The BFCM Prep Checklist: From Least to Most Impact

where as a rule across the rest of the year, what you've turned Chad Media buying tactics,

basically don't work. The idea is that you want the algorithm to do the work for you,

and that makes perfect sense. However, across Black Friday Cyber Monday, buying behavior is so

“different, and people's behavior is so different. That what you need to be doing is basically”

be at the controls on an hour by hour basis and have some understanding and tracking when things are taking a fix from down and being adjusting budgets manually. This episode of the Ecommerce Playbook is brought to you by Universal Ads. Here's a question. How much of your TV budget actually makes it to the big screen? On most TV platforms, it's not all that, not even close. Platform fees, data fees, optimization fees, it adds up fast. With Universal Ads, you can ditch

the middleman. It's 100% self-serve TV advertising built for brands of all sizes with zero platform fees and zero hidden markups. You get your brand on premium networks like NBC Universal Fox and scripts, right next to brand-save content, your customers are already watching. And right now, new advertisers get $2,500 in matched ad credits when they spend $2,500. That's double the TV

for your first campaign. Get on TV without the fee. Go to www.universalads.com/middleman and use

code UACTC when you sign up. That's www.universalads.com/middleman code UACTC. Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook podcast. I'm your host Richard Gaff and Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Fred. It's been a minutes since I've been on the pod, but I'm joined here today by Joyce Sharma, who heads up our seven figure service offering here at Common Thread Collective. And Joyce jumping on with us today to share, obviously something

very important. We're here. We're in Q4. It's already started. And what we want to go through

“is basically from an order of least to most impact, the things that you need to do right now”

to start prepping for Black Friday. So, Joyce, what's going on, man? Cut. Excited? Great. Yeah, I mean, it's the most wonderful time of the year, of course. So, we're excited to get into it. So, Joyce, why don't you kind of talk us through kind of a little bit of what you shared with me in terms of going from kind of like the least impact things to the biggest thing that you can do to prep this season? Yeah, I wanted this podcast to be just a playbook

for certain figure businesses that's there listening through. So, pretext, everything you're sharing is going to affect your new revenue. It doesn't affect your return, you know, I think Taylor has talked about this a lot, which is half of your Black Friday is built 60 days before Black Friday. So, whenever customers are required to your rear, consider that as your return revenue growth

for Black Friday. And everything you can do from new customers is basically going to talk through.

So, let's start with, I think there's some basic housekeeping, which is make sure your ad account has a billing that is higher than what you're expecting to spend. Some type of people who this is the first Black Friday for will experience this, which is like their limit might not be high enough. We're working on calling it at the rep, getting an increase, pretty simple stuff. Making sure your commerce manager is up to date, it's tracking well, events are firing,

you have above 90% match rate on all the drugs or traffic to progress, essentially. Yeah, pixel is firing correctly, it has no issues, no lockages, no year-long allow list, domains, and stuff like that. Like, I'm like, those three things aren't like basically how stupid you just talked about. Okay. So, I'll tell you that. Let's get into offer. I think you have said this so many times across the bird every year, which is number one,

make sure your offer is about 20%. It's not below 20%. Anything below 20%. People don't care. They just think it's like people are entitled to that. I get a 10% discount I give my email away. So, 20% is not real. The second thing is make sure you simplify it. I have seen a lot of people do this where they're like, I want to ensure my, I have 10% for the first $50 to 20% for 50 to 100. Just simplify it. People don't want to spend time understanding your offer.

It is the highest, it's the most demanding market it has ever been in the entire year. So, give people a super simple offer that looks like it's really good and let people buy it. That's, that's a, that's the simplified, as much as you can. I would recommend trying to update a lot of business should do their LTV analysis on if the customers they're grinding black fire and air value will not because a lot of times they're different LTVs than normal

acquired customers. Without it's true, do your math, how much money you make on that and try to

“do a re-bundles if you want to if the LTV just terrible and just make bundles and make them”

specific to I would say, kifting if that's something you can sew to yourself in is actually going to very helpful if the business doesn't work naturally into into one of those moments, try to go to what's kifting which is like, hey, people don't want to buy my product during this time period. Can I make it into something that people want to buy and that's the cultural norm that people are interested in at that time period, that's, that's, that's rule number one,

is a point that we try to make every year instead of doing these sort of complex tearing systems or making it sort of making the customer do math. You don't want to do that. You want it to just feel like a huge discount and be basic. So I'll be 20% of more site-wide is sort of

the simplest version, but obviously that may not work for everybody's margin, but that's the first piece

