BFCM: Your Questions Answered
This week’s Scalability School is a tactical one answering ALL of your BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday) questions. Andrew, Zach & Brad cover how to pace and budget through the holiday surge, build offers that protect margin while lifting AOV, and line up Meta/Google + Email/SMS into a single MER-driven plan.
You’ll hear pragmatic guidance on creative angles, inventory-aware campaigns (and what to do when you’re light or heavy on stock), discount frameworks that don’t nuke LTV, and practical measurement (MER, CPA, and “sanity check” rules). The guys wrap it up with channel sequencing (what runs when) and a concrete weekly timeline to execute without panic.
Key Takeaways:
How smart brands set BFCM budget and pacing so they don’t blow spend too early.
The offer types that actually move volume without wrecking margin. -
How to properly adjust bids, caps, and campaign structure on Meta when auctions heat up. -
The “MER guardrails” to keep things stable during BFCM (and when it's okay to see a dip). -
Planning inventory-aware promos (overstock vs. thin stock) without confusing the customer. -
The creative themes and formats that typically win BIG during BFCM - When to lean into Google (Shopping/Brand Search) vs. Meta for incremental volume. -
How to measure success when attribution goes sideways. -
What your backup plan should be if your first offer underperforms on Friday morning.
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.
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
(00:01) Legal plays a big role. And I think to your point, Brad, those people that come in and ask questions and have curiosity, I mean, it's honestly such a better route to go. Because if you're not undermining the employees that are already there too, right? The employees that are there, they have opinions. They've seen what's going on.
(00:19) Like why aren't you asking them instead of just coming in and being like, well, here I am, you know? So we had a client run their annual sale, which happens to be in September, you know, August, September. If you run a Labor Day sale, this is a good indication for that. It's like, go look at that and see what you did creatively and what conceptually worked.
(00:37) And for them, we just had a ton of low-fi, lower-effort ideas for making organic-looking posts. Low-fi, which is like the very hot, ugly ad method. They had their team records and videos. They made the graphics, whatever. It's like, go back throughout the course of the year and look at your promo periods and see what worked.
(00:53) And every single time you do a promo, what we're trying to do is what conceptually worked that we can pull forward to the next promo. And then what didn't we do that we want to try and throw into the mix? Or what didn't we do enough? Who was actually getting the gift was the important parts. We had a product that did really well for customers.
(01:10) Male demo that was like 18 to 25 was a huge demo for us of who would receive that gift. So a lot of this was targeting moms and it was a lot of language around the gift that your kid will actually want in their dorm room. Like shit like that, that seemed to do quite well.
(01:28) So it was kind of like calling out the maybe obvious, but then like being a little sassy about it, it seemed like really resonant. And now let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Welcome everybody to the Scalability School podcast, the Q4 Black Friday, Cyber Monday Q&A, among many other things, potpourri of ideas coming out of this episode today. Brad has a meme that he wants to talk about. Brad, do you...
(01:59) I misled you with the meme. It's not actually a meme. I don't know if you guys have seen this. I watch sports. I don't know if you guys watch sports. There's something I've been seeing that's really fascinating that keeps popping up on my timeline related to sports is the Colts, the football team. Indianapolis Colts, their owner died like not that long ago.
(02:18) And his daughter has like taken over. And it's really fascinating because like everything you see about her taking over is like she's on the sideline. She's got a headset. She's got a notepad. She's in every single practice. Like she is fucking locked in and it's like sick. It's really cool to see.
(02:36) Maybe he's outside looking in school, but she's just like, she seems like she's obsessed with learning about anything that she needs to know to help like operate the team. And obviously they've had like a successful start to the season if you've watched any any football. It's just cool. Like, I don't know. I just like really not that she needs my stamp of approval, but I respect the commitment that they're just like learning, learning by showing up and just being there. I don't know. It's just cool.
(02:59) So it is amazing, isn't it? Like when you bring somebody outside into an organization, right? And they're like, they have a different way of thinking about it. They have a different like way going about it and they'll see things you wouldn't. And I mean, I think that's, that's good in any organization. Honestly, I've seen that happen so many times.
(03:17) It's why consultants generally do well because it's, they're just a new person coming in sometimes and being like, have you seen this? What do you think about this? Right? Because you get stuck in so much of that day to day grind. Yeah, I think the, I mean, everybody, every agency person has a story of a marketing manager coming in and like having a really bad experience or really good experience.
(03:40) Like it's, it's usually the extremes and like the good ones that we've had is, is just like they care to listen. They want to learn if they know that you're a partner and the bad ones are like, they come in with the plan of what they're going to do and they don't, they don't, there's no question asking. It's coming in swinging. And you know, when somebody comes in and they fire all the vendors, it's going to be great immediately. Yeah. Oh yeah. That usually was the signal.
(03:57) Incredibly well. It always like, I mean, it's like how much agency attrition could be attributed to got a new marketing director. That's a fucking idiot. Honestly, it's like what? 10% annually. Like, yeah. I mean, because like, the MO is another 10%. Yeah. Because there are incredible leaders that come in waxed.
(04:21) It's absolutely waxed, especially if there's a brand of like substance, like 50 million plus in revenue. Yeah. You're cooked. If that brand is hired a new C CMO. That's a lot of it too is like, I think a lot of people look at, look at experience within DTC and they'll, or without outside of DTC and they'll go to like a brand that's sort of a, you know, that they want to be like.
(04:47) And the person has managed, has managed a big team or whatever, but they haven't been in the weeds as much and they, and they've managed people, but they haven't managed growth and they come in and you know, if they start, you know, digging around and how many times you've been on a call where a client will bring it, they'll like be, be sharing a screenshot with you from GA four that they found.
