Black Friday Strategy for the Power 30 Days of Q4

moment constructed around that I would that I would contend is the sort of the the table stakes sort of based on. So starting in sequence from that you have early November that's going to be you know the start of the month maybe end of October the first week or two in November.

“This is the first reason that you're giving customers a reason to buy, right?”

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e-commerce playbook podcast I'm your host Richard Gaff and director of digital product strategy here at Common Threat Collective and I mean that literally this time because I am here in the studio with our president Mr. Luke Austin sitting right across for me and obviously this is exciting

“for me because it's the first time I think I've done it I think I did one with Tony maybe a little while ago”

but just being a person it's a good vibe and we're ready to talk about Q4 here with y'all but Luke how you doing man? How do I do it? I'm doing great. Yeah, we're fresh off a little midday hyerox work out where nine weeks, nine weeks out from hyerox and I'm so the group of us participating in that that the stakes the stakes are high got my pro pro mix protein shake here as a after work out recovery course thinking about black Friday, cyber Monday can't for I mean it's all kind of

you're talking about it's all kind of working it's all kind of working right now and I do want to clarify for the audience that I'm not one of the people trading for hyerox coming up in nine weeks or whatever so I'm not going to sort of steal that thunder there but yeah let's go ahead and roll into it so what we're talking about today is what we call the power 30 and the power 30 are the

30 most important days of the calendar for every brand so here's the key stat kind of for this which

is that 55% of Q4 website revenue comes in the power 30 which for this year will be November the 17th through December the 16th so I guess we can characterize that as like a couple weeks before and a couple weeks after black Friday so that represents 32.6% of the Q4 calendar but of course

“recounts accounts for 55% of that revenue so what we want to talk about today I think is obviously”

the why of it but maybe more specifically what the brands that really won this power 30 span did that other brands didn't do and looks going to break that down for us but let's yeah I'll further review look like what talk me a little bit more about this 30 day period and how the best brands take advantage yeah so I think there's two I think there's sort of two ways to think about the this conversation and they sort of sequence and one is like what is the what is the basic

shape of the next two months really that we're headed into November and December what are the core moments that are like the table stakes right like the like scaffolding that branch it built

around and then from there this the second sequence is okay what is within that sort of scaffolding

general structure what are all the ways that brands are taking that to the next level right adding it making making the making the home really their own and improving on it so and it's and it's interesting the the interesting thing about the the seat that we sit in at CTC and our data set of hundreds of brands and billions of dollars in GMV is naturally larger data sets tend to when you look at the averages across larger data sets it tends to sort of like smooth out the anomalies right and you sort

of like get this like cluster and the 80% out in the middle that's like oh like generally brands do these things right but it but that does two things which is like the the 10% outlier on sort of either side are the really interesting cases that you can sort of pull into pull into the middle and and what it also does for us is it highlights just how wide when you when you step back and don't look at the the data set from like an aggregate average standpoint and really at an individual brand basis

what highlights is how wide that has between what how how people are approaching queue for generally off for strategy create a strategy email sequencing like all of the components that there's people doing really really interesting things that we all don't know about and we're doing it sort of the way that we've done it and maybe iterating on past years etc so it's a it's a it's a fascinating place to sit in I think one that we want to continue to think about okay we have this

aggregate data set that's sort of a baseline that's the scaffolding step one but then how do we

to continue to push the envelope and highlight and surface that so that we don't regress to the mean none of us will happen okay well let's talk about those and so what are the key differences then between well let's talk about what the mean is so what is that average approach what's the like let's say temple ties approach that people are sort of repeating over the years and then talk about how like a couple of examples of the interesting things people are doing yeah

“to break that so I think that there's these core moments over the next two months that”

every brand should have some moment constructed around that I would that I would content is the sort of the the the table stakes sort of baseline so starting in sequence from that you have

early November that's gonna be you know the start of the month maybe end of October the first

week or two in November this is the first reason that you're giving customers a reason to buy right a selective offer maybe a product launch but you're giving customers a reason to engage shopping process early on then that'll lead into some VIP or early access version of your block Friday offer which will come before the public launch so depending on sort of the cadence of your block Friday launch timing that could be you know that could be the Monday Tuesday of that

block Friday of that Thanksgiving week or prior then you have block Friday that's the going to be the 27th and then through the weekends I were Monday gifting early December pre-shipping cut off post cut off Q5 year-end which is post post Christmas and to the end of December and then early early

