My Complete Guide To Black Friday, Part 1: Offers, Timing, & Forecasting transcript

Black Friday is coming very soon. I am going to give you the first of a two-part episode today about how to prepare what I'm telling my clients to do to prepare so that you can be set up for success for Black Friday. Let's get right into it. All right, I've got six things here and I I think there's going to be stuff here you've never seen before. There's particularly a data point about when to launch your sale that you need to know.

It's really important. So, I'm going to get to that soon in the context of the rest of this. Uh, but make sure not to miss that. Okay, so um I'm going to break this up into two different episodes. One of them is going to be more about the general setup, the offer, the planning. The second one is going to be more about how to manage your meta ad account specifically. Okay, so we'll do it in two sort of phases, distinct episodes.

Let's start with number one out of the six. How to win for Black Friday as big as possible. Number one, it's all about your offer uh and your category. Let's just assume first of all before we get into any of this stuff that your category is going to make a really big difference here that it's going to be different for supplement brands and beauty brands and gifting brands and everything else. There's highly seasonal brands, less seasonal brands, everything in between, you know, to some degree how that's going to work out for you.

But within the context of sort of the baseline expectations of your brand, etc. Uh it is all about the core thing, the most important thing is building a great offer. And in order to do a great do to do a great job with your offer, my strong recommendation for you is that you build in some way for a more of a focus on AOV than you normally would in your offer. What I mean is you should be building an offer whose main point is to generate as high of an AOV as possible.

And the way typically to do that is uh in order is is to build actually a series of offers with some mega offer at the top. Right? So the simple way to think about this is is that for for many if not most brands, the way to think about this is that if you can sort of pre-bundle some things or build like a sitewide offer or something where it's like buy more, save more, etc. Those offers tend to work very very well. you know, buy uh you know, spend $50, get 10, get 20% off, get spend $100, get 30% off, spend $150, get 40% off, whatever.

Even more than those kind of simple stacked offers, what I really like is pre-bundling some things, if this makes sense for your brand, where you have one mega giant bundle at the top of your of a of a sort of BFCM holiday landing page that is just like, you know, a million units of everything that you sell for 50% off or 60% off or whatever it is. And there's a lot of reasons I really like this um and really like doing this this way.

The first of these is is that at Black Friday, people are just willing to spend a lot of money. And so, your conversion rate is going to go up so much that you can actually get some very large orders mixed in. And typically, if you're doing sort of a a stacked bunch of offers like that, what will happen is like some small percentage of customers will end up going after your largest offer and that will drive the AOV up for for everybody.

So, of course, not everybody's going to take your biggest offers, but some small amount will and others will take your second biggest offer or whatever it is. So just building that sort of stacked bundled approach can work especially well. Now I should say here a lot of brands do just fine with like a flat you know 20% off site wide 30% off sitewide whatever it is kind of offer and you'll still get some AOV increase just because people are ready to spend.

Uh so that can work just fine and especially if you're a smaller team and you can't spend all the time and energy and resources building some really complex big thing or whatever that's totally fine. You can get really really far doing that and go spend your effort elsewhere. But I think if it's at all possible and you can build some larger offers that have bigger discounts, it has all kinds of benefits. One of those is at the marketing level, you can promote that offer and all of your material.

So you can put up ads that say 50% off, 60% off up to whatever really big numbers. I think in black at Black Friday, there's very little um problem of brand degradation by offering discounts. Like everybody discounts at Black Friday. It's fine. Uh most brands are also just not super premium. And so like you you don't need to worry about this thing that people worry about where it's like ah we're going to degrade the brand by doing these discounts.

Like all other things being equal, you you probably are overly concerned about that. I certainly have been in the past at times. And at Black Friday, Cyber Monday, giving big aggressive offers works. I think it is not going to hurt your brand in the long term in most cases. Um, and really honestly for for most brands, if you're sub $50 million in revenue in particular, uh, and especially sub 30, sub 20, something like that, like you basically shouldn't even worry about sort of long-term brand degradation.

