Welcome back to limited supply. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different because I'm recording this one on the fly. We are right in between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's a bunch of things that are sort of popping up and, you know, consuming people's minds. Black Friday obviously being the biggest thing. It looks like we've had a record breaking Black Friday for Shopify, for Amazon, according to different articles on the Internet, or actually according to Adobe analytics, shopper spent almost $11 billion on Friday, which is 10% more than last year. And they're anticipating that Cyber Monday was going to be another record of I believe close to 13. Yeah, 13 billion, which is also up from last year. I didn't realize how much bigger Cyber Monday is. I mean, I guess I see it individually, but I've never thought of that collectively. I've always thought that because it's retail on Black Friday that it's going to be much bigger than Cyber Monday. But anyways, for today's episode, I want to go through a couple of things. Obviously talk about Black Friday. I want to talk about some of the things I really liked that brands did on Black Friday that I thought was really interesting. Things that set themselves apart and sort of differentiated them from the rest of their competition. I want to talk about what I saw from a performance standpoint. I want to talk about some of the meta and health news that's come out around targeting specific medical conditions. And then if we've got any time left, we can chat about something called Applovin, which everybody's been talking about. It's a new channel that is scaling usually as the second biggest spending channel for some brands in our network. So that's what we're going to talk about today. But I want to first talk about Black Friday. So from everything I saw, Black Friday was a huge success. Most of our brands were scaling on a daily basis anywhere from 20 to 50% in budgets. The best performing creative. I'm curious to see what you guys saw. Also as you're listening to this, if you hear something I say and you want to rebuttal it, you want to respond to it, you want to add to it, shoot me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an email. Just narma.com is my email. And so Black Friday we saw CPMs were up quite a bit, anywhere from 60 to 90% in some accounts, which was pretty crazy. Conversion rate was up anywhere from probably 20 to. Well, some brands saw 100%. We have one brand that converts right around seven and a half percent. They hit a peak of 14% on their conversion rate on their site. That's macro conversion rate from Shopify, not just a specific channel. Most brands that were not beauty had a pretty successful Black Friday. For some reason, beauty brands did not have a huge Black Friday, at least from the beauty brands that I had visibility into. I think that that was probably due to just the offer not being good enough or fresh enough or as unique. I think it's also kind of hard to just stock up on a lot of beauty products because they have expiration dates and seasons change. People want different shades of foundation or they want different shades of eyeliner. Whatever it is, I'm not really sure. I don't do that stuff. But that is my hypothesis. Supplements had a really good Black Friday. Obviously the beauty of supplements is, you know, you can scale really hard and be slightly breakeven or below break even if you're really confident in your returning customer rate. Emails and text messages proved to be an amazing last minute, winning last minute sort of like way to get revenue in last second. We sent a lot of amazing emails out last night. In fact, one of my favorite lines of copy that we used was, you know, today this is the price, tomorrow prices go up. That, that subject line and that sort of messaging positioning for Cyber Monday at least did really well to bring in some more deals or, sorry, some more sales. We saw a lot of good conversations in different group chats. Whether brands were, you know, they're normally doing $100,000 a month, they're normally doing a million a month, they're normally doing 10 million a month or they're doing, you know, we had some brands do 10 million in a day, but everybody had a really successful Black Friday. I'll tell you what the biggest commonality was about brands that did well during Black Friday. They the brands that felt really prepared going into Black Friday. As in they felt confident that their offer, they had a good offer. They felt confident in their website UX and ui. They felt confident in their email flows, their campaigns, the ad creative that they put out. They felt confident that they had a good creator platform. Those were the things, those were the brands I would say that performed really well and, and essentially crushed Black Friday. They, you know, they focused heavily on retargeting. They weren't necessarily going for prospect or I should say like net new prospecting in the sense that they weren't going after people who had only Just heard about the brand and then decided to buy it at a deal or on a discount instead. They were going after brands that are. Sorry, they were going after customers who had interacted with the brand at some point before, you know, either through post engagement, through site traffic, through interacting with an ad in the past, you know, maybe on social organically. And those were the customers that really came in. It was probably, I'd say like