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DEEP DIVE WITH IBRAHIM

Early morning thoughts for BFCM 2024: Revenue-driving ideas

Happy Wednesday!

The team at DTC Daily has been working on a few interesting things of lately, and have been really busy, so stay tuned for some exciting announcements.

Coming to today’s deep dive, I wanted to hit you with some thoughts as I put together my plan for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024. These were 10+ thoughts/ideas that came to mind as Must Do’s this year for BFCM. If you have anything you’d add, you can share it with me here and I can share it with everyone in the future emails.

Alright, let’s get into it..

Use TikTok Shop this BFCM!

The most important thing about TikTok shop is that if you want to use it for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you need to start NOW! If your business is not already on TTS, the process to get started can take anywhere from 4-12 weeks depending on the category and complexity of your business. That means that you need to get started TODAY, in case it takes longer than you think.

You also need to start creating organic content there ASAP so you can build some traction and establish your profile before BFCM. You want to create social proof on your product cards with purchases, you want creators posting, and you want those who are organically posting to start tagging your products. You can’t add shopping links to past videos, so getting this live is important!

Once you’re live on TikTok Shop, you need to start tapping into the TikTok affiliate network to begin building relationships, content, and sales, that you can leverage for cyber month this year. As I mentioned above, all of this takes time and I believe it’s important to start early in case any issues arise.

Once you have TikTok shop setup, you will be able to leverage the channel for BFCM in 2024. When you work with affiliates for your BFCM planning, figure out who can create for you on TikTok… you want this done for two main reasons:

1. Why not? You should have all your affiliates who you’re doing deals with or pushing, push for you on TikTok. The more, the merrier. As TikTok Shop continues to develop, you want more people posting and linking your product card.

2. SEO. Yes, SEO on TikTok. You know where 28% of Gen Z goes when they want to see if something is actually legit? They search it up on TikTok! Simple Modern? Warby Parker? Lemme? All of it is searched on TikTok for unbiased reviews. Get more of your content on TikTok!!

As a reminder:

• TikTok has 1.9BN users globally, and 150M users in the US as of last year. They also claim to have 5M US businesses on the app, already

• TikTok shops are on track to do $17.5BN in GMV this year. Up nearly 10x from last year.

• Americans spend an estimated $7 million per day shopping on TikTok Shops

• Americans spent a total of 4.43 billion minutes per day watching TikTok videos in 2023. I did the math and that’s 8,422.69 YEARS of collective watch time per day. Pretty insane!

• Adult users spend an average of 54 minutes per day on TikTok, which is 64% more time than the same cohort of Instagram users spend on Instagram.

• The Top 5 selling categories on TikTok Shop are:

  1 — Beauty & Skincare

  2 — VMS: Vitamins and Supplements

  3 — Lip Cosmetics

  4 — Cologne and Perfume

  5 — Body Lotions & Treatments

• TikTok Shop is already the 14th largest health and beauty eCommerce retailer in the U.S.

So the point is… Don’t wait, and get on TikTok shop today.

YouTube’s Shopping Platform

The same advice can be said for YouTube shops this year. They recently announced their direct integration with Shopify. This is another sleeper channel for BFCM this year.

I still believe that YouTube is one of the most under-utilized channels for DTC (I need to write an email about that!) and I also think brands will see strong performance from YouTube shops throughout Q3 and Q4 if they can figure out how to make creative that converts on the platform.

It’s still a new channel, which means, realistically, YouTube/Google is likely going to juice the performance for the next 12-18 months. YouTube is now rolling out an affiliate program, similar to TikTok Shops, which is going to have a similar effect on YouTube Shorts, as it did on TikTok. I also believe integrations into longer form videos are going to be really interesting. You can already see MKBHD has his Atoms shoe collab in his YouTube Store… I imagine this is going to become the default for any brand deals with Shopify brands.

Leverage Old School Direct Mail

Another one of my favorite hacks for BFCM is to use direct mail campaigns to your top 1,000 to 10,000 customers (depending on how large your brand is) to warm them up the prior weeks to Black Friday. You want to make sure that when someone starts to think about the shoes or fragrance they want for Black Friday, you are a part of that thought process. The best way to do that is warming up an audience for BFCM, and direct mail is a great channel for that.

You can leverage a re-marketing list (going to people who are already in your CRM) or a prospecting list, taking a look at who your best customers are, and then building a model off that. With a service like Post Pilot, you can even have your postcard be a part of a Klaviyo flow… so when someone completes their third purchase, they get a special email and Post Pilot sends them a hand-written note, calling them out by name, coming from the CEO of the brand. I can bet that will boost CVR and overall brand affinity.

Limited-Edition Product Drops

Another good strategy for BFCM is to have a limited edition drop only for that week or month. That could be a new style, colorway, collab, or something else. You can drive a lot of FOMO and exclusivity with a limited edition SKU that’s only for BFCM. Jones Road Beauty does a phenomenal job at this by selling their Mini Miracle Balms JUST on BFCM and for Mother’s Day. They don’t discount, they just sell it as a limited edition SKU.

Product drops are one of the best ways to generate hype from your existing audience of potential buyers and existing customers. If you aren’t able to fully develop a new product, you can alter a current best-selling product or source something you can brand with your logo and call it an added gift with purchase.