What you should worry about instead is generating as much cash as possible in your business, as much profit as possible. Um, and when you get bigger, you can rethink some other things. Now, there's limits to all that, and I have to speak in generalities here for the sake of this episode, but that's the way that I would be thinking uh, big picture. There's another reason though to think about big AOVs um and and driving that up and that is you are a DTOC brand and DTOC means that you ship your product directly to the customer and shipping your product directly to the customer to their door means paying for last mile shipping and paying for last mile shipping means margin degradation at the level of your order because shipping to a customer's doorstep costs a lot of money and uh and it ends up being a huge part of the margin profile.

Many brands, many many brands are spending close to as much on shipping the product to the customer as they are on the product itself. And so if you can push a bigger AOV, uh there is a massive um uh economy of scale in larger AOVs, you know, we call it sometimes value to weight ratio that if you can take imagine two products, one of them uh costs the customer $20 and the other one costs the customers $100, but they're the same weight and size. uh well the $100 product uh there may be all kinds of upsides and downsides to 100 versus $20 etc.

But one of the major upsides is that the shipping cost is advertised against a $100 order instead of a $20 order. And that means that you just spend way less of your margin on shipping. And so at Black Friday Cyber Monday where you're already offering a big discount, one of the biggest things to watch out for is margin. And I'm going talk more about that in a second because you can actually generate a whole bunch of money and uh a bunch of revenue and not that much profit if you are sort of o so aggressive about your offers that you don't have any margin left over especially after you factor in ad dollars.

And one of the things that a large AOV does is it is it creates a margin benefit for you where you can actually um if you can push the AOV up, then the cost of shipping to the customer goes down and actually the blended margin after all of the discounting and shipping costs and all that comes out in the wash and you end up being able to to have some margin advantage there. So, um so there's there's a lot of reasons for this, but really like I I think pushing AOV at Black Friday is a really important thing.

Obviously, you want to get those discounts pretty big. You also don't want to just run like 10% off or something like that. It just won't look good. You need to be at a minimum 20 um for for your offer to move the needle at all at Black Friday. Lots of people are going to be pushing much bigger numbers than that. So, if you want to grab attention, you just have to do it. So, um lots to say about great offers and you could do a whole podcast just about that episode about that one thing.

It's going to be so specific to your brand in a lot of ways that I I don't want to belabor the point too much. But I do just want to say if it's at all possible, build for AOV in some way where it allows you to get the margin benefit and uh also the sort of just revenue per click benefit of of the um of of your Black Friday offer. Okay, so there's number one, build for OV. Number two, related to what I was just saying before, get very serious.

Pay very close attention to your margin. Um, and and this deserves its own point. Uh, aside from what I was saying about AOV, because this gets tricky, especially if you do have a stacked offer where different products or different amount like have different discounts or whatever it is, you need to um go look at a unit economics sheet and factor in all of the costs involved after your offer and then set your CAC targets in your ads from there because it is possible to generate revenue and lose money.

It's very possible, especially if those discounts get really, really big. One simple thing you can do is go to my website right now, ajfgrowth.com. Drop your email address in the popup or in the footer, and I will send you my four free essential e-commerce resources. One of those is my unit economics calculator, which allows you to go um line by uh item by item very easily in your product set and look at your unit economics um for the products and for the orders that you are sending out.

And you can see like, okay, after a discount, if I get this much money and my COGS are this much, here's how much margin I have left over for CAC, here's how I set my ad targets, etc. You you can see that it's on the screen right now. Um, you can see that that is uh that that that information is there. Go grab that and fill it out specifically for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. If you have heard my ads for rich panel and thought that maybe it's just a a piece of software for newer brands and not as good as as other pieces of help desk software, that's just plainly wrong at this point.

Multiple of my 8 figureure brands are using rich panel as their customer service help desk. And on top of that, huge brands like Ridge and Pila and Jones Road Beauty are using and loving Rich Panel because it is a great piece of software. So, what we talk about, what I talk about all the time in these ad reads with Rich Panel is that it is guaranteed to save you 30% on your customer service uh help desk bill if you switch from Gorgeous or if you switch from Zenesk.

And that is 100% true. Those legacy players are more expensive than Rich Panel for that reason. Uh and uh that is not it. It's not just that it is cheaper. it is that it is a great piece of software that has figured out how to deliver a great customer experience to your customers via AI. And that's because Rich Panel has built AI first from the ground up. That makes it so that your customer service agents can respond to more tickets more quickly, which creates a better experience for your customers.

