Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re well caffeinated, staying hydrated, you have a weighted blanket on your lap to keep you calm, and you’re feeling good going into the Super Bowl of CPG. Last night I was fixing landing page bugs at 2:30 am, so I’m right there with you — we got this!

I’m going to keep today’s Sunday newsletter shorter than normal since I know everyone is focused on BFCM stuff. Today’s content will be a checklist of things to make sure you double-check and turn on, to ensure a smooth-sailing BFCM season. But, before we get into that, I have to quickly ask… did you listen to Limited Supply this week? If not, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Moiz and I talked all about email subject lines, increasing SMS opt-in rates, and more.

Alright, here is the list. Make sure you run through these ASAP, and maybe daily for some of the testing… you never know what can just magically break overnight.

  1. Make sure the ad creative you’re launching has matching creative on the landing page or web page it’s driving to. Just by not having a matching visual from the ad to the site page, you’re going to increase your chances of bounce rate, right away. It’s something we marketers don’t think about much because we wouldn’t mind it, but consumers don’t think like marketers!
  2. Test every single button, variant selector, image preview, coupon code, and Shopify script. To set something up and then assume it’s going to run as-is, with no issues, is like buying a raffle ticket and thinking you’re going to win — it’s delusional. Things break. This is the most stressful time for every single piece of your tech stack, so things will break. Just make sure you’re constantly testing things to make sure they still do what they’re supposed to.
  3. Tag all your customers from now until after the Cyber Monday sale as BFCM2022 customers. Next year when you’re planning your BFCM sales, you’ll want to know how your customers from last year did, to give yourself a better understanding of what promos worked or didn’t, from an LTV and contribution-margin standpoint. Also, at any point, it makes it easy to mass-communicate to your BFCM customers, in case there are any delays or logistical issues they need to be made aware of.
  4. Don’t forget to push every single promotion, every day, to your organic social channels, especially TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s very normal behavior for someone to jump to your social media to look for a sale. I recommend having someone talk through and explain the promotions on Instagram stories as well, not just a graphic with the sale going on. Also, don’t forget to have a LinkTree page or some sort of a link in bio that works toward a customer getting to the site and promo.
  5. Make sure all your product-specific promotions are live with Google Shopping, so when someone searches for the product, they see there’s an active deal or discount attached to it. Also, make sure that if you have product bundles you sync the right ones to your shopping feed — you don’t want a “Subscriber-only bundle” showing up in your shopping feed!
  6. Update your email pop-up to reflect the discount that you’re pushing. If your email pop-up says “Sign up for discounts” during BFCM, it’s not going to convert as high as, “Unlock 30% off”. The quality of your subscriber might be slightly lower, but tag your BFCM emails so you can see that over time. Take advantage of the high traffic and high intent while we’re here, it’s not “off-brand."
  7. If you’re running paid ads, there’s a chance that you’re only running a few ads with a URL that you’ll redirect to different pages, so that you don’t have to go through the learning phase again. If you are, then triple check your page redirects on multiple devices and incognito browser windows. Make sure you’re using a URL redirector that updates quickly.
  8. If you have 2 “products” set up on your store that are essentially the same product, but for the purpose of your backend, they’re 2 separate products… combine the reviews for both. This sounds confusing as I write it, so here’s what I mean — this 6 capsule product is essentially the same thing as this 12 capsule product. Combining the reviews gives a stronger presence of social proof to a potential customer, and also allows them to read and go through more reasons to buy.
  9. Before you send a ton of emails or traffic, make sure you test your email renders with Litmus, and site renders with BrowserStack. You’ll likely easily catch mistakes on different browsers, devices, sizes, etc.
  10. Triple-check that all your pixels are live, firing and collecting data on all your pages, including landing pages that might be hosted by another CMS. You can even use the FB Pixel Helper (this is an official Meta product) extension on Chrome and make sure that when you click a button, it verifies that it’s collecting that data. Use the extension and browse around Love Wellness’s site, and you’ll see what I mean.

What else did I miss? Reply with it, and I’ll make sure to tweet it out this week before BFCM kicks off! Alright, on to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

What do Chamberlain Coffee, Solawave, Jones Road Beauty, Fabletics, Love Wellness, and Hexclad have in common? They are all massive DTC businesses doing anywhere from $20 to $400M in eCommerce revenue this year — this means they’re also quite the experts with paid social, paid search, developing customer journeys, and understanding the right tech stack to continue scaling their business.

In order to understand what works, and what doesn’t work, especially in an environment with lesser data feeding back into the ad platforms, these 6 brands all use Universal Attribution, which is Northbeam’s unique attribution model. The Universal Attribution product gives merchants a comprehensive and accurate measurement of not only each channel's performance but also gives reporting down to the campaign and creative itself.

Now, who’s Northbeam? Northbeam is what I call a triple-threat attribution platform. It measures, calculates, and delivers results based on 3 main factors, which make the data so accurate:

  1. Appending trackable strings to the end of ad URLs — this is similar to when you copy a post from Twitter and Instagram, and it has a set of numbers & letters at the end.
  2. An on-site tracking pixel — this allows Northbeam to quickly understand with every pageview, WHO is arriving, and WHAT they’re doing on the site.
  3. Universal Attribution’s AI — this is the real secret sauce that only Northbeam has, and it’s an engine that constantly gets smarter and more accurate as Northbeam continues to track over $3B in ad spend from its clients.

Don’t be left in the dark when you’re running multiple advertising channels, or you’re looking to launch new channels and want an accurate read on your data, I highly recommend doing a “demo” call with Northbeam.

Northbeam has a strategy team that has offered to jump on a call with anyone who reads my newsletter and to just have a growth marketing brainstorm session. You can chat about paid media (they see $10M+ per month in ad spend), what’s working in your category or vertical, how Universal Attribution would work with your brand, and anything else that relates to eCommerce growth!

Schedule a call with a strategy lead at Northbeam by clicking this link!

LP of the Week:

The biggest issue with building HOOX is that I discover some of the coolest products and slowly keep losing apartment space to new packages and things to try. This week, that is Vietnamese coffee from Nguyen Coffee Supply.

Click Here to see the BFCM Landing Page!

I think my favorite part of this page is the combination of the USPs and the GIF of the coffee filling up in the cup.

Purchase a landing page with HOOX, on this page, if you’re ready, OR if you have questions, email dillon@hoox.co with questions or jump on a call!

That's all for this week

This week was a lighter week for the Sunday email, and I can’t wait to show you some of the new BFCM landing pages we launch for other clients this coming week.

Make sure you get enough sleep, drink a ton of water (add some Waterboy if you need it), go for walks or take breaks, and make sure to balance stress before it eats your head too much. We got this. You got this. You’re going to crush this week.

I’ll see you next Sunday — as always, shoot me a DM on Twitter or reply to this email if I can be helpful 😊