(05:05) And you're like, or, you know, from universal analytics back in the day. And you're like, where did you find this report? We haven't been looking at this for like three years, you know, and you get blindsided by it. And I think, I think that's true sometimes in senior leadership too, like ego plays a big role.
(05:24) And I think to your point, Brad, those people that come in and ask questions and have curiosity, I mean, it's, it's honestly such a better route to go because if you're, you're not undermining the employees that are already there too, right? The employees that are there, they have opinions. They've seen what's going on.
(05:40) Like why aren't you asking them instead of just coming in and being like, well, here I am, you know, if I ever get hired as a CMO number first day, I'm renting a renting a Bentley, driving it to work. Because you're in office, coming in in a suit. Also the main thing that's really neat to me is like, how many new SaaS products for DTC do you guys hear about every day? For me, minimum three.
(06:06) I easily, you texted me one yesterday and I'm like, we're probably paying for this, but I don't know what the fuck it is. It's not, it's just like, that's a hard, that's an incredibly hard thing to manage. Just like validating it for seven and eight figure brand owners, right? Like who this podcast is made for.
(06:24) Like it's, there's so many of these that you're like, what do they even do? Like I was just thinking about, there was a senior staff of one SaaS company that just went to another company and this person announced they were going to another company. And I'm like, I've never, what does this other company even do? Also I'm definitely standing up a shell company and just saying we do agentic commerce.
(06:43) Yeah. I like it. Oh yeah. I'll invest. I'll get you. I'll get you a 20k MRR right out of the case. I mean, give me a red phone. What do you do? I mean, I don't, it doesn't really matter. It's agentic. I should close that out by saying like all of our experiences with marketing managers have been fantastic so far this year. Like genuinely.
(07:08) I want to make sure that someone's in case they're getting their clients just in case this gets into anybody's hands. Like genuinely, no, genuinely. Like we've had really good experiences. I've had, I've had some crazy. Okay. Sorry. I'm going to delay this. We had one time we had somebody join calls for the first time and he was getting his, his house renovated is literally like he was the one sawing.
(07:25) I was shit, you know, for like, for like the first three months every single week is joining. It was like, he was like, I'm not joking. Like his house has been renovated and he, it sounded like he was the one doing the sawing and he was like the senior marketing person that just joined this company. It was, it was wild. Like nobody, but nobody asked any questions.
(07:43) I think that over time though, to your point, you know, you're saying that the people that you're working with now, like they're great. And I think over time, like one of the things that one of the marks of a great operator of a great agency operator is you know how to communicate with a breadth of people.
(08:00) And you also know what's going to like, what's going to read what they're looking for so that you're able to communicate back to them and say like, Hey, I know this is a concern to you. I could tell based on the call like, and it's a, you're able to level with, with those folks and that's a big part of retaining because everybody has different opinions.
(08:16) They have different reports are looking at things that are important to them. And you know, you get better at that over time when you start, I mean, you have to take on clients because of where you are, right? That you revenue wise need it and you don't know. And you also don't know what to ask, which is why I think those people that are in an agency operation, it's so common to hear, yeah, we, you know, we're, we had some churn, you know, we're doing okay.
(08:39) Or like, it feels very frenetic because you aren't, I haven't gone through the paces of understanding here's what I have to ask to make sure to get to the discussion and the level of discussion that we need to. And so that's just like a big learning curve thing. That's a great point. I don't know if frenetic needs, but everything else is always awesome.
(08:58) I just say, I don't even know. I knew breakfast is going to call that out. I was, I saw a blank extra hard after he said frenetic and I'm like, he's Google. That's just the kind of stuff that, you know, I use to sound smart. I don't even know. I'm a agent to commerce. Yeah. That's the name of it right there. I'm like 25 grand MRR baby.
(09:18) Yeah. Just off of that. That's good. No, I think I know we're like segueing super hard right now, but the one thing I do have to say is that's been really interesting at Homestead is watching just the quality of people that we start working with has definitely leveled up in the last year to Brad's point that people know more. They understand the business more.
(09:45) I remember going back a few years ago and people had no idea what they were doing. No clue what they were doing. So that's been cool to see. The other thing though, the point that I was really trying to make was that when you're an agency owner, you have to have time and market. Time and market adds so much more just quality of clients, amount of inbound.
(10:04) It is pretty wild to see. Riley will sometimes remind me of what clients are working with us now because I'm not fully in the day-to-day at Homestead. He told me about one that's a very well-known, huge influencer that didn't even know we were working with. It's pretty wild to think that we would have never been able to work with this brand. Even four years ago, three years ago.
(10:28) But now that we have the team, the senior leadership and everything, it just starts to fall into place. I think a lot of these people started an agency right away and they're like, "Hey, it's not working. I'm doing this lot of churn." That's just part of the game when you start. You have to figure the shit out. The patience and time and market is a huge part of it. So breaking news, I just got a message.
(10:45) Just got a text. Read it live to our tens of listeners. Fox will love the Q&A episode that was released recently. I liked it, subscribed, I unsubscribed, and then resubscribed again to make your numbers look great. So there you go. Fantastic. All right. Appreciate that signal. I'm not a zero. Dang that. That's good stuff, everybody.
(11:08) Put out a little tweet or post on D2C Celebrity Zach Stux account asking for questions about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We're not hosting a operator style 400 speakers two day summit. We don't have Aaron Orndorf. All right. It's just us. So what we have here is a bunch of questions that we will go through and that we hope are helpful for you to make a bunch of money during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Q4.
(11:46) My favorite question to kick things off, what is Scalability School? Damn. 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 Zach and I want to talk about what makes Northbeam a little bit different and why so many e-com legends like Zach trust their data.
