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We break down ABO vs CBO, budget pacing, offer architectures (sitewide %, tiers, gifts, bundles), landing-page quick wins, and the email/SMS cadence that stacks revenue—plus day-of MER guardrails and intra-day pacing.
#BFCM #Ecommerce #MediaBuying
Key Takeaways
This episode is sponsored by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love here at Scalability School. If you're ready to cut through the noise, stop guessing, and actually see which ads are driving your business, book a demo at northbeam.io/demo, and tell them Scalability sent you. Join the club.
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
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The weekend is always
something to be afraid of.
I personally, many years
ago, I've learned since then,
but definitely had
harder returns on the weekend.
So making sure that
you're aware of where it is
on an hourly basis through the weekend,
I think is really big.
And then knowing that it's gonna be a
bigger push on Monday
because people are ready to drop.
I kind of chat about
Black Friday, Cyber Monday
is that people kind of
think it's this retention play
where you're running
discounts to get people to come back
and you're gonna make a bunch of margin.
I think that's absolutely true.
But I think this is one
of the best times a year
to acquire new customers at a discount.
You get them at better efficiency
because everybody's in shopping mode.
And I don't think
enough people realize that.
And then there's also
this kind of like grape
that these are discount
customers and they might be.
But you should go look for yourself.
It's really easy to
build a cohort of people
who bought during that
stretch on those discount codes
and see how they reacted.
The point you need to remember though,
is you need to factor
into that acquisition cost.
When you do that, you
can't just look at revenue.
That's not fair.
Yeah, I see it as like an AOV lifter,
like in like a progress
bar type of situations.
Spend next morning, get a free gift
and spend even a little
bit more, get free shipping
and then whatever.
I've seen that do okay,
but I have never seen
that as like a Black Friday,
Cyber Monday offer crash.
I will say like the biggest
contention I have with that,
and I think this was a point
that Andrew is making as well,
is that if it needs any amount of volume
to get some signal from Meta
because otherwise Meta just
won't put anything behind it,
that gets really tricky.
Even if you're using a
CBO with minimum spend,
for us we are
launching a lot of new creative
in an existing ad set,
just because we want to
consolidate the learning
into that existing ad set.
(upbeat music)
And now let's take a listen
to the Scalability School Podcast.
All right, welcome to the
Scalability School Podcast,
episode 380, I'm just kidding.
I think it's episode.
Whatever it is.
(laughing) It's a lot of guys.
About the podcast.
It has a number at the beginning.
It has a number, per usual,
got a lot of good feedback.
We actually are getting
a lot of good feedback
on the podcast generally.
Spoke to somebody yesterday, brand owner,
started this brand with his wife,
there's a side hustle,
spending $1,000 a day
now, which is pretty cool.
Came from zero, listened to
all of the episodes twice,
which I was like, dude, appreciate you.
And also why?
(laughing)
But we had a good time chatting
and was really, was
incredibly kind person
and helped him out,
gonna get him some audits,
gonna get him some
people, looking at stuff.
So like, that's why we exist, right?
We're here to help you in a real way.
And people, I've had
some other chats with folks
about like, you know,
helping them with their brand
or hey, I need a creative audit
or what do you think about this or that?
And like, I'm happy to
source those to the guys
or send them to
different places to resource you.
So, you know, reach out, right?
Andrew at foxwaldigital.com.
I'm happy to help source
you into where you need to
because we're here to help
you get good information.
Today's podcast, we are
talking about Black Friday
and Cyber Monday, but
we're starting off the show
because we got such good feedback
from the tens of listeners with beefs.
Once again, who do we hate?
I'm just kidding.
All right, this episode is
brought to you by Northbeam,
the marketing attribution
platform that we love here
at Scalability School.
We know that there's a
lot of attribution solutions
out there, but you know,
Zach and I wanna talk about
what makes Northbeam
a little bit different
and why so many e-com
legends like Zach, Zach,
why do you love Northbeam?
I mean, we've been using Northbeam now
for almost four years.
So I think the initial
thing where it kinda got started
was we had kind of from
Ridge kind of told me,
he's like, "Hey, days
of last click are gone
and we need a new solution to kind of
take a look at this."
And this is before all of
the crazy Facebook updates.
He was already kind of
thinking ahead about this.
So that's how I
initially got introduced to it
and just started using
it obviously, you know,
as a customer and, you know, as a recent,
I think the biggest thing is
that it's not just last click
and it never was just last click
and it spreads the credit of the purchase
across the entire customer journey.
So like, you know, it's gonna give credit
to each piece of the
funnel that had its, you know,
touch point.
And I think that that's
what's allowed us to really decide
and spend ad dollars appropriately
based on what's actually working.
So we use it across all of our brands,
across all of our Homestead clients
that are paid clients of ours
and Northbeam one day
click, Northbeam seven day click
are kind of like the golden North star
on how we're making
decisions on a day-to-day basis.
But I mean, that's the main reason
is I feel like the data is very clear
and it's not just, you know,
it's not just a click basis.
It's proper allocation across
the entire customer journey.
Yeah, I think all of
those things are true.
And you know, there's
things like the Northbeam Apex.
It's awesome.
It's integration with ad
platforms like Meta and AppLovin
and allows you to, you know,
those ad algorithms to
actually drive your ad delivery
based on first party performance data.
So for the things you talked about,
things like Northbeam
Apex, you know, it's big
and Northbeam doesn't inflate revenue.
It's just the real
numbers that actually line up
with Shopify, which is really nice.
So the Northbeam difference, better data,
sharper decisions and
more profitable growth.
And you know,
everybody's using Northbeam, right?
Dollar Shave Club, Hexclad, you guys.
So if you're ready to
cut through the noise
and stop guessing, go
ahead and book a demo
at Northbeam.io forward slash demo
and tell them that
Scalability School sent you
for a little surprise.
