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Sponsor/Instant AI Representative (16:05)

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Nick Sharma (16:15)

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Nick Sharma (16:24)

Days at Instant1/Sh Slash. Sharma, go lock it in and crush BFCM. And now we're going to move to email and SMS. So the first one is prep your entire email schedule. This is something that's probably already done so you don't really need to do this I would imagine, or hopefully you don't. But you know you want the first one to kick off at 12:01. You want to then build out segmented, didn't open and open but didn't click resend groups. So these are people who have shown some level of interest either because they're on your list and maybe recently shown engagement or because they open but didn't click and you're going to hit them back. You're going to set exclusions so buyers during this period stop to get or stop getting sale blasts. You want to add dynamic banners which you can do for sure in Klaviyo but these dynamic banners are basically they show the sale so whatever the ongoing sale is that day that's the dynamic banner that gets inserted and because it's dynamic you change it once it applies to everywhere you update your pop ups. So you know I've recommended using Alia. I'm a fan because of just how I'm like the one Indian who doesn't know how to code. So it's very easy to set up a pop up and get your opt in really high but you know make sure that you have something like you call out the discount in the pop up. People should be entering, they should think they are entering their email in order to unlock the discount. You know you don't want to just have like sign up for updates as your email pop up during this time you want to make sure from an SMS standpoint you get an announcement, you get one kind of midday push or mid sale push and then maybe a last call sms. You probably want to be a little bit smarter about how you segment just because it is significantly more expensive to send. So you know if you've got people you've sent text to before who have joined the group and never purchased maybe not really need, you don't need to send it to them. You can let email kind of capture that. But yeah, you can kind of depending on your price point, your purchase frequency, you know, and sort of how these people came in, you can kind of decide and figure out what, how you segment those lists out. Just because this has happened in the past, I would recommend pre writing three different emails. One is a site issues kind of a plain text emergency email. So just, just have it ready to go, right? You can have like 80% of it filled out, except maybe that 20% that decides exactly how it's going to get handled. You can pre write a shipping delays emergency email. So you know, basically it's, it's pretty common for warehouses to get backed up or for orders to get backed up, especially if you're using a three plus. You know that, that, that is just maybe smaller as a lot of smaller brands do. So you can have a shipping delays email ready to go and then a product sold out email ready to go with a waitlist cta. So again that would go back to the back in stock reminder I talked out before. Next one is to add an email reminding customers that your discount expires in X amount of hours. So you know, we talked about the announcement, launch reminders and last call. This would probably go in the reminders category. You can do another founders plain text email that goes out, you know, during the sale as a reminder as well. Make sure you segment your VIPs on both SMS and email for early, you know, early access slash preview. And the last thing I wrote is just test your emails across devices and it is litmus that is the app. All right, moving on to paid media. If you didn't already upload your Cyber Week ads, do them right now. This is also, you know, regardless of whether or not you have a rep, the pre, the approvals go slowly during this period of time. So not only is everybody approving a ton of ads, but they're also fighting a bunch of ads that probably got disapproved. So the overall process is a little bit slower. Make sure those are in your best evergreen ads. I would duplicate them and add sale overlays. This is again something you probably already did. If you have evergreen winners that you're planning to turn off, my recommendation is to not turn them off, but instead redirect the URL that it's going to. So for example, if it's going to a landing page, but you instead wanted to want it to go to a holiday theme landing page, just do that redirect but do it in Shopify or whatever your CMS for the website is. Don't do it in Facebook because if you do it in Facebook it's going to reset the learning for the ad entirely. But if you have something that's working right, the click through rate is strong, the CPM is good, then just change the URL redirect on the back and that works out really well. You probably also have, you've probably scaled your budgets up. Make sure you also scale your retargeting budgets proportionally. Right, because this is a period of time where you get a ton of extra traffic. But also this is a time where you want to hit everybody and let them know if they haven't bought but shown intent that you're running a sale and this is their best time to buy as well. Make sure that you've got, you know, TikTok shop, set up TikTok ads going, make sure you've got product feeds uploaded so or updated rather. So if you're using like a mar pipe to run your sale catalog creative and pricing, make sure that that's properly updated and synced out with all the other platforms, whether it's a GoPuff, a TikTok, a Facebook, a Google whatever. And then the last thing is just make sure that all of your DPA ads are also just showing the right price. So you know, do it in Marpipe and then go validate it in Ads Manager and make sure that it's all working properly. All right, we're going to get to the next section here which is Organic Social. Organic Social is one of the things that for some reason a lot of the brands miss. I think it's just because most brands tend to focus on customer