(12:11) Zach, why do you love Northbeam? We've been using Northbeam now for almost four years. So I think the initial thing where it kind of got started was we had kind of from 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.
(12:29) 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 of recent, I think the biggest thing is that it's not just last click and it never, it never was just last click. And it spreads the credit of the purchase across the entire customer journey.
(12:47) So like, you know, it's going to give credit to each piece of the funnel that had its, you know, touch point. And I think that that's what's allowed us to really decide in, in spend ad dollars appropriately based on what's actually working.
(13:04) 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 clicker, kind of like the golden North star on how we're making decisions on a day to day basis. I mean, that's, 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.
(13:22) It's, 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.
(13:39) 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.
(13:56) 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. My favorite question to kick things off. What is Scalability School? Damn.
(14:15) Brutal. It is. Sorry, he did ask that. What is this? That's funny. That's, that's good shit right there. Thank you, listener. I mean, hopefully now you're listening or person on the internet. That's super funny. Um, okay.
(14:34) For first question that we got, how many net new concepts should brands launch to hit 1 million in monthly ad spend in October? So this was the first question we got. What do you guys think? Yeah. Brad kicked this off. Yeah, I'll like set the stage, but I know you're probably making like 8,000 videos that you're gonna, you'll tweet about your output. That's all I know.
(14:51) There's a, there's a way to, there's a way to get to the number. And it's like, you know, if it makes you feel better about like having something to shoot for, what you can kind of do is figure out, okay, what do you, what do you, what is your average spend per ad right now look like? And how much do you want to spend in what you've, this question says a million dollars a monthly ad spend in October and November.
(15:08) If you have a $500,000 deficit and you're spending 500K right now and your average, you know, average spend per ad is 2000, it's like, okay, well now you can back into how many you think you might need. The caveat to that is you should probably expect some efficiency improvements depending on your category. Most categories will see a bump, particularly into November. So you can kind of factor that in.
(15:28) Potentially need less, but I mean, net new concepts. This will be a question that I think we addressed later on. Somebody asked about what percentage of spend goes into evergreen versus like holiday or Black Friday specific creative.
(15:45) But like, I think you can continue to take a lot of net new swings going into this moment, even if that means you're making them for holiday for Black Friday, like for those different moments. But there's a math way to kind of back into it, but it's probably not perfect. Zach, how are you thinking about it? I mean, the Delta is kind of the starting point to Brad's thought, which is important.
(16:06) So if you're spending $200K a month right now and you want to spend a million, you have to factor that in. Now, you definitely have to add this multiplier. I'm agreeing with basically what you're saying, Brad, which is like add a multiplier, go look at historical data if you have historical data last year to see what was the lift that it felt like you just got in performance or that just felt like it was easier to scale into and apply that to it.
(16:24) If that's 20%, 15%, whatever that ends up being. I like to think about it as how much are you spending right now on testing? How much are you willing to spend on testing as a percentage of your daily spend? And then of that, how much are you willing to spend behind each creative? So if you're running a lowest cost methodology, are you going to spend $250 behind each concept that you're going to launch, which then there might be five or six variants of that concept? That is also how you could back into this. So just very quick back to the napkin math, if you're going to be spending $250 a day on
(16:55) each concept, each concept is six unique ads. What would this end up being times maybe 25,000? Yeah, I mean, like I think you can do that rough math where it's saying this is how much I'm willing to spend behind each creative test that I'm going to launch 250 day for three days, whatever that rule is that you've been running.
(17:18) Everyone kind of does this a little bit differently, especially if you're running, you know, cost controls and then just back into it from there. I don't think there's really anything that much more specific into holiday, October, November, besides just kind of knowing your basic math and then knowing what that lift will be, which I would assume can be like somewhere between a 15 and 20% lift.
(17:40) You can expect an extra performance out of the new concepts that you launch that will get gain spend. For us, like the honest truth of this is like we're not making more new concepts in October or November in preparation for BFCM. We're basically just continuously making the same amount and or as we have more budget and have more money in the company to add a new creative strategist or add a new editor, it's not like October, November, we're making a ton more ads for that period of time.
(18:05) So I would say focus more on making better quality ads. Keep the pace that you're running now and just know that there's a chance that you find more winners over this period of time because buyer intent goes up. Again, not the greatest, most exciting answer, but that's kind of how we think about it too.
(18:25) I would go to that thing about what you said before, Brad, with the how much is spent on new versus new stuff for holiday, whatever. Let's just jump to that. You said you checked on a couple of counts on this to look through. I think this is always a question. We talked about this in another episode of Black Prize every Monday.
(18:41) Evergreen seems to always do well and do better, but it can be that holiday specific stuff does better to the lower part of the funnel to win people back. What did you find in your research? Yeah, so I pulled up one, two, three, four, five, six, seven accounts and I just looked at their spend from November 1st through December 15th.
(19:04) The question for what's worth is for November, December, what percentage of spend typically goes to evergreen winners versus holiday creative, either net new or winners with holiday overlays. What I found, and I'll just read that off brand by brand, I won't say the brand name, but maybe I'll try to give c
(19:20) ontext into is the brand... Most e-com brands are impacted by Black Friday to the tune of no less than 20% of their revenue happening from November to December 15th. There's some that are 40, there's some that are 70. Just keep that in mind. I'll try to frame this up with context if I can. First brand spent about 40% of their spend into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday specific assets.
(19:45) I would say they probably do something like 30 to 40% of their revenue during that period, split pretty evenly between new and returning customers, new customers more aggressively recently. Second one, again, 40% of their spend into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday assets, but three of the top five spenders in that case were actually gifting messaging. This is a pretty gifting heavy brand. There's a question about gifting.