So join the club and check out Northbeam.
Once again, who do we hate?
I'm just kidding.
Brad. No, actually.
Leave someone.
Yeah, who don't we hate?
Yeah, actually what we're gonna start off
is with another one is X tweets where,
sorry, a post on X, not a tweet,
about the playbook that
works 99% of the time,
which was a response to the Daniel O'Con,
legend and friend of the pod,
incredible human being actually.
But talking about, Zach,
your playbook that works,
that kind of you go through,
we obviously have an episode on the zero
to eight figure playbook, but you know,
what do you wanna call out here
in terms of what you
went through with Daniel?
I mean, I think Brad
and I can kind of go back
and forth here a little bit.
So Brad's a big cost control person
and I'm a sometimes cost control person.
So I did call that out in this tweet
and kind of just
talking about what's working
for Mediavine Playbooks right now
and what's working like 99% of the time
when we look across brands that are
working at Homestead,
our own internal brands, friends of ours.
So I think like just
kicking things off is,
I wrote, "Keep things consolidated."
That said, the more products you have,
the more campaigns you'll have.
So the way we think about this is,
we prefer to break
out, and Brad, I'm curious
if you agree with this or not,
breakout campaigns basically by funnel.
And by funnel, in
theory, you're breaking it out
also by product,
because usually you'll
have different funnels
for different products.
It doesn't mean
necessarily just by funnel though.
So like if you're gonna be running,
let's say you have one product.
If you're running a bunch
of different landing pages,
like we'll usually keep that
consolidated in one campaign.
We're not breaking down each new funnel
for that one individual product.
But for like Holo, for example,
we have a bunch of different products,
and each one of those
products has its own funnel
that we push towards.
That's like hiking,
running, hunting, whatever.
That's where we start to
break up more campaigns.
We feel like that does a better job
of finding the consistent person.
The messaging is
consistent across the ads
and the landing page for that campaign.
I feel like it just like
hones in on the problems
that we're addressing in the ads
and the solutions that we're kind of like
heading out into the landing pages.
So it just like stays concise.
So keep your account consolidated.
You will have more
campaigns if you have more products.
Yeah, Brad.
We generally follow
the same rule of thumb
and you can kind of
use campaign and ad set
interchangeably here
depending on if CBO versus ABO.
But generally speaking, keep, yeah,
things consolidated.
One product equals one campaign.
When we start to deviate from that,
it's because we've introduced a new offer
alongside that existing product
and the unit economics are different,
which is I think is, it's
primarily a cost control thing.
But even if you're
not using cost controls,
if you're optimizing for
two different price points
and AOBs or even if
they're not that different,
you do have two different margin profiles
if the offer is different
that you need to hold
to different standards,
at least keeping those separate
when the economics are different
helps at least kind of tell meta
what it is that you value in that way.
And then at some
point, it's just like when,
so you kind of mentioned
going from like, you know,
hunting and running and
all the different ones,
the way that we do that
kind of in the short term
is it stays within the existing campaign.
But at some point when those prove out
to have enough volume
to stand on their own,
meaning they
consistently stay out of learning
and push volume, then yeah,
totally makes sense to just split it out.
If for nothing else, like organization
and keeping it all
clear of where is, you know,
what is this for and
where is it going to?
Yep, yep, same page, same thoughts.
The next point that I kind
of get into here is like,
ABO is usually
preferred for creative testing,
but CBO with minimum spends
per ad set can work well too.
Especially if you have a
ton of creative launch.
So we run both.
I mean, honestly, we run both.
If you have the budget to
spend $200 to $300 per ad set
per day behind each new creative test,
which is usually like
somewhere between three and six ads
per ad set for us, I mean,
some other people run more than that,
but that's usually like a concept.
And then there's going
to be different variants
with different hooks or different bodies
within that, but it's the same concepts.
That's kind of how we break out
and how we treat creative testing.
In an ABO setting, we do
the same thing with the CBO,
but then we'll put
minimum spends behind them.
So the nice thing about the
minimum spend set up for CBOs
is at least you're
going to get the dollars
that you want spent through those ads
to make sure that some,
all ads get some spend,
which I know is a different
theory than cost controls.
We like to do that because
then when at least we know,
okay, this ad spent or these set of ads
in this ad set spent $500, $800
over the course of a couple of days,
they're working, they're not working,
but then because they're, it's in a CBO
with the additional budget
beyond the daily spend budget,
it can flex up really nicely.
So it allows ads, which we
now internally call breakout ads
to really grow really quickly.
So like we had one for
one of our brands, not Holo,
but one of our other
brands that we launched
and it was like a creator whitelisting ad
and we dropped it in
the account and it went,
the minimum spend on
the ad, that's whatever,
that ad set was like $300.
And then within a couple of days,
now that individual ad is spending like
five, six grand a day.
And the only reason
it was able to do that
is because it was able to
flex up beyond just the ABO,
just the individual ad set
budget with that minimum spend,
it was able to take the
whole budget for the CBO
and what was left over,
eat up a bunch of that spend.
So I like that set up for us.
And I'm gonna say the next
thing, which is kind of two part
and then I'll let Brad go
cause he's gonna probably wanna talk
about cost controls.
Cost controls can work great.
And I fully believe in them.
If inventory is constrained,
the brand is a smaller brand
where like other things are constrained.
It can even work for
an eight figure brand,
but it will limit the scale.
And the other part
that I mentioned is like,
it can break frequently.
So don't expect it to be
less work than lowest cost.
That's what we found is that there's
still a lot of breakage.
There's still things that can happen.
So it's not like you can
just like set it and forget it.
And it just works.
