The BFCM Playbook: What to Do Before, During, and After Black Friday ft Cherene Aubert

Full session transcript

Hello, beautiful people. Wow, I am so disappointed. There is not one roundtable in sight. Can you guys laugh harder? That was my joke. Thank you. Thank you. so Black Friday, we never do this. We never did it last year. We'll never do it this year, and we'll never do it next year. But I'm here to talk to you about what you should be doing for Black Friday, before and beyond So this is my Super Bowl.

Can I get a, "This is my Super Bowl," in the chat? yeah. Does... Are there any broccoli heads here who can give me a, "This is my Super Bowl," in the chat? So this is a big deal, and you should listen to me because I have about 15 years in e-com. I've helped, over 100 brands grow, bootstrap to series A to C, to post-acquisition, from ne- zero to nine figures.

At Bobby, we went from zero to nine figures in two years, most of it D to C. I joined ILIA post-acquisition, drove a turnaround for their D to C business. Now I'm at Growth Capital helping other brands grow, and these are all examples of things that I've done during BFCM that have worked. They may not work for you, but they worked for me.

All right. Before we get started, I wanna talk about my BFCM philosophy and what I've seen. You have to look at your own data and validate all of this and make sure that it's real. But the majority of your BFCM volume typically comes from existing customers, and those top BFCM cohorts become your, best cohorts anytime you launch a new product i- in future sale moments.

So this is the best moment to acquire new customers, and those new customers are gonna be the baseline for repeat revenue in the future. So yes, repeat revenue is important during BFCM, but I want you to think about all of this in the context of optimizing for new customers. And these are the four traps that kill growth during BFCM and Q4.

The first one is that you haven't reached enough new accounts, and you shouldn't wait till November or December to reach more new accounts. You should reach them now because CPMs are gonna explode in November and De- December, and the br- and the audiences that you get in front of now are gonna become your conversion cohort in BFCM.

Number two, the long sale trap. I don't believe that you should run a month-long site-wide sale. A- as good as the numbers are, even if your net sales are amazing, it's brand dilutive and you have to comp it again next year. So do better. And if you're an omni-channel brand, your retail partners won't appreciate a long sale, and your January performance is gonna crater.

Number three, the creative fatigue cliff. You know, all year you've been working on getting the best ad content that converts- And in BFCM-- during BFCM, you're gonna spend insane amounts of money against those evergreen pieces of content, and they're gonna fatigue, and you're gonna go into January with not enough content to sustain growth in the beginning of the year.

So while you are thinking about Q4 and Q4 content and Q4 planning, you should also be planning your content pipeline for January so that you don't come into January with fatigued ads. And then number four, offer innovation stagnation. You're doing the same thing year over year. You're doing deeper and deeper discounts, and you're training customers to wait, and they're fatigued.

So my encouragement to you here is to think of creative offer formats, that are unexpected. And as you guys have noticed, this deck was not made with AI. This is made with my own brain and my own hands. I am-- I, I'm AI-pilled to the core, but I think there's something about, showing you guys what I really think.

And so we're in September. There's like a week left in September. so it's a little bit late, but some of you might already be planned for BFCM. I'm gonna walk you through every month and what I believe every month should mean for you. September and into the beginning of October is your last best acquisition and awareness window to bring in new customers who will repurchase again during BFCM.

October is what I like to call retail demand pull forward and Prime Day. So this is when retailers and Amazon try to pull forward demand from DTC businesses. And November is the Wild Wild West. This is when noise increases. You're gonna be tempted to launch your sitewide sale early if you see your competitors doing it.

BFCM weekend is the peak. December is still strong. This is shipping cutoff and Boxing Day for brands that have international presence. And then January is what I like to call the great creative reset and a good opportunity to launch new products. And here's another way to look at it Last best acquisition awareness window.

November is luxury CPMs and the temptation to start early. BFCM's the peak. December is a good Amazon peak. made this happen. I see too many Shopify brands overpaying for big email tools and using only a fraction of their features. We're tired of complexity and never ending price hikes too. That's why Seguno Email is different.

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Link in the show description. Now back to your replay. And here's another way to look at it. Last best acquisition awareness window. November is luxury CPMs and the temptation to start early. BFCM's the peak. December is a good Amazon peak. And January, based on what you do now, can either be a slump or a pump for next year All right, let's talk about September.

