Question: What BFCM tactics actually work for DTC brands running Meta ads?
Answer: The BFCM tactics that worked best last year were planned around specific hours, not just the weekend: a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale sent by plain-text email and SMS, which roughly tripled hourly revenue, and a pacing plan built from last year's daily and hourly Shopify revenue and matched to the day of Black Friday rather than the calendar date. On Meta, run BFCM-specific creative alongside evergreen ads, build a dedicated BFCM campaign on min ROAS with a pre-built volume campaign as backup, and give lapsed customers their own one-day-click retention campaign with a ROAS target two to three times higher than acquisition. Then make sure shoppers can actually qualify for your best offer, because a threshold set too high prices them out.
These BFCM tactics come straight from what worked last Black Friday Cyber Monday:
a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale that roughly tripled hourly revenue,
a pacing plan built by the day and by the hour, and BFCM-specific creative running
alongside evergreen ads. Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch walk through seven tactics
to set up now, including campaign structure, a dedicated retention campaign,
landing pages for new vs returning customers, and why lowering your offer
threshold can help you scale.
We discuss:
- How a one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale works, and when to rerun it
- How to pace Black Friday Cyber Monday revenue by day and by hour
- Why Cyber Monday landing on November 30 changes your December comps
- Whether BFCM-specific ads beat evergreen on Meta (last year, they did)
- Black Friday ad ideas: founder warehouse videos, gift guides, ugly ads, the
"We're sorry" ad, Christmas tree product shots and comment replies
- BFCM campaign structure: min ROAS, cost caps, 1-day vs 7-day click
- Why you should pre-build backup campaigns before the weekend
- How to set up a Meta retention campaign for lapsed customers
- Landing pages and pop-ups for new vs returning customers
- Why Hollow dropped from buy 3, get 3 free to buy 2, get 2
Subscribe for a new episode every other week.
Watch last year's BFCM recap with Zach: https://youtu.be/3POPSecWu_M
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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
Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
Chapters
03:03 The one-hour free gift with purchase flash sale
08:07 How to pace Black Friday Cyber Monday revenue by day and hour
14:11 Do BFCM-specific ads beat evergreen on Meta?
18:20 Black Friday ad ideas: ugly ads, "We're sorry" and Christmas trees
21:24 Black Friday campaign structure: min ROAS, cost caps, click windows
26:37 Backup campaigns and the Black Friday retention campaign
29:46 Black Friday landing pages for new vs returning customers
33:43 Pop-ups and offer consistency before and during Black Friday
35:36 Offer thresholds: why buy 2, get 2 scaled better than buy 3, get 3
Full Transcript
[DRAFT] BFCM Tactics to Help you Hit 6-Figure DAYS - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ilMMhToBE
Transcript:
(00:00) you are running campaigns on Meta to people who are unlikely to repeat purchase on their own. So there's a math that you can do to do that, but typically it's like you have your targeting your lifetime customer list, but you're excluding people who have purchased in the last 90, 120, 180 days. Again, it's going to be brand specific and you're trying to reactivate them during this time period.
(00:18) The specific setup that we ran last year that worked really well was one day click again cuz you want to hold Meta accountable to a more aggressive attribution window on this type of audience. I think min because it's just easier across the wider catalog. Generally, we set our row as target like two to three times higher on that campaign than we would for our acquisition campaigns, which is going to be a little bit brand specific.
(00:36) If you have an income mentality benchmark, you can use that and that was kind of the general setup and then you just threw all of your Black Friday, Cyber Monday assets into that and it just yeah, it just rips. I'm okay being much less aggressive on the ROS target, meaning actually set it higher because you like you're not only are you discounting, but these are people who are more familiar with you so they're more likely to come back that new acquisition.
(01:00) And now let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Welcome to another episode of Scalability School and I am here with Brad. We are talking about Black Friday Cyber Monday tactic reviews and what happened last year that worked really well. What we're going to do this year, um, this is going to be one of many episodes about Black Friday Cyber Monday.
(01:27) So, if you I don't know if you participate in this listener, um, but there's this time every year called Black Friday Cyber and, uh, basically, um, we don't even, nobody I know even uses talks about it. We all just say BFCM. And there's a lot of there's a lot of PDFs out there about this. There's a lot of info about this kind of stuff, but this uh episode is going to be full of tactical exactly things that you can do.
(01:52) And it's going to be a little quicky uh episode in terms of uh things to start thinking about. So Brad, uh glad to be with you as always. How you doing, by the the thought of Black Friday gives me like real anxiety. It's September. It's September right now and we're doing this and just BFCM just sends chills up and down my up and down my spine.