The last point that I
want to call out here
on like the bidding
strategy set of things,
of this like playbook that we've seen
work most of the time
is that if your goal is
to scale from 10K a day,
which this is now getting
into bigger brand ecosystem,
but 10K a day on meta to
a hundred K a day on meta
in less than six months,
the best way that we've seen to do that
is by using lowest cost,
not using cost controls.
I've not ever seen that happen
from all of the hundreds of ad accounts
that I've seen over the last few years.
Yeah.
So that's the last
thing I want to call out on
kind of bidding strategy.
It's just more flexible, right?
I mean, it's just like
common sense in reference to
if you're looking for that scale,
it's just more flexible and it's more
available in auction.
I think it's always a balance, right?
Of like when you're
scaling that up in bread,
you can talk about that.
Let's start with the ABO
versus CBO with Minn Spens.
I honestly don't have a strong opinion.
Ironically enough, I
just re-listened to-- or not
re-listened to, but I just
listened to Andrew Farris
podcast from a couple weeks ago where
he talked about his thought on
creative, generally speaking.
And I thought it was really interesting.
There was some tactical
stuff and also just thought
provoking.
And I largely agree with a
lot of things that he said.
So I'll check that out
if you haven't heard that.
That said, I have a very
specific instance in mind
where we split out some
creative testing into an ABO.
And we pulled--
we launched some ads recently.
They didn't get any spend.
We pulled them out and
put them into the ABO.
And in the CBO, they didn't spend.
In the ABO, they suck.
When you use ABO, you
should be confident in the fact
that you are going to make bangers
and you launch mostly bangers in that.
And obviously, but
everybody is striving for that.
And so my biggest beef
since we're talking beefs here
is that I think it's
really hard to know what's
going to work before it goes in.
I think you can be confident.
I think you can put in all the work.
But that's like an example recently
where we've done a lot
of forced creative testing
in this specific
instance that I'm thinking of.
And there's been some winners, no doubt.
But we didn't put them in the CBO
to see if they would have spent first.
So I don't know if it would
have gone the other direction
where you launch it in the
CBO and it becomes a breakout.
I will say the biggest
contention I have with that
and I think this was a point
that Andrew is making as well
is that if it needs any amount of volume
to get some signal from
Meta, because otherwise Meta just
won't put anything behind
it, that gets really tricky,
even if you're using a
CBO with minimum spend.
Because for us, we are
launching a lot of new creatives
in an existing ad set just because we
want to consolidate the learning into
that existing ad set.
I don't really have a strong
opinion one way or another.
I generally lean towards
let Meta decide, though.
Yeah, I mean, I think
there's a couple of things to say,
which is we don't want
to have dogmatic thinking.
I think that's where
people get caught up.
It's very black or white.
That's not the case.
So that's just one
general thing to think about,
which is it's always a
mixture, generally speaking,
when we're talking about bidding.
And I also think to call it
the last part of the playbook
that you went through, Zach, it's
the biggest wins in performance.
I always come from one of these three.
One, new ad creative plus
more diversity of content,
mixed pages,
whitelisting versus brand page.
Number two, offer
change, usually the fastest way
to show what change of
performance you said.
And then number three, big swing in CRO,
I think entirely new PDP design.
I think we've talked about
these themes over and over.
And to me, what's
interesting is so many people
are focused on ad buying.
And we were raised in a
way to think about ad buying.
And that's not where we're at now.
It's obviously about so
much bigger of the picture.
And obviously, we can
talk about ABO, CBO,
and there's all these
different ways to do things.
Creative testing is
obviously great as ample
because everybody--
I feel like there's 100
different ways to do it,
we talk about.
But I think your main
things that you're talking about,
Zach, are don't try to add
buy your way out of the problem.
Like try a different offer.
Pitch it differently.
Talk about it differently.
I mean, that's going to be helpful.
A good example.
So Andrew Ferris has a client right now
that Andrew and the
client kind of reached out.
And we're just like,
hey, we'd love some thoughts
on just kind of what's going on here
and just see if you
have any ideas or whatever.
So happily was just
like, sure, take a look.
See what's going on.
So Andrew runs bid caps and
t-row ads and all this cost
control stuff.
And I very easily-- and
this is like kind of sometimes
how these audits can go-- is just like
shit on and be like,
no, you got to move to lowest cost,
and this is the best route, and whatever.
Completely off of that.
I disregarded that
completely and was just like, OK,
let's go look at the
fundamentals of what's
going on in this account.
And all that I'm looking at is ad
creatives and landing pages
and offer.
That's it.
So if you look at the last three,
I think in this list of
biggest wins and performance
always come from ad
creative offer or CRO change.
Everything else is
kind of irrelevant above.
You can find wins in both ways.
I just kind of shared what we've seen
work most of the time.
And for us, it's-- and
we've talked about this part
in the past a lot, but
once a brand gets big enough,
kind of like where Hollow's at
and where other brands are at
right now, we have operating expenses.
We have to generate
enough cash on a monthly basis,
to be paying our overhead.
And if we're running
cost controls completely,
and for some reason
something breaks and spend
falls completely down, it
can really mess with our cash.
And that's one reason why we
also still prefer lowest cost
is just the fear of that happening,
because we have seen that
happen to us in the past,
where we can't get cost
controls to work and even just spend
enough.
That's my last point that I wanted
to bring up on that reason
why we chose to go that route.
We had cost controls
absolutely ripping last Q4,
so I have no gripe with it.
But yeah, looking at this account,
that was Andrew's
account that he's running.
It was basically like,
stop worrying about the media
mind shit and stop worrying
about the technical things
that are happening, like event quality
match scores and stuff
at a certain degree.
Everything looks generally normal.
Go focus on ad creative.
Go focus on landing pages.
Go focus there.
I mean, for me, the
first thing that I do,
when we ask to get on an
account is, first of all,
I just write back the
agency you're working with sucks.