(20:05) I'll try to fly through this and then maybe add more context. Another brand spent 70% of their spend on holiday specific assets. One spent less than 10%, the next one spent 20%, the next one spent 16%. And then the final one that I have spent like 16% on Black Friday and 15% on the holiday product that they released.
(20:24) And so all of this to say, there was more spend into the specific assets than I anticipated, to be honest. I was going into this thinking, I would see 20%. And we just scaled up evergreen for the most part. It's obviously going to differ by brand. But looking at the breakdown here, I was surprised to see how much was actually spent through those specific creatives. And I can talk about what showed up in the creative a little bit.
(20:50) I scanned some of the top spending ads that were holiday specific, were Black Friday specific, and were evergreen specific. So if that's helpful, I can dig into that. But I don't know if you guys have any immediate reactions to the percentages. I thought it'd be different as well.
(21:08) I think you kind of go through this and think it's a lot more spent on the existing. So I think that's interesting. I think it's also though, when you get into certain verticals and different accounts, and certainly see this in the Foxville Founders membership and the wrap up that we do each year, those people that create not just taking the existing product and put a bow in the image or something.
(21:33) Those people that actually have done packaging that is giftable, or they've made it in a way that's an easy thing to gift for a certain person. I know, Zach, you've done certainly stuff like this with Holo in terms of the offer. And I'm not sure if you've done any packaging changes that I'm aware of. But anyway, the point is, I think that has a lot of legs, because that stands differently than the same images that you've had next to a pine tree, or the same product even next to a pine tree or something. It's not that special. I just pulled data for Holo, just for
(22:07) that sake. So November 1st through December 15th, Metaspend last year was like 1.5 million. 35% of that was holiday, holiday or BFCM language. Again, it can be substantial, by all means. If we didn't run that, that would be pretty substantial. It's not going to be the majority though, I don't think is the average. Would you agree with that, Brad? Yeah.
(22:30) It's going to be like maybe 70, 30, 60, 40 in most cases. And it's going to differ by brand. The obvious gifting heavy brands from the list do definitely skew on the 40, 60 and then 70% side. The 70% one is very seasonal, actually outside of it. They peak in summer, I'd say a little bit more, summer and spring. That also skews it a bit. Yeah.
(22:58) I think the lesson here is, to Andrew's point, is that there's two things that I learned looking at this. We made a ton of assets last year where we just put overlays on top of the shit that you worked throughout the entire year. It was like, I'm not convinced that that was worth the effort.
(23:15) And it's not hard to do because it's just adding an overlay. But I don't know what you're seeing in Holo, but I'm just starting to think that that wasn't worth it. And I'm starting to think, "Okay, great. If the client's going to do a photo shoot, or is going to make some video content, or we're going to help them get video content, or whatever it is, lean into the moment and send them into the warehouse to record something.
(23:37) Put them next to a Christmas tree and make it look like it's gift wrapped and packaged. V03 is going to probably have some crazy... I'm sure Santa doing crazy shit this year is going to be very popular with V03. You're probably already cooking something up. And nano banana, it probably makes it really easy to get some holiday photos that are relevant.
(23:54) But I think you got to really lean into that moment because that's what I saw was the top spending stuff was really leaning into those moments with something unique, not just slapping an overlay. Now, statics that are designed for sale periods, that's not what I'm talking about. That's still worth doing. Those still look solid, but just dropping the overlay. I don't know if that's what you're seeing for Holo. Same pitch. Same pitch. Yep.
(24:15) And we've seen that even this year, too, even for the big holidays. In the warehouse packing boxes, the air packing orders, the relevant 4th of July fireworks content is what worked for this year's holiday. I would expect the same. Can't just half acid anymore with it. I already got the picture of Santa stuck in the chimney with the holo socks peeking out the bottom. It's great. Exactly. There you go.
(24:41) There's a free concept. Okay, cool. Next question. What do you have? The next thing is gifting related. In my notes, I have a little screenshot in there, which we don't have to specifically reference, but I think something that you're saying is really interesting to roll into is if you've run promos throughout the year, you should go promo by promo and look at all of the top spending creative and the concepts throughout the time of year.
(25:10) We had a client run their annual sale, which happens to be in August, September. If you run a Labor Day sale, this is a good indication for that. Go look at that and see what you did creatively and what conceptually worked. For them, we just happened to crank out a bunch of "they helped a ton with this. It was awesome." It was great collaboration.
(25:32) We just had a ton of lo-fi, lower effort ideas for making organic-looking posts. Lo-fi, which is the very hot, ugly ad method. They had their team records and videos. The graphics, whatever. Go back throughout the course of the year and look at your promo periods and see what worked. Every single time you do a promo, what we're trying to do is, what conceptually worked that we can pull forward to the next promo? Then what didn't we do that we want to try to throw into the mix? Or what didn't we do enough of? The screenshot that I have, which I probably shouldn't share, is a
(25:59) breakdown of conceptually the type of ad. So lo-fi, organic, produced, whatever. Ad counts. The quantity of ads that we had and then the volume of spend for that category. I've talked about this before with the pillars and angles thing. This is just a different way to look at it. And then now what we're just doing is not, "Okay, great.
(26:17) We know that lo-fi and organic stuff worked really great." Because it's super easy to shoot that. Let's just go crank out more. Let's have more people, more different models do the same thing on repeat and just hammer out more of the stuff that has worked throughout the year. So the lesson here is continue to pull forward the stuff that's working. Don't just abandon it. Go back and look at it.
