Why September Is the Most Important Month of Your Q4

Saturday Monday is going to be primarily influenced by your current, your active customer file, the current state. So what your active customer file looks like for your business is going to have a meaningful impact on the outcome that you see over Black Friday, Saturday Monday.

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At Common Threat Collective, and I'm joined coming in live from our studio and co-stimates of California, Ms. Luke Austin. It's president here at Common Threat Collective. Luke, what's going on then? >> We're in it. We've got some family, family things going on, new,

new baby in the family, got this sort of end of September that the end of August, beginning of September, I think has been it starts to become really real for people

that black Friday's ceremony is basically tomorrow.

So you sort of have that, you sort of have that converged as well.

“But never, never do a moment, and that's how we like it.”

>> That's how we like it. All right, well, so let's talk about that. And as here we are, the beginning of September, and really the middle of September, if you think about it, and really if you think about a Q4 is basically here, as you said, black Friday's right around the corner.

And so the time to prepare is now about the exact things that you need to be doing to prepare in Q3 are very specific in order to achieve the Q4 outcome that you're looking for. So, we're going to talk to the three things that you need to sort of consider as you approach black Friday, and I'll set them up for you.

And then you can kind of dive in. So one is, you need to ask yourself what you believe about the impact of your active customer file, and we'll impact that a little bit. Then you need to be thinking about your short-term LTV.

That's the second thing that third is the incremental impact of your media spent.

So talk about those three factors, Luke, and what addressing them in September, how that can impact your Q4 performance.

“>> Yeah, so, to frame it up, I think it's helpful for everyone to ask themselves the question,”

what they believe about this time period we're in right now. Like September of 2026, in Q3, Q4 starting. The next month, right? So, the rest is September, the first half of October. How do you view this time period for your business and the opportunity that it represents?

And what I'll say is, from the seat that we sit in, the approach from brands is wildly different as it relates to how you approach these next four to six weeks. And what you see is the opportunity everywhere from, okay? We're supposed to slide forward, we're supposed to go back to school. This is really the, the, the trough moment things slow down,

conversion rates lower, consumer sentiment and behavior is down, it's going to hold back, sort of be more efficient and, and save for the push coming up. All the way to the brand scene that says, okay, this is our moment, actually, to grow new customers, grow our list, really lean in hard, pull out net new campaigns, new launches, new categories, et cetera,

and drive the man at this point to contribute to Black Friday's ceremony and that it doesn't pull revenue forward, it actually can be incrementally really helpful.

“So, I think it's helpful to just sort of reflect on, okay, what do we believe about this moment currently?”

And as it relates to this moment, what we would contend based on what we see is that how you approach this moment comes down to what you believe about the three things, Richard, that you just walk, that you just walk through. The impact of your current act of customer trials, short term LTV growth of your business, and the incremental impact of your media spend, let's walk through briefly here.

But the, the main point that all these three, these three things point to is that these next four to six weeks are wildly impactful and represent a, a meaningful opportunity for your business to maximize your 2026 outcome as a whole, to maximize this time period of the next four to six weeks, but then also to maximize Black Friday's ceremony and the Q4, sort of, the year period that's coming up as well. And that this, this moment is not a, okay,

full back sort of be more efficient, but this is, this is a really impactful moment for your business and represents a lot of opportunity and we'll contribute to the success that you see or lack thereof in Black Friday, several days. Okay, so let's talk through, let's unpack each one of these.

net active customer file? Unpack that sentence a little bit. Like, what exactly, what's set of thoughts

“are we looking at here? Yeah, so, so the, this first one, so the impact for your current active”

customer file, they're the revenue that you realize in Q4 and over Black Friday's ceremony, is going to be primarily influenced by your current, your active customer file, the current state. So, what your, the active customer file looks like for your business is going to have a meaningful impact on the outcome that you see over Black Friday, ceremony. And we've, we've done into some data and you may have seen some of the things out on the world around this, the

tailors, the tailors shared as well. But if you've grown your active customer file by more than 10 percent this year, so far, there's a 77% chance that you grow and be last year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And the median result is a 40% growth. So, and then if your customer file is flat here today, there's a 50% chance to be, so it's a coin flip. You may grow last year, you may decline