So I just write away shit on them.
And I want to make--
It's part of the template, right?
You copy and paste your templates
at the top of the template.
It's like, they suck.
They're bad.
And then I want them, the client,
to feel like they're immediately back
hits against the wall.
That's my goal there.
No, I think you raised
a lot of good points.
Brad, anything to wrap it in?
No, I mean, I think there's
potential small counterpoints
to that situation, like raise the bids,
run some of those costs alongside.
The main point is true, which
is those bottom three things
is where you should be
spending most of your time.
The media buying stuff
is important to get right,
but there's ways to get it right within
both of those frameworks.
Well, let's talk about Black Friday and
Cyber Monday, right?
There's a ton of different things
that we can talk about here and get into.
But let's talk about the
beginning of getting into it.
As we're walking into
Black Friday and Cyber Monday,
anything that you guys
want to say from the outset
about Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
and how you prepare for it
leading into that time frame?
Two things that come to mind.
One is that it'll be really nice that
Cyber Monday is also
in December again this year.
So the year-over-year comps are less
ridiculous to look at,
because 100% of brands
probably looked at November.
And it was like, why is it so much
smaller year-over-year
this last year?
And December's like, oh, we killed it.
What did it do differently?
Cyber Monday was in December.
And it will be again this year.
So I'm excited about that.
Although it's a slight
shift in how it rolls.
There's one more or
one less day in December
that falls in the BFCM range.
The other thing that I've
heard often from clients
and also just people who
chat about Black Friday, Cyber
Monday is that people think it's this
retention play where
you're running discounts
to get people to come back
and you're going to
make a bunch of margin.
I think that's absolutely true.
But I think this is one
of the best times a year
to acquire new customers at a discount.
You get them at better efficiency
because everybody's in shopping mode.
I don't think enough people realize that.
And then there's also
this kind of like grape
that these are discount customers.
And they might be.
But you should go look for yourself.
It's really easy to
build a cohort of people
who bought during that
stretch on those discount codes
and see how they reacted.
The point you need to remember, though,
is you need to factor
into that acquisition cost.
When you do that, you
can't just look at revenue.
That's not fair.
So those are my mentality.
Dropping some bombs, Brad.
I love it.
These are all things--
These are all things that piss me off
when I get feedback on all of them.
So yes, I think the
biggest one that you brought up
is the lifetime value of
these customers and shit.
It's not.
OK, Homestead has--
I don't even know.
It's been like 150, 200 brands that we've
managed paid acquisition
for over the last five years.
We have looked time and
time and time and time again.
And the LTV is the same.
It's like rarely, rarely.
I don't even think one
brand that we acquired customers
over BFCM weekend, that the
LTV cohorts of those customers
was worse than their
average year-round customer.
So I would completely
disregard that shit.
I would also go as hard
as you can on acquisition
during that period.
And if customers show
back up and buy again, great.
That's awesome.
Use own channels to do that.
Don't spend a bunch of money to do that.
I mean, of course, spend
some, but focus your efforts
on own channels to
absolutely rip through those customers
and bring them back.
Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing--
if I can drop one piece--
don't change your offer that--
don't make your offer that crazy.
We're not changing our offers.
We run an offer, and
we're keeping it consistent.
I'm not changing it.
And you can get away with that.
We're going to do
mid-eight figures this year.
Get away with it.
Go look at all the brands that are
growing extremely fast,
health and wellness brands,
some of these individual brands.
They're not changing anything
fundamentally about the way
that they discount.
It's just a positioning standpoint.
So as long as you're--
maybe you add a free gift,
or maybe you add an extra 5%,
or maybe you add an extra $1 from $50--
Or volume discounting.
51.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, we can
definitely talk about offers.
But I just think everyone gets so
obsessed about the offer.
If you have an offer
that is working right now,
don't feel like you need to come up with
something so dramatic
that's going to
absolutely derail your margin
and just crush your profitability.
Probably think about
just running the same thing
you're running now
and just positioning it
as your Black Friday sale.
That is my one piece
of advice, and that I
feel like a lot of brands
in the homestead ecosystem
and have run that
playbook has always worked out.
The last piece, Byron
Tent, is just absolutely insane
during this period.
So the brands that are saying, oh, we're
in health and wellness
and we're not going to grow,
you're just doing a bad job.
That's my harsh take.
We've seen health and
wellness brands absolutely
rip during Q4 if the offer feels strong
and it feels like it has
high urgency to take advantage
of it if you're
bringing in new customers.
So those are my gripes.
Beefs with the entire
health and wellness industry.
Good thoughts, right?
So let's say that you're
getting things together
and you're scheduling out the
way you are going to do this.
Let's talk about calendars.
So October, November, December.
What does this look
like for successful brands?
When are you
generally starting promotion?
I would say that founder members that
are running ads for their clients,
the wrap up we did last year, it seemed
to be that most people
actually started November,
and that was generally fine.
And then they may have increased the deal
or some sort of
changed the offer slightly
during the Black Friday,
Cyber Monday timeframe.
But it wasn't this, you do
this, you do this, you do this.
And also the deal, the
offer is the same generally
throughout the whole
weekend, with the exception
of sometimes people will
put an exclamation point
on the Cyber Monday
deal or change the offer.
I'm just wondering about when you guys
are helping clients prepare or Zach,
you're going through with the brands,
like what are the
calendar, what are the key dates
you guys are thinking about?
Yeah, I can rip on like very general
things for a second.
And then Zach, I'll be curious to hear
how you are feeling about it.
So looking at, I'll
just go chronologically,
it's a big word, October,
there will be a Prime Day
in some capacity.
Now, I don't even know
if it's called Prime Day,
it's like Prime Big Savings
or whatever they do in October.