And on top of that, they average a 30% reduction in total tickets in the first place because their customer service self-help portal powered by AI is so good. They also have an AI comment engager responder that will go respond for you on your Facebook ad comments. That is something I've watched brands struggle with for forever. My like literally my entire 10 or 11 years or whatever in meta ads work. Um brands have not known how to effectively and efficiently interact with customers on their comments.

AI's built uh Rich Panel's built an AI comment responder for you that could do a great job interacting with customers there. It's just an awesome piece of software. The transition is quick and easy. At this point, if you're using one of those legacy pieces of of customer service help desk software, you really ought to take a call and get yourself all set up before Q4 comes around before your ticket volume goes way up and your bill gets a lot higher.

Make the switch right now. Richpanel.com is the place to do it. Richpanel.com, link for that is in the show notes. Go check it out. The point is, you need to know your numbers here because this is just a giant math game at Black Friday, just like it is all year long. And the more you can pay attention to where your margin is actually at and the dynamics that are happening in your business, the better. Especially at the level of your CAC targets.

Your CAC targets almost certainly and your rowass targets almost certainly need to change during Black Friday relative to normal, both because the AOV is going to change and the margin profile is going to change as you offer a big discount. So, that is a a critical thing. Okay, number three. This is this is I think the one that sort of blew my mind the most. I'm going to give you the best and clearest direction you've ever gotten about when to launch your sale.

Uh, and that is because uh, I came across some data earlier this year and I actually can't show you the actual chart because I'm under NDA for it, but I can still summarize it for you. I'm going to ask you to trust me here, okay? Um, but there are some specific things here that are really critical because uh, because I have wondered year over year for a very long time, is it best to do the thing where you like launch your Black Friday sale on November 1st or should you wait until Black Friday?

Are you cannibalizing future revenue? Is there any benefit? And people kind of debate this um in a in a bunch of different ways. Um but I want to start by giving you some baseline expectation of when you should and shouldn't launch your sale because there's some uh there's some key details that you should know here. Okay? And and here's here's the key idea. Uh the key thing is that if you're going to launch your sale early, you ought to launch it the first week of November, not the second week of November.

So if you break up November into basically three 10day se sections, okay? November 1st to 10th, November 11th to 20th, November 20th, 1st to 30th. Okay? Just break it up into those three things. And Black Friday is late this year, so it's going to come at the end of the month. All right? Um, if you just do it, so the first, third, second, third, and and end, there is a consistent revenue pattern no matter exactly where Black Friday falls every single year that goes like this.

There's a giant spike in purchase behavior the first third of November. So, November 1st through 10th, okay? There's a really big spike in that. And there's, of course, an even bigger spike in the third section. So, November uh 21st through 30th as you get to actual Black Friday itself. But what most people miss and what I have missed in the past is that between those two purchase behavior actually comes down. So November uh between so basically between November 11th to 20th purchase behavior comes down.

And I think there's a really obvious reason for this which is that basically um people are going to launch their sales and there's going to be some beginning purchase intent in that first 10day period in November. And the reason that you're going to um see that is like the shopping season starting to come around, people are launching sales, etc. But that once you get into that second period out of the three, people are going to start to wait until Black Friday.

No matter how much you tell them, uh no matter how much you tell them, hey, look, you know, this is the best deal you're possibly going to get, etc. As you get closer to Black Friday, people are just going to go, I'm just going to wait. I'm just going to wait and see. Compare that compare my offer to everybody else's offer. Um and you know, they're going to they, you know, there's share of wallet issues. etc. And so, so people are just going to wait.

And so the so so there's the initial spike, but then as you get closer, there's a dip and then it respspikes again at Black Friday. So my advice to you is if you are going to launch early, launch in the first 10 days of November. That is launch super early. Okay? Because that is c that is purchase intent you want to capture. And in my view, you probably ought to do that. If not, um if not, you probably should just wait until closer to actual Black Friday.

Yeah, I wouldn't wait till Black Friday itself. You want your ads firing and in the account and live and through approvals and all that. So, you know, you might want to launch it. You also don't want to have force people to like get up and work on Black Friday morning, like on uh Thursday night, excuse me. Uh people are going to work on Black Friday morning, but on Thursday night, you don't want to force people to work while, you know, they're having Thanksgiving with their families or whatever it is.