of it and then to reiterate again the second piece of it is increasing AOB over this time and in the past we've talked a little bit about black Friday being the moment for volume in terms of quantity of customers and cyber Monday be the moment being the moment for volume in terms of actual like cart size and growing that as well. So I don't know what your perspective on that is joy, but the idea anyway is that there's opportunity for both and particularly some opportunities here

to get a better AOV out of the day than you would evergreen. Yeah, my, my perspective of the AOV is that sometimes people like, I mean, generalized statements are not enough for right vicious, but I say that if your LTV business then what I'm saying is look at your LTV and if your LTV in a year or the margin you're going to cost around this quarter of customers like $10, there's no need to sell subscription or whatever your LTV thing is just sell more stuff,

upfront and make the entire year's money together. There's also this other idea which is if you are low ticket product and you go to like $30 or $50, you're probably going to end up

“making money on it. So that's what I'm saying. I increase your AOV to the point where you actually”

make money on it because you're giving a big discount. So like there's just some parameters that

I'm discussing though that. Yeah, okay. So first is the offer piece simplifying it,

making sure that it's the AOV that you need to. Let's go to the second piece here which is email and SMS. Yep. So timing matters a lot for email and SMS the way I would recommend is if you want to, it depends on you. If you have a lot of stuff to move, do a bigger quality back Friday sale. It could sound on the first of November give people access on email and SMS 40 hours before that and go like, hey, you're a special VIP customer. Pretty black Friday

for you. Start on the 30th or whatever. Start blasting it out. During the period from pre-black Friday to the Brock Friday, I would say minimum. Again, this is the bare minimum you should do. This is not the maximum. You can send out as many as you want. But bare minimum, I have three emails a week being sending out during the pre-black Friday period. Then going to start your black Friday would say basically on the Monday off that week when you have your black Friday, that period sent

“one at least every day and then on black Friday, Cyber Monday, send three emails if you want to.”

And Cyber Monday on Cyber Monday, the next day, say extended, Cyber Monday for two days, turn it off, then turn on the shipping cut off sale. That should run to basically, like the

all for you should always have. There is free exposure to shipping so you can get the Brock

by Christmas. That's it. A lot of people just stop at Cyber Monday. You actually can squeeze a lot of juice until free shipping cut off. Like, that should be a time line. I'll pause it. Okay. Yeah. So to reiterate, then three emails a week leading up to black Friday week. So this is throughout November. And then one email a day for the week, one of three emails per day during the weekend itself. And then immediately into the free shipping cut off. Any other things that we should know about

how to think through email it has to mess. Yes. So on the days of pre-black Friday and Cyber Monday, we will publish these charting, which is basically how you're like, what the average of the hours is when you make the most money, I recommend it if you can go and take the emails that are being sent and you can time it to when they're peaks in the day. Do that for your brand with the

“artistry that if you want to find your peaks and send on those peaks. That is the biggest leverage point.”

And then I didn't talk about SMS, George Rars, send as many. Like, this is there. The whole idlogy about email SMS, creative, everything about black Friday should be throughout the year. People who are optimizers, they win, right? The most bang for your buck. If that's the kind of person you are, you win. Like, that's the way to win the year. This is the only time here. These are the four weeks where maximize. Because the sweet spot is so out into into the volume game that

nobody actually gets there. So the person actually does the most of tries to do the most, actually. This episode of the eCommerce playbook is brought to you by universal ads. Here's a question. How much of your TV budget actually makes it to the big screen? On most TV platforms, it's not all of it, not even close. Platform fees, data fees, optimization fees, it adds up fast. With universal ads, you can ditch the middleman. It's 100% self-serve TV advertising

built for brands of all sizes with zero platform fees and zero hidden markups. You get your brand on premium networks like NBC universal fox and scripts, right next to brand safe content, your customers are already watching. And right now, new advertisers get $2,500 in matched ad credits when they spend $2,500. That's double the TV for your first campaign. Get on TV

That's www.universalad.com/middleman code UACTC. That's a good general principle that goes into and we'll talk about this a little bit later, but specifically like you've talked in the past about media buying over the course of Black Friday, September one day, where as a rule across the rest of

the year, what you've turned Chad media buying tactics, basically don't work. The idea is that you want

the algorithm to do the work for you and that makes perfect sense. However, a cross black Friday cyber Monday, buying behavior is so different and people's behavior is so different. That we need to be doing is basically be at the controls on an hour by hour basis and have some understanding, be tracking when things are taking what things are coming down and be adjusting butchers manually. And it sounds like essentially what you're saying is that it's also the same for email.