Leveraging Influencers & Affiliates

Using influencers and affiliates as a core strategy for BFCM is pretty obvious. TikTok affiliates are going to be the largest channel that folks are paying attention to this year. That said, you can also activate other affiliate networks (and even your own customers) with smart affiliate campaigns.

The next big piece is influencers and content creators. Influencers are just one kind of affiliate. These are the folks that already have followings and hopefully some level of influence with your target demo. You should absolutely try to leverage them as whitelisting partners, more so than just posting with your affiliate link.

In that similar vain, leveraging and whitelisting with content creators should absolutely be a priority this year, if it wasn’t for you in years past. This will be my 5th year running whitelisted BFCM ads with creator and publisher pages pushing the ad. Take advantage of it, especially with verified pages.

If you have a few influencers that you have been working with this year that have been performing for your brand, you might want to front run the conversation with them to see if you can get them to make some custom and exclusive content for your brand for BFCM. If you don’t have influencers ready to make content for you, now is the time to start reaching out, running some tests and getting your rates locked in for BFCM deals.

Send More Emails!

This next one is so important. According to Klaviyo, the average brand sent 11 emails during BFCM weekend in 2022 with an average open rate of 49% and an average CTR of 1%. That’s only 2-3 emails per day. In my opinion, you should segment and send way more emails.

A more aggressive email strategy on Black Friday might look something like this:

1. 12:01am, you send your first email blast announcing your sale

2. Between 7am and 9am, you send your second email blast reminding them of the sale

3. At 11am, for anyone who didn’t open your first two emails, send another segmented blast

4. At 12:30pm, for anyone who opened but didn’t click or convert, you should send your first text with a “Text only offer” around lunch

5. At 3pm, send another email telling subscribers that “Inventory is moving fast and they better act now”

6. At 6pm, send a plain-text email from the founder thanking the subscriber for one of your best Black Friday’s yet and adding another offer like a free limited edition gift with purchase available on all orders now through end of day (EOD) to drive more sales

7. At 8pm, send one more text to anyone who has clicked but not converted and increase the discount with a new custom code. Offer an additional 5 to 10% off here..

8. At 9:30pm send one more “Last Chance” email to push for the final purchases of the night

Remember: Brands work the entire year to build awareness and anticipation for the Q4 sales season and then when shoppers feel ready to spend (i.e during BFCM and the holidays) you need to go all out to clear your funnel and get viewers to convert. I call this flushing the toilet… you’ve got all that build up from the year, now it’s time to flush that tank!

I feel very confident that no one will remember that you sent 8, 10, or 15 emails to them 2 weeks after BFCM. But as a brand owner or marketer, those extra emails or “chances” to convert could equal a meaningful increase in revenue (and hopefully profit) for your company and team. In short, don’t be afraid to send more emails. 11 is the average. I think 15-20 throughout the weekend is more than okay!

Gamify the First 1,000 Orders

To get sales rolling, try giving exclusive offers to early birds like “the first 1,000 orders receive a free gift with purchase.” As long as you have an engaged email list, this works every time!

Make sure that if you know this will go fast, you have extras. So if you have a list of 450,000 people, and you offer the first 1,000 orders, then have 1800 or 2700 set aside to account for the overages or for people who purchased at the same time.

Running Paid Media for BFCM

For ads, you are simply paying more money to get in front of people who have already interacted with you before. You should be spending the vast majority of your budget on retargeting traffic (anyone who’s been to your site, engaged with your profile, given you their email, engaged with your social platform’s shop, etc.).

You don’t necessarily need or want to spend too much time and money trying to convince cold traffic or net new people to try you for the first time, though with the right offer, it can work. The downside, even if you go after net-new customers, is in most cases, these aren’t your high LTV customers… they’re hunting for a deal, they’re glad they got you at a deal, and they won’t be back until you have a steep deal, again.

Start your BFCM early!

The last tip I’ll give (and really the theme of this email) is to start early!

This is my 6th year running BFCM campaigns for brands. The key is to start early. It gives you enough time to deal with things that stand in your way, whether its crafting the perfect offer or waiting for a product to arrive on time for BFCM, and will let your marketing team do what they do best—drive revenue!

This means, starting early with your prep, but also your offers and sales. The funny thing about Black Friday is that even in the last 6 years, the timeline keeps getting pushed up and elongated. At first, it used to just be the weekend of BFCM, and then it was the whole week for “Cyber week.” Last year, it seemed like it was “Cyber Month” with many brands starting their ads and sale campaigns many weeks before BFCM.

I’m curious to see if we’ll have BFCM campaigns starting in October this year. I think that’s super early, but I guarantee that brands will start running promos and ads on November 1st and probably before.

The point is, brands are starting earlier and earlier each year to compete for wallet share during cyber month. If you are a serious brand that wants to get your slice of the pie before consumers tap out, you should be doing this too. Regardless of what you think of the brand perception to start early… people set aside a budget for BFCM and if you’re the last to get a shot at that budget, there won’t be any left for you.

Alright, that’s it for this deep dive. Let me know any top-of-mind tips you have here, and I’ll include it in my next few emails regarding BFCM.

Lastly, if you need any kind of help in regards to auditing your current marketing strategies, email flows/campaigns, landing pages, etc., join this waitlist to work with me.

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