This store requires javascript to be enabled for some features to work correctly.

#87 Black Friday 2021 Prep Episode 2 of 2

#87 Black Friday 2021 Prep Episode 2 of 2

It's time again for what should be the best sales day(s) of the year for e-commerce brands. If you're not prepared already, you better get a move on.

It's time again for what should be the best sales day(s) of the year for e-commerce brands. If you're not prepared already, you better get a move on.

In episode two of this two-part series, we'll go over crafting your Facebook and Email campaigns for maximized conversions during the big sale.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Podcasts

 

TRANSCRIPT

Yes, it is the Ultimate Marketer podcast!

I'm your host, Orlando Rios. Welcome to the show. Welcome to November. The holiday season is here. Hope you had great Halloween. Hope you had some good candy. Hope you dressed up and had some fun after what's been a crazy couple of years. Cool. So following up on last week's episode, we did some touch ups on the promotions that we should be thinking about for the upcoming big sale of the year. I'm talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend. Now, I will preface this with saying that a lot of marketers and a lot of business owners online, e-commerce, don't know what's really going to happen this year. This year is very, very different. Number one, there is this huge online e-commerce COVID bump that happened last year. We're not sure if that's going to carry over.

Number two, and this is the big thing, last year we didn't have Apple messing with our Facebook tracking, a Facebook optimization, operating system 14 wasn't around yet. So coming in to this year with all those things, everything is up in the air, but that doesn't mean we give up. That doesn't mean we just throw in the towel and try to make it any other day. We have to still try and do our best is try to get the most sales as possible. The one thing that we do know that we think should happen is that people will be in the buying mode typically around Thanksgiving time, the weather changes, things start to get a little different. I think as COVID has settled down a little bit, families are going to start really getting back together. The holiday spirit is going to be in full effect.

And for people, a lot of times, that means being more generous with their gifts, buying gifts online for people, buying gifts in person for people, all those types of things. So I think the market will still be there. I think people will still be in a mode to purchase. How everything is going to happen is still a little bit of a mystery, we won't know until we get there. But we're still going to set things up. I know I'm still running ads for myself, for my clients, and today's episode, as last week's episode was more about thinking about the promotions, things you can do to really have a great sale, this episode is more about the traffic, more about getting in new customers, reinvigorating past customers to make sure that on Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, which typically is a big weekend for most retailers, online or in person, that we're doing the best we can to get the best results possible. So before I get into Facebook ads, the first thing I want to get into is email.

I hope you are doing email. Even outside of the holidays, email should be a big part of your marketing strategy. If you're on Shopify or WooCommerce or something like that, I also hope you're using Klaviyo or Klaviyo, however it's supposed to be pronounced, I still get confused. And I don't get paid by Klaviyo at all to endorse them, whatever, I've used a lot of email programs and Klaviyo seems to do the best. They have the best automated flows. They have the best integrations with things like Shopify. It's just amazing. You can do all types of flows based on what customers have or haven't done, what they purchased, dollar amounts, all that stuff, and make really tailored flows that continuously generate revenue for you well into the past. I have flows for people that sign up for my email list.

If they haven't made a purchase over 30 bucks or something for whatever it is, then they get on this other flow that starts making offers, all this type of stuff, trying to find something to eventually get them to purchase. So if you're doing email marketing, and hopefully you are, no matter if your goal is leads for a business or purchases for your online e-commerce store, email is the number one thing first that you need to get set up. Now, in the past, maybe people would say, "I don't want to send my customers more than one email a week. I don't want to be too intrusive," all that kind of stuff, however, when we enter Black Friday, Cyber Monday territory, in my opinion, all bets are off. You go full speed ahead. This is the week and the weekend to do that. So what I would do is I would set up campaigns to run for each day of the sale. That's right, every single day you should send an email.

And that includes the day before. So the day before the sale, this is your chance to get people primed. And if you can afford to do a couple lead days, even before the sale or have the will to do so, I say do that, get people hyped up. If you listen to the episode before this one, I talk about having that landing page up, start educating your customers about the sale that's coming up, whether it be by email, whether it be by organic social, however you speak to your customers, let them know that this is coming so that way they're prepared. They're already in a buying sense. They know. And if they get that itch on the day after Thanksgiving or on Thanksgiving, whatever it is, they're already going to have in their heads, oh, I remembered that I got an email from X, Y, Z, and they're having this sale for Black Friday, I'm going to go there, I'm going to purchase that because I already know about it.

Don't wait too long. So prime your customers with email, letting them know about the sale, send them to the landing page, have them sign up for an alert. Think outside the box, whatever you can do to get them ready for that. Then when the sales go live, boom, hit everybody on your email list, let them know that the sale is live and then every single day send another email through the sale.

And on the last day, I would send two to three emails, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one at night. And you can get a little bit creative here. You probably don't want to just send the exact same email every single time. Maybe each email's a little different. Maybe it's based on real time data. If you have one collection that's selling really, really well, maybe the email is, I don't know, maybe it's yesterday's best sellers, shop today before things run out. We talked about door busters last time, maybe you have a different door buster every day where you have one specific item that you sell that on each day it's a different item that has that big percentage offer, that big discount, spice it up, change it up a little bit, change up your subject lines.