It has some sense of what the day is going to look like and then create a volume email plan

“to take advantage of those specific peaks. Yeah, I think Black Friday is famously a day”

when people act insane about buying and so you can actually behave that way and people will respond to it. I think that's kind of the lesson here. That is sure. I think it's even for production, like this when I'm trying to get to because most of the work you're going to do is going to

start before Black Friday, so I have backlogs always. Media buying is something we can go into,

but I just don't recommend that to listeners because they might send the burning body so don't follow the situation. All right, yeah. All right, so don't do as we say, not as we do, so don't don't follow just yet, but but the point stands that it's like this is an unusual time and you have to sort of behave completely out. Okay, let's talk about the landing page and turn the onsite experience during this time, so talk a little bit about that. It is always the

home page. A lot of times people are like, oh, should I have a landing page specific for Black Friday?

“No, everyone is going to source your name. Every demand is insane through the roof,”

so start on the home page. We run both of the ads to the home page for Black Friday. That's the highest performing bed all the time. If I optimist everything there, then you can look into the future, like, okay, and I do a Black Friday collection page and all this, but like those are things of the future. They don't decision need to be done instantly. For the home page, make sure you have a

timer on top. That helps a lot, all these urgency, scarcity, best things ever. Then you basically

talk about the blue Black Friday. Have a sticky bar at the top, which talks about, like, blue Black Friday. There are a lot of things people do, which is to make sure there's some product that is discounted a lot, worship the rest, so you can say up to 40%, but have something in the house and buy the talk about that. Have a hero image that talks about Black Friday. That's an accessory. Have your best selling perks, merchandise on the home page right under it, have at

least three different blocks where people can buy to the perks, so like best sellers, then highest daily and basically another highest margin, like have those three different categories of perks throughout the page. Make sure prices are still asked and in a different color, so they stand out and people understand how big the discount is. Don't do illegal stuff where you basically keep the same price and increase the price and you slash it. Or if you want to do that, that's here,

whatever you want to do. And then have Black Friday's specific bundles. They're like, we can get into this idea, which is, just put this in people's mind, which is, how you treat your whales is not how you treat average people. Have Black Friday bundles and then all have something for your whales, which basically means I don't think people understand this. Founders on an

“assigned size and I've said this, I think so many times, I say this every year, which is you should”

have something to go for your whales. And if you sell a $50 product, I've sold bundles worth $1,000 in that category because we made that for our whales. So like what do you think of the whales would buy if very different? Have some time for it. Yeah, we've talked about like doing, you know, for instance, like before Black Friday News heard an early VIP sale for the whale specifically to kind of give them a first look at these sort of massive orders. And obviously,

we talk about everybody else's buying behavior being different. That's not that holds for your VIP customers as well, where they're going to, they already buy a lot they're going to buy even more. And it's about setting things up to taking advantage of that. So it's any else, people, people just don't understand how rich people are. Like I think that's true. That's part of this, which is like if you're, if you're selling coffee for, or like you're selling whatever for $50,

I would bet there are people in your customer base that would buy a $1,000 product. They would buy an ad on subscription in front if you give them a big discount because they just don't can't. Yeah, they have, they have the disposable income sitting around. They're just waiting for a chance to use it on basically. Exactly. Yeah, so it's worth thinking about anything else for landing

make sure you turn off your like first time member, first time customer discount pop up or whatever,

like make sure that those, like evergreen things are gone, we're the amount completely reset everything to be Black Friday's specific, but anything else like that, anything else to avoid.

“I think that's an email policy, don't help. I think that's sort of that. There's nothing.”

Cool. All right, then finally, and, and again, given that we're going from least to most, this is the biggest impact piece, of course, which is creatives. So we've recently done a little bit of research on basically crunching the numbers on our sort of meta-spend and meta ads over the last several years. And a couple of some interesting insights, so we'll drop a link for that, I believe, in the show notes. But I just want to talk through some of this data here,

the headline on this particular like report that we've put together is that, quote, nobody makes enough ads. So talk through a little bit of some of the insights around that and other things that come out of this report. Yeah, so this is, this is the conversation I've sat through so many times in the last two. This came out of, I was being asked this one same question so many times. Before the entering October, every client was, should I just sacrifice October ads to make

November ads and then how many ads should I make, which is like, I get everyone into this thinking about it or in one supply and for it. And the answer to the came out is it was actually so good.