July was later this
year, so it might be later
this year for October, we'll
have to see what that does.
But that's probably
the kickoff to proper Q4
for a lot of people, call it mid October
until it's full actually released.
We see gifting for gifting
heavy brands start to pick up
the last week of October.
Now, I'm not gonna say like pick up,
but they just start, you know,
like you start to see
some movement there.
If you've got some gifting messaging,
you might see some
movement starting in October.
So I don't think it's
too early to start that,
like honestly, I don't
think it's too early,
especially if you're using cost controls,
because they just won't spend, you know?
Anyways, November, so
then going into November,
we will recommend to brands
if they feel comfortable starting
November 1st or something, feel free.
Like I'm not gonna
hold your feet to the fire
and say you have to start November 1st,
because maybe that feels a little early.
I think we progressively
see people start earlier,
in earlier, but if you feel comfortable
starting November 1st with anything,
I think that's a good time to do it.
Otherwise, we are strongly recommending,
do not wait until Black Friday,
probably don't only
start the Monday before,
but maybe go the Monday
before that or before that,
which is not the first week of November,
it's the second week
of November, start that.
I have not seen it cause
issues with your ability
to then also continue to rip
into the actual week of Black Friday.
We have very, very few people
who will just start on
Black Friday and then end
on Cyber Monday.
So start mid-November if you can,
if you wanna change
something about it going
into Black Friday, maybe do that.
Let it rip through Cyber Monday,
maybe we can talk
about changing the promos,
and then immediately, if you can,
flip over from Cyber Monday
into some kind of gifting messaging,
but you might not even need
to change your offer that.
All legal things aside about consistently
having the same offer will
sidestep that for a second,
but I think you can roll
with out of Cyber Monday
into gifting basically that Tuesday,
and then run that through December 15th
when shipping starts to cut off,
and then again, through
maybe move over to Amazon
to close it up.
So anyways, that's my general calendar.
I'm staring at my
calendar as I say all this.
Zach, your opinion?
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All right, so my calendar is Labor Day,
into fall sale, into primetime sale,
into anniversary sale, into Black Friday,
into Cyber Monday, into
back to, no, into holiday sale,
sorry, anniversary
Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
holiday sale, New Year's sale.
That is the rest of our
year for Easy Street Brands.
So, I mean, this is
how we think about it.
We run promos, it works.
We've seen brands do this same playbook.
I mean, the one brand I
always like to reference
that did this six
years ago, seven years ago,
I helped work on one of their ad accounts
is Nectar Mattress.
Nectar Mattress was the first, I think,
billion dollar in revenue D2C brands.
Their playbook was
sales all year round, baby,
and it was just rinse,
repeat, make slight adjustments,
tweak things, your
performance gets weird,
shift it around, maybe go
from a buy more, save more,
to a buy X, get Y free,
generally the same promotion,
just slightly
reworked throughout the year.
So, I completely agree with
Brad, just like your thought,
on kind of just like keep rolling.
We are essentially a rinse and repeat
and maybe slight
reworks throughout the year,
but that's how we roll.
So as far as launch
day, I have Monday, 11 10,
flip over to Black Friday,
and then run Black Friday
all the way up until Sunday
before Cyber Monday, and then on 12 four,
flip over to holiday.
So, yeah, I mean, pretty
much the same playbook.
We historically for homesick clients
will launch November 1st,
but because we, Hollow,
have a true anniversary
during that like first week of November,
which is always really helpful,
or end of October, I should say,
we usually just like roll
with our anniversary sale
and then roll that straight
into Black Friday for Hollow.
So let's talk about the,
so we talked a little
bit about the schedule.
Let's talk about offers.
Let's talk about as
people are crafting this,
like what have you guys seen that works?
You know, to me, the
general consensus is like,
it has to be a good deal also, though.
It can't just be like
some run of the mill thing
in terms of like 10% off,
unless you never discount.
Like it needs to be
meaningful and feel meaningful,
and volume discounting
is actually attractive,
and free shipping tends
to be quite attractive.
I mean, you guys can
tell me what you think,
but those were some of
the themes from last year,
the last couple of
years from founder members.
What do you think about
when crafting an offer
the right way for this period?
Want me to go, Brad? Yeah, I'll go.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, the first thing that I will say
is I don't like dropping an offer
just over this period of time.
I think that you should have two weeks,
kind of to Brad's point,
to have an offer that's
strong that you can ramp up
and figure out what
creatives with that offer
are resonating, and then
those ones you can hammer,
along with your Evergreen ads,
which we always talk about every year,
that Evergreen ads usually
crash over the BFCM weekend,
but I think those weeks leading up to it,
like this is why I like
dropping an offer sooner.
So I mean, like I know it's
tied to calendar and offer,
but I definitely would run it,
that same offer that you're gonna run
through that Black
Friday, Cyber Monday weekend,
I would try to run that
two weeks leading up to it
at a minimum.
So you can get
validation that it's working,
because you might launch that offer above
and beyond your
Evergreen offer or no offer,
and it flops hard, and you're like,
"Shit, now at least you
have two weeks to shift,"
versus just saying,
"This offer better work
on Black Friday and Cyber Monday."
That way you at least you
have a little bit of time
to kind of shift if
needed, which we've done.
We've done that at
Homestead before for clients,
we're like, "We'll
launch a BFCM offer early,
and just it's crickets, just bad,
and we should see some signal."
And so then we just rework
it within the first week,
and usually see a lift in
performance right there.
Yeah, I agree with all that.
I would say there's three cohort themes
that I've seen that work
consistently pretty well.
It's gonna be percentage
off, up to X percent off,
and then the bundled savings
are the three biggest ones.
Give with purchase, I
think, I'm sure it works.