(02:11) Um I was I was showing you before you hit record my my boom boom stick uh DDC Dc brand. Actually I think they're they might be bigger retail now but uh you know just got to just got to keep keep hitting the good stuff every day until then. >> Well, it's almost lockin season, right? Oct one.
(02:28) It's almost, you know, uh, it's almost time to just get that seat belt attached to your desk chair and make sure that you are there. And also, I just want to point out to those of you that are watching and video, if you're not, I have a blackout shade behind me, which is taped on my window because, um, it's so hot that I'm trying to keep the heat out of my house currently in Santa Barbara um, in September here.
(02:47) So, uh, that's what you're, in case you're wondering, that's what that is, along with a lot of my, uh, daughter's. >> I'm admiring I'm admiring the wall art personally. >> Yeah. Lot of really good stuff. Got the art, got the star charts. I got a mosaic back here that I created. And you know, there's a lot of good stuff in here.
(03:02) But let's go ahead and talk about this. So, tactic one, free gift, gift with purchase, flash sale. So, last year, what Hollow did was the flash sale, free gift with purchase for 1 hour. Um, on Friday morning, it was a free beanie over $100, repeated two more times. Um, there was a bunch of other stuff that happened.
(03:23) Do you want to go through kind of what what how this worked and what was great about it? >> Yeah, if you want to hear the full details of this, we did an episode last year, literally after Black Friday, where we recaped all these things and we just figured it would be helpful to rip through these as quickly as we can and just kind of talk about like you should be writing down and setting a reminder of doing each of these things to make sure that you're prepared because it is just it's just free game.
(03:44) Uh, and so Zach, um, Zach kind of teed this up where he talked about Hollow and what they did. And to your point, they did a free gift with purchase, um, which specifically was a free beanie if you spent over $100. Uh, and they basically just like put together a plain text, email, and SMS and ripped it out to their audience.
(04:00) And they said for the next hour, if you spend this much, you're going to get free gift with purchase. Um, we did the same thing for a couple of clients around the same time last year. And we saw basically the exact same result, which was insane hours of of performance. Now, you're taking a little bit of a hit by giving away a free gift, but you're exchanging that for maybe people who wouldn't have bought buying um or pulling forward some some revenue that might come in the future, which gives you maybe a little bit more cash today to to to push into
(04:26) spend uh and just keep cranking up uh ad spend. So, you know, Zach saw something like 3x his normal hourly pacing revenue. We saw something similar for for those clients. Uh, and what's nice about that is you can you can run that like multiple times throughout the course of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You could do it on the first day of your sale.
(04:45) You could do it on actual Black Friday. You can do it on Cyber Monday. You could do it before the shipping cut off. Um, and if you're a brand that has multiple SKs, like you can you can you can change the way that people qualify for it. And you can be a little bit more creative because maybe you'll find that you hit your hit your list once and people were kind of exhausted by the, you know, the free the free beanie option.
(05:04) So maybe you try a free pair of socks or do something different uh during that time, but I think you can keep it pretty simple. Plain text emails work really well for this. And um Zach made the point that I thought was really interesting is like the free beanie was like a high value gift for them cuz they were fighting.
(05:18) They were actually selling a decent amount of them kind of through the traffic on their website anyways. And so you'll probably have more success if you give a gift that actually has a decent value associated with it. But I'm sure it would it would work um pretty well regardless. We have an awesome tool that's a little bit of a secret and I'd like to tell you about it. It's called the Foxwell MCP.
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(05:57) It's honestly very inexpensive for the value that you get. You could get it plugged in and say, "Put together a report on this account of what I could do better." I mean, it's endless what this MCP can do. And I encourage you to check it out today. foxholedigital.com/mcp. We'd love to have you.
(06:15) And there was no exclusions for people that already bought. Um, they just kind of ripped it to them again. Um, which I think is great. I mean, I think when people are in that mode, right, in that Black Friday, Cyber Monday mode, they know there's deals coming around and something like a free gift can put them over the top.
(06:30) Um, and it's a great move on profitability. I mean, I don't know, you know, these things didn't the hard cost on them was not enough and it definitely outweighed the profitability that came from the rest of it. So, um, I think it's great. I think for you, you said your AOV went up like 30% as well on doing this.
(06:49) Um, so you know, in terms of doing it longer or more frequently, I mean, I think this is one of those things that if you told people, hey, like we're going to be doing a free gift with purchase twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, you know, and and kind of give people that predictability, um, along with reminding them of that.
(07:05) I think that's something that people would like really even focus in on and try to, um, try to make sure that, uh, they're there for that because, you know, people love a free little gift, especially if it's a useful one, you know. Yeah. I mean, you're buying all this stuff for somebody else and if you can get a little something yourself, that's nice.