But, but launch ads, you know, on the Monday or Tuesday before, whatever, so everything is kind of up and going, um etc. And and you've got that. So, um that is my strong advice now that for brands that are already offering a pretty big discount, launch super early. The place to avoid is launching that um is launching in that second period because there's just no reason. If you're going to launch early, you might as well launch even earlier than that and capture more purchase.

If you're not going to launch early, wait until you get closer to actual Black Friday. Um that pattern, by the way, is consistent in a large data set that I've seen. A very large data set is consistent every year since 2021. So it's not just something related to Black Friday being late last year or something like that if you wondered. So that's my strong advice to you is launch it early. There there are some secondary benefits to doing this.

One of them is like your best um ads will be launched and out of learning hopefully your best sale ads etc. You'll have some sense of what's resonating and what's not. Your ad account will be a little bit more stable. You should be getting some volume early on. You can see kind of how things are shaping up. Any consolidation you want to do in your ad account with your winners etc. Same is true if you're testing any landers or offers or specific bundles or anything like that.

You've actually got time if you launch early to start making some adjustments and seeing how things um play out. Uh so all that stuff is beneficial. You can make additional ads uh you know if something is if something is working or something is not working. There's there's just some ability to sort of maneuver by launching early as well. So increasingly that's where I'm at. Just it's Black Friday month in November. Launch super early.

Um, if if your brand isn't going to be hurt by having a serious Black Friday sale, then go ahead and launch it really early. It's not going to be hurt by that either. Um, you know, it's just the ultimate shopping time. And so, you might as well capture as much of the intent as you possibly can. [Music] You are an operator planning for Black Friday. You are an operator planning for profit in your business. If you are thinking that way about your business, you should be thinking about Intelligjam.

Intelligjs is the CRO CRO tool of record in the e-commerce space. And that's because CRO is actually kind of a misnomer. They are not a conversion rate optimization tool. Intelligence is actually a profit optimization tool. That is the way that Intelliggeems uh as a team and as developers are thinking about this tool is how to help you build for maximum amounts of profit. And they've built everything about the tool to do that.

And so um you can test all of the biggest needle movers on your website with Intelligjs. That includes simple CRO tests, right? The kind of stuff that is part and parcel of driving profit in your business, landing page changes, etc. Uh, Intelligjs makes that extremely easy, extremely easy to measure, extremely easy to implement. The software is very easy to put on your website. You do not need help from a developer. They will walk you through it.

It will be very fast. You can be up and running with tests quickly. So, that kind of stuff is covered. But beyond simple CRO, Intelligence actually allows you to test way more important and bigger needle moving things. I have a client, for example, that has repeatedly used Intelligjs to test their main sitewide offer that goes throughout the year. They used to have sort of a a flat 10% offer for new customers and they moved that to a stacked offer that was like 10, 20, 30 depending on how much you buy.

They found it drove not just a higher conversion rate, of course it did. Of course it drove a higher conversion rate because you're offering people bigger discounts, but it actually drove more profit per visitor. And that is the key metric that intelligence helps you to see because it can uh combines up the differences in value per order AOV that's uh per uh with different offers on your site uh differences in conversion rate and critically it ties into your cogs.

So you can actually see that down to the level of profit even of discount and that also and because the software allows you to test things like offers not just uh you know visual changes on your landers you can get really important information about exactly this kind of thing. Uh, you can do that same thing with your free shipping threshold. You can do it with your price of your product, which I guarantee you did not think hard enough about, and there's probably margin advantage to be had there.

Uh, there's just all kinds of stuff like that you can do. It's really awesome. Get intelligence on your site. Get testing. It will make a huge difference for your ability to maximize the profit of every visitor that gen that gets to your website and create the best experience for those customers. And you get 20% off the first three months if you use the code Ferris 20. F A R S20. So go to intelligence.io Ferris 20. get 30% off your first three months.

Get it today. In the midst of that, by the way, one other important detail um as you plan your uh as you plan your ads is that and I'm going to mention this more in the meta ads specific episode, but um but just remember also that no matter how much you launch early, there's still going to be some people are going to wait for Black Friday. So, just expect that there's going to be a bigger spike there. Expect that you're going to have some of your spend in those earlier periods is going to create value further down the road and you should be planning accordingly.