There's not that much time left. on the right here, this is a real promotion that I ran last year. This is from Ilia. This is a VIP sale. And the intention of this was to con-- build a groundswell of acquisition and loyalty ahead of BFCM. So it's a gated offer, and the intention is to bring in new customers, but more so it's to move existing customers further down the funnel into loyalty.

And if you don't have a VIP program or you don't believe in loyalty, you can run an e- SMS exclusive offer to bring new people into your SMS list. September is a great time to do sampling if you're a CPG brand that, has trial and if you have replenishment. It's a great time to bring in new customers who will repurchase again and be, during BFCM.

And now is the time to also continue to build your content for November use. New account reach initiatives. I mean, there's a... If you, if you're doing incrementality testing, there's a lot of debate on whether top-of-funnel media buys on Meta actually drive incremental growth. But this could be a good time to potentially put some budget into TikTok and see if you can get in front of new audiences All right, we're going into October.

This is what I like to call the holiday soft launch. This is when you can start your seasonal positioning for holiday without, diluting demand. And ideas here, and these are ideas from the beauty industry, which has nailed this, is every end of September and October, beauty brands launch holiday bundles that are limited edition and exclusive.

And so if you're in a brand in a category where virtual bundles are easy to get together, low AOV limited edition holiday bundles are great for new customer acquisition, and high AOV limited edition bundles are great for existing customers. And, and again, you don't wanna d- dilute your November efforts, so October is a great time to introduce holiday position gift with purchase.

Here's an example. This is a scarf GWP that we introduced in October. The intent was that you could wrap your products. It had a holiday theme, and it was a great driver of demand All right. November. November, this is where you cut through the noise. The goal here is cutting through the noise, and you need to focus on being strategic with your promo timing and being ready for creative iteration.

So this video right here is a great example of a piece of branded content that we ran during one of Ilya's sales. And you don't really think of like branded content and sale moments as an obvious thing to do. But if you think about what's happening in November in BFCM, all of you guys are loading in your big red forty percent off static ads into Meta, and Meta is like pushing a button and pulling a crank and opening up all this really bad inventory, and all of those sale statics get stuffed into this really bad inventory.

And the user, the customer, the social media user, is not opening up social media to see your amazing big red static ad. They're opening up social media to be entertained and inspired and delighted. So that's all a long way to introduce this piece of content, which is one of our best pieces of sale content, and it was a piece of brand creative.

It's engaging and unique, and customers loved it. They were commenting on it. They were sharing it. They were inspired by it, and it was one of the best pieces of content. So that's just a little bit of inspiration to get you to think differently about creative diversity. And I do think month-long offers in November are acceptable and can be non-brand dilutive, but they shouldn't be site-wide sales.

Gift with purchases are great. Deeper bundle offers, so if you introduce bundles in October, you can increase the discount on your bundles to drive demand in November. And even though I said earlier, don't start your BFCM sale too early, I do believe you should be ready. You should be observing your competition.

You should be ready to go early, have all of your assets ready. And if you start to see your competition launch early and you believe that you could be diluting your BFCM per-performance by not going early, then you should be ready, and you should launch early I have in here influencer content that drives inspiration and desire ahead of the sale.

And this goes back to optimizing for new customers. New customers wanna understand why they should buy your product, who you are, and maybe it's not influencers, maybe you don't have the budget or maybe bigger influence- influencers haven't performed for you. But this could be affiliates that are talking about your USPs, why you're new, better, or different.

And so I strongly believe that evergreen content should continue to run during November to bring in new customers. And then at the bottom here, high intent lead gen to build audiences ahead of the sale. This is really interesting. It's not really pl- applicable for every category, but I'll give you an example.

At Ilia, it's a, it's a makeup brand. Shade matching is a big part of the purchasing decision, making sure that the product matches your skin tone, and that's a huge friction point in buying the product online. So what we would do ahead of a sale is get people to take our shade matching quiz, and we would incentivize it.

