5 things you can do to make your BFCM a success

Look, I know you’re getting 200,000 emails about preparing for black friday and you have since August. For us, a whopping 43% of our revenue comes in Q4, with 85% of that coming from November and December. So it’s quite a bit.

That being said, we’ve been preparing for Q4 and BFCM since May, and I feel the most prepared we’ve ever been. That being said, there are some things to note that I would like to walk through that many brands sometimes overlook or forget to think about. Hope this helps.

1. Create evergreen holiday creative

For example, I would prefer to show the same offer throughout the holidays, including BFCM. That means if you’re going to do some offer during this time, then do something like UP TO 40% OFF or whatever your offer is during that window of time + during the holiday season too. Hopefully you will have some type of sale going on with some of your skus to make that happen.

What that does is extend some ads that will definitely have social proof and could also support consistent sales and conversions for the rest of the holiday season going into the shipping cutoff.

There are some super simple examples of creative we’re cooking up for our brands, and I would love to show a couple examples of what we’re doing that you could also try to see if it works. Obviously we haven’t gotten these live yet, so there’s always a chance they flop. We are also bringing back a couple types that crushed for us laster year that I think make sense to roll out this year as well.

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What I like about this setup is that you can treat these as evergreen ads, and if we give a similar offer next year then we can go ahead and use this again next year and some of the top creative we can keep running and there’s already social proof.

Again, these may flop, so don’t blame me if you create something similar but I do believe these should work really well.

2. Review your customer acquisition funnel

Make sure your funnel is locked in and ready. We have prepped our new customer acquisition funnel and so what that means is that we will have everything ready to go when we go live with our holiday sales.

This should help things move smoothly for us overall and will make things be easier for us as we scale holiday spend. For us, we will be running most traffic to offer-specific landing pages. Some brands go to the home page or collection page, but we find that we still are super focused on sending people through the funnel to get the best results.

We will highlight the timing so ‘pre-black Friday’ or ‘holiday sale’ as we go, but we don’t really want to mess up what’s working. If the winning landing page is converting at 5% in slow September, then it should crush it for new customers in November and December.

3. Review your spend targets

We build out our spend targets very clearly going into BFCM. We also make sure our Meta rep knows how much we’re going to be spending and that our spend threshold is good to go as we will be spending over 200k over BFCM weekend for Flewd, with some stretch targets if we can get to a specific efficiency.

I can share more how we set up our scaling plan and overall ad account structure if that’s interesting to you in next week’s edition. Just reply and let me know if it’s something you’d want to know.

We will be heavily relying on cost controls and some other setups to help us scale, but generally we’re going to be scaling into 25k/day in ad spend prior to Black Friday, then doubling it on Black Friday. We are following this approach that David Herrmann shared in a resource that was shared by Proxima AI.

This is how we are planning on spend targets for the weekend. I think it’s an excellent way to think about scaling over that time and what needs to happen to get to specific targets.

We build this out in our daily report that is pretty robust to back ourselves into hitting our monthly targets. We do this for not only our brands, but our client brands too (shameless plug), and we find this helps us hit targets extremely well and also stay pretty accurate on projections. We also know when we need to adjust as we go through the month.

4. Review your offer

By this time you should definitely have an offer locked in. But I have looked at some evergreen offers and been confused, so please don’t confuse your customers and if you have a lot going on make sure your messaging on your sales ads and your home page or landing page is very clear.

I find that a certain % off is always super clear. But you also can add free gifts, but to me that’s really a bonus. I would prefer to talk about up to x % off and stick to that and then surprise users with a specific free gift or a way to unlock that top % off you’re offering with higher order value. Don’t make it confusing.

5. Remember to adjust your targets

Cyber Monday is in December, which is interesting for this year because you will see November not be as strong due to Sunday and Monday landing in December. You can adjust, but we are going to push super hard for a very strong December across the board, looking to have strong revenue goals for December when in the past we had the weight be heavier in November than December but December being more efficient.

Bonus: Have Fun

This is simply the best time of the year in my opinion, if you have brands that are holiday-focused brands. We have a lot of fun with our team and it’s so exciting to see things scale over time. To me, this is the time to shine and all the hard work we have done over the last few months. If you have been testing consistently and looking for winners in your funnel, you’ll find that most of your creative will see a boost in performance during this time, especially your tried and true thoroughbred winners.

I am so excited for the next couple of months and I hope you are as well.

I am happy to send out a guide on how we’re scaling next week if you’re interested, then I will take the week before BFCM off before we work to scale during that week and the rest of the holidays.

Ways to work with me or support me:

Agency partnership: We have officially opened our doors for Q1 of 2025 for 2 brands in total to join us (one spot has already been filled). We prefer to work with health & wellness brands that are solving a real problem. If you’d like to learn more about our work and how we can support you (through creative strategy/production + media buying) you can do so here.

Consulting Call: If you want advice on scaling your agency or your brand, I am happy to help. I usually keep this to no more than 3 calls a month (already have 2 spots taken for November). You can find a time to meet with me here.

Resources for Q4: I highly recommend checking out LiveRecover for Q4/BFCM - they have live agents that recover abandoned carts and we have rolled this out for many of our brands and it has been epic. They’ve recovered 100’s of thousands of revenue for us in the last few months. They’re waiving the platform fee for 3 months if you let them know I sent you. Check them out here.