makes sense. So a narrative you could, you could see happening in, in 20, in 26 on black Friday is going to be kind of a similar idea.
(26:55) And the idea that organic plays into it as well, you know, cause that's something you're talking about more. Here's a crazy stat. So we had, um, three, 315 black Friday BFCM ads live over that weekend. We had 407 evergreen ads live. It was almost half of our ad library was also BFCM ads. So to your point, like treating new creative, that's probably why it also ate even more, you know, 40% of the spend.
(27:23) Yeah. I'm looking at a brand where we had last year, they did like a fifth of their active ads were black Friday. This year was literally even like it was, it was even. And that's the one where it grew 50%, um, from that example that I was giving. I was going to ask, do you, do you know either in any of your examples, either of you, like if, uh, if at the same time you were just doing big campaign structure in terms of wide campaigns, not necessarily finding like, you know, you're not necessarily doing segment
(27:53) targeting. The creative do the targeting and you're just continuing to open it up. Right. Like that's what you're doing for structure in these instances. Like I think sometimes when black Friday and cyber Monday comes around the old, the old tech tactics come out a little bit, right? Like I'm going to do a little bit more sub audience.
(28:08) I'm going to do a little bit more previous customer, which I think is okay. But for those that really scaled, it's like, you're just opening it up and it's going where it's going to go. And that's it. Right. Yeah. I did not pull out like the reach campaign for retargeting traffic, but maybe I, maybe I should have, that was a, that was an old school one that I think we tried it like two years ago.
(28:25) I do those and then charge on percentage of spend. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. That's where I'm at. Yeah. Me and Meta have a deal. Yeah. No campaign structure was super, super straightforward. It's like black Friday specific campaigns in most, most cases and jam literally all of the creative into one ad set.
(28:41) That's how we do it. Um, you, we started a lot of them like Minro as we, we had Minro as in many cases. Um, one or seven day click. We had, um, some cost cap campaigns and then we just like had some, um, I know there's a lot, there's actually a decent amount of chatter. I think, uh, uh, David Herman started it about incremental attribution during it.
(28:59) We saw some decent success with that. So like we just had a bunch of backup stuff ready, but most of the spend went through Minro as in cost cap, which is kind of our MO. So not really surprising for us. At least we did do a little retention stuff, which I can, I can talk about the retention thing, but I can, I can wait.
(29:13) I'd love to hear about that, Brad. We did on the retention side, 20 grand to like a retargeting campaign of, of that 900 that I said. So, yeah, I mean like it's pretty much wide open. And again, like no account is the same, right? We had, I'm looking at like 20 campaigns running over the course of the weekend in our account.
(29:34) You know, you can't, no one, one way to, to, to, to do it all. I think is the, is always the, the synopsis after like we get, get down to the bottom of it. Like, I think there's some good methodologies that you can definitely follow, but I don't know. I think every account's different. Yeah. Brad, what were you going to say? Yeah.
(29:53) The retention campaign structure that we used that worked really well. And this like, this is mostly worked well from like the entire year, but obviously this, this moment is a good one to use it. But, um, retention campaign, um, one day click, set it up on min ROAS. We set the target like two times higher over the prospecting target just for, uh, incrementality reasons.
(30:11) And you don't like, if you, if you're running your, your prospecting at, um, a break even for just as an example, and you set your, your, your ROAS target two times higher than that for min ROAS because of incrementality reasons. Like let's say that, uh, meta is not as incremental on repeat customers as it is on new customers, just as an example, um, then you need to set it even higher than, than that.
(30:33) So we set it like something like two times higher, uh, just from a, how to set the min ROAS there. We took all the top performing Black Friday, Cyber Monday ads. We set, we, then we also had a separate one for DPAs when clients had a larger catalog. So that ends up with two campaigns. Uh, and they just, they just crushed like this added.
(30:50) We had some, like, I hate, I hate Twitter screenshots where people post like, uh, we got a 10X ROAS like, you know, like they, why do you spend more money? But like, I'm like, I'm not exaggerating. It was like, we had campaigns running at a 10X and like on retention campaigns, I don't feel as strongly about trying to spend into it because there's a much more limited audience, but it worked extremely well, particularly when clients had like a wider catalog.
(31:09) But in general, like people can come back and buy gifts for, for folks. And those, yeah, those did extremely well. We did see some differences in, um, we, we don't like change landing pages a ton during this period, but if you already have like PDPs and collection pages and all different kinds of stuff, we saw in a few instances, like the, based on the customer, whether it was a new or returning customer, the actual destination mattered like a ton.