I just haven't seen it personally work
in any meaningful way that I can remember
off the top of my head,
but percentage off discount,
probably need to start
at something like 20%.
It might be tricky if you
have some tariff concerns
or things coming up, so
you might wanna probably
start thinking about your
actual MSRP pricing today,
and if it makes sense
for Black Friday coming up,
we just had a conversation with a client
about their pricing
and some tariff stuff,
and how they probably
need to start adjusting now
to be ready for that.
So percentage off, I
think, can work really well.
The up to discount stuff,
it's kind of maybe tacky
for some people when
they have the loss leader
kind of pricing where things are
aggressively discounted,
but we have plenty of
people who will do up to 50%,
60% off, and they have
a good range of stuff
in the 20%, 30% range,
so they're not pissing
a bunch of people off,
and then they have a decent
mix of stuff in that 60%
range, but it's nothing,
it's not your hero's
skews, and obviously that big
percentage off can be pretty compelling,
and then, yeah, the
bundled stuff, which is, I guess,
kind of similar to the up to, in a way,
just slightly different.
When I say the up to, I
really mean you have different
skews marked down at different prices,
versus bundling is buy
more, save more, in a way.
Yeah, and I think the
buy more, save more,
you can always position as up to as well.
We've done that for
hollow, consistently, right?
So if it's buy two, get
20, buy three, get 30,
buy whatever, four,
get 40, you can always
run up to 40% off, and I think that
that's completely fine.
Yeah, I mean, same with us.
We've never seen a
gift of the purchase, Rit.
It can work to increase AOV.
I've never seen it as
an offer crush, though.
It's like standalone, right?
Maybe combined with
something else, it works.
Like with a discount, it might work.
Like it's a sweetener to the deal.
Yeah, I see it as like an AOV lifter,
like in a progress bar type of situation,
spend next morning, get a free gift,
and spend even a little
bit more, get free shipping,
and then whatever.
I've seen that do okay,
but I have never seen that
as like a Black Friday,
Cyber Monday offer crush.
No, I didn't have an either.
It also just feels
very like, you know, not,
like what is it?
Do you know what I mean?
It feels cheap.
It's also like what's
the real value of this,
and it feels cheap, unless
you really know what it is.
Yeah, and the main reason
you're going to that store--
Huge surprise gift.
Totally, the main reason
you're going to that store
is to buy the hero product, anyways,
that you're gonna get a free gift with.
So you don't really give a shit.
Yeah, I would probably stay
away from that if you can.
Same with Brad.
Percentage off, up to
buy more, save more.
Those are the three.
You know, the BOGO is
obviously the other one,
which that's always
gonna work really well,
depending on like your product margin,
and all that good stuff.
But those four, I
should say, are like the top.
And you guys have, so
you're having, you know,
the, all of the ads, even Evergreen,
are going to the redesigned lander,
or like the homepage
that's being modified, right?
Like with talking about the deal.
So that's number one.
Then you also have--
I don't change the landing page.
All that I change is like the top bar,
or if there's like a section--
That's what I mean, that's what I mean,
the top, like a tiny thing.
Yeah, you're not like
totally re-doing anything.
Right, okay, that's what I mean.
Like some sort of call out
that it's a holiday period.
But like other than that
doesn't have to be anything.
When you're launching the offer ads,
which again, I think are
always an uphill battle
against the Evergreen
ads that you have running,
do you typically launch
a corresponding lander
for those as well,
that's like a specialty thing,
or are you just driving it still to the,
is the ad to leave,
just driving it still to
the homepage for them to work?
I prefer to still run
your top landing page.
If your top landing
page is five reasons why,
listicle, or if it's your homepage,
or if it's your collection page,
or whatever it is, your top page,
that you've kind of
identified between Q3 and Q4,
the start of Q4,
that is where you should push the ads to.
I wouldn't build like a
big promo page necessarily.
I know like there's
some brands that will run
like a very promo heavy,
like land on a page and
like scratch off a discount,
and then it pushes you
over to like a shoppable page.
But the majority of traffic
from what we've always seen
is pushed your top landing page,
pushed your top PDP, top clutch,
whatever's working top destination URL
that you're pushing traffic to now is
where you should go.
Have you ever seen
success with like taking your,
taking the format of
like a five reasons why page
and making it like way more giftable?
So like, you know, you
have a bunch of gift shoppers
between December 1st and December 15th.
Have you ever seen any
success that I have it?
That's why I'm asking.
We tried it and it
flopped hard last year.
So we just kept
pushing to our top listicle
and making the ads very gift heavy
and then adding a little
bit of like holiday vibes
to the website, right?
You know, you put a
Santa hat on your logo
or whatever little shit like that.
Well, cause you still need to sell people
on the product, right?
Like it's, they might love the discount,
but like the discount is not the only
reason they're there.
Yeah, that's like the, you know,
like the extra add on for them.
Yeah, you just have to persuade them.
So how do you
coordinate across all channels?
Ads, email, right?
Like for me this year,
I'm recommending everybody just blast
only Texas with SMS.
That's like the number one thing.
That's my number one recommendation.
Same.
But like, how do you coordinate it?
We talked about that a little bit,
but is there, let's talk
about it as a relation to email.
We haven't talked about that as much.
Just same messages
generally that you've seen
in the offers that are working.
And then rip a plain text email as well.
Yeah.
Okay, so I would make a checklist
of all the things you need to update
and then look at it every single day.
And it's probably gonna give
you a little bit of anxiety.
And that's good because
you need to feel anxious over
making sure everything is consistent.
So make a checklist of all
the things you need to update.
Ads, emails, landers, website, whatever,
everything that you need to work through,
just make a checklist.
I'm sure some person on
Twitter will have a checklist
list for us in the coming weeks.
And you could just borrow.
Make a list and just
kind of work through that
to make sure it's updated.