(26:34) I think that's true. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it's a story that we've talked about a lot, which is obviously having diverse set of ideas and angles and the way that you're talking about it and all different types of concepts out there. We're going to talk about creative. Let's go back to talking about creative in a second.
(26:51) But one question I know that you guys have each done Black Friday, Summer Monday planning. I've been part of it for different agencies as well, having them go through this. And there's obviously this learning period that you're going or these learning lessons that happen and mistakes that happen.
(27:10) What are the things that you screwed up on last year that you want to make sure or that you're fixing this year with the team structure wise? Zach in your own company and then Brad with your clients. Yeah. I think the biggest lesson from last year was having enough creative. This is actually outside of even ads, but having enough creative for other channels.
(27:30) Email and SMS being a huge one. So getting ahead of content for holiday, for sale related and baking that into flows that you might update or emails that you might update. I feel like everyone forgets about that. It's the last minute thing where they're like, "Oh shit, I got to go update emails." Or maybe we didn't get enough holiday creative. That's one thing that we got.
(27:49) We're getting way ahead of this year. So we're having photo shoots done in October that will be content for November, December, gifting holiday BFCM. So that's one thing that I feel people forget about is the content for things outside of ads to be planning for while in advance. So that's one. I don't know if I have anything crazy to add.
(28:09) I probably need to reflect on it a little bit more, but there's just the ever present checklist of things that you need to control for. The website, landing page, headlines, email stuff that you mentioned. And I think it's just really easy for to get to do that stuff. And we're probably all going to have really high anxiety leading into it, just trying to remember each of the things from that list.
(28:27) But I would probably echo similar thoughts that just from a creative perspective, just having what you need with plenty of time. And we always start, I mean, in the next couple of weeks, we're recording this at the end of September. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to start chipping away at building that library for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Because you don't want to be Friday afternoon thinking, "Shit, I need more ads.
(28:46) " I mean, you can still crank about more ads and we'll do that, but just not the time to have that reflected. One thing to Brad's point about looking back at ads that worked historically, also go look back at brands that have run sales during big promo periods this year. Go look back at brands that you know run big DR, big offers.
(29:05) Just go look back at their Labor Day sale ads, go look at their 4th of July ads, and if they ran an anniversary sale, whatever that might be. That might spike some ideas for content that you want to shoot now, not in November. I feel like we're usually shooting content last minute in the warehouse or last minute, whatever. I think getting ahead of that just reduces the stress that Brad's talking about.
(29:29) One question, Zach, have you ever run completely out and then gone to a pre-sale or a waiting list type of thing? We've never done the waiting list. We've done Holo has run out of inventory every year for the last, this will be our fifth year, fourth year, every BFCM. We've run out of inventory. Basically, we end up turning off ads, which sucks. It's the worst feeling in the world.
(29:53) We tried pre-orders for some SKUs that we knew that we felt decent about. For Homestead clients, we've done that. A hex-clad, long-term client of Homestead, I know that we flipped over some pre-sale stuff for them one or two years ago that did really, really well. It was like, "Hey, we put shipping deadlines on the page and people were okay with it because they knew that they could get the best deal of the year.
(30:16) " It's definitely something that I would be open to if you know and can forecast out inventory into Q1. I think the biggest lesson that we've made historically with Holo though is we gas the shit out of it because it's going well and performance is great. Then we screw ourselves for Q1. I think the biggest thing is making sure that you're not just forecasting into Q4. A lot of smaller brands will just be like, "This is my goal for this year.
(30:40) " Think about Q1 and Q2 and what that impact might have. If ads start to break out and performance really starts to lift, that you can hit it, make sure you don't screw yourself over for the next year because we've done that. Makes sense. Timing-wise, let's talk about this.
(30:57) Somebody asked, "I've seen some brands that are really Q4 heavy start their holiday stuff really early, like first week in November, whether there's wait close to Black Friday. What do you think is the best time essentially to offer this to start putting things on sale? How do you navigate from early November through Black Friday, Cyber Monday into December?" What do you guys think in reference to this? It's always one of the wrap ups last two years with Foxville founder members, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is like, "Start earlier. It is a good thing. People are in the mood. They're going to
(31:25) be looking for deals. Don't be disingenuous if it actually is the best deal. Stick to that." Generally, trying to push inventory and especially push messaging through the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period because that's actually when people are going to buy. Even if early in November, they're not buying, they're looking, they're getting used to the offer.
(31:45) What do you guys think and how do you go about this? Knowing who this was from, I think we can tailor it a little bit. I'll set the stage slightly. They sell a product that's going to be very giftable. There's another question about all things gifting. Somebody wanted us to dig into, Hannah, I believe, wanted us to dig into all things gifting. Zach, you and I have both had the maybe pleasure of owning gifting heavy brands.
(32:07) We can divulge some stuff there. He's going to have skews that are going to be probably pretty solid during November, but more so I would bet in December. Then he's going to be able to have holiday specific products. That's the context that I'm going through this with. For him specifically, I think it's okay.
(32:25) Literally right now, whenever you're listening to this, if it's October, start your holiday and you're gifting messaging ads. No, that's fine. They won't spend. If you're running into CBO, if you're running with cost caps, they just won't spend until people start to be in gifting mode.
(32:43) But the last weekend in October, when Mariah Carey's song starts to pop up the charts, people are in gifting mode and they're going to start buying gifs. My grandma buys shit two months in advance. She's ready. It's okay to have it ready for those people. My thought is you can start gifting messaging now. Don't expect that it's going to really pick up until November.
(33:00) Then literally Cyber Monday through shipping cutoff, it should really pop up. Our gifting heavy brand does more revenue from December 1st to December 15th than it does in November. It's depressing because I want Black Friday to be better. That's what happens. Let me get through the schedule really quick and I'll pause. Start gifting now and run it through shipping cutoff.