(07:21) >> Yeah. The amount of times my wife has come to me with stuff in her cart and she's like, "Yeah, I was like so close to free shipping." So, I was added this. It's like, "Oh my god, they got you." It's like, "You need to spend $7 more dollars. You spend $20 more instead of just paying $7 shipping." Exactly.
(07:36) Whatever. It works. It works. Um, so yeah, super easy one that basically anyone can do. like other versions of this you could you you know I I always like think of the ramifications of potentially pissing people off. Um and so you know um you could just like raise your sale percentages for a little bit, give an additional percent off potentially.
(07:54) The free gift is nice because usually if you can do something that's like high value, low marginal cost to add it to the box that you're already shipping. That's nice. Like the beanie is a great example of that, but there's a bunch of different other ways you can deploy quick little flash sales during your promo. >> Yeah, totally. I agree.
(08:09) So, tactic two was was pacing. Um, and I think you did a video on this last year. Um, and you'll update it for this year as well. Um, but but how does this work? You're starting with the revenue goal, then you look at the daily Shopify revenue, then you map the goal for revenue. Um, can you walk through how to think about this? >> Yeah, it's really important that you understand when your revenue is going to happen.
(08:33) So if you are not even if you are running cost controlled campaigns but I think it's even more important in like lowest cost campaigns you know when you should be thinking about ramping up spend uh not only on a daily basis throughout Black Friday Cyber Monday but also literally hourby hour there's going to be cases where you want to push more aggressively and you need to know how those things are going to trend uh and you can keep it super simple and yes I will make a follow-up video that's custom for this year because Cyber Monday is now back in November after 2
(08:58) years of being in December. So everybody's December comps are going to look like year over year. So just a reminder 2026 December is going to look brutal. Um that's because Cyber Monday was not there uh this year. Um but I will adjust the video to to be like date relevant um as much as I can for for this year too.
(09:14) So the way you start with this is um you probably already have like a forecasted revenue goal for November and December. I like combining them because of the fact that Cyber Monday has been moving around. I think it helps you kind of like normalize a little bit for um not quite Q4, but you could do all Q4 if you wanted to. But start with your revenue goal.
(09:30) So if you want to make 10 million $10 million during November, December, you start with that number. Then you go into Shopify uh and you uh you grab daily revenue and you plug it into a spreadsheet. And then you just look at percent of revenue by day for the entire period. So if Black Friday was 20% of your revenue, then this year it should also be 20% of your revenue.
(09:50) And that you can just like drag the formulas up and down. It's it's pretty simple. There's a little bit of coaching you have to do, but the important thing there is you're not matching it to the date. you're matching it to the the day of Black Friday. And like that's the thing to account for. Um, right. >> There's a couple ways to do this.
(10:03) You can do total revenue or you can segment it down and do new customer. I like new customer for ad spend pacing, but repeat's also helpful because it'll help you understand like did when did we send emails last year so we know that we're comping similarly year-over-year and we keep that same plan.
(10:19) Um, but yeah, very simple. Start with a revenue goal. Look at daily Shopify. You can export that. You can throw it into your spreadsheet. I'll make a template that you can you can steal uh in a future episode and then yeah just uh map that out. The the way to make this a little bit more useful uh even further is go into like hourly pacing during Black Friday.
(10:36) So probably starting Friday, but maybe even Thanksgiving would be helpful to to start with um or depending on whenever you start your sale, you can do hourly pacing so you can see when sales occurred on your website because everybody does the same thing every single year. They say um Black Friday feels like maybe slow in the evening because everybody ripped throughout the morning because they were waking up from their turkey coma and they're online ready to shop and then and then everybody's back to work on Monday and
(11:01) people are freaking out thinking Cyber Monday is slow when really just like no it always picks up in the evening and the evening is insane like that's when you really need to push. Um so the hourly pacing there's an hourly view in Shopify as well. You can break it down make the same spreadsheet so you know when should I be spending and how much should I be spending by.
(11:19) Yeah, I think you know the hourly thing is is massive and we you definitely want to be taking note of that and being aware of that and making sure that that's part of your pacing because I think it's it's a common one and I think this is one of those places with a with a nice pacing document you can be working with your clients to make sure that they get this and see this because there's always those classic questions of like hey why didn't it do as well or why isn't it as good as it has been you know and like you know also knowing how much you need
(11:47) to be adjusting for for the Saturday Sunday slump, right? Because people know that stuff's coming back on Monday. So, um, you know, just making sure that you're walking through it with people to make sure they understand how the pacing goes so that there's it's clear and and you know that you're locked and loaded, especially for not only Black Friday, but for Cyber Monday, especially in the evening.
