Happy Sunday!
I hope you've had a fun Halloween weekend so far and that you haven't eaten too much candy. Do me a favor and double-check to make sure that you're sitting on the comfiest corner of your couch, feet up on the ottoman, a Feastables bar in your hand, and you're ready to dive into some tactical things that always work for me on Black Friday.
Before we get into this week's newsletter, have I ever told you that me and Moiz Ali, the guy behind Native Deodorant, have a podcast called Limited Supply? Francesco really liked the last episode breaking down the numbers behind the Snif collab, which did all of 2021's revenue in 7 days. You can listen to the last episode here.
So when I write this newsletter I think of 3 people I write for:
- A bootstrapped founder who wants to do well, but doesn't have a ton of money to spend.
- A head of growth who's got a $12M+ budget to spend in advertising.
- The CMO of a Fortune 500 company looking to build a stronger eCommerce business.
I think these tactics can be applied by anyone, and for very cheap, if not, free! If you think of some good ones, please reply with them, and I'll call them out in next Sunday's email. Let's help each other all win and have an amazing Black Friday this year!
Tactic 1: The Data-Driven Report
Have you ever seen a viral post on social media of your hometown that says something like "We Ranked the Best XXXXX in San Diego... Where do you stack up?" or it's just full of inside jokes with your local radio hosts, or how light is always out? Basically, something that only relates to a true San Diego reader.
What they're doing is creating content knowing it'll evoke an emotion of pride, because you're one of the few who will understand the content. As a result of human nature, you naturally share it.
So my idea for BFCM is to create content that also gets shared by users in group chats or DMs, where you leverage your own data. For example, with Long Wknd, we might create content like:
- What do people in your zip code order?
- Here's what scent 1 in 5 people around you shampoo with
Daily Harvest might put up an article titled, "Here's which state has the healthiest eating habits!"
Whoever has the top eating habits, those places are going to share it with pride and ego. If it's an app that pulls data based on a zip code — then it works universally, and you're collecting zero/first-party data.
The goal with this is that you push it initially, maybe through social media, email and paid ads, but the goal is for each person to then drive a handful of users to your site — the viral factor.
Basically, create content that people find genuinely interesting, which caters to vanity, vice, or ego.
Tactic 2: The Push Notification Hack on Facebook
In 2017, I tried to think, "What can I do differently that no one else is doing?" and surprisingly no one is really doing it STILL — 5 years later! So I'll lay it out, and I hope to see replies of event links to sign up for.
Everyone is competing for the same real estate on someone's phone on Black Friday: ads in the feed, email inbox, and SMS messages. So how do you stand apart?
How about a notification that comes from Facebook for an event that's about to start?
When you create an event for your Black Friday sale that starts at 8:37am PST, you'll likely catch most people while they're awake, and 8:37 is far enough from 830 and 9am where you won't collide directly with other scheduled communications.
If you create an event, you can post the link to the sale directly in there when people open it. Use email, SMS and even FB Event Ads to drive sign-ups (usually about $1-2/sign up).
It's free to do, and everyone has their Facebook notifications enabled! You can also do this with Instagram with countdowns.
Tactic 3: Drive Up Organic Page Post Engagement
This isn't specific to Black Friday, but works well to build a highly qualified audience of engagers. I used to run this with about $50-75 per day. Here's how you do it:
- Identify a handful of publishers that create content that your consumers would love. At Hint, I used to go to Refinery29, PopSugar Fitness, Well + Good, and a few others.
- Scroll their Facebook page posts to find articles that have already proven to do well for engagement on Facebook. By articles that have done well, you want to find something that has a high count of likes, for that page, AND almost a 1:1 ratio of likes:shares. You want something that gets shared well, otherwise, you're overpaying for the distribution of the content.
- Take 3 articles that have done well, and schedule them as posts with engaging captions for the next day on your own Facebook page.
- Take the post ID of the scheduled post (in the URL), and run a post-engager ad to a prospecting audience you're trying to get in with.
- By the time the posts go live the next day, they'll have a ton of engagement AND you're building a great page engagers audience to retarget.
It's an easy hack to qualify who is a good contender to target with a BFCM offer from your brand.
Tactic 4: The Reservation
Have you ever wondered how subscription platforms work? Apps like Retextion or Smartrr sit on top of Stripe, which holds the payment tokens. Payment tokens give Stripe the right to continue to charge you on a monthly basis until you cancel your subscription.
So my idea here: create a VIP Mystery Box with a limited number of units - proportionate to your audience size. It should have a ton of value, compared to the price you're selling it at — for example, sell for $99 and get $250 worth of goodies.