Quick hits on ads,
leave your evergreen as is,
duplicate your
evergreen ad banners on the top
of the top evergreen performers,
and then do the rest of
the promo stuff from there.
I think if you're gonna do promo specific
or gifting specific content,
you gotta really lean into it.
Be creative with a reason
that you're making those ads.
The big discount text stuff works,
but it works for people
that are familiar-ish.
And it's like, you're not
gonna push a ton of acquisition
by doing that.
So I think you just
need to be really creative
when you're doing the ad side.
In the emails I have a
couple of quick points on
that I would do differently-ish from ads,
but Zach, do you have anything on ads
that you'd drop in there additionally?
Not really, no, same thing, keep going.
I can always comment on it.
Are you gonna be in the warehouse
with a Santa suit and
socks in the sack or what?
(laughing) I've been there, I've been there.
This is Zach from Holo Socks.
Yeah, yeah, it does work, it does work.
We should all make a white listing page
for Santa wears holo
and then see if we can--
Free ideas, baby.
Hey, I'll send the invoice.
For emails, something that we like to do
a little bit
differently, if you can swing it,
I like to do a little
bit of an early bird
kind of discounting for
people who have maybe purchased
before, there's
competing thoughts of like,
okay, are you giving
away margin to people
who might buy anyways?
But I think it's cool to
send an email that says,
hey, our Black Friday sale
is gonna go live tomorrow.
When it goes live on the website,
you're gonna see this discount.
I'm gonna email you
again and I'm gonna say,
use this discount code and
you'll get an extra 10% off.
If you will not see this on the website
because you're special, you're unique,
we wanna treat you
because you're a customer,
you're on the list,
whatever, that works really well.
Plain text versus not, I
think is fine either way.
Plain text can really work well for that,
especially if it's like
from the founder message.
So if you wanna offer
an additional discount
to people who are already on the list
and you don't wanna try
to require them through ads
or, and they haven't purchased, right?
So this is not new
customers, but on the list,
I think you can do that.
And then if you wanna try and get people
who haven't purchased
in a while to come back
or existing customers
to maybe buy quickly
before they go spend all
their money on everything else,
I think that that can work really well.
So that's something I
would do differently
from ads to email.
The other thing for email,
for email and SMS, I guess,
is incorporating the new
discount into your flows.
So we always do this,
Homestead obviously runs
a ton of email and SMS.
It's like our biggest
service offering that we offer.
I think it's like 80, 90
brands that we run every year.
We're always like, give us the offer
as soon as you possibly can.
So we can go make these custom sections
that we replace in your flows,
which will always help
with email performance, right?
So when people are
dropping into these flows,
they're not seeing like
an evergreen discount,
they're seeing your
holiday discount in there.
So I would definitely make
sure you're taking a look
at your flows too, so
that those are up to date
with the best offer
that you can showcase.
But yeah, Brad, some more thoughts,
nothing really too different over here.
We should get a special
segment like overlaid on this
from Jacob and just like,
how many emails are we sending
and what is too many?
Because he's probably gonna say more.
I mean, truly though,
like that is one thing
that we can probably talk
about for a second is, yeah.
I mean, we will send between Black Friday
and Cyber Monday for Holo,
like 12 emails in four days.
No, more than that.
That's probably, it's gotta be more.
Yeah, 15, 16 emails.
We'll send four emails a day
and probably two to three texts a day
on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Some people are like, we'll send two.
Like we're afraid to send two.
We'll like send more of them for sure.
Yeah, I think four is
kind of like the sweet spot
for brands that are 10
to 100 million maybe.
I would definitely try to send more
throughout that period of time.
Okay, so you're coming into this
and now it's game time, right?
And there's always a pacing
document that everybody has
that you're trying to
look for and the days
that are really the hottest days.
How do you guys look at this?
What are the things
you recommend looking at
in terms of pacing?
I feel like a lot of the success
of those that do really well
is that you're scaling up, that's one.
And so how do you scale up,
I think is a good question.
I mean, obviously just
increasing spend is one thing,
but like by how much and how
is it going to your forecasts?
And then are you
spooling out new creatives,
net new concepts in this period,
or like what other pieces are you doing
to amplify during that
time when it's really hot?
Yeah, I think pacing is
really difficult last year,
kind of like what I started with
because we had to kind of combine
what November and December did last year
and then figure, or in 2023,
and then figure out how
it was gonna be spread
across both of those months in 2024.
And there was just like
a compressed time period
from the start of Black
Friday to the shipping cutoff.
Like it was just fewer days.
And so I think that
made it really difficult.
Now, thankfully this year,
and I think it changes
again the following year,
thankfully this year will be really
similar to last year.
So I think you can kind of
use last year as a guide.
You should go and look at
every single day of revenue,
new customer revenue and spend by day
from the start of November
through the end of December
and just look at how your
spend and efficiency looked.
And then you can just start to kind of
map it out that way.
And you can kind of
determine for yourself
if you're happy with how it pays or not.
But we just kind of start with
what is the total budget
for November and December.
And then we use kind of daily pacing
from the previous year as a guide
for how to like actually
allocate that across the days.
And then usually scaling up, I mean,
going into Black Friday,
your budgets can easily double the day
your sale goes live.
But I think you should
anticipate budget going up 20, 50,
100% from the Sunday
before into the Monday before.
And then again, there's a
different step function,
the week of Black Friday.
And then again on
Friday through the weekend,
it dips a little bit and
then Monday it pops again.
So that's kind of like the general theme
is I would expect the weekend,
actually last year the
weekend like didn't dip
as much as it normally dipped,
which maybe was kind of
that compressed timeline,
but expect a little bit of a dip.
I don't know if I explained that well,
but that's kind of the overview.
I mean, thematically-
Just double budgets.