(12:06) As you said, >> Saturday, Sunday point is a really big one. Like, don't don't keep your budgets the same. >> No, you have to be really depressed. >> It's always trash. Yeah. I mean I I have I have very rarely seen and heard and you know like hey and and done myself where it's like yeah the Saturday Sunday like it's still pumping like everybody knows because I think we've trained consumers they know that that the Cyber Monday is is like the biggest usually the deal because you're trying to squeeze everything out of it. So, um,
(12:36) you know, and then obviously the deals can kind of extend through the till the last shipping date, but like that's generally when they're going to get the best deal, and people know that. And so, we have to just be prepared that like that's when it's going to happen. And you also have to prepare yourself, of course, that like your results in November are going to look like trash basically until this.
(12:57) And again, it's a it's a pacing thing. I think it's important to walk through that. important to make that clear to the client or important to make that clear to your boss um if you're one running paid or yourself if you're the one running paid in a brand like okay this is going to take a little bit longer right um and it's going to look like this as it relates to to the hourly and so it's good to have the pacing so let's talk about tactic really quick thing is the shipping cuto off time like the actual shipping cutoff time there's
(13:20) there's more time between Cyber Monday and shipping cut off this year than there there has been the last two years now so if Cyber Monday I think is November 30th you've now got December December 1st. Is there a 31st in November? I don't think so. Uh there you got December 1st through like December 12thish is like pretty common when last year was like I think Cyber Monday was like December 2nd or 3rd.
(13:42) Uh now you've got a much compressed time window. So like that's the other thing that could be a little bit tricky this year is you might actually expect to um stretch out the revenue a little bit more because there's more days to shop. And I don't know that more days of shop means more revenue necessarily versus just like you might have slightly slower days, but in aggregate that Black Friday through shipping cuto off period might still be the same total revenue, >> right? Oh, I agree.
(14:06) I think it's it's just important to make sure that you're creating that pacing and that you're setting expectations appropriately across the organization. Tactic three, creative strategy. So, you know, evergreen ads do fine, I think, generally speaking, right? And everybody always tries to create BFCM specific assets.
(14:24) Um it's interesting because uh BFCM assets that are specific worked better last year than previous years. It was almost like meta algorithmically cranked them differently. Um and so what was it that did well that was BFCM centric um around uh last year and you know I know you you had mentioned reels. What else what else was really hitting? you said something in that episode because I relisted to it that I thought was like in hindsight was even like it was really smart in the moment and it's only been more true.
(14:54) Uh and you brought up the the gem like gem was like starting to be Andromeda and Gem in particular was like starting to be a thing that people talked about last year. Uh and I think that that's probably a piece of it. Um so that was it's interesting you kind of saying the algorithmic piece again because there definitely something to that.
(15:09) Um but I think it's just like a reminder for everybody two years ago everybody's like just keep your evergreen assets on. they're going to spend more than your Black Friday stuff anyways. And last year was the first year that we started to see a real deviation away from that. And we had kind of predicted that because everybody has the ability to crank out more ads now.
(15:24) Whether you're you got creators on Tribe and you can ask them to make something, which is a pro tip. Uh you should have your creators make something and make sure that they know what the deals are uh because they're going to be able to crank out stuff for you. Um um but yeah, just making being being intentional about creating Black Friday, Cyber Monday specific assets because last year they worked much better than just leaving Evergreen on and hoping that that would that would scale you.
(15:46) Uh Zach actually gave a specific example for Hollow where they made 315 Black Friday, Cyber Monday specific ads and they had 400 Evergreen ads live during that stretch. Um, so to break down some of the creative stuff that worked really well last year, so you can start to prep these. Um, get the founder doing anything uh in the warehouse talking like walking up the rack, showing all the inventory.
(16:06) Um, you can make have the founder or different people on the team talking about their favorite items. Obviously, you can have creators do that, but I feel like there's something to like the founder being in the warehouse or like the head of marketing like being in the in the warehouse or with their favorite products saying like, "I'm on the team.
(16:20) This is what I'm looking forward to for the Black Friday sale. This is what I'm buying." And just kind of break down their reasons why. And let me just jump in on that. You know, one of the things that's interesting is one thing that still hits fairly significantly is gift guides. Um, and I think it's because people and the consu consumers look at uh a product selection across what you have and they feel overwhelmed by the amount of choice many times depending on what you're selling. But, you know, it's it's tough.
(16:47) And I think there's even even though I think people know generally bestsellers many times is just what you're trying to get rid of sometimes and isn't actually bestsellers. Although it could be bestsellers plus other things, right? But like I think that still is the most popular place for most people to go and you know this cuz you know you're you're doing a lot with website optimization and stuff like this now.