“the meaningful. And the median result is 5% so single digit growth. And if your customer file is”

down 10%, there's only a 30% chance of beating last year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the median is median result is being down 20%. So, maybe even to take step back, your customer file every brand's active customer file has a different definition. But what we do is we look at all the customers within Shopify store, within your online store, and create benchmarks around when the time period is for these folks to purchase. And so what we're able to see is that different

percentage intervals where customers find land into active, at risk, and then churned cohorts based on the prior behavior. And so we can see for individual brands, things like, okay,

if a customer were to repurchase, were to purchase a second time, there's an 80% chance they would have

done that within the first 150 days after making their first purchase. If it's been 150 days, since they made their first purchase, and they haven't purchased again, there's a, there's a now a 20% chance, and it dissipates from there. And that's where we carve out these customer, these customer statements. For most brands, their active customer file ranges in a four, five or six month time period. And so you can really just look at all the, all the folks that you've acquired over the past six

month. Like, this is a, this is a, this customer file is unique for everyone. As a, here, a steak, look over the last six months, the customers that you have acquired, and, and that a purchase business, how that, how that relates to the same time period in the year prior. And that gives you an indication of what your current active customer file is, and if it's growing, if it's flat, or if it's down. And then you can use that to inform, okay, what is, what is the likely result

over Black Friday, several, that we can, that we can realize from from this set of customers. And what, what it will do, what it'll indicate is where, what is the likely to happen based on the current set of circumstances, right? And it's, it's a helpful framing for us to understand, okay, based on where we're currently at, where do we need to head, but it, but it, but it, this ties into

the second point, which is around short term LTV growth, because if you look your active customer

file, you see based on the data, what is likely to happen? Now, you can choose to not believe this, right? You can choose to say, okay, these are, you know, aggregate stats from CTC's database of hundreds of e-commerce brands, and I'm going to be different, and you, you will, to some extent, right, so there, there's, but based on the data set, this is what's likely to happen. And so if you believe that to be true, then what it leads you to, what it should lead us to do is, is try to think

out the ways that we can change that outcome, right? How can we increase the outcome based on where we're currently headed, and the main way to do that, if the, if your current active customer file is a, is a, is a meaningful indicator of Black Friday, several Monday, and the way they all through that directory, improve that directory, is to grow that active customer file as much as possible before we get to BFCM, because yes, we still do have time, not much, but we still do have time,

and that leads into the second point around short-term LTV growth, which is the, the, the following

question from, okay, I want to grow my active customer file more. It's a big indicator of my BFCM success, but is it worth me going to acquire customers in September and early October, because those customers by the coming BFCM, Cax will be more efficient, is this really a good time to push, consumers are holding out, et cetera, and this is where the belief around short-term LTV growth, the second point comes in, which is, we consistently see that the most amount of your

“LTV is realized over the first 30 to 60 days after a customer, do you acquire customer, right?”

And that gets heightened into Black Friday's every Monday, does not go the other way. So what that means

Sarah Monday, then you actually have some additional room when it comes to customer acquisition, that you could likely lean into ahead of Black Friday, Sarah Monday to grow your active customer file, right? Because you can count on short-term LTV growth that's going to be some of the best that it is this year for the customers that you acquire the next four to six weeks, and leaning more heavily as it relates to acquisition to grow the active customer file,

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“Well, so let's let's I think maybe let's roll into the third and then talk through like what the”

playbook is to address each one of these things. So the third piece here in the list is the

incremental or what you believe about the incremental impact of your media spend. So unpack that a

little bit and then let's kind of run back through and end up. Yes, so this this this is to be sort of a two B as well. So like we the active customer file is a big predicament BFCM success. Your short-term LTV growth is going to be some of the best that it is in September and October heading into November and December. Now the question is the media spend. Where's it best deployed? Should I index more heavily right

now on media spend? Or should I hold the word chest for, you know, those core days around block Friday's hour Monday because Ross is so much better, cat is so much more efficient, et cetera. And so the question then becomes, yes, now what do you believe about the incremental impact of your media spend specifically in the block Friday, Sabramunday promotional period? Do you believe it's

“better than it normally is in the rest of the year? Do you believe it's worse? Do you think it's the same?”