(33:18) If you want to start your promo, November 1st, November 3rd is the first Monday of November, do it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Then I probably wouldn't go crazy heavy on holiday specific collections during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. If you've got inventory, that's really holiday specific. It's a holiday box. He sells some stuffed animal stuff.
(33:37) If it's a stuffed animal with a Santa hat, you can maybe have it live on the website. I don't think you want to run something discounted that is holiday specific and lose the margin on that. When I think you could launch it without as an aggressive of an offer December 2nd and then get the second wave of gifting. That would be my recommendation based on what we've seen for some of these brands.
(33:55) It'd be different if it's just the same SKU. For us, we have the same SKU. I think rolling with the same discount and just changing the name of the sale, which I know you mentioned that's what you're doing with Holzec. I think that's okay. But if you've got a holiday specific SKU, personally, I'm waiting until maybe Cyber Monday, but probably the day after.
(34:13) Same exact strategy. We owned a gifting brand that we've since sold, but it would do 80% of the yearly revenue from November 15th to December 15th. It was pretty brutal, to be honest. The crazy thing is most brands might have this BFCM peak. Black Friday, crazy weekend does good. Cyber Monday, great. And then it chills out, but still has a strong December.
(34:38) This brand would literally build day by day through December. I think if you do have the ability to do holiday gifting, anything like that, you're December 2nd through the last ship days. Wait to launch then, but make sure your original BFCM offer is as early as you can afford to do it.
(35:01) Homestead, we have slowly each year brought it up a few more days or even a week. I think Holz is launching, I think I might have shared it on the pod already, but I think it's the 10th that we're launching. You have to double check. It's early. And we like that because ads can get spending, they'll start to get traction.
(35:17) And then that way, you know if you've got a winner or not going into the week before Black Friday, that Thanksgiving week, which then you can really hit the gas on those ads and have a little bit of proven track record. If you wait right up until that same week of Black Friday, it's really hard for those ads to start to break out. Just because they'll get buried with your kind of evergreen stuff.
(35:35) I'd say BFCM offer launch as early as you can in November. Holiday gifting stuff, same as Brad. Early December after BFCM, I'd wait. What did you see working from a creative perspective for gifting brands? I think it'd be good to spend some time on gifting brands. Yeah, I think it was just language around who was actually getting the gift was the important parts. We had a product that did really well for customers.
(35:59) Male demo that was 18 to 25 was a huge demo for us of who would receive that gift. A lot of this was targeting moms. And it was a lot of language around the gift that your kid will actually want in their dorm room, shit like that, that seemed to do quite well. It was calling out the maybe obvious, but then being a little sassy about it, it seemed to really resonate.
(36:25) So I think understanding who's actually receiving the gifts, who's actually buying the gift, make sure that you understand that relationship so that you're not running your year round advertising that maybe is targeting the person that might buy the products when it's not a holiday. When it's a gift period, I think you just have to re-shift that language. Same thing.
(36:42) Our product is dumb. So talking about white elephant and those funny things. Read the room, know what your product is used or not used for, and speak into that. To your point on ramping into December, I just pulled up. I have two gifting examples. One works well for Black Friday. And they hit their peak of revenue on Cyber Monday. Black Friday was just the dip below that.
(37:06) But their peak in December following Cyber Monday was the 12th into the 13th into the 14th into the 15th. 15th was the shipping cut off. So it just tanked after that. The other brand that I'm looking at, the second week of November was great. And then it dipped off, which was post-election. So it makes sense that that was the best one. Black Friday was fine.
(37:25) Cyber Monday was better. The week after Cyber Monday doubled. And then the week after that went up another 20%. And that was even after shipping had to cut off already during that point. So if you're gifting heavy, you should just be prepared for December to be nuts. That's where you should start to ramp up.
(37:43) So whenever everybody starts posting screenshots and you're depressed about Black Friday not being good, it's like, "Yours is coming. Don't worry." Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. The other thing to remember too is that transition to buying on Amazon is something to remember. So if you're selling your product on Amazon as well as D2C, we always see that shift maybe starting the 15th where it'll just go very heavy Amazon.
(38:06) So if you're running your business off of a blended MER between Amazon business and D2C business and you actually take into consideration that halo effect, that halo effect gets massive those last weeks of around last ship day and then especially after last ship day. And just be considerate of that.
(38:23) Don't kill ad spend if you're still seeing performance looking good across the business. We usually run ads even a little bit after that. We've even used the Amazon language in some of our ads where we'll say last ship day, this day, or buy on Amazon. And we'll usually see that halo pop even a bit more. So something to consider if you're a big gifting product.
(38:39) Interesting to say that because I looked at Amazon as a breakdown and Amazon did 20K the week of, 200K in total from the beginning of November through the end of December and did 20K the first week of December. The second week of December did 40 and then before the shipping cut off, it did 60 and then dipped down to 35, which was like that week ended the 23rd.
(39:01) So it was like, to your point, people can get it in time if they go to Amazon. So there's that shift that you just have to be comfortable to be ready for. It makes a ton of sense. The only other reminder, and this is more like an operations thing, but make sure you ship your product into Amazon early.
(39:19) Be the annoying brand that overshifts stuff and FBA complains to your team about it and bitches about it. That's what you want to be. You do not want to be the brand that's waiting to ship stuff because the check-in periods, the distribution periods go up pretty dramatically, especially because of you're coming off of Prime Day from Amazon, which is happening in early October.