a 70, 30 split in terms of maybe even 75% of the customers that have come in are all customers that have in the past interacted with the brand at some point. The other thing that I thought was done really well was how some brands were taking advantage of TikTok. So I'll talk about it in a second when I get into some of my favorite examples. But on TikTok, there was not only brands that did a phenomenal job when it came to product seeding and talking about, you know, getting, getting creators to talk about the Black Friday deals that they're running. There was also a bunch of brands who did executed TikTok shop really well. You know, they had promotions running, they had flash sales, they had different bundles for Black Friday. They updated their product image carousel to reflect the deal. They had essentially, you know, all of the different landing page modules you would want. But in that carousel, some, some brands even did a really good job building mini landing pages within the TikTok shop description because you can add combinations of text blocks and image blocks. And so essentially they use text blocks and then they grabbed images that essentially represent landing page modules and put those in between the text blocks, which I thought was really smart. And then the last piece of that was brands that did a really good job on TikTok Live. So whether they were going live themselves and live streaming their sale or promoting the sale, the products that they're running, or it was them essentially doing this on an affiliate level. So it's not the brand that's directly selling the product from their own account, but they've got all these other affiliates. Or the third version was brands that sell on TikTok shop do not allow affiliates to join and sell, aka you know, me as a creator account on TikTok. When I open up the TikTok shop. Most products say, you know, earn an affiliate commission to sell this product. There were some brands that did not allow that, but were going live on TikTok with legitimate celebrities and huge influencers to exclusively promote their products on Live, but. But not the general kind of like creator pool on TikTok. So all three were really unique and really well done. But for today's episode I actually put together a list. I actually wrote this in a newsletter and sent it out. There's a bunch of examples and if you want to see all these examples, I've got links for everything I'm about to talk about. They're all docsend links. So I'm not taking you to the brand site because these site banners or the holiday shops or these drops or whatever I'm about to talk about has potentially been taken down by now because you're listening to this during Cyber Week or after Cyber Week. So if you want to see all the links for this, join the limited supply Slack group and we're going to put it in the general channel there. So it'll be there in general chat and either general chat or announcements. So join there and you'll be able to see all these examples. So let me get into it. So the first one that I thought was sort of obvious, but surprisingly most brands did not end up participating in it was creating a holiday shop. I don't know how most so many people did not create a holiday shop. But you know, you're essentially, it's not even creating a holiday shop. It's not like you're creating a micro site or anything of that sort. You're really just creating a landing page experience where you've, you've curated what products are there, what messaging is there. You've probably got some holiday like photography, holiday like messaging, some messaging, focus on gifting. Why other, you know, messaging even that is not necessarily talking about benefits or value props that you would, you know, have for yourself, but something that's easy to read and then regurgitate to somebody else as you're gifting the product. So anyways, highly recommend the holiday shops. The one that I put in this example was for Lemmy, which is Kourtney Kardashian's supplement brand. They had a beautiful holiday shop page. It was a one stop shop experience. It had everything from its hero banner which had beautiful holiday like photography. And you know me, if you've listened to this podcast before, you know how much I love good brand photography. I think it adds a ton of credibility and trust to the brand itself. And I think especially for a brand that is E commerce only, one of the best things you can do to build that sort of trust and social proof is have high quality photography. Because only a low quality brand or a brand that you know isn't legit would have product renders only or kind of like not cohesive, not really high quality imagery. So I think that good photography adds a lot of trust. It also contributes to building the brand. And this holiday landing page, or holiday shop specifically also did a beautiful job with iconography, with animations, with motion graphics. And so I just thought it was a really beautifully done page. It started with the hero. It had. Very quickly you could choose between you want bundles, you want apparel, you want to shop by benefit, you want to shop by product type, you want stocking stuffers. So making it very convenient, sort of creating that red carpet like landing page experience. And, and they not only had that, but they had holiday messaging throughout. So for example, one of the products they sell is Let Me Chill, which is a de stressing gummy. And you know, they added this module in between that says stress