Happy Sunday!

As you read this, I hope you’re reclining comfortably with a tasty beverage in hand to sip. Today’s email is going to be more of an answer to a question emailed me this past week:

“Hey Nik! You said to email you with questions so here’s mine... we haven’t really started preparing for BFCM yet, is it too late? What do you think we can focus on to make the biggest impact on sales?”

This is a common question I always get around BFCM, is — what’s the last minute playbook and checklist to maximize BFCM revenue? That’s going to be today’s email. If you have BFCM figured out, then you can double-check and see if there’s anything you’re missing. If you don’t have it figured out yet, this checklist will get you set by the end of this week.

Two quick things before we get started:

Did you snag your ticket for the Q4 Summit yet? If you’re a brand, you’re in New York City this Thursday (September 26th) and you want to come, reply to this email and I’ll get you setup with a ticket. We have an amazing lineup of speakers (Shopify President, HexClad CEO, PetMeds CEO, Skinfix CEO, Jolie CEO, etc) and such a great group of curated attendees too. I hope to see you there!

Are you a brand looking to hire someone for growth marketing and or someone for retention marketing? I always have a few really sharp people in my pocket who I know are looking for new roles. If you’re hiring, fill out these forms and I’ll connect you with the candidates!

I’m hiring a growth marketer!

I’m hiring a brand/retention marketer!

Vendor of the Week

Roku — The TV app with 83M streaming households now has its own self-service ads manager.

Roku ads manager just launched to democratize connected TV advertising, making it accessible to US brands for as little as $500! 

This is a HUGE deal!

For those that don’t know,  47% of all U.S. TV streaming time happens on Roku and they’re now allowing brands (in the US only for now) to access the top ad-supported streaming channels to serve ads to their audience with ease. 

You just need to: 

  1. Create your account.
  2. Choose your objective and target audience.
  3. Upload your creative for approval.
  4. Launch your campaign and measure the results.

And get this… Shopify merchants can now launch self-service shoppable ads that allow consumers to check out on-screen using their Roku remote — on-screen DPAs!

This is going to be incredibly powerful for DTC brands. 

If you are a brand that runs TV ads or are considering it, I highly recommend that you check out Roku’s new self-service ads manager here.

Incrementality 101

This past week I had Olivia Kory on Limited Supply. I’ve been using incrementality to understand a channel’s true performance since 2017 at Hint Water, but it’s complex and tough to explain. So I decided to bring an expert on, who could explain it to a 5th grader. Olivia has been setting up incrementality experiments for almost a decade now at companies like Quibi, Sonos, Netflix and she broke it down perfectly. She now leads strategy at Haus, our preferred incrementality tool at Sharma Brands.

On another episode with Cody Plofker, we talked about how they ran a YouTube test to see if YouTube would drive incremental revenue, or if it was just a waste of upper funnel media dollars. He learned that the click-based reporting data was underrepresenting the channel’s true impact. The test showed that YouTube ads at “business as usual” spend levels drove 1.82x more orders than they were tracking via click attribution. Even better... they learned that doubling their spend on YouTube resulted in 2.26x more new customer orders, giving evidence that they could confidently increase spend on YT efficiently.

The experiments you can run with Haus are amazing and there is no end to what types of experiments you can run. If you’re a data nerd, you’d love logging in and playing around with the platform. After the podcast, Olivia offered a free incrementality audit to anyone on my list — it’s free, sign up here.

The Last Minute BFCM Checklist

This is going to read like an outline, because I think that’s the easiest way to think through this and turn it into something actionable for you. If you have any specific questions, feel free to reply here, everything comes to my Gmail inbox.