And to frame the sub more specifically how we think about incremental impact media spend is around

incrementality factors related to channels, right? So you have a platform reported, row ask for a specific channel and sub tactic and then you have a I row ask the actual measure measured result. The incrementality factors are relationship between those two things, right? So 100% incrementality factor is saying they're perfectly aligned with the platform is reporting for that tactic aligns with the incrementality, 100% for saying 50% and saying the platform

over pointing by two acts, right? That actual I row ask is a 50% share of what the platform. So that another way to frame it up is what do you believe or have you measured related to the incrementality factor of your media spend in these different time periods, right? And an evergreen not heavy promotional time period versus a big sale of the year time. What do you believe about the increment increment done by? Some brands have done this work. It represents, I think,

there's, there's hesitation especially if Black Friday's our money is your biggest moment of the year to run an experiment during this time period because it's going to be some holdout on either geographic or a customer level or user level that's being done to measure the impact the media spend. But we last year did a smaller batch of conversion lift tests for brands around Black Friday Cyber Monday. Geo holdout testing is our preferred sort of approach but it requires larger holdouts and

impacts conversion lift testing requires less of a holdout and less of a potential risk to the business. So we did that way. It's a user-based holdout rather than Geo-based holdout and through meta-s conversion lift tool and you get static results, et cetera, and it gives it's really helpful indication. So we've done this for a handful of brands over recent promotional periods and we've seen wildly disparate results as well related to this, which is like, oh yeah, like your media spend is

a little less incremental during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but it's kind of the same or a little bit more. We have not seen that. We have seen the cases where the incremental impact of media spend is the infertility factors half of what it is during an evergreen time over that sort of core weekend around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and then we've seen it swing the other direction as well. But the point being that there's a really different, there's likely a very different incremental

behavior as it relates to your media spend over key promotional periods relative to normal time

“periods, which is probably when you have done your marketing measurement testing historically, right?”

So this bakes the question going back to the sort of this point three, what do you believe about your incremental impact media spend? Yes, the raw season's going to look best during Black Friday's our amount. It's constantly going to look stronger right now. There's sort of less of this consumer demand the lean ends. But if you're going to see the biggest impact of your LTE short term LTE growth,

in another period, then all the more reason to actually pull dollars into making this into a moment.

And these, this isn't a binary like, you know, there's a set amount of, you don't think about budgets as like you have a set amount of budgets. So it's like you just pull it from here and that one has to

“go down, right? Like if you're creating increment of contribution margin, you should allocate”

incremental media dollars to do so. But it would just make the case that the incremental impact of the media spend is strong leading to the short term LTE growth, which leads to the net active customer file growth, which is going to lead to the Black Friday's our own impact that you're seeing. And all of these sort of data points that we're throwing out around what we're seeing, that some of these, you've measured maybe some of them you haven't. So you're going to have to believe we're

sent to some of this, right, around like, what do I, what do I think is true? Or create a measurement framework for you to get actual results for your brain and specifically in this time period so that you can use that for future decisions. Yeah. So right, I mean, I think that that's kind of one of the next questions is how to move from belief to knowledge on many things. But yeah, or the the incremental impact of Black Friday versus your ever great, let's say, is there, and maybe

you mentioned this, but is there a rough correlation between how like the incremental impact in other marketing moments or other sale or promotional moments, let's say like Father's there or whatever, and Black Friday is just Black Friday is just that writ large or is there some other sort of discrepancy. Yeah. So if I, if I had an incrementality result from, if I had two

incrementality results from Met acquisition, one, third and evergreen non promotional period and one

during my July fourth sale period, then I'm likely going to use the incrementality result or late or a closer result to the July fourth period result. I have, right, now Black Friday's our money mode is just, it's just a different moment altogether just because there's so much demand up there, but it's going to be the closest, you know, form of what I would true and an indication of how my spending works during a commercial. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's, let's kind of then circle back

to each one of these points and talk about, I mean, it sounds like then again, they're kind of all related to each other, but what's the playbook for addressing? Let's say, here it is, it's September, I've been neglecting my Q4 prep just because I've been putting out fires everywhere, a team is kind of scrambling. Here we are, what is the, what is the, the move here to grow that short-term wealthy, the growth active customer file? So step one, measure your net active customer file relative

“to last year and see where you say, or you grow, you have 10% plus growth, are you flat or you down?”