less this holiday season, cozy up and wind down with Let me Chill gummies, blah blah, blah, blah blah. You know, just figuring out how you can reposition a product within the context of how somebody is shopping is such an amazing framework to again, just kind of like immerse somebody more into that holiday experience or whatever promotion you're running. Maybe it's holiday, maybe it's Easter, maybe it's Memorial Day, maybe it's Labor Day. In the same way you could take this Let me chill example and you could talk about let me chill during Christmas time. Oh, your family's coming home, you're gonna need to take some of these gummies. Oh, summer's coming up, there's so much going on, you're gonna want to take these gummies. So leveraging that framework across different promotions is really easy to do. They also sold some merch, then they sold shop by benefit and then just sort of a grid of their top selling products. So anyways, I thought the, the Lemmy holiday shop was amazing. You should check it out in the slack. There's a whole video recording of the full page. The next one was something that Lemmy site also did, but I first found it on the mirrormate website. So mirrormate.com they had this really beautiful holiday banner and it did a good job, sort of just outlining the entire promotion for the holiday. It looks like the banner's already been taken down now, but again, if you click the link in Slack then you'll see it's still there. But this basically had a really beautifully designed, you know, holiday like graphic and it said the big sale, 25% off now through Cyber Monday very clearly outlined the offer. You know, 20% off one frame, 25% off two or more frames, very simple offer. That's another thing I should mention that brands that crush Black Friday did a good job of is they just had very, very stupid, simple offers. Nothing was complicated. Nothing was, you know, too hard to do the math on. Nothing was like if you get this, then you get that, or if you, if you hit this threshold, then you unlock this. But if you hit a different threshold, you hit that. You know, it was all very simple. And those were the ones that did the best ultimately. But again, this was a site wide banner. Every page you shop on, it has this at the top, right underneath the navigation bar. So it probably takes just slightly more than the navigation bar's height and puts it right below, which obviously shrinks what you're above the fold can look like. However, it just does a really good job of explaining the promotion and. And I know they had a phenomenal Black Friday, so big fan of that. Next one that I thought was really interesting was there's a athleisure brand competitive to Lululemon and Viori, et cetera, et cetera, called Set Active. They're based out in LA and actually a good friend of mine, Kira McKenzie Jackson, is now their chief Brand officer. And it's pretty amazing to see how this brand has evolved since you joined. So one of the things I noticed right away was a lot of their photography has shifted towards lifestyle versus more like in studio and product stuff. But separately, talking about Black Friday, what they did was really interesting. So they launched a. They dropped the new collection on Black Friday and they put it, I believe it was 30% off. It looks like it's not live anymore, so I'm gonna have to check what the video was that I recorded for the Docsin group. But essentially they had 30% off. Yeah, site wide. They had a sale page that was up to 80% off. And then the thing I thought they did really well, that was such an easy, low lift thing to do and easy thing to execute was they essentially created collections pages, which is very easy to do. Right. Cause it's just either you're creating a collection based on how a product is categorized in Shopify's backend or based on what products are tagged, which again happens in the product editor in the back end of Shopify. So what they did is they tagged products different ways. I'm guessing this is how they did this. And they created these different gift guides for different groups of people that they sell to. So one was so basically under the gift guides section it says, you know, for the gym brat, for the Queen of cozy for the coolest girl, you know, for the jetsetter, for the hot mom, for the. Then they had gifts under 25 stocking stuffers, stocking stuffers under 50 for the gym brat. So anyways, all, all this to say they created these really beautifully curated collections. And by when I say beautifully I mean I'm looking at the, the COVID images here and they just look, they look, they're so simple. It's literally just product imagery on a off white background with some nice text at the top. It looks so simple, it's so on brand, it's so well done. And when you click it you immediately get to the collection and you know the collection is called for the Hot mom. So it's obviously just a tag collection which is amazing. And not only on that, but not only that but they had a really nice collections page with quick add and they also highlighted the discounted price. The only thing I would probably do differently here is in the hero image which is a full width Image on the first, I don't know, 40% of the page. I'd probably just add more details around the sale or reiterate sort of like why the hot mom would love SetActive or maybe even put a review from a hot mom and sort of call that out. Like I would probably just put a name like McKenzie over there and put whatever quote I love this