So the average spend per ad in the first 14 days for Black Friday ads is like 2-3. That's what

they're supposed to be. And October ads are less than half of what they spend in the first 14 days. But October ads spend in the quarter from October till December 50% more money than Black Friday ads. So anyone who says, oh, should I sacrifice my October ads so I can make more ads for November? It's actually bad, but because if we look at a return in a time horizon of three months, you actually make more money or return our money on October ads than any November ads. So please

don't make them stay of just stopping production of October ads just because you wanted to make more November ads. Like that is not the point. The point is nobody makes enough November ads, but that

“doesn't mean that you should stop your October production for that. That's just an important point”

to remember. Because when you go into Black Friday, you can look through your ad account. Black Friday specific ads will only drive 30% of the total ad spend of the account. Meaning all the evergreen ads actually carried rest of the 70% of the spend. That means whatever you've produced is actually like it has a lot of value. So don't disregard that. What was the first point? The second point was exactly in the opposite direction, which is

we took five different brands across all the different spin ranges. So we took people who spent

about 100k, 300k, 500k, million, two million. We took every type of brand and across the range.

We basically ran how many ads they make and basically how they're degradation changes. Like, so who makes how many ads? What the spend per ad and how it changes when you spend more money. And the interesting thing we found is that when we talk and then this is my experience. Like, I talked to people and I'm like, are you making Black Friday ads? But like, yeah, we are making a lot of ads. And then the thing is like, it's so relative because people don't

understand how many ads they're competition makes. So when they say, oh, I make a lot of ads, really how many? Oh, I'm going to make 200 Black Friday ads. And this dataset basically has a case set of a brand that made 1500 ads just for Black Friday in the last two years and their spending increase. And their spending increases, five grand a day goes to 55 grand a day because they launch 1500 ads all in on a single day. So it is used to change what people's perspective is on wall

im and scale. That is what I'm trying to point to go. Just like, this is true, right? We all know that a lot of brands at least half of the categories that exist in DDC make majority of their

“money in Black Friday. Then why not double down on it? Like, why not make significantly more ads?”

Like, people sometimes are seeing, oh, yeah, we would just make three ads last year. They spent so much money. Like, interesting. So why didn't you make more? Oh, you know what? And like this whole research is just for that. It's like, this research basically has, we distribute this across our clients. It basically said, how many ads you have made? And where you come in relation to everyone else, that spends the same amount. That was the important point. Which like, if you spend $55,000 a day

during pre-Black Friday, then compared to all the other brands that spent 1500 $1,000, like, there are you. And the funny thing was that brand wasn't the top, I think, 5% top, not even top, but it's just, like, it should just put in perspective. And like, this is true for a lot of businesses. Like, we have published this research, and you can go and even check it out. But the point is, your your value, like, there's a degradation, right? We make this margin return to the model.

That's all of what CDC started with. That's where our model started. Which like, how much money should I spend to get the best return on that money? Which like, I spend 5k, I get a 2x

That's all points. For Black Friday ads, we build a similar model. And what we realized very quickly

“is that the breaking point where you'd no longer make more incremental dollars for making more ads”

is so out in the future that it's so out, if you're making 100 ads, it doesn't come anywhere to 1500 ads that the answer for most of the people is just make more ads. Like, don't you don't need to worry about finding your sweet spot. You just need to go and find how much you can spend and how many ads you can make. And for example, we can put this as a screenshot of what

would basically, for this particular brand that we publish, if they make 1,000 ads this year,

they will spend $77,000 in totality, I think, during those four days. And then, oh, actually, I think it's it's for a day. So there will spend $77,000 per day. If I now change that to, they may, they spend 15, they make 1500 ads, they will now spend $93,000 a day. And a lot of people like, oh, that's, that's five, it's 50% more ads for a very small increase in spend, which is like,

“I think with 20 k additional spend a day. But you, the way you should approach this is like,”

yes, that is true. But if you have limited resources, where else can you put those resources, where the degradation is so small, where you can make 500 ads and spend 20 grand a day additional. Like, there's, there's no point in time that exists for you in the entire year where you'll be able to do that. So that is the important thing we're trying to drive home. And the interesting thing about Black Friday ads is that they coincide in 60 days with new year's sale and Christmas sale.