(17:08) It's like so I think the more that you can say these are my favorite items. These are this is why this is a great item for gifting. This is a great um you know bundle of items right like if bundling you know is definitely an an awesome one because it's I think the singular item in terms of a gift is also not as powerful um depending on what it is right but like Zach talked a lot about that what he did with hollow you know so much of it was bundling multiple pairs together making it so you're raising the AOV that you're trying you know this type of sock you're
(17:42) trying this type of sock this type of sock back and you know you don't know right and so I think that there's there's a lot to be said for that and especially when consumers are like I'm either going to spend $40 I'm going to spend $100 like I'm I'm going to spend 100 on the gift to get the bundle and then I can split them across different people that I'm giving the gifts to etc.
(18:00) So, my point is that I think the here's why these are our favorite items. Here's why these are our bestselling items and the team walking through that like in the warehouse, all that kind of stuff. I think that's really really good because it's it's generally true. It's the things that you want it that you're like these are the best things that we have.
(18:16) Here's why we love them. Um, and I think that kind of authenticity works really well. Um, ugly ads as as you had talked about last year, like you know, whiteboard type stuff, like that stuff does really well. Um, there's another one that you really liked called We're Sorry, >> of last year. >> Yeah, this is like everybody's like, "Uh, sorry to everybody who bought last week. Our deal is better this week.
(18:40) " Like super It's super cringy, but we ran it everywhere and of course it worked everywhere. Um, yeah, I'm sure I'm sure several people on Twitter claimed that they were the first one that did it. Um, >> but yeah, that was that's always a classic. Um, one of my favorites is just like a dumb easy one.
(18:56) And the way that we we talked about it last year was just like having the product in a Christmas setting. So like literally holding your t-shirt in front of the Christmas tree. Um, and now you can go to Nano Banana for sure. Like last year was maybe a little sketchy. Like now you can literally just like take your lay flat photo and throw it into GPT or Gemini or whatever and get a really solid prompt back that looks like a real Christmas setting.
(19:19) Um, it yeah, it works extremely well just doing that. Mhm. I love the the comment reply or the reply on the comment of will you be having a Black Friday sale and taking out the comment and then like putting that in the in the video of like yes, we are going to be having one and it's here, you know, like I love that kind of concept. >> There's something to like the common reply that feels like you're it's like more than just like answering the question.
(19:40) It's like maybe you're actually engaging with people. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, >> we see the same thing with pricing. Like people are like, "But this is really like the comment we always throw up is like, "Oh, but this is really really expensive." And then the it's a video of the founder replying to the comment of why it's expensive and what they put into it and all that.
(19:54) And that always crushes. Um and and now you can take all of these um one of the things Zach said last year is you can you can turn the warehouse ad into a video. You can put statics. He said he had the the gaylord of like the big USPS box with a ton of packages in it. is like overlay the the promo on top of it so people feel the FOMO of missing out on that.
(20:14) So yeah, ton ton of different creative ideas that you can you can yink. >> Yeah, I think those are I think those are good. I think the big one is yes algorithmically and I think with with GEM um there's a lot of signal that comes out of obviously what the ad is saying and I think if it's some people are going to be you know so much of it is about serving to people that are in your potential audience pool that are going to be responding.
(20:37) Some people are going to respond to sale messaging, some people are not. And giving the option across your suite of ads that you're running for those to be there is a big one. Um, and so, you know, some people are going to resonate with evergreen and some people are going to resonate with a promo.
(20:50) And I think you want to have both. Um, and you don't want to try to separate those too much. Um, so tactic four, campaign structure. Um, actually, let me jump back what I said. You don't want to separate those too much. Like you can put them in the same container. Like it's okay. There doesn't I get asked I got asked that a lot, too.
(21:06) like, hey, do I need to have like a separate promo assets? Like, you should probably just put it in like a CBO and like let it run and see who's what it serves where. It's probably the easiest, I would imagine, but you could also just probably put them in in a pre-existing asset uh ad set, right? And like rip it from there. So, yeah, a lot of ideas.
(21:24) Um, all right, campaign structure uh tactic four. So, let's talk about this because BFCM specific campaigns that were set outside the normal evergreen campaigns having a min rorowaz min value worked great. Cost cap stuff was okay. Can you talk more about this, what you saw last year and then I'll comment what I saw from founder members.
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(22:48) And when the test concludes, your results flow straight into your MTA, meaning you can easily see results alongside the rest of your data. Incrementality was broken. Northbeam fixed it. >> Yeah. So, it's like a it's a followup to the point that you were just making where what was the actual campaign structure.
(23:05) Um, we tend to build a Black Friday specific campaign, but I I don't think it's the end of the world to throw it in an adset within your existing CBOS. You just need to be conscious of of margins and how that works for existing products. But your products are discounted anyways. So, like, does it matter if it goes into the same CBO? Probably not.