January so each of those each of those moments are sort of the core there should be some messaging

some reason to buy around each of those around each of those and and it's each one of them naturally sort of create this like VIP early access it's a specific subset of customers that you're bringing them bring them something before the public launch and then block Friday several Monday typically you're gonna want to tear up your offers right or block Fridays substantial offer but cyber Monday gets better in some way and so each of these have a unique we're not running the same

you know the same offer through them but these are sort of the baseline moments that we want to

“we want to worry around and then with that I think the there's the core sort of okay the creative”

email media plan like we're gonna overlay that against the marketing calendar but this is where I'd start to separate out some of this some of the sort of baseline expectations around November and December and I think a good illustration of this is actually on the on the media behind side with meta so we've we've been doing a lot of analysis over across our data set for brands last year looking at account structure bidding optimizations and meta looking at decisions that were made every

day every hour within those accounts and what the expected impact was and what it what it highlights like as an illustration of this of this point is that there are so much of the time around these days that we've also looked at like all the slack messages and calls that we had over those days like what what people talk about so much of the interaction and brain space over those days tends to go to okay hey let's do a quick check-in how there's been pacing what's rust

“like on meta what are some tactical adjustments we can make in our media accounts as a result right”

should we raise that raise the budget in this campaign should we lower the budget should we raise the rust goal in this campaign and what we've seen is one making those changes like opening up or lowering your rust goal in a mineraloss campaign usually takes at least three hours for that to take into effect so it's not even actually going to impact your out of count out of the gates and and he's been so much time oriented around like trying to come to a decision-making matrix

around those sorts of decisions that it takes away from the things that are actually going to really move the needle not take sort of hours to come to come to fruition so all that to say I would say the sort of baseline expectation is around these core moments from early November all the way to early January having some reason to buy illustrated for the customers that you have and then and then your your sort of media creative email expectation against those against those moments as

well where this starts to separate is when over the course of those days you can start to take the attention and the focus and the resourcing and the meetings and the slack messages away from okay here's our plan now let's think about all the tactical ways we can optimize the plan to actually how can we change and improve upon the plan in real time during those days. Brands like Wayfair, Kitch and Ridge are already scaling on app love and most of their competitors

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credit when you spend 5k just go to app love and dot com slash ctc to get started. Okay so why if you and real quick just for the record so we have kind of in summary so like the the core decision making moments let's say on the calendar or over the period of time is so there's early november which I get technically is outside of the power 30 but then there's sort of a VIP early access launch so what that would be in the november 17th range and on from there then obviously there's black

Friday there's cyber Monday there's the gifting period the pre-ship and cut off the post cut off and then the q5 sort of year end slash early january kind of like health and wellness push there.

So that's those are the core peaks and if you have those in place great but

clearly there's like a way to distinguish yourself in the pattern so you mentioned the difference like you're sort of phrased it like people focusing on tactically optimizing what they're already doing or against these sort of however new six or seven items as opposed to making those better so what's the difference I guess between pure optimization and then actually like doing something strategically unusual okay so the there are a number of different sets of actions that we

could all take at any given moment to change the outcome of of the brand and to like we could name a list of those and it would take us an hour just to do that but like to name a few of the back you can make adjustments to the media budget within your meta at account right in the tactical campaigns at that you could adjust your email send calendar so add in some sends adjust you know add in a recent whole campaign out you could create an at new marketing moment that wasn't previously

planned for the business and and you sort of go down the line but what the what the starts out I think is like the understanding that the highest impact activity over the course when you're in this moment when you're in the power 30 and in the days of Black Friday several Monday is that you're marketing calendar and you're off for strategy is going to be the highest

“lever impact that you have and yes you should have enough media spend to fuel us you're driving”

folks to the science so they're hurting when they get there jumping up emails that are also doing the same thing back customer base but if you are like it as an illustration we tested something with the brand last year where they based on inventory and a couple other factors wanted to exclude their top selling line from their Black Friday several Monday office and I've done it in your past so we launched that and Black Friday was pacing less than half of the revenue of the year prior

on the same offer and it should have been it should have been flat to up at least that offer was changed on Sunday heading into cyber Monday to include that core style and the revenue the revenue discrepancy was like we're pacing at three times as much even with the hourly revenue pay cents were previously you can't do that by like hey let's increase the budget on the minute right or like even hey let's send twice as many emails today like you're not going to three extra revenue

now those are important ingredients to have but the thing that's going to change the most is

is related to your marketing calendar and your office right so I think that's the first thing to