Okay, I'll say more about that later. All right. Number four. Number four. You cannot send too much email or SMS. Any concern you have. I just I just hear operators say, "Ah, we're we're overloading people with email and SMS, and we're whatever." Impossible. It's impossible to do it. Okay. I mean, maybe it's possible, but I still haven't seen it. I saw a brand a couple years ago or something like that that sent six emails on Black Friday or on Cyber Monday, and you know, they just they just went so crazy.

And yes, your unsubscribes are going to go up over that time period. They are. Uh, and that's okay. Unsubscribes are the cost of sending email. And you have to ask yourself, how much money are you willing to pay to not lose subscribers? And at Black Friday, Cyber Monday, every email and every SMS you send is worth a good amount of money. If that's the case, okay, then you probably ought to send a whole bunch of it. And you probably ought not to worry about unsubscribes.

On top of that, nobody's thinking about your brand as much as you are. Everybody's sending a bunch of email and SMS. Nobody's offended by how much email they're getting from you or worried about it. You've got a couple loud, noisy customers that are going to talk about, oh, you spammed us. You sent too much whatever. You know what? Don't worry about them. If that is who the customer is, if that is the way they're feeling about it, they're going to go away and at some point you can get them back if you release great products because people's are fickle about these exact sorts of things.

They don't they don't really care that much. Uh, and uh, and as for unsubscribes, also just recognize that the kind of person who is unsubscribing from your email or SMS list during Black Friday and and when they get emails from you instead of buying is probably not your customer anyway. If they're not going to buy at that moment, you don't really care if they leave your list. If anything, thank them for making it a little bit cheaper now to manage your Claia list because there's one less person to pay for on your list.

All right, so uh, so yes, don't worry about it. Send a lot of email and SMS. um SMS I think the particular value is for timebased things especially and for reach email it's such a blood bath in people's um inboxes that you you really ought to be thinking about how do you get people's attention SMS probably does work better there and those those SMS subscribers are super valuable so so don't forget um to use those don't again you're going to get some unsubs that's true with SMS in general but um but but really really valuable to to have that list and to use that especially effectively at key moments okay um all All right, number five.

Imagine that your Black Friday is going awesome and your Cyber Monday is going awesome. Things are going really, really well. In fact, they're going so well that you're going to blow through your inventory. I've watched this happen, especially for a lot of younger brands, a lot of times. I want to remind you in that moment that when that happens, you must lower your CAC target. What you don't want to do is run out of inventory that is good quality inventory and uh do that uh while there's still chopping time left in November and December.

Okay, if it's December, if you are projecting to run out of inventory on December 3rd, slow your ad spend down. The key here, the key idea here is take more margin per customer. Black Friday is a volume moment for most brands. You want to maximize your volume and you want to maximize your profitable volume, of course. Okay, that's very clearly true. Um, but you can have a secondary benefit which is maximizing your profitability if your volume is going to hit an actual maximum to which you cannot have more.

You know, like if you're going to run out of inventory, then the game changes from how do I get the most volume possible to how do I get the most profit possible with the available volume that I have. Okay. Um, so you want to eat up less margin by spending less on ads in that case. Don't spend through all of your inventory uh if you are going to run out of it. it's just not going to um it's it's not the best way to maximize.

Congratulations in that case, right? You are in the enviable position that your Black Friday went so well that you blew through your inventory. There are cash limitations to how much inventory you can buy. Probably worth thinking about the trade-off between a plan for an aggressive Black Friday versus not. If you are in an earlier stage of your business and you don't know how well Black Friday is going to go, um, you know, you can think about your your inventory buying strategy this way, which is like, look, if I don't buy enough inventory uh to really fully maximize the moment, well, that's okay as long as I maximize the cash received in the moment against the inventory that I do have.

As long as I maximize the profit in that moment, okay, for an earlier stage business, this is a real tradeoff and you should just be aware of it that way. And it's okay. It's okay. Okay, it's okay to take more profit and less volume. Um, all right. Uh, so lower your target if you're hit if you're maxing out your inventory. Um, um, and and accept making a bunch of profit. That's a good thing. Okay. Number six, and this is another mistake I see all the time, and it's where I'm going to land.