(23:22) It just depends on your your bidding. So, um, where we saw the most success was definitely using value optimization, particularly on cataloges that had a handful of products and a bunch of different deals because you have to account for the discounts across a bunch of different SKs, right? If you're a high skew count apparel brand and you have up to 70% off, well, you have a bunch of different bunch of different price points.
(23:43) You have to know where you can set your your mineral target based on um, what you're actually expecting to to sell unitwise and the discounts across those units. So mineralize was nice a nice way of like stabilizing that and just making that much simpler. Cost cap was okay. We just didn't see as much volume last year. Um I'll be interested to see if that that differs.
(24:02) But we always have a value campaign and a volume campaign. Whether that's minor as and cost cap or just like auto bidding. Um up to you, but I like to have both because if you need more volume, you can flip one on. It's already pre-built or you can have them both on at the same time and they occasionally hit different customers. Um, we tend to use 7-day click primarily, but we saw a lot of success with one day click.
(24:24) Um, which I think just it's a shortened buying window and so it kind of fits the fits that theme. Um, but David Herman specifically last year was talking a ton about incremental incremental attribution during Black Friday and obviously it's been a really hot topic this year. I'm curious how that does.
(24:38) Um, you know, like I think if you my logical understanding of incremental attribution is like, hey, it's it's the model is built on um holdout tests. Um, and so I don't know if it can optimize as quickly on a short window. I just don't I don't know. Um, I haven't seen it work consistently across accounts enough where versus versus 7-day click or one day click.
(24:57) Um, but it's it's it's worth worth trying. Um, and then the other the other thing I'll just kind of close with is like we just left the evergreen on and you can then you can scale up evergreen and Black Friday interchangeably depending on how performance looks. Um, so that's kind of the the first core of the campaign structure.
(25:14) uh anything on that before I go into the retention retention. I think I think the big one is I think so so much of uh BFCM stuff for so long was very dogmatic in the approach of like all right do this then this and then this and then this and then this and then this and this is how you're going to achieve success right and I think a lot of it today is and a lot of it the last few years has been that you need a you need a mixture of a lot of ideas and you need to like have stuff that's ready to scale that you know is doing well like evergreen but you also need to make
(25:40) sure that you're utilizing cost caps and minor um min volume you know like in the in a way that is um going to be effectively like spending when it can but also saving you on the backside from the back slide you know so like and it makes you know seven we did a lot of 7-day click I think one day click is um in certain areas also works well so it's not one thing it's like a combination of all of these things and utilizing them in different ways and if you run your campaigns enough uh and deeply like that's I think a big one the big you'll
(26:11) you'll know this and you'll know the nuances of this I think that we're talking about Foxhole founder members and looking what they did like certainly there was actually a certain amount of like c capping and and utilizing minro as um in the places that they were a little bit outside of the normal evergreen like where they were taking a little bit more risk in terms of a creative type or something that was a big part of it um and yes evergreen also stayed on so definitely in agreement with you on that that was also big so
(26:38) yeah let's talk about retention and what you what you saw there from previous custo >> yeah the one thing the one thing that I would say is you probably want to pre-build a couple of extra campaigns cuz the last thing you want to do is try to get more volume and when you increase the budget it's not spending and then you try to build a campaign from scratch and Meta's not approving it fast enough.
(26:56) So like don't be afraid to have some backup campaigns pre-built out. Uh so you can you can flip those on if you need to get more volume. Um the retention campaign. So this is this is like I've been I've been hammering this for like this is probably the fifth time I brought this up in a dedicated episode.
(27:12) But um the long story short of this is you are running campaigns uh on meta to people who are unlikely to repeat purchase on their own. Uh so there's some math that you can do to to do that. But typically it's like you have you're targeting your lifetime customer list but you're excluding people who have purchased in the last 90 120 180 days.
(27:29) Again it's going to be brand specific and you're trying to reactivate them during this time period. Um the specific setup that we ran last year that worked really well was one day click again because you want to be you want to hold meta accountable to a more aggressive attribution window on this type of audience.
(27:44) I think uh minor because um it's just easier across the wider catalog. Um generally we set our rise target like two to three times higher on that campaign than we would for our acquisition campaigns which is going to be a little bit brand specific. If you have an incrementality benchmark you can use that.
(27:58) Um, and that was kind of the general setup. And then you just threw all of your Black Friday, Cyber Monday assets into that. Um, and it just, yeah, it just rips. Um, I'm okay being much less aggressive on that rorowaz target just be or yeah, much less aggressive on the rorowaz target, meaning um, actually set it higher because you like you're not only are you discounting, but these are people who are more familiar with you and so they're more likely to come back than than net new acquisition.