(31:32) So for new customers, if, uh, folks had, if our clients had like a wider, um, uh, a wider range, like the, the landing pages that were already working did really well. The, um, direct, uh, PDP worked really well for the product that was shown in the ad. And then like a bestsellers page crushed. Um, what didn't work was there like, uh, it was like a black Friday, um, collection, which was sorted with like, not the top selling products.
(31:54) It was just like, Hey, these are really good deals. Um, but for retention based audiences that like black Friday assortment was like, here's the best deals. Maybe you're a little bit more willing to explore different products that aren't the top selling huge difference. Like we're talking one, one spent, uh, you know, 10 grand over that stretch and one spent, um, 20 grand.
(32:12) And it was just like completely different delivery for, um, prospecting versus returning customers in the actual destination. Content was the exact same. Brad, how did you, uh, across like your, your clients, did you see MER change or AMER change much year over year? It depends on like where they're at, but.
(32:28) We were literally within single digit changes, which is crazy. MER was up 2.6% year over year and NC ROS was up 4%. I mean, that's crazy for you guys with how much you're scaling too. Like you didn't, you didn't have to sacrifice efficiency to get, um, what I'm assuming is a lot of presented truth. AOV was only up 7%.
(32:49) So the one thing that we changed, and I think that this is actually a really important call out is our AOV prior to BFCM with this offer. If I look at like the first like week or two of November, new customer AOV was 145. And I was under the impression that, that it was too high. And I'm like, Hey, if someone's going to impulse purchase during this black Friday period, they're going to hear about hollow for the first time and they're going to actually buy on like a literally one within one hour click basis, which is what we want.
(33:17) Uh, we need a lower AOV. Like, I think it's just too high for socks, $145 on socks. Like you're taking a bet on six pairs of these alpaca socks. Like, I don't know. Um, so that's why we rolled offer from three for three to two for two. Um, and I honestly believe that that is part of the success of why we had such a good BFCM is that we've made the offer better, but it also with that better offer conversion rate popped.
(33:41) So like we offset it by then still keeping MER. Actually, MER went up like significantly. Like MER in the first two weeks of the month was like a two, six. And then over black Friday was a three, three, one, five. Yeah. I mean, it's like what you're going to take a chance on, you know, totally. Yeah. You know, of like where your discretionary income for gift giving is.
(34:02) Right. And I think it's a great, I think it's a great call. The interesting thing is that I was talking to Connor from, from Ridge and he was like, we did the, we do the opposite. We literally crank it. So AOV goes higher over black Friday. Um, so I, I'll have to talk to him and see, I don't have any update.
(34:18) I know they had a banger year, but, um, I'm curious to see like what they saw year over year by doing that. Cause we literally thought to try the exact opposite of what they did. So let's talk about specific creative examples that really worked. Um, right. I think this is something people want to get into.
(34:35) So we're talking about, we talked about the spend there. We talked about founder video, um, talking about favorite, favorite items, um, talked about website screenshots and discounts with like a, you know, like the ad is actually a picture of the cart with the discount in it, which is great. Um, sorry to anyone who bought last week, our boss, our warehouse, uh, kind of ad, uh, any other ones that you guys want to call out that like did really well that you think, man, that was a really good concept.
(35:04) I'm glad we did it. Yeah. I mean, the ones listed here are ones that worked across like several ad accounts. So not just, not just making up one that I saw, but, um, the founder video crushed, um, whether it was them in the warehouse talking about the promo and showing some of the specific things that they liked, um, or, you know, them just like talking about their favorite, favorite items.
(35:23) Um, that was really, that was really solid to like, like the one that you said about website screenshots. Like those are easy to do. Like I was in, you take a screenshot, you go into Instagram stories, you slap the overlays on, you export and go into the ad account. I was making those all weekend and I kept telling our team, like, if you need more, just tell me what products and I will get them to you.
(35:40) Um, uh, the sorry to saw that in a ton. I think it's a meme on Twitter right now. Um, where everybody's talking about how that's the new, uh, the new Adams ad that it's not expensive or it's, it's not cheap or whatever. Um, yeah. So that's funny. Uh, we saw like the whiteboard ugly ad kind of thing. What I saw a lot more whiteboards than I saw posted notes this year.
(35:57) Uh, I don't know if that's interesting, but, uh, that, that stood out. And then one, which is like very simple, but I saw across like solid gift giving brands. It's like the exact same shot, but like across several brands is like people holding the product in front of a Christmas tree, like, like up just in front of a Christmas tree.