So we would say, you know, "Five lucky winners win the whole website if they... And, and they're entered to win by taking this quiz." So not all of those leads are great, but they are high intent, high quality leads that have purchase intent that take the quiz ahead of the sale Alright. BFCM, this is my Super Bowl That's what I look like during BFCM on the right.

This is creative and offer warfare. So I strongly believe that during BFCM, you don't wanna go live that weekend with a deeper discount. You don't wanna go from, you know, let's say you launch your BFCM sale a week or two before BFCM at, let's say, 20% off sitewide, and you're like, "I have a great idea.

During BFCM, I'm gonna make it 30% off sitewide, and it's gonna be awesome, and everyone's gonna love it." And that's, like, the best way to piss off all of your customers and have them write into CX and be disappointed and ask for a back discount applied to their order. But there is another way, and I have seen cohorts of customers who are acquired early in the sale come back and reconvert during BFCM weekend when the offer was different, and it wasn't just making the sitewide sale deeper.

A great example is introducing a gift with purchase or introducing a tiered incentive or a tiered gift with purchase. Something special, something juicy to get them to buy again and to be excited rather than to be pissed off Mid-tier and macro evergreen influencer content that's non-sale. I said this before, but I think it's super important.

You should continue to build your evergreen content that's non-sale during BFCM and continue to launch this content. And again, it doesn't need to be mid-tier or macro influencers, although getting social proof from other voices is hugely powerful. It can be an, it could be affiliates, it could be branded content like the example that we saw.

But the point is continue to optimize for new customers. And then how do you do it? If you have a team of multiple people, mul- multiple functions like growth, e-com, creative, social, I highly recommend a daily stand-up. Even on Thanksgiving and the weekends, get those people on a call, get them to chat for 15 minutes, look at performance together, iterate, and then give them a couple of extra days off at the end of the year.

It goes a long way

All right, December. December is the shipping cutoff cliff. This is where the goal is urgency marketing, and the customer sees shipping cutoff, and we, the operators, see inventory liquidation and a really good time to turn inventory that might be expiring into a gift with purchase. Get those low threshold, low barrier to entry offers during, December before the shipping cutoff in.

Post shipping cutoff, you know, it's not a huge volume driver, but digital products, gift cards, pushing your customers to retailer Amazon. And I'll give you another example. You know, like at Ilia, we had these exclusive bundles that wouldn't come back the following year. They would go out of stock. We would update the PDP and drive that PDP for that o-out of stock inventory to the retailer site.

And you're like, "Oh, man, you're, you're sending your DTC customers to retail. That's a crime." But it's a bigger crime to have to take those refunds back from retailers. So post shipping cutoff is a great time to do that. And then Boxing Day. We forget about how big Boxing Day is in core non-US markets. And those markets don't really mind if you recycle your BFCM offer for Boxing Day All right, we're in January.

January is the month that you guys all forget about until, until it happens, unless you have really sophisticated planning teams that are, that are on it. but yeah, I think this is a great opportunity, you know, to position your business for the new year. We talked about having creative for January. This is so important.

Have a pre-planned creative backlog to combat fatigue. Your team is so focused on BFCM right now. Start making creative for January. I can't tell you when to, to start doing that, but you should do it. And this is also a great time to incentivize subscription if you're a subscription business. new year wellness routines, incentivize your subscription.

But I wouldn't recommend incentivizing just your first order for subscription because you're gonna bring in a bunch of customers that are prone to churn. But test out what it looks like to in-incentivize your subscription forever. What if you went from ten to fifteen percent off on every recurring order?

Obviously, you have to do the math and see if the margins check out, and it's-- the LTV growth is worth the margin that you're trading on every order. But it could be a great way to bring in more subscribers. And then again, this is, this is a great moment for launches, partnerships, cross-selling, Q4, Q4 cohorts, getting those Q4 cohorts that you acquired in November to purchase again in January.

yeah. All right. TLDR, what did we just talk about? There were so many things. Number one, optimize for new customers. Those new customers are gonna be your baseline of repeat orders for future sale moments and future launches. So optimize for new customers. Pretend that you're always talking to someone who's never heard of your brand before.

Avoid the four growth killing traps, and have a very strategic month-by-month execution plan that gets you just beyond BFCM weekend, but from September to January. Thank you so much. That's great. Yep. She's getting-