(28:23) Um, and an additional way if you have, again back to like a high skew apparel brand, like a DPA works really well for this, but I would keep it separate from that campaign just because the way that DPA optimizes. Um, I have a little bit of like a follow point on the destination thing, which is like kind of part of campaign structure, but also gets into uh landing pages for this time period a little bit, which I'm I I imagine we're probably going to have its own episode for Black Friday landing pages and what to do. Um, but any any retention
(28:48) campaign questions before I dive? >> Yeah. No, I I think it's good. I think one thing that certainly founder members talked about was utilizing what you just said, which is inflating it to a point in terms of rise, making it higher because they're going to come back, you know, and making sure that you're not trying to like um I don't know, let that go as as as as easily as you would in other places because it's going to be higher. So, I think that's good.
(29:10) Um and and you know, de definitely DPAs are a big part of it. Making sure that you're separating those, as you said, is huge. But if you have customizable DPAs um for people and showing off more of the catalog, that's going to be a a good thing for people especially that know you um and utilizing them in prospecting too.
(29:28) But you know, I think as much as you can, separating that out is going to be good. And um if you've not customized them before, you know, using it a tool, um definitely do that. I think that's it's gonna it makes it easier for consumers to see the product. It's not just on a white background, etc. There's like good ads.
(29:44) AI is a good example of one that can do that. So, just just throwing that out there and Okay, so let's talk about landing pages, which is its own big thing. But what have you done? And then I'll talk about what I saw. >> Yeah, I'm I'm really interested this year because I have a lot more ideas based on this how this went last year, but um we saw a couple of accounts where um the the the type of traffic really mattered for the the destination page.
(30:09) So, uh in the case of net new customers, most of the evergreen stuff continued to work really well. So, you want a mix of landers that are, you know, funnel congruent that we've been talking about relentlessly this year. So, you definitely want that for net new acquisition. You just want to make sure you overhaul those to make sure that the announcement bar, the shoppable section, the offer section is like consistent with what your Black Friday offer actually is.
(30:30) So, you just want to make sure you update those. Um, and then PDPs and bestsellers page, great for new customers. Like those those tend to work really well. Um, they're spending less time trying to figure out what to buy and more on, oh, this is a sweet item. like I just saw an ad for your the six Spider-Man hoodie that you're wearing.
(30:45) Uh and I don't want to land on a collection page where I have to go find it. Like it's at the top of the collection page or I'm going directly to the PDP. Um that works really well um for new customers. For returning customers specifically, we actually saw just like doing a better job of curating a Black Friday specific collection where you showed like, hey, these are actually the best discounts and it didn't line up with the best product cuz they probably already own the best product.
(31:08) They don't they don't need to come back and buy that same thing. Maybe they want to explore the catalog a little bit more and they want the best deal and that's what they care about is like, "Cool, I already trust this brand. I'm willing to take a risk on this item that maybe I otherwise wouldn't, but it's 40% off or 70% off, so f it.
(31:22) I'm going to load up my cart." So, I'm I'm really curious to see how uh that does again this year. But the the type of traffic was was super interesting there. Um, and I have a bunch of ideas for like net new pages this year, but I think we should we should save that for for a separate episode. But uh uh what what were you saying? I mean, I think so much of it is like so much of the stuff in thinking about um landing pages and and you know, going to new versus returning, I think is a huge differentiation that you just don't hear about that often in terms of
(31:50) a tactic. I think the big one is people are going to want to shop during this period of time. So the more that you can go through and design landing pages that are for people in that journey and you give meta options for people in different parts of their journey with you, the better off you're going to be.
(32:13) PE, we know that people love a bundle like we talked about. We know that people are curious about the best sellers. We know they're curious about what makes you great, right? So trying different versions of social proofing of um you know product demoing of showing the product and what it's actually like in somebody's house um on video like the more that you bring these things forward the better off you're going to be.
(32:35) I think that there's so much of it that's built around CMO, CRO, that's built around getting people to click buy and convert and add to cart and everything, which is good and that's where a lot of optimization lives and it should live there. But it's also it disrespects to a degree the customer journey itself in terms of like where people are at headsp space-wise and giving them the options that speak to that.
(33:00) So it's not just about a bestseller page, but it's about why are these the best sellers? What have they done? How many units of them have you sold? How many have been returned? How many what you know what are the reviews on these products? What are what are the features people love about this product? Can they search the reviews easily to answer questions? Like there are these things that we all do that you that you do as a consumer but you don't necessarily know think about as a marketer sometimes.
(33:23) So I encourage you as you kind of go through mapping this out. I think landing pages and the variation on landing pages along with variation on creative is a massive one to think about because it's going to unlock all different types of you know uh of customer not just personas but angles um customer segments um you know and customer buying behaviors as well.