The goal is to get them to at least open one of these emails. And with the amount of emails that are going to be coming through from other retailers and all their other stuff that they're subscribed to, you have to be aggressive and it's okay. Yes, you might get some unsubscribes. That is definitely possible. Actually, it is definitely possible. Yes, you will get unsubscribed. But as I've always said with email, if somebody doesn't want your message and doesn't want your sales offers and all that stuff, why do you want them on your email list? The big number email list is such a vanity metric. If nobody's opening your emails or nobody's clicking through your emails because they don't like what you have to offer and they take it upon themselves to unsubscribe, that's a thank you, in my opinion, because if you're on something like Klaviyo, they charge you by the subscriber.

So having a more accurate subscriber count that is ready and willing to get your message is highly, highly preferred. So get aggressive on those emails. Now, Facebook. What do we do with Facebook? Well, like I mentioned earlier in this show, last year we didn't have the Apple problem, now we do. So what is this going to do for our campaigns? Well, we don't know. What we do know is that we are getting less data because of Apple, our campaigns are not able to optimize as good, they're not able to give us as much data as before so we have to use our own methodologies to calculate the impact of our marketing efforts and if our advertising dollars are being spent profitably or not. That said, Facebook is still the king of ads, in my opinion. Whenever I do big Black Friday sales and stuff like that, again, just like I talked about with email, you want to go all in on your advertising if you really want to go for it.

I use this as an opportunity, not only for prospecting, but also for customer reinvigoration. In terms of prospecting, what I'll typically do in past years was just have some various different types of lookalikes and maybe an interest here and there and just call it a day. This year, I think, unless you have a ton of data coming in and I'm talking unless you're making 50 to 100 orders a day on Shopify or 50 to 100 high value events a day, I would go heavily in on interest based targeting. If you have an e-commerce store that sells various products that could appeal to vast, different types of people with different interests based on the product. So maybe you have, let's talk furniture store here, maybe you sell couches, but then you also sell televisions, it's not necessarily the same audience. So I hope you understand what I'm trying to say here.

So maybe you have an interest based target audience just for the couches and you maybe have an interest based audience just for the TVs, because they're so different. The same people that might be looking for a new TV may not be looking for a new couch. So hope you get what I'm trying to say there. So what I would do is create a bunch of interest based targets as many differentiating ones as you can, and place specific products for your sale as a feature within those specific interest based target audiences. Now, if you have enough data for lookalike audiences, which is typically 100 events, that can be tracked now by Apple, what I typically would do there, that's where I would put my more evergreen advertising. That's where I put my more general sales, where I sell the store, sell the main products that we offer in the lookalikes campaigns with the lookalike purchases. If you have enough data for lookalikes, I would look somewhere around the four to 5% on lookalike on purchases.

If you're not getting enough purchases to warrant that pixel lookalike, one thing I would consider is going up that funnel and using add to cart lookalikes. So lookalike on your add to carts, because while it's not going to be as good all the time as purchase, that's still somebody that's willing to take an action on your site as opposed to just a traffic visitor. So think about those type of lookalikes, go broad on those lookalikes. The days of just doing a 1% lookalike are over, in my opinion, days of just doing 3% is also over, in my opinion. I think we need to go up to the fours and the fives now. Just because Apple is not giving us enough data to work with these days. So we need to expand out. So if you come at it with a combination of the lookalikes and a combination of differentiated interest based targets, you should set yourself up nicely to do well on the prospecting end of things.

Additionally, you also want to be set well with remarketing and customer reengagement. So remarketing is going to be more towards the people that have visited your website during this time period, I would expand it out to maybe at least 14, 30 days. If you can go 180 days, go for it, because you want to hit everybody. Obviously anybody on a Apple device is not going to be included in that 180 days look back remarketing audience, but people that are Android will. And there's a lot of people on Android. So your marketing audience should be fairly broad again. And it shouldn't only be people that have visited your site. I would also look at targeting anybody that's watched any of your videos. So if you post videos on Instagram or Facebook, whether there be ads or organic social, I would make an audience of all past viewers that viewed more than, I don't know, 50% of the video.

You can mess with that there, but, again, you want to target those people. You also want to make an audience of anybody that's ever engaged with you on Facebook or Instagram. That includes, again, organic or ads. You would just make an audience, max it out as high as you can go, I would say try to get around 180 days, if you could, of anybody that's ever engaged with your business on Facebook and Instagram, that's another great remarketing audience. So with those two remarketing audiences, you should be pretty set. But then there's this third that tends to do really well on big sales like this, and that is the customer reengagement. This is where you target all past customers. You can do this a couple of ways. One, you can make an audience that uses the Facebook pixel and get all past purchasers.

But then two, which you should also do, is you should actually upload a customer list from Shopify. You can export from there. If you're on Klaviyo, you can actually sync a segment from your email list to anybody that's ever purchased before and do so there. So that way you make sure that you hit up everybody that has purchased from you before, again, on these remarketing audiences. And most people do, most people have an email list that has a group of people that have never purchased from you before.