So what happens is a lot of effort that you acquire here, you actually get a long-tailed value from that sale. So you should take that into account. It's like, that 20 k increase actually has a long-tailed value to it, adding some to their value. And that is an important point of everything. So it's, I mean, really like the distilled down is just make more ads. And I think like there's also maybe value to thinking about like, okay, yes, there is something to think about

relatives here on industry. But at the very least, a starting point would be just to try to make more ads than you made last year. I made part of what I'm looking at here is this is a chart. Made of a double. Yeah, at least. So you have this chart that's anonymized. So you have brand C and brand B, let's say, or let's say, brand C, brand D here on this chart. We can throw up a screenshot of it. But we see brand C increased in 2024. There's been a 118k in November in 2025. It's been 528k.

And in 2024, they made 84 ads. 2025. They made 359 ads, right, which represents more than a 3x. Right. And also, and Black Friday, they made 12 Black Friday ads in 2024 and 22 Black Friday. That's 25. So the actual, like, absolute volume of ads is not that much. But the amount of ads, particularly that they made across the holiday season, increased significantly. Because then we see they contrasted that we had a brand. This is a bill. This is a brand B. They spent 209k on Meta

in 24 319k in 25. By making 1500 ads, or almost 1600 ads in 24 and then 2000 ads in 2025. So that actually represents, there is a smaller increase in ads, even though the absolute value

or number of ads was also enormous across that. But they saw an increase that was basically like

proportionate to how much, how many more ads they made that year than they made last year. So it doesn't have also about 2000, but it could be 350 if that 350 is 3x. The amount of ads

“made last year. Sorry. Good. I think it's also a degradation. Right. It was like if you look at brand D,”

they increased from 527 to 821. It was like, I think about about 50% increase. But they have to increase their ads. If you look at Black Friday ads, they went from 183 ads to 972 ads. So you don't need to make 50% more ads for 50% more spend. I understand that. And then people are like, oh, that means I'm already at my sweet spot. Again, the point here for the first time in the year is not to be at the sweet spot. It's to take all the dollars that are available to you. Right.

So we're like regardless of the, yeah, whether or not you're going to see a 20% increase in a spend just because you did a 20% increase in ads, who knows. But what you will see is an increase in spending an increase in revenue. And that's going to result in this long-till. I think that's going to be interesting. Yeah, the answer to be like the money that you make on that income you wrote me. If that's more than the cost of the ad, keep making, keep keeping making more.

Yeah, quite totally. All right. Yeah. Maximize over optimized. Okay. Cool. Anything else you want to pull out from this report? Yeah. At the end, there's a checklist that people can follow.

I would say go in that sequence of making ads, started frames. They always are the highest

vendors, easier to make work. I've got both catalogs for Black Friday with your sale

truck-based ads. I would say you can take existing product imagery, and you can put Black Friday

off on top and all that stuff. You could put that, like you could basically put really good headlines

“and stuff like that. Then make a video. And the way you should do videos take all the existing”

content that you have. That is reform well. But Black Friday offers on top, remix them in whatever shape or form you want to basically show the Black Friday offers here. And then if you are still

left through with the ability to make more content, you should make more Black Friday team content.

That is like giving, giving creators the production, telling them, hey, make, talk what our Black Friday offers, that's like that. And that's it. That should be the sequence. That's right.

“Yeah. So, I mean, it's worth reiterating that the last, the least important, so to speak,”

on that kind of hierarchy there, is making Black Friday ads, right? Making new sort of Black Friday

team holiday ads. The most important is taking your Evergreen, your Daba, I mean, and then putting

a frame on it with the offer, which we mentioned before, and then taking your Evergreen ads and then adding copy or adding the offer to it, because Evergreen is what we're expressed, and additionally, you're kind of boosting that with this specific offer. All right, cool. The last thing that you've

“gotten your notes is stay safe. So, do I have the people who just stay safe this Black Friday?”

The amount of depression I've seen in Black Friday, that comes from people, overspending, or not spending enough is to, they should have to be the highest. Yeah, yeah. You got the white, stay safe. All right. Stay safe folks, don't depressed. Spend more, make more ads, maximize on Black Friday. All right, folks. Well, I think that's going to do it for us, but we're doing an in-person Black Friday boot camp at CTC's office on the 15th, which will be in a couple days

by the time you're tearing this. We may have seats left. I'm not sure if we will. But if you're interested, we'll have a link in the show notes as well that will allow you to request and invite to the boot camp. And if we got space left, we'll fit you. We've got a bunch of brands coming in, a lot of them local California, seven and eight figure brands. What we're going to be doing is sitting and building our Black Friday plan and making sure that all of these checkboxes that we

just discussed today are checked and that your holiday plan is set to go so that you, in fact, do not become depressed over the course of this month. So, all right, that's going to do it for us, folks. Enjoy, thanks for joining us. I have everybody else out there listening.