(33:44) >> Yeah. And and like the other the other thing is like it's not you're not only connecting your ad messaging to the landing page and funnel that they're landing on, but like you don't want you want the offer to be consistent from all the things that they're clicking. So if they land on a landing page, that offer should be consistent with what's on the in the announcement bar on the actual website or on the PDP or very clearly on the corre collection page.
(34:05) But if you're going from a lander to a PDP and then all of a sudden you have a popup on that that's like, "Hey, get 10% off which has like nothing. It's just like your evergreen email popup." um that you just like always run and you didn't switch it for Black Friday. It's like, okay, now it's time to switch it for for Black Friday to make it you just got to make it all consistent, which means that you need to update your welcome flow to make sure that's pulling into the right places and that messaging is is accurate. Um, one other quick thing that
(34:27) I didn't write down that I just remembered though is usually a couple weeks before like Black Friday is really starting to pick up. So maybe mid November or maybe even early November, we tend to we we've we've swapped over the popup to say get the offer today. same offer like like if if you run a 10% evergreen.
(34:48) Um just adding the messaging that's like plus be the first to know about our Black Friday deals that that increased optin rate pretty significantly. Um which had like conversion rate didn't change. So like you just got more people and people were still buying today. It's like it wasn't like you were kicking the can on those people but they just they they built the list a little bit more.
(35:04) So, um, speaking of like being consistent, um, in the short term, you know, pre- Black Friday, you can update your pop-up to just like, uh, sneak in that wording. And then during Black Friday, the pop-up should be consistent with the offer. Uh, and honestly, like I don't have any data for this yet, but um, I just wonder if pop-ups are even like super valuable during Black Friday.
(35:22) Maybe they are because people are bouncing between websites and trying to shop, but also like should we be distracting people from shopping? Um, I'm not sure. Um, so to be determined. Right. Right. Right. Right. Um, whoopsy daisy. I lost my Here it is. So on the final tactic, what are your takes on AOV? >> Yeah. >> And how's I mean la I feel like last year there was a lot of discussion that Zach did.
(35:53) It was absolute mastery on this with hollow. Um, so let's talk through this. What what are what's your take on from 3 to 3, 2 to 2, etc.? >> Yeah, I think this is one like you you probably got all the sauce from from from this episode by without listening to that one. But I think this specific section is probably worth going and hearing from from the horse's mouth uh Zach directly by going back and listening to that podcast and I'm sure uh sure I'm sure Shane will link that up for us.
(36:18) Um but he said something that was super interesting which was he's kind of like hey on Hollow's website we were doing a three for three offer. So it was a great deal. getting, you know, buy three, get three free. Um, and but his concern was like, hey, we're kind of like pricing people out. Like you're spending $150ish dollars before you get this offer.
(36:35) And they keep the offer like fairly evergreen throughout the year. Um, where they ran that offer for a long time and then they kind of keep it consistent during Black Friday minus the flash sale stuff we talked about at the top. And he's like, "We're just pricing people out. Like people are look, they're shopping and looking for a deal and the people who are just never going to spend $150 on this product are just they're just going to leave.
(36:54) they're not going to buy because they don't qualify for the best offer. So, they just lowered it from three for three to two for two. Obviously AOV down uh AOV went down but CAC went down faster and so your AME goes up and all of a sudden you've got a better you've got a better margin profile on that which allows you to actually scale more effectively uh into that which you know um maybe not as much for hollow but for other brands like that has that can have massive implications on your your LTV because all of a sudden you just have a bigger
(37:21) customer list to go off of. The last thing I'll say on this is we just have we have clients come to us from time to time and they're like we just need to figure out how to increase our AOV. It's like I don't know if that's like actually the goal. Like I don't think it is the goal. Like the goal is to figure out how to find the right ratio of of AOV to CAC.
(37:37) Um and it doesn't mean increasing AOV at at all costs. Um now increasing AOV might give you a little bit more space, but it's just like finding that leverage between increasing it but not increasing it so much that all of a sudden your your CAC puts you backwards. Uh and AM can help be that measure of that.
(37:53) So, um, yeah, TLDDR, they went from three for three to two for two and that allowed them to scale really, really heavily because it just lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people. >> Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, um, look, we thought this was going to be 20 minutes and we are sitting at 35minute episode full of value.
(38:10) Um, there's going to be a lot more from us coming on this. If you have questions, feel free to email me, Andrew at Foxwell Digital. I will, uh, send it on to Brad and involve him and Zach if needed. Otherwise, keep on listening, keep rating, and uh thank you very much for being here, everyone, and have a great rest of your day. The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends, honestly.
(38:33) Like, reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. Um, and so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app. Now, anything you can share, the better we're going to be. Um, guys, anything else you want to say on this? >> Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube.
(38:53) Rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. >> And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So, please say something nice about all of us. >> Thank you everyone. Thank you for listening. Honestly.
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