(36:13) Very simple to do. You could probably do it with Gemini in four seconds. It's like, if you still need a, I don't know when this is going up. I think there's still a little bit of time before the shipping cutoff, but like slap it into Gemini and get in front of a Christmas tree. Damn it. It's, it's working.
(36:24) Um, and like that, yeah, that was like, across like seven accounts. Like it's not like, that was a takeaway on Foxville founders too. It was just like putting it in front of some holiday, like take the thing, put it in front of it, take it on your iPhone. Done. Zach, any, any concepts that really crushed for you guys? Um, this like, sorry to all hunters who bought socks last week.
(36:46) Uh, but hollow just dropped this sale. Uh, whatever. Um, that's basically it. I mean, like we've, we have one of those concepts that spent 90 grand over that weekend, which is just ridiculous. So, you know, I don't know. Keep it simple. Like, I think that I, whenever you run sales, you have to run those concepts.
(37:04) We run them in statics. We run them in gifts. We run them as like AI hunter guy sitting in a stand, like with that text over it, that looks like an organic Instagram story post. Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that. Cause I was just going to say like, we took, I, I made a joke about how you shouldn't just like slap the slap and overlay on top of your African top performer, which like I mostly agree with, but well, something that we did see working well, kind of to your point is like having the, either the Instagram or the TikTok like comment reply.
(37:31) But the question is, will you be having a black Friday sale? And then the hook, um, the, the actual voiceover is, is, is yes, but then it goes into the rest of the normal video. So, um, it wasn't just like a, add an overlay on top. It was a little bit of customization that, that did really well. We have a photo of like a bunch of orders and like a cardboard, like Gaylord, the big like box that they all go in for us postal service, whoever's picking them up.
(37:54) And then like a, uh, four truck. And it literally just says like, we overstocked on alpaca socks, buy two, get two free, ripped 30 grand and spend that one. So I don't know. Sometimes like you just gotta, you just gotta keep it simple with the offers, with the offer concepts over the holiday period. We also had one that was just like a big 50, just like literally just said 50.
(38:15) And it was like percent off, uh, with like a little tags below it. And that was it. So I think sometimes like this year, I think this year it proved like consumer wanted the best deal. And so whoever had the best deal and threw it in your face, uh, and made sure that the offer was on the front end, it worked better.
(38:32) I think is came through and what we saw in performance. How was Apple 11 for you guys? Did it hold steady? I heard a lot of, obviously a lot of good stories about the Apple 11 team doing a lot of great like care for people and everything over the weekend. What'd you guys see? Yeah. Yeah. Their team made us like a bunch of interactive cards and they did really well.
(38:49) I wouldn't say they were top spenders, but like it definitely helped us add volume in a couple of those accounts. But a couple of specific examples, we saw Apple 11 spend something like 20 to 30% of what meta did at slightly better efficiency. Um, what's still not super clear because we haven't run like holdouts or anything at this point is, um, how much of that isn't, is completely net new.
(39:08) The new visitor percentage is a little bit lower on it, but it sounds like the, in the conversations that I've had with them and I've seen some, some posts, I think Marin posted something with this. It's like, if you look at the individual ads inside of Apple 11, their new visitor percentage is much higher.
(39:23) There's just a higher frequency on Apple 11. Um, and so that, that kind of drives that new visitor percentage down, but we saw performance do really well. Um, the specific things that worked were adding the end card to be like aggressive on the promo. I don't know if our episode with, with Miranda will be out at this point, but like she made, she was like, if you don't have an offer in your end card in your interactive card, it, your, your click through rate is going to be literally half of what it should
(39:46) be. And so like that, we saw that to be true during, during Black Friday. So interactive cards where they had like some actual animation to them and some, some motion to it, those crushed, uh, and the offer super, super clear. Um, but yeah, Apple 11 was solid. Yeah. No, no, it's really, we, we spent, spent some dollars behind it.
(40:02) Definitely nothing near meta, but it was great. I think we spent, did we spend equal to, let's look, equal to Google? I have a Apple 11 agency. I charge on percentage of spend. Um, I mean, if you're going to, if you're going to run an agency, just copy, just send me the best performers from meta, even though that's not necessarily proven anymore.
(40:23) That was, that was what worked last year. Uh, and then just fire them up. It's like branded search. It's great. Anything else that you guys want to call out that, uh, you feel like was, was big. Um, I, I, I'll just call out to, uh, definitely heard from, I've heard from a lot of people recently as well, uh, that they're loving the podcast.