“sort of acknowledge in this is okay that's still the highest lever that you have to play and they”

connected to that the the attention during this time period I think there's there's this there's this idea and it comes up especially with email sends where it's like people are going to unsubscribe or start to you know click this is spam or get annoyed by our communications or they're seeing way too many of our ads because our frequency is you know two x or whatever on black Friday whatever might be where on those days in particular you cannot be communicating enough because people

are inundated by so many we all have 70,000 emails in our inbox and you decided to send one or two more emails in the mix of all of those things it's not going to be the only thing that's going that's going to change is potentially get you in front of someone who missed all your other three emails because all the other things were happening on all your other thousand ads because they got you know we're being served all these other all these other pieces so the the marketing

calendar finding with the brands last year that that really did interesting things the releases conversation is that they found ways to create novelty and messaging in real time around their marketing calendar and didn't treat that as the stagnant fixed thing right like this is our offer for cyber weekend this is what we're running great that's set now what we're going to go do is go tweak the meta out account yeah it is it's no that that's set that how we're thinking about

what the robust bits are and we're going to give enough budget based on the efficiency expectations

“and we're going to spend the time necessary there but we're going to do a lot more through”

API based rules and connections to our system and that set and what we're going to think about is how do we actually make the adjustments and novelty and the messaging and the marketing calendar in real time or at the course of those days to really alter the trajectory okay so obviously yeah there's a distinction there between and we talked before about like black Friday pacing on for meta buying or whatever is sort of an hourly thing so there is some extent to which adjustments may help there

but overall like the tactical play and I talked a little bit about this with joy last time we shattered was just to make more ads and spend more money right okay so that's fundamentally what it is then obviously we were talking about it getting creative with the offer so we have sort of an overall shape to how we talk about some of the points in the calendar that you mentioned earlier

so there's the VIP early access this is your first time you're the first people to get access

to this new product okay and then there's black Friday which is tends to be a volume play right most people more people are buying so you go for volume with your offer cyber Monday in the past at least we've said it's an AOV play it's like try to get your whales try to get

“people to spend as much money as they can but at less volume on cyber Monday or at least that's what”

you can expect then obviously gifting is about shipping cutoff lessons to get this before Christmas and then so on and so forth so talk a little bit about like beyond just that how do you get creative within this sort of the period with your offer so we're going to take some examples of how people done that yeah so we'll give a couple examples and I'll say like the offer strategy itself there's all sorts of different offers you can run on those days and so that needs to be a lot of

thought needs to be put into put into that piece what what should be in addition is have a bunch of different ideas of how you can sweeten or change or alter the messaging of the offer interesting right so so we're going to run okay it's going to be by two get one it's going to be back Friday's 30% off-site wide and the cyber Monday's going to be by two get one free and that's an AOV play right that's our V that's a volume play that's the shape generally that got the main major moments

yeah okay what are you saying at 8 a.m. on black Friday what are you saying at 10 a.m. black Friday yeah what are you saying at 1 p.m. on black Friday and the default will be like okay we'll say like black Friday's here 30% off-site wide and then three hours later while supplies to last 30% off-site wide like ending soon 30% off-site wide right like the offer stays consistent and generally to messaging is slightly altered and it's like okay we have a few emails

ban and that's best plan but how how can you make it so that people are engaged consistently through those through those time period so a couple examples so we had we had an apparel brand where they did VIP hours and they did this did this on the IP hours on on black Friday where they would go they had their baseline offer and then we go up to 50% on selected styles over these VIP hours and so there were they would have customers come to the site right and like