(39:36) They will likely launch a Black Friday sale on Amazon the week before Black Friday is what I'm being told. So make sure you're getting products in as soon as you possibly can to Amazon. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I think that we're all looking for that last minute. So it makes sense.
(39:54) I think it's also trended last year that people were buying gifts later. The consideration or consideration cycle was longer. There's obviously Black Friday, December, Monday. There's a certain group of people that will always love that and hit that up. But also getting things last minute and thinking about it, knowing people can get it later.
(40:17) Ben spoiled with that, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a certain percentage of people that have their partner asking "Did you get that for your mom?" Knowing you can get it on Amazon is a really big deal. And even if you're offering two-day shipping or whatever, that is a marketable thing because that's something everyone's looking for.
(40:40) And the cost of getting it to them is not irrelevant, but close to irrelevant if they don't have a gift for the people that they love. Two things I want to hit on real quick that our channel that we rarely talk about, which is Google, something to be considering is just updating your titles in Google to reflect your sales period, especially if you don't run sales very often.
(41:04) If someone is Googling a brand or a product near yours and you're running brand search campaigns, those are the ones that you really want to win out. Making sure that your offer is showcasing in those. And then the secondary piece to that is, if you have the ability and have the capacity and you know how to do it, updating your shopping images to have some type of gift ability, wrapper, whatever, something special that makes those pop out and stand out a little bit more in the Google shopping feed. So those are two things that we always forget in the last minute.
(41:26) And then I'm Googling our brand's name just to make sure our website isn't down. And I see those things and I'm like, "Oh, shit. Yeah, let's go update the search listings and the shopping stuff." So something else to consider. Channel wise, I have two maybe quick things.
(41:44) Channel wise, outside of Google, are you guys experimenting with anything else? The reason I ask is we launched Snapchat randomly last year for a couple of people and it just cranked. Now it sucks right now for me, which sounds like other people are not having that exact same experience, but Q4 or Snapchat was awesome. So are you experimenting with other channels during this time? Are you going in with what you got? App Love and I think it's still a good option if you're heavy gift ability.
(42:08) Most of the customers and users of App Love and where they're running ads. So people that don't know what App Love and is, essentially it's an ad platform that runs similar ads, mostly video, almost entirely video, to people playing mobile games. So think of the mobile game user for the most part, those are like 50 to 70 year olds playing all sorts of games on their phone. That's a very heavy gifting segment.
(42:29) Spending dollars if you have really good gifting ads that are working on Meta, just over on that platform to close out the loop. Even from a bottom of funnel opportunity is a big one. We spent a lot on App Love and last year. I think we cranked it up at one point to 20k a day. So it was working quite well. We were looking at one day clicker ads and it was holding strong against Meta. So that's one.
(42:48) This year, because our advertising budget has grown, we're spending on linear. So as of right now, we're spending about 5k a day for Holo and I anticipate we'll continue to ramp that up. We're using our MMM right now, which is Prussian to keep an eye on that and it's looking decent. Post-purchase survey is looking decent.
(43:09) We're usually looking at dollar spent versus the result in post-purchase survey to correlate. So if TV budget is 2% of our total daily spend budget or 5% of our total daily spend budget, we're hoping to see 5% or close to 5% on post-purchase survey within one to two weeks after we launch. So those are looking pretty good right now. So I anticipate we'll continue spending there. We did some streaming ads earlier in the year. They did okay.
(43:31) Not super excited about that platform. I think linear remnant spots are the new hotspot that it seems to be working even better. So I'd say that, Apple, I mean, are the two that we're going to double down on. What is linear remnants? What is that? So it's a snack. It's actually Thanksgiving. Yeah, right. It's my new SaaS company, Remnant.
(43:52) No. So my understanding of how this works is there's basically dead spots that haven't been purchased yet. They're just random spots that someone didn't buy. They're not prime time spots. They're just random ones that will show up. So we are basically... We're working with Tatarri. We're essentially telling Tatarri, "We'll take the random spots at random times throughout the day.
(44:10) And here's our budget. And here's what we want to pay on a CPM basis." So when you pay a little bit later in the night, random slots, not prime time TV or prime time watch times, you usually get cheaper CPMs. So for us, if we can bring that CPM price down, the cost per visitor, which is really the metric that we're looking at, is looking really, really good.
(44:32) So we can correlate cost per visitor to conversion rate to AOV, and we can back into RUS that way. For us, we're buying those spots versus just saying, "Hey, I want to run on ESPN at five o'clock when the game starts," or whatever. Those are much more expensive spots to buy. So this is the cheaper alternative to get your foot in the door that we see decent performance from. So what do you guys think about... This isn't one of the questions we got, but we got this question. We've had this question before.
(44:58) We talked about it a little bit, but I want to make sure we talk about it again. Building offers that protect margin and how you do that. Because I think the classic 30% off or whatever is okay, but it also just crushes your margin unless you're doing a ton of volume. How do you think about crafting an offer that's holiday forward? And how would you take a template almost to this to make sure that people are building something that's logical, that's going to make them more money? Yeah, it's going to be product dependent, but I really buy something, get X of the
(45:39) same product. Especially if it's socks makes a ton of sense, our gifting product made a ton of sense. There's a lot of products, t-shirts make a lot of... Apparel can really work with this. I really like that for a couple of reasons. I recorded a video for a client today where I basically explained to them, if you run 30% off, it takes more off the top than if you just give somebody a free t-shirt. The cost of shipping goes up by a dollar.
(46:09) Maybe the pick-pack fee goes up by 50 cents. The marginal shipping cost of getting an additional unit in for many brands whilst you're shipping saunas or heavy shit is really not that much. So the actual perceived value to the customer of a free gift is probably higher than your percentage off. And it costs you less in many cases. And the marginal shipping cost is not crazy.