With the VIP Mystery Box, create a HOOX page where you collect a $1 reservation. This would guarantee that a customer will get one of the 500 or 100 mystery boxes available. They put $1 in with Apple Pay on the landing page, and on the day the box ships (on Black Friday) you charge the remaining balance to the card since you have the payment token.
The goal isn't to be shady here — in fact, the night before you should setup a Postscript text that goes out to all the reservation holders which says:
"Hey {FIRST NAME}, we're going through the warehouse right now and I think we secured you a VIP box! I'll ship it out tomorrow"
It'll also give you a good understanding of what to expect for BFCM.
Tactic 5: The Convenient Gift Guide
What's an easy way to drive value for someone? Help them get their time back and lower their stress. This is why we're going to use data to build a gift guide, that works hard for your brand, and makes your customer's shopping list easy.
Step 1: Figure out what brands your customers like. You can either do this by using the Quantcast Measure pixel on your site and get the exact brand name, or use it as a data point to understand that your customer would like brands similar to the ones listed there.
Step 2: Collect a list of active deals, coupon codes, where to get the best deal for that product (ex: if it's not Bala Bangles's website, maybe it's on another marketplace).
Step 3: Build your own gift guide for your ideal customer. Include photos, a blurb on why it's great, the direct link (hey, you could even do this as an affiliate and make a few thousand dollars), the coupon code, and maybe a review.
Keep your brand in the first or second slot, but still make the rest of the gift guide valuable. Push it with your own audience and get the gift guide viewers to share it on their own. This is the type of content to get a 1:1 ratio of likes:shares when run as an ad.
I did this 2 years ago with JUDY where we had JUDY as the first thing, and then Amazon affiliate links for the remaining items and made about $4-5k per day in affiliate fees.
Tactic 6: Use landing pages instead of your clunky site
Chances are, your site hasn't been updated in forever. What's the easiest way to increase conversion rate, AOV, UPT (units/items per transaction) and make sure you're pushing the right offers? Use landing pages!
With all our Sharma Brands clients, we are building a landing page PER sale — one brand has 9 promotions running in a short span of time, and each one has a corresponding landing page.
Make sure you get a landing page setup with HOOX or do it by yourself — you'll kick yourself for not making the investment to have a 2-3x bigger Black Friday.
If I missed something that you would also add to the list, please let me know and I'll share it next week and give you credit!
On to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Tapcart — An easy way to drive incremental Black Friday sales for free, with a mobile app for your store
Alright, this is the last time I'll tell you about Tapcart, but they gave a solid deal for you. Tapcart sees with their clients that users are 40% more likely to download an app during this time of year, than the rest of the year. You also get the ability to have a better relationship with your customers, push notifications, better analytics, etc. So here's the offer:
- Tapcart will build you an app for your store.
- Tapcart will give you 3 months to use it, for free.
- They'll help you set up all the integrations with Shopify, Okendo, etc so your app looks clean like the Long Wknd app.
- Tapcart will have an app ready for you to use on Black Friday!
I truly think in 5 years, as retention becomes a more competitive landscape, people will wish they had an app installed on people's phones and could send push notifications instead of just emails.
Put your info on this Tapcart landing page and they'll reach out to get you set up.
LP of the Week:
Brunt Work — Another incredible brand that even Harley from Shopify is a fan of!
If you missed Harley's tweet here, he was talking about a really awesome brand called Brunt. They make higher quality workwear for construction workers and focus on comfort. The reviews from customers praise the products so much.
They are a HOOX client and we created an awesome page I wanted to share — and feel free to shop their boots too — click here to see the page.
As a reminder, HOOX is making you landing pages to run on Black Friday. You can see the entire process here and what the lift on your end would be when you work with us, on this page here.
If you have any questions about HOOX, just reply to this email and I can help out!
That's all for this week
Couple of things I need to mention:
- I am speaking at Affiliate World Asia in a few weeks. You can grab a ticket for 60% off using this special link, and we can link up in Bangkok.
- Pipe dot com, the platform that lets you get upcoming subscription revenue TODAY, has one of the coolest CMOs and I convinced her to let me create a report with their insights. If you have a question you wanna know like, "How much does a brand doing $15M a year spend on inventory at a time?" you can ask that question on this Google Form and I'll get you the answer.
- If you liked today's email, you'll love this coming Wednesday's Limited Supply episode where Moiz and I discuss these ideas together.
- If you want to give the gift of happiness, mouth-watering cookies, and Moiz's favorite gift, you can now do corporate gifting with Last Crumb! It's such a smart/low-lift business idea for some extra $$ at the end of the year.
That's all. I hope you had an amazing past week and that you're excited about Halloween tomorrow! Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an amazing upcoming week!