“I figured with their core offer was I think 30% off it was it was a range based on their”

basically on the different products they had but let's say 30% off the customer is coming for the

core offer right shopping around and then you have a VIP hour over the course of 60 minutes where you'd sit on email sit on SMS there you'd be doing stuff in organic social and you would have 50% off select style so the smaller group of those and so you get that sort of morning Toronto people and then two or three hours later you're doing that and it's creating more interest and those people might become it back right because they bought some stuff and then

oh now it's 50% I'm going to buy some more stuff right and then continue to add styles through these VIP hours that they drove throughout the days. Then on cyber Monday they did free shipping plus to give a plus to gift with purchase different gift purchases or the course of the course of that day based on based on what what availability they had another another brand they did 30% off site wide excluding some of their core hero products right so it's like

let's say you sell leggings and like you know 80% of your sales are black leggings like maybe that's excluded right and you do like a really deep discount on like all the other colorways but then they would do hero product flash sales during during that day and so they'd have email SMS socials and then obviously everyone coming to the ad traffic if they're they're seeing this happen on the site where there's going to be these hero product drops that

happen over the course of the day and so it's just a continuing to engage people and think about different ways to interact with them over the course of over the course of that day and so your product flash sales over the course of that day were certain hero products were also thrown into having an offer in addition to their sort of core 30% off almost site wide sale

of like being as nimble as possible in this way but over the course of server Monday this

“founder just had was a ripping off plain text emails and every hour was doing a different gift”

with purchase based on in live inventory and what instance so we look at okay here's your product sales that are coming in okay we have some of this inventory from the release and back in June the next hour everyone that buys a hundred dollars worth of stuff is going to get this thing let's go and send two three emails an hour about this yeah like people are like oh should I send three or five emails that day right and you're like what like you're running a different it's a

different sale every hour you can you can send an email you can send an SMS you can have it on your social to the brand could be going live like when we think about TikTok live an Instagram live like you could be live all day and have something new to say and people would want to hang out and track along with you because you have these things going on and the media plan has to be dialed the sort of core email SMS plan the creative that all has to be there but as much as you

can set and again we've done a lot of analysis and we're doing a lot of work to set the sort of operating approach for how we're making an interday media buying decisions but we're looking for in terms of robust versus a mere relationship that every hour of the day so I'm not saying like this card this stuff doesn't matter like we're going deep on this stuff to be able to free us software in those days so that that is done really really excellently while so that we can focus on

this higher these higher impact levels because the reality is like for most brands you spend 80%

of the day on Black Friday several Monday talking about these decisions and these tactical executional media buying adjust this in the campaign structure and it takes five hours to take take you know effect in the out account anyway and actually doesn't change the business and you could have spent those that 80% of the time on on the other activities interesting so there's some blend in of like okay so some of this is done live and obviously in the context of having done

preparation across a number of different operational things but then also it sounds like there's clearly some of these are like prepared and advanced of this idea of like here's how we think Black Friday is going to or maybe I should ask do they do this or Black Friday has a certain peak at a certain time in the morning so everyone is a peak at the end of the day is there some like calendar then built out for the day for some of these offers or is a lot of

“it really at hawk or like what kind of as the split there I think there there are very few brands”

that are actually doing doing this at the level described in terms of and so I'm sure there are some brands that have this planned out on a really granular level but like having having a comms plan by hour with unique marketing and all for strategy over the course of Black Friday's every Monday and and and also over power 30 like you could break it out to these like these like eight peaks that we talking about right is is not is not a typical friday or expectation still

so I think so that so that's where I think it like it creates white space and that's where we saw brands last year where is like oh wow this is what consumers are inundated with messaging during that day and so the challenges how can we increase the output of communication around a really

good offer for them but to do that in a novel way always right over the course that we can how

can we do this very differently change the offer change the messaging change the channel like

“what are the ways that we can make this unique to the customer and so I think there's there's a”

lot of opportunity to to be able to do that like yeah here's our here's our hourly homes plan over starting at 6 a.m on Black Friday because yeah those are the biggest biggest hours are the morning so here's our hourly comms plan here's the channels we're gonna go here's some offers we have lined up here's based on our inventory here's some things that we can pull in for gift purchases here's some ways we can we can we can sweeten the deal related to our core baseline

offer that that could take it to the next level yeah no it's interesting okay but and real quick what are some defectors driving like some of the more off the cuff decision so you mentioned the guy are just like ribbon out these plain text emails based on inventory levels so that's the sort of an obvious one but is there any other like signal that you were that the brands were doing this well are reacting to and just kind of building these offers off of I guess yeah so

inventory is gonna be the major constraint for most brands if like what what is available and what makes sense from a margin standpoint and so having some understanding of how much value likely related to an AOV threshold you need a consumer to be able to spend to make sense for whatever additional thing you're throwing it right now and then but but then there's other ways to do it that aren't related to inventory where the discount gets better at higher thresholds