Based on that results, are you happy with what that'll lead to? From a aggregate data set or median outcome of what we talked through, if you are, then maybe your game plans working, maybe note no changes are necessary. If you aren't, but I would contend even if you are, like, you know, in the ballpark, then getting to step two is understanding what your short-term LTV growth is, it is going to be in any year, in a year's LTV impact, the biggest impact

is going to be the first 36, it's just, it's for, for any business. So relative to that, walk through

some scenarios around. Okay, what if we could push X amount more media spend at XCAC and bring in this many new customers? How would that impact our net active customer outcome, right? We're right now, we're facing to 7% growth and our net active customer. If we did a big push over the next six weeks, create some moments, et cetera, lean then, could we get to 10%, could we get to 11%, right? Like, that's, that's the, that's the move to make to where you can

start to increase your probability of making the BFCM as basic. That's going to be the hardest work is specifically crafting the moments and things that are needed to be able to execute against this outcome. And it's going to require a lot of creative, right? How do you manufacture moments for your brand over the next 46 weeks? How do you create the landing pages, the ads that you have the production engine to be able to support that in that time horizon, where

where you index the additional media spend based on the measure result of it? That's, that's the actual hard work of this is once you create the, is creating the game plan to index against,

“but that's what it is going to require. And then third, on the incremental impact of your media”

spend, they're, a decision needs to be made around how you're going to approach the measurement of that, of that media spend over the course of Q4. And what we recommend is a clean action item for, for most businesses is to run to do a marketing measurement exercise, likely conversion of steady or if you're comfortable with it, do you hold out steady around one year upcoming marketing moments in Q4? So you can get real clarity for what your, how your media spend works

for you in moments like this and how it's different from either non-promotable. So yeah, can you give some examples or maybe some just concrete instances of the type of, like, the

potentially put together in some clients from what up? Yeah, so we can, we can go, so what I would,

what I would start with as, what I would take us to starting point is, is there, is there any moment calendar related that you could attach your brand to, right? And there's all sorts of things that that go on in the world that are like, you need, you know, like cellular health, celebratory day, September 7th, sure. Like there's all sorts of things that go on that are like these moments calendar calendar related or trend related, like there's, there's things going on,

“like we, there's a, I'm trying to remember what this specific day was, we had brand, we work with,”

that's like religious, reading materials, and journals, and there was, it's not a calendar specific

day, but it was something that was being planted around college campuses and was like a day of prayer sort of idea. And so there was this, like, this moment that was going on that they attached themselves to, right, and had a partnership with one of the non-profits and like, do the thing around it, right? And so that's where I would start is like, is there any momentum in the world that I can attach my brand to, right, and enter into the conversation? And then

creates a specific offer that's genuine to that moment and to your customers to be able to drive access demand, and then all the things that we are necessary, creative assets, the landing pages,

“the media spend planning, et cetera, to be able to get there. But that's, that's really the”

play of a start start by finding some energy, some momentum that exists out in the world that you can, that you can connect to in a genuine way and ride, take some of the wind of, of that, right, like, sort of ride that moment, as well as invest into it, and then bring, yeah, a specific offer for for the customers in that period and then campaign that aligns that aligns with it. It's going to result in the biggest outcome that you're going to be able to be able to see outside

of just, just sort of grinding on your core effort grain, you know, great, great more ads, push more media spend in the most incremental areas, et cetera. Yeah. So, I'm sure, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, it's about building a marketing moment, figuring out why September makes sense at the time to buy for your brand, and then being creative about that and going from there. So, yeah, anything else that you want to add on this loop, can you sort of

find a, like, if you, again, are in position, any of our, given some, some advice to distill it

down, or like, was the first step. What's the first move for somebody listening to this right now?

In terms of doing this prep? I would consider, like, all the, I've sort of made a case for, like,

“why this moment should, you know, like, you should index or these next four to six weeks.”

I would throw that all the window and just, like, approach these next four to six weeks about, like, how can I make these the biggest for my brand, right? Like, yeah, there's, I think there's this concern many times for, like, okay, well, if we do something now, are we pulling revenue full word? Is it going to make our offer or in VFCM confusing? Like, we're, we're two and a half months away, like, no one remembers, I don't remember what I ate for breakfast two days, right? So, like,

there, that doesn't exist. And so, how do you approach this moment and maximize your free of brand and don't get pulled into the, like, oh, it's, you know, it's September. It's just going to have a slow time period and, like, we're really focused on a Q4 in the moment. Like, all of that, you're going to maximize that moment more by making this moment as big as it can be for your business. So, so do this, right, because it's going to give you both. All right, folks. Well, if you

will are interested in a moving from belief to knowledge on these three points and then be executing against the direct way, obviously, commentarycode.com hit the highest button. We would love to talk to you, particularly if in a, you're a seven or eight figure brand about how we can start crushing this time for you. So, Luke, anything else you want to add? That's it. It's have a great September, the best September. That's right. That's the best September. All right, that's going to do a

for us. We'll see you all next.