(40:42) So appreciate you doing that. If you really do love it, please rate this podcast because it does help us. I think we're the number seven most popular podcast in Argentina for marketing right now. So that's how we climb these charts. Okay. So I just want to call that out real quick before we say goodbye, but anything else you guys want to talk about? Yes.
(41:02) I would like to add onto that. We have a couple of team members in Argentina that listened, so it's probably them holding us up. So shout out to, shout out to them. They're awesome. Um, so yeah, that's a, that's all I have to add. Thank you to your Brad's team members. Yeah. For our tons of listens. No, I think overall it was a different BFCM.
(41:21) It felt a little different. I don't think it was like the same rinse and repeat that we've done historically. I think brands were more aggressive. People were sending more emails, more texts. First were bigger. Um, so I think like for those of the brands and the people that, that didn't see as big of a win, which we had a few, like again at, at Homestead, we, you know, I think on average it was, it was, everybody was up, but I think we definitely had a few that, that were either flat or even slightly down year over year with, with top line.
(41:48) Just know, like it was a tough year. It was a tough one. So I think like you're not alone if that, that's the case. And obviously it's fun to share wins like we are in this, but it was, it was definitely kind of a brutal, uh, run up. I know like the first half of November was tricky for a lot of brands, including us.
(42:05) So Shopify, no commerce had a sweet live tracker. Like everything looked like it was up 20% in revenue year over year. What we don't know is how much more people spend and we have no idea what people were doing at discounts. And so like, as that information starts to come out, like don't, yeah, if you were down, don't freak out.
(42:19) Um, cause like revenue is a, revenue is a very, uh, you know, it's, it's an important factor, but it's not the, uh, it's not the only, not the only factor. So we will, uh, get more information as, uh, as things go on. I'm sure. What are you guys moving forward? What are you going to do now? Yeah. We run the same offer basically that we kick off Black Friday through shipping cutoff.
(42:36) Yeah. I think it's through the 14th this year on Sunday. But yeah, nothing crazy. I mean, just not overthinking it. I think, I think the come down from the holiday sale this year is going to be tough because even for the health and wellness brands that we have insight into, those brands are getting cooked right now, uh, coming out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
(42:55) I would, uh, I'd prepare to like lower your expectations after shipping cutoff in case you're having like an absolute banger of a year, uh, taking your profits now, but you know, store those for a little while. Yeah. I mean, you can use the flash sale thing. Like if you're here, if you're listening to this before, before the cutoff, like use it, it's going to work.
(43:12) So, um, let it, let it rip. And then I think as you start to reflect on like what worked for Black Friday, obviously plan that for next year, you can pull forward into, into other promos, um, from an ad side specifically. Like we're just trying to group group learnings into like what ad formats worked. So that way we can take those and pull them forward.
(43:28) If it was an ugly style ad or it was a organic selfie looking photo, or it was, you know, the sorry messaging. It's like, can you, can you pivot that into an evergreen message without, um, being like cheesy about it? Like, I think there's a lot that you can do. So, uh, just like go bucket them into groups. See what worked on, uh, uh, across the board and then, yeah, try to pull it forward into everything that you do.
(43:48) Awesome. Well, thank you guys for being here. And as always, let us know if you need anything. Andrew at foxhole digital.com. You can get the message to the guys. If they have questions, thank you gentlemen. And, uh, we'll look forward to the next time. This episode is brought to you by the Foxhole founders membership that Andrew and his wife, Gracie run.
(44:12) 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.
(44:35) So definitely would recommend it for anybody that's looking to, you know, take it a step deeper, try to get a little bit more knowledge on, on growth marketing and all the world DTC is. I think one of the most incredible things about it is you can just like open up the Slack group every single day. You can pin your favorite channels for the topics that you care most about.
(44:51) And like every day there's going to be somebody who just like, because they want to contribute something valuable to the group, you can go learn something every single day and it's going to be extremely useful. There's, there's some ballers in there that you just get like the benefit of learning from that, like for the, for the costs, like you couldn't pay them that for their time, but through the membership, like you get access to some, some incredible people and tons of resources.
(45:12) The, yeah, I mean, I think the biggest resource to me too, is like the events that, you know, Foxville 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 like honest conversations of what's going on, what's working for them now, you know, where, where they're at in their business and knowing that there's going to be, like Brad said, some real killers in the space in this, in this membership that
(45:35) can, that can help and are willing to take the time and help. 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, yeah. Foxvillefounders.com. Go check it out. Go apply. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. mm