over the course of the day right like that be AOV tiering sort of discounting strategy but that just you just have it changed over the course of the day and have it have it fluctuate and then other and then other things as well like shipping if it's meaningful for the brand including that

the level of creativity as a relates to this this strategy is like the it could just continue in that span so I think the constraints the constraints prior or everything to be like okay what could make sense for us and should it be a lot of gift with purchase strategy or adding this that the attention is like you don't want to confuse it consume or of course at this time period as well right so you go in from like this hour we went to a gift with purchase and the next hour we did by two

get one free and the next hour we did 30% off site wide excluding course styles like you've lost the thread a little bit right yeah but if it's okay what we're going to do is this our course strategy and then we're going to have different gift with purchase in these different hour blocks or or or this is our yeah this is our core offer and then at different AOV tiers throughout the day we're going to be adding in additional styles into that offer but having something that people can fall

along like people want yeah people want a narrative and something to be connected to outside of like

“hey remember that 30% off site wide and of course like if that's the messaging and it's like”

every day it's like reminder 30% off site wide second reminder 30% off site wide there should

be hesitation to send you know five seven emails or of course the day because like you're saying the same thing in the same way yeah no yeah right so at the very least or really I guess what we're saying is like this ought to be variations on a theme as opposed to doing something completely completely novel across the course of the day so there's some sort of there's some sort of through line or restriction on what the offer could be and then you were creatively within

that to build out the offer that would make sense where that would be interesting to people go and one thing I like about this is that it's on so the surface is sort of cuts again something advice that we've given about not complicating your offer but really what this is is like instead of let's say tiering let's doing AOV tiers right this is a great example where it's like you you say hey here's five AOV tiers you'd buy two you know spend a hundred bucks to get

X spent 200 Y it would be like you show them one at a time for example across the course of the day so instead of one complicated offer you're really doing five simple offers that are being shown

“one at a time so it's the only thing that people are ingesting at any given moment across the”

course of the day right so anyway I think that's maybe a good way to sort of frame how you how you as a brand me to think about the restriction and the variations within it but cool anything else do you want to hit on this I think no I would I would just I would just say this is the the bar continues to be raised and I think in past years what we've talked about and what continues to be in the narrative is like holidays happening early and earlier right like that's like Christmas

earlier and Black Friday's earlier which is which is true and gonna be the case but I think the thing that's more true is peoples the amount of really good content and things that things that we have competing for people's attention it's just getting more and yeah right like it's more competitive related to these things and what's happening with TikTok live especially and what's happening with live shopping generally is like that's this like brands are running 24 hour live seven days and we just

selling consistently and finding different ways on a 45 second loop to be like cool we have like a watermelon here and we're gonna like carve out the watermelon okay next 45's we're gonna like do this like these ways to get people engaged and the the bars just continually being raised for this that I don't think this is as much of an indication of like okay what you know it's so

hourly calendar and versus daily calendar is thing now it's like always on unique messaging

content creation is just we're like all of this it's all of this is happening yeah right and it's good I mean maybe sort of perspectives on all of this aside like this the fastest growing sales channel outside of TikTok shop right now is Diane which is China's TikTok shop and it's almost 80 percent the the founder of Uganda the other day who's like almost 80 percent of Diane shopping is done live yeah so if we believe our world's headed in some version of that direction then like that's

you know like that is the that is where this converges and it doesn't stop at you know hourly messaging iteration yeah all right so one step down the path towards being on all the time and that's already kind of kind of where we're at so but anyway I think like in summary this is the sort of

“important step everybody needs to be taking this year if you want to sort of outline the competition”

so again the power 30 we're calling this like the 30 days from November 17 to the 17th basically

November to December and amongst that or across that you have your sort of early VIP gifting thing before the the weekend then you have like Friday you have cyber Monday and then you have sort of the shipping cutoff and across that is about getting creative around those four initiatives and doing it in such a way that you can continue communicating a new with your audience

else you want to say don't we leave it there all right cool well folks appreciate y'all joining us again

“if you want to work with us across this power 30 period and more come for a go to calm hit the”

highest button let us know you're interested in working with us we would love to build out this

type of plan with you but all right until next time folks take care [BLANK_AUDIO]