(46:32) I really scaled discounts or buy more, save more for that reason, but percentage off can work too in a lot of cases. We're doing that exactly. This is kind of Hollow's current offer and it's going to be the playbook that we run for the rest of the year, which is this buy three, get three or some version of that.
(46:50) One of our other brands in the portfolio, which we don't normally do an offer like this, but we're going to run a BOGO. So it's going to be a buy two, get one. And we're positioning it as essentially getting more of the product. Let's just call it a 30-day supply of something. You'll be getting a 90-day supply, but for the price of two.
(47:07) So just a different way, I think, than even some companies that are maybe they're in health and wellness or they're whatever, still running some type of free gifts can work great. So I would highly suggest that too. I think to Brad's point, by us doing this, we're already forecasting our AOV. We'll have a pretty big bump.
(47:26) So we're anticipating a $20, $30 bump in our AOV by buying two full price products to get the third one free. And with that $20, $30 bump in AOV, we're anticipating overall net margin going up 5% net profit versus what we're even running right now. So there's a chance that you can punch AOV up. New customer CPA will probably go up slightly, but not entirely match one for one.
(47:49) Even if it does match one for one, there's a chance that there's still extra margin still there, left over just based on them spending more money. Yeah, that's definitely how we think about it. That's a great point, just to add on that. Because in the 30% versus buy one, get one that I was describing, it's like their CAC was also substantially better on buy one, get one.
(48:06) So it might be better margin anyways, and then better margin, better perceived value, whatever. And then on top of that, your CAC was better. Now, even if the margin was the same and your CAC was better, or wasn't better, and your CAC was the same, or better with-- you get what I mean? Yeah, I mean, there's really three variables.
(48:30) It's like, what is your new customer CPA? Or what is your whatever CAC, even if blended or not? What is the cost of delivery? And then what is your real margin after those two things? And if you can build a way where your margin still gets better by your AOV going up, your new customer CPA staying, even going up, you can still create more margin at the end of the day, which usually means that you can get more scale out of ads, which usually means the more scale that you can get out of ads, means that the more you can offset your operating expenses, which usually leads to more.
(48:54) So definitely something to consider. Yeah, I just was thinking about that, because we've had that question come up. And I think it's important to talk about. Another thing that came to my head, I was looking at, I asked a couple other members in the community what they would ask.
(49:12) And one of them was like, hey, make sure you guys talk about credit card, like making sure that your limits are set. This is one of those things that I feel like can be a real issue. Zach, do you guys negotiate with your credit card company? Or you let them know? Or I feel like this is one of those things that can be often overlooked. Yeah, I mean, ideally, you're getting more just in case. It's usually the best solution.
(49:35) I mean, obviously trying to negotiate credit limits up on future revenue, people don't really love to do, but sometimes they will. So just getting more is always a good backup plan. For those looking for good options, Capital One has a great card that I think is 2% cashback. And they've been amazing to get us pretty big limits. So if you haven't worked with Capital One, I would just recommend check them out, whatever. If you need a contact, let me know.
(49:59) But they've been really helpful to us and to homes and clients that are like, hey, I need a scale spend by K month over month. And I need a card to be able to do this. They've been really a good solution for that. And then for meta, just like go into your meta account, go to build settings, billing, whatever, and check what your daily threshold is. And if you anticipate spending more than that, start requesting it now.
(50:15) They've been, for what my experience is that meta has been pretty good at increasing limits as you've scaled spend. I've actually personally outrun into a situation recently where we've actually needed to request more than what we've had.
(50:32) So I did have one time where they like knocked it down randomly, like 50 bucks a day after it was like 12,000 a day. And I was spending 12,000 a day. I was like, can you help? But I haven't had any issues recently, but worth checking. A lot of good stuff we covered here. As always, if you anybody has any questions, you can reach out Andrew at foxldigital.com. I'm happy to route it to the guys.
(50:52) You can find us on all of the channels that we are on youtube.com. We're on there. You can check us out at scalabilityschool.com. That's our website. I don't know if you know about websites and we each have a profile on social media, specifically X I believe is the name of the site. So lots of good ways to get in touch with us. All of you that are out there listening, really appreciate you listening to this podcast.
(51:18) Please like and subscribe because it does help surface us. I think we're number two in marketing podcasts in Brazil. I got an email from some spammer about that. So I feel like, you know, this is only for us on the come up on the come up. It's going to be big. So as always gentlemen, great to be with you. Thank you for your time.
(51:44) This episode is brought to you by Homestead's email and SMS service. Honestly, we've done an episode with Jacob from Homestead. He's the man and he's got to be probably one of the smartest email and retention operators like on the agency side. Hands down. I look forward to seeing the tweets that he puts out basically every single month with like a recap of the designs and as amazing as the designs themselves are.
(52:06) It's the actual tactical behind the scenes work where he just like knows what he's doing and the team at home said like really know what they're doing on email and SMS. Probably if not the number one, very close to competing for number one retention agency in the DTC space. So just killing it. Yeah, absolutely agree.
(52:22) You know, if you are looking at your emails and you're like, these are terrible and you know you can optimize the flows and you know you can do SMS better, you got to look at the Homestead team. So check them out, reach out, and they can definitely help make your entire email and retention and SMS program so much better. And I'm not just saying that we've all seen the work.
(52:45) I actually had a member who sat down with with Jacob at the founder meetup that we had and he came over to me and said, I just talked to him for 10 minutes and literally he's revolutionized my entire email department. So agencies are modeling themselves off of what Jacob is giving them for advice. So anyway, onwards to hopefully working with them.
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