thing and you know, signed mackenzie, you know in parentheses, Hot mom in la, whatever it is. But anyways, I thought that was really smart to drop a collection on Black Friday and discount it. I know that their community and their, their just. Yeah, their community, their audience on social was really happy about it. So I thought that was really well done. And again, big shout out to them on their photography, their campaign video that they dropped. I thought that was also really nice and well done. It was always nice. It's always nice to see a brand like invest in a campaign video. You know, obviously they're a lot more short lived now with, with how fast media cycles work. But it was nice to see it happen and I think again it's something that just adds to the, the trust or the validity or the proof that the brand is legit exists. You're going to get your product on time, you know, your credit card's not going to be stolen, et cetera. Next thing was, was product imagery. So we just talked about this a little bit but you know I'm a huge sucker for beautiful product imagery, especially around the holidays. And there's three brands that I think did a really good job that I saw or sorry, four brands. One was Hexclad and Caraway also. But all of their ads, all of their on site imagery collections, pages, imagery, pop up imagery, organic social imagery like it all use this really beautiful color matching holiday, essentially holiday esque imagery. So that had, you know, ornaments in it, it had red ribbons in it, it had red backgrounds in it, it had off white backgrounds in it. It was really well done. Hexclad did it, Caraway did it. Simple, modern did it. Crown affair did it actually crown affairs I thought was really interesting because they didn't even go to the ornament and the red route. They went straight to the Thanksgiving table. They had a nice tablescape photo which had all these beautiful tables with or sorry, plates with products on it and forks and napkins on the side. And then the other one is Kadence, which I've talked about before for sort of being really beautiful with their product photography. But Kadence did a really good job with their photography as they always do, pushing their red and their kind of cream or off white colored products. So I thought that the holiday photography again, it adds that trust. It sort of shows that okay, the brand is legit. And you know, I'm sure it did really well from a click through standpoint as well. Speaking of Caraway, two things that I thought they did really well that I want to implement going forward. One was I thought they did a really good job on the UX for within their PDPs to add products. So if you're buying a set or an individual product, there's one or two additional add on options and it's really nice because it's within the same experience before you hit the add to cart button, meaning most brands, when you add something to or when you get to that shop section of a pdp, you have to click add to cart. And then underneath that usually is another, you know, upsell product and you have to again click add to cart. In this case, the way they did it was, it was they had these two upsell modules right, right above the add to cart button and you just check, you know, as you're, you choose your color of the pots and pans you want and then as you're moving your mouse down, that's where you choose if you want to add on, you know, whether it's the aprons or whatever else it was that they're selling. And then you click add to cart. And so all of it goes in at once and then in the cart it renders really Beautifully in the cart too. They've got, well, they've always had an amazing gamification or gamified incentive incentives driven, you know, progress bar in the top of the cart. But what they did here is they actually brought that, that progress bar onto the, on, on basically site wide. So it lives at the bottom of the site. And site wide you sort of see that at the bottom and it tells you, you know, you've unlocked free shipping or a gift or whatever it may be. But I thought that was really good. You know, most people only see that when they're in the cart. Maybe, you know, maybe that incentives bar or progress bar doesn't stay site wide forever, you know, because it's not a promotions period. But I thought it was smart to lean into it because everybody's already thinking and about deals and getting a good offer and things like that. So it made a lot of sense in the context. I wonder what the sort of business as usual or evergreen version of that is. Maybe it's something that, you know, is sort of always, you know, showing, but it's not disruptive in the middle bottom of the screen. Instead it's just at the top, right? Maybe it's like popping out or, or kind of like, kind of like an imessage bubble popping out of the cart icon that sort of shows you your progress. But anyways, I thought that was really good and I, and I sort of liked how they leaned into that. They also had a really beautiful holiday shop and it didn't necessarily have too much like imagery and bells and whistles as maybe like the Lemmy holiday shop. But it was really fast, really easy to navigate and they did a really good use, a really good job using badges and tags, you know, like in the collections page, there's the image of the product and then you can put little badges within that image. They did a really good job doing that. Calling out what was new or what was a bestseller or what was a holiday sale, et cetera.