Don't force it. There are some brands who will have underwhelming Black Fridays. You will be on Twitter or in Workspace 6 or wherever else and you will see people talking about uh about how great their Black Fridays are going and plenty of people are going to have monster Black Fridays and it is very hard to sit there and watch yours not be as good. On the one hand, I love the um impulse to action when that happens. Go do extra stuff and see if you can help it.

But in my experience, I've actually never seen somebody like fully turn around a Black Friday by just actioning more over that period of time. Um, you know, I've tried I've done stuff where it's like we completely overhaul the offer. We completely and it just didn't move the needle. And that's because just those brands were going to have a decent Black Friday, but not an amazing ones. And that's just all there is to it.

And so um so you know again if you launch your Black Friday sale what I'm saying here like around that you know the first few days of November you may actually have time to go and change your offer and see if you can you know um generate some additional volume at some point or test some of these kinds of things that may actually work. But but what I want to resist is the the sort of uh need to like force it by doing crazy stuff and chipping away at your margin more or something like that. like you know if your brand is basically set up for success total as a brand then Black Friday and Cyber Monday shouldn't make or break your total performance um across the year.

Now obviously that like that's not true for extremely seasonal brands. Extremely seasonal brands have to maximize this moment but for those brands they pretty much will as long as they don't make any mistakes. What I mean is if you are super seasonal um the way to miss the moment like you're going to have a mega spike in Black Fridays every summer Monday no matter what because that's that's the the sort of tutori I'm saying this kind of brand is for the highly seasonal brands you're going to have that moment and I think there's something to be said here that like certain brands just do have monster seasonality where the category and the customer lends to much bigger Black Fridays than others.

In that case, you're going to have a big moment. go do all the things you need to do to maximize it, make it as good as possible, etc. If you're not one of those brands, you don't need to force it to become one. Um, and there are plenty of brands like that, and that's okay. You're going to have other moments throughout the year, your seasonality probably just looks different, and that's okay. So, don't force it. That will end up being a way that you make mistakes.

Um, and a lot of times, I really think it's driven by uh maybe not your healthiest impulses. It's driven by insecurity or comparison. I I feel all those things every year when I'm working with clients and all that, too. So, don't let those be the drivers of actions. Instead, build your plan, be realistic about it, build your forecast, and um and and be ready for um for a good moment, even if it's not a great one, because you should have that if you do the things that I'm saying in this episode.

All right, another one is coming. Make sure you hit that subscribe button uh so that you don't miss it. In a few days, I'll have another episode out specifically about the meta ads account. Some of it, of course, will have overlap because you can't run a great Meta Ads account without thinking about the total finances of your business. But go ahead and subscribe. Send this to somebody who is planning for Black Friday as well who could use the input.

Um, uh, I'll recap it one more time for you. Build for AOV. Offer is really critical. Build it for AOV. Number two, pay super close attention to your margin along the way. Uh, number three, launch your sale early. My suggestion is in those first few days of November, catch that first wave of shopping intent. And particularly if you're going to launch early, don't wait till the second section of November. Um, number four, it's impossible to send too much email or SMS.

Blast people. Now's the time. That's why you have that list. That's why you've been building it all year. Number five, if you run low on product, lower your target. Maximize your margin per product sold. Number six, don't force it. Don't let insecurity and other emotions make you make decisions that are not actually best for your business. All right, that's everything uh for this episode. Thanks. Seriously, thanks so much for watching and for listening to this episode.

I appreciate your time and attention so very much. Uh it it really um I I never lose sight of that. Somebody's giving me a bunch of their time and I I try to treat it well. Um thanks to Intelliggeems and Rich Panel, both great sponsors. You can follow both of them in the show notes for this episode. And of course, you can email me podcastfgrowth.com. Would love any questions you have. Maybe there's even a Black Friday AMA episode to be done.

Um something like that. So we can kind of have one last episode about this. And like I said, you aren't going to want to miss my meta ads specific one which is going to get into the details of media buying. Um, for this moment, uh, you can also sign up to work with AJF Growth, probably not for Black Friday, but, uh, but for next year, afgrowth.com, fill out the intake form there. I'd love to talk to you about the possibility of working with me, uh, and with my team on your business.

Um, and I think that's probably everything. Yeah, that's it. Thanks, [Music]