  • You need to decide what promotions you plan to run for the holidays. Think about a Black Friday and a Cyber Monday sale option. If you can pull it off, you can add another promotion for Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday. 
  • Bundle sale - Build a bundle including best sellers and products that you need to get rid of or drive sampling of. I would recommend having a discount higher than anything you’ve run during the year. Most brands will be around 25% to 60% off for BFCM.
  • Multiple Bundles — Very similar to the above, but you have a few bundles that you merchandise specifically. This is great when you have a hefty number of new customers to bring in, as well as returning customers who might have different shopping preferences.
  • Tiered Promo — Something like, “Spend $50, save 10%; spend $100, save 20%; spend $250, save 30%”
  • You can see an example of the backend setup on this YouTube video.
  • Gift with Purchase — Once someone spends a certain threshold, or even without a threshold, they receive an additional gift in their order.
  • Buy X, Get Y free — Another way to wrap a gift with purchase promotion, or an easy way to sell complimentary products (i.e. a suitcase + a free organizer inside)
  • Site-wide % Off Sale — Automatically applied evergreen discount for a set %. You can also do these as category specific %’s — i.e. “20% off shampoos, 30% off hair tools, 40% off shower caps”
  • Homepage — Your homepage hero banner should reflect the sale messaging
  • Collections page — On the collections page, update banners to reiterate the sale. 
  • Announcement bar — Your site wide announcement bar should reiterate the sale.
  • Make sure it doesn’t get too thick on mobile.
  • Email Capture Design — Mentioning your promotion in the email pop-up yields a higher opt-in rate.
  • Make sure all promos are active — double/triple check everything is live when it should be, and is spelled correctly.
  • When applicable, like with a site-wide sale or tiered promo sale, apply discounts automatically for the customer vs requiring a promo code.
  • You can do this with Shopify scripts or automatic discounts.
  • Don’t forget to account for all time zones.
  • If you’re in PST, start your promotions 3 hours before it starts, to account for EST. For example, if your sale starts on 9/27, you should enable the sale at 9:00pm PST on 9/26 (midnight EST). 
  • If you’re in EST, end all your promotions 3 hours into the next day. For example, if your sale ends on 9/27 at 11:59pm EST, you should keep the sale enabled until 2:59am on 9/28 (11:59pm PST).
  • On your website and with any apps in your tech stack, don’t push updates.
  • If you absolutely need to push an update, test it thoroughly in a staging environment and then go live with those changes.
  • Make sure your pixels are all properly firing.
  • Don’t forget to make sure your Heatmap is properly capturing user data for your to analyze later.
  • Post Purchase Survey
  • Make sure you have one active and updated with any creators/influencers/affiliates you want to try to understand performance from.
  • Make some creative exclusively about the sale — For example, loud, bold, chunky text highlighting the % off with your product image.
  • Make some creative merging your best performing prospecting ads that also include sale messaging.
  • Try including the promo code in your headline on Meta and Google (this could be a cool test to run an incrementality test with)
  • In the chance that an ad is stuck pending approval or gets disapproved, you can make the necessary changes with time to spare.
  •  As a best practice, you should always have promo codes auto-apply when linking to your store during a sale. You can see how to do this on this doc (a part of my personal swipe file).
  • Preparation is king with your email and SMS strategy. Make sure you have all your emails written, designed and ready to fire as soon as possible.
  • Sale announcement — Optional, but I’ve seen this do very well. It preps your customers to hold a spot in their wallet for you.
  • Sale launched email and SMS blast — This goes to everyone to notify them of the sale, what it is, how to take advantage of it, etc.
  • You can decide if you want to send this to everyone, just openers or just clickers. And, whether you want to send an SMS as well (this can get costly). You should make sure to exclude any purchasers and subscribers.
  • Sale ending soon or 24 hour notice email — This can be the same as the above email, but just add a big sticker saying “24 hours left”.
  • Last call sale email — Same as the above, but swap messaging for “Last call — 1 hour!” or something similar.
  • Sale sold out or product sold out emails — If you anticipate any products selling out, have these emails ready along with the form capture for those who want a notification when it’s back in stock.
  • Technical difficulties email template — This is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
  • Shipping delays email template — Same as the above. This is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
  • If you have any philanthropic components to your business, you can talk about what the sale did for those efforts.
  • Update dynamic banners in flows to include sale messaging, wherever applicable.
  • Typically customers who come through BFCM have a lower LTV, so educating them early is important.
  • Post the sale across organic social media — stories, links in bio, pinned posts, highlights.
  • Update your shopping catalogs with sale prices so they reflect discounted/promo prices inside Meta and TikTok shops.
  • Their promo codes should be easy to remember if someone saw it on a billboard and had to remember it 6 hours later.
  • If possible, use branded links for each affiliate/creator/influencer, for example: haus.io/limited versus unbranded links that are hard to remember.
  • Make sure they all have updated talking points, understanding of sales/dates/promos, and don’t have any questions.
  • If you have any GWP you’re promoting, make sure they have this in advance and they don’t have any questions.
  • Setup sales inside TikTok for any creators who plan to go live and/or promote your BFCM sales.
  • Make sure you have comment moderation on lock from the creator pages or you plan to respond to the creator post comments from the brands
  • Make sure you email your promos and all its details out to your affiliates as well as publishers who have an affiliate arm (BuzzFeed Shopping, Insider Picks, etc).

What else would you add to this?

That's all for this week

I hope I had something here that you didn’t have! My overall philosophy with BFCM is, promote offers people will love and make them easy to understand. Keeping it simple always wins in marketing.

It is Sunday, so I hope you are planning to get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. I know I will be trying to get as much sleep as I can leading up to this week’s Q4 Summit! If you’re planning to be there, please shoot me a DM on Twitter or an email, or just flag me down so I can say hi!

Have an incredible upcoming week. I’ll see you next Sunday with some of my favorite learnings from Harley Finklestein, Danny Winer, and so many more from the Q4 Summit!