I mean, there's just not this every day.
I'm scared about it.
The weekend is always
something to be afraid of.
I personally, many years
ago, I've learned since then,
but like definitely had
harder returns on the weekend.
So making sure that you're
aware of like where it is
on an hourly basis through the weekend,
I think is really big.
And then knowing that it's gonna be a
bigger push on Monday
because people are ready to shop.
Yeah, the other thing to keep in mind is
if you're not using a MTA tool,
like Facebook is not gonna be caught up
with what you're doing for pacing,
you have to use AMER or
something else to do that
because it's gonna look
like garbage and platform
probably most of the day.
But if you're using a North theme
or a triple offer attribution,
you might not have
that issue necessarily.
I wouldn't, it can go either way,
but I generally lean on AMER
and then just bump as things
continue to look efficient.
So looking at Holo from last year,
basically where we're at here
is the day before Black Friday.
So the 28th, we were at about 40K.
And the next day on Black Friday,
yeah, we scaled up to like close to 80.
So about double.
And then we actually had a
really strong Saturday Sunday
where we basically baselined.
Usually we'll pull down Saturday Sunday,
like a decent amount,
but we just had pretty
consistent days there
and then actually
pushed up a little bit more
even on Cyber Monday.
Brad, have you seen that historically
where you'll basically go a lot,
whatever, push up Friday,
kind of see what happens.
Are you usually
pulling down Saturday Sunday?
Yeah, historically,
usually more than this last year.
And I, I don't know if that was because
shopping timeline was kind of compressed
and people were, they
didn't realize that,
okay, I started later than I thought
because it's already almost December,
but yeah, it was much
less pullback last year
into the weekend.
Yeah, but I also think some of it is,
the sophistication of an advertiser,
like if you guys are at a certain level
or the people that
you're advertising for Brad
are at a certain level to spend.
And if you have been properly prospecting
at a high spend over a
period that's leading in,
you're gonna see less of a dip
because typically what's happening is,
for a normal seven to eight figure brand,
I think a lot of
what's, is they're spending,
a lot of what's happening
is that they're spending
more into an awareness phase in October.
And then they're hoping to
convert a lot more of those folks
versus somebody like,
you know, that's spending,
let's say a 500K a
month or whatever, right?
Is a much bigger brand and
the awareness is a lot higher
just all the time.
So you're gonna see less of a dip.
And so I think that's good.
I think that speaks to the
consistency of like being,
you know, being aware
of what's happening.
Yeah, I mean, I think,
I think if you have the right offer,
thinking that you can
spend three times what you were
earlier in the week on Black Friday,
or even four times what you were is
definitely possible.
And we've seen it
happen time and time again.
So yeah, I mean, to Brad's
point, pacing is a huge thing.
So Facebook will not know
how well things are going.
So having some type of like hourly
or even every two hour
pacing check to be like,
where are we at?
Are we past the goal?
Like if I, I mean,
again, this is where like,
I think a lot of brands will say,
this is our revenue number
and here's our, you know,
MER target for the month.
Kind of know where you need that to land
going into that weekend.
Cause like if your MER is low
and your revenue is right in line,
like maybe you don't
have to gas as much in like
returning customer will help lift that
MER up and your month will balance out.
But if your month is already looking good
and you're really ready to gas it,
be prepared to like double
budgets and double them again
two or three times on
that Friday or Saturday.
I mean, this is
something we've talked about
on this podcast before that there,
a lot of currently,
if you have a good
foundational funnel built under you
or, you know, meaning you
have multiple good funnels,
you have ads that have, you know,
the things we talked about, right?
Especially, you know, you
have great performing ads
with good social proof, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
If you have all those
pieces that are together,
spending more is something
that's gonna help improve
during this, I mean,
it's just like doubling it
is gonna help.
Like, you know, not even doubling,
but like increasing spend
generally is a big lever
that I, you know, I think you can help
if you're an agency listeners or like,
if you're a brand, this is like,
you can walk yourself through that,
like we're gonna be okay.
We have a good
foundation, it's been working,
we're gonna double it and
we're gonna see what happens.
And generally, like the
market will hold that if it's good.
Do you guys agree with that statement?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, that's something that I, okay.
That's something that
I personally have like,
I feel like been more conservative on
and I feel like that's a big lesson,
which is just like, if
it's working and it's good
and you have a big
foundation there, then more.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just
going back to look at even
the previous year for Holo
and even in the previous year
when we were much
smaller, we went from, you know,
20 to 60 day over day, right?
So it's, I mean, if
the funnel is working,
you can definitely hit
the gas in those days.
The previous year though,
we did need to pull down
on Saturday and
Sunday because performance
wasn't there as strong.
Again, this is where
like, having a good team,
having a good agency, like
taking the time that weekend
to just like, stay
chill and kind of lock in
is usually worth it because
buyer intent is just so high
during that, you know,
four or five day period.
All right, well, tons of
actionable insights here.
Obviously, more to talk about and more
that we can get into.
So feel free to share your thoughts,
andrew at foxwelldigital.com.
And we likely will be talking
about Black Friday even more.
We'll get into this, but we
hope this has been helpful
to give you a little bit of a playbook
in the way that we think about it.
And we'll look forward to
your reviews and your feedback
and hearing from you.
And we really appreciate
you listening to this podcast.
So have an awesome day.
(upbeat music)
Yeah, we're pretty close.
I mean, I think it
changed your mic, by the way.
Sorry, pause.
Shane, clap.
Yeah, it was really intense.
You were like breathing into it.
It was very like-- It's
actually, it's better.
It's very vampire.
Yeah, it's much better.
Okay, it was maybe your, oh,
I don't know why I did that.
It's weird.
It's good.
Okay.
Shane, we're back.
(upbeat music)
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