But this is a great time to get in front of them. Yes, you're going to messages to them through email, but maybe you also just export your entire email list and make that an audience that you target as well with your general sale offers. So if you're noticing a little theme here and the theme is basically all in. We're going prospecting on lookalikes and interest based targeting. We're going remarketing on visitors and anybody that's engaged with us on Facebook or Instagram, and then we're going customer reengagement, anybody that's on our email list, anybody that's ever purchased from us before using the pixel or using actual exported customer lists that we match in a Facebook audience, anybody that's ever watched any videos, whatever. So all in on that. I also recommend, while Black Friday's the day that sales usually actually start, I would set up your site to actually start taking those sales as early as the Wednesday and Thursday before. Additionally, I would start running your ads at that time.

The reason why is because typically when you turn on Facebook ads, it can take a day or two to really start getting going. You don't want to turn on your ads on Black Friday because it's going to almost be a wasted day because it's going to take a little bit of time to get its wheels going. So think about that. Think about starting your sale a little bit earlier. You don't have to announce it to your email list, but have your landing page ready to go and start pushing ads to that page as early as the Wednesday or Thursday before that Friday so that your ads have at least a day to get going. Another reason why is that Facebook, especially whenever we have these big volume days of advertising, sometimes when you place an ad it can take 24 hours or more for those ads to be approved.

You don't want to be in a situation where you launch ads on Black Friday and they don't get approved until Saturday or Sunday and then you've missed two biggest days. So bring it a little earlier in, and that way you avoid that problem. A year or so ago, Facebook ads completely crashed on Black Friday and ad managers couldn't get in and set things up and get things going. That was a disaster. Again, getting ahead of that will be better as well because your ads will already be going. If something happens with Facebook, you're not going to be left in the dust. So if you take a highlight out of this whole entire podcast, I would really circle that one three or four, five times to make sure you really, really understand that. That's what I'm going to do for my companies, and I recommend that you do it for yours.

So, that's on the Facebook front. Of course, there's also some other platforms we can think about like Google. I don't know if Google Search is necessarily the best thing for this. If you want to run Google Search, or if you're already successful with Google Search for your products, one thing I would use is the extension, the promotions extension for that, if you're making search ads, you'll notice where you can make extensions. There's one for promotions. That way you can list your Black Friday, Cyber Monday extension sale there on that promotional part and it'll show up in the search ad. If you're running shopping, any type of sale that you put on should show up on the shopping feed, if you're discounting inherently within the site or however you set up your product feeds, one thing you could do is YouTube ads.

If you do YouTube videos, if you have a special sale video that you can make, that is a great way to do some remarketing, customer reengagement, to people that have visited your site before. If you have the Google tag, I would also think about display in terms of remarketing. So I like Google a lot for the remarketing part of this, just because it's a lot different than how we do things with Facebook and Instagram, where it's more forward and visual, Google is more in market. So I would lean on that a little bit more for remarketing if you're talking about Google. Obviously TikTok is an option as well. I would follow the general same regimen almost as Facebook. I'm not as well versed in TikTok ads. It's not quite there yet for me, but something to think about there.

So to wrap this up altogether, when we talking about getting the traffic for our Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, again, I'm going to mention, maybe start your sale one to two days earlier to avoid any conflicts and ad approval delays from Facebook. So Facebook, we want to do prospecting, lookalike audiences and interest based targeting, remarketing, people that have visited the site or people that have engaged with our posts on Facebook and Instagram and anybody that's watched any of our videos, customer reengagement using our email list, customer list, anybody that's visited our site before, those type of things, and then go big on email. Everybody on your list. Don't be shy. Get people prepared for the sale, send daily emails, and on the last day maybe send two or three just to knock it out of the park. Awesome guys. Well, thanks so much for listening to this episode.

I'm going to put this up on the site with a transcript and I think we're going to try to make a blog that encompasses both of these two episodes that you can highlight out everything that we talked about. Again, if you need any help with your ads, please go to dropkickads.com and use promo code ultimate. Something really, really cool that's coming out here is I've been working on our own platform for our copywriting pro service, our service where you pay one monthly fee and you get an amount of credits to use every single month to order Facebook copy, email copy, landing page copy, whatever, and even some images as well. I've been working on a brand new platform, that's almost done. So look to that in the next couple of weeks to be launched, hopefully before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, really pushing for it.

Additionally, next week at Dropkick Ads we're launching, finally, I've been working on this for such a long time, our motion image video ads, where now we're going to be able to offer you the ability to order custom made motion image video ads that you can use in your Facebook ad campaigns, in Instagram. Technically you could even use it in email as a gift if you wanted to. So these are motioned ads instead of just the static, which seemed to be still working really well, but we're going to be able to add some motion in there for you. So look for that launch coming next week as well. We're getting ready to hit it. It's a big month and we're going to hope to help you do the best that you can for you and your clients. Again, dropkickads.com, promo code ultimate. And guess what guys, I will see you next week.

Leave a comment