acquisition with paid media during this time. So organic gets some love and some attention, but not necessarily a lot. But right off the bat, you know, update your bios with your BFCM offers. So if you've got different offers throughout the days, make sure those are being updated. I recommend also just adding a pinned story highlight called bfcm. And every time you've got a new story or you have something that relates to bfcm, throw it in there. But as the sales go on, delete them from the beginning so that if somebody joins on Monday, right, if somebody comes to your account Monday and they click the BFCM highlight, they shouldn't see everything from Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You know, if you, if you're adding a bunch of stuff in there, I would remove it. But if you've just got maybe a summary slide of what the sales were Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then it goes into Monday. I think that's fine. But I'm not a fan of making it too hard once somebody gets in that highlight to see what it is. You also want to make sure you've got bios updated. So bio should have the offer the link in bio, whether that's in the actual bio itself or it's within that cluster of links to click. Another suggestion there don't you know, if you, if you have more than two, if you have two or more links in that bio, it's two clicks to get to the site versus one. So if you've got more than two, make sure that you absolutely need more than two for this period. Otherwise remove them and just keep one. That way it's one click to get to the website and ideally you're going to a sale landing page. Ideally you're using a, you know, apple.cominsta or apple.cominstabfcm something that signals that it's traffic from Instagram and it's unique to that user coming from Instagram because that's also a perk and a reason to click. And then BFCM just hints to the person that, yeah, the sale is going to be on this page when you get there, but then on your end that might unravel and include UTM parameters for where it comes from. And then of course again, like I mentioned earlier, you can tag and track those people down the road. In addition to updating all your bios, making sure that pinned posts are on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter announcer announcing the sale, I would create story posts every day that talk about each of the sales and what they are, what products are in it. Are there any bundles? You know, you put a timer. Is there any ugc? Basically think of this as. Think of your story as sort of like a. An advertorial slash, longer version of a TV commercial maybe. Right? TV commercial, you have less intent behind the viewer because they're watching for something else. But if somebody comes and sees your story, you have them a little bit more. So feel free to give them everything. What's the sale? How long does it run? What's included? Tell me other people who bought from the sale and loved it. Show me proof. Right? You can, if you want, run an Instagram live or a TikTok live during your peak hours. I wrote about it in this last weekend's newsletter. But brands are crushing on TikTok live and, and some have a really elaborate setup with stages and sets and multi Cam and some don't. Some are just very simple so you can kind of go on and see how they're doing it, see if that's something you want to explore. But my guess is it's already the 26th today, so probably don't have time. And then the last one is just this one is an easy one to do and always hits it out of the park. Kind of goes with the, the email idea of sending a founder plain text email. But just record a founder video in front of your iPhone, just put the camera down, you know, make sure your phone's not directly on the table because then the mic and the speaker don't work well together. But you just put it down in front of you. Record a video announcing the sale, why you're excited about the sale, you know, maybe a couple little personal anecdotes that makes it feel like you know, you're telling somebody as a friend versus telling them as a, as a company. But these tend to have high click through rates and also high conversion rates. So it's easy to do if you can run it from the founders actual Instagram and TikTok accounts. That's always also a good idea. But something that takes 45 seconds and has a really big payoff now going on to affiliates and influencers. So affiliates, you want to start by emailing all your affiliates and if you have them on text or Discord or Slack, however you have them, you want to make sure they're all getting their codes, their auto apply links, any sort of talking points that are different than what they may have before or you know, you also want to assume that people lose things so just resend all the talking points and then sale start and end times for each sale. So what this does is it just gives them a quick sheet they can reference for the next week or so in the future as they're quickly going and posting and grabbing links. You know these, a lot of these affiliates, creators, influencers, they tend to be people just working from their phones and doing everything from their phones, shooting content, editing, posting and communicating. So make it very easy for them to copy paste. Even when you send the email of their link, their codes start and end times make it super, super, super easy in terms of format. You know, in theory like a 5 year old should be able to find that email and know exactly what their link is, when the sale starts, when it ends, what's included, what should they say, et cetera. You can also reward your top partners with extra commission or you know, goalie famously in the Past has given away cars or I know a friend who does this with apartments in Miami. Like he'll give away a year of rent in Miami or something. But you know, if you can get your affiliates to go really hard for you, you know, that apartment or that car ends up being pretty cheap. Lastly, I would say, yeah, make sure that you've just got everything. To be honest, with affiliates, it's just really about making sure that they've got all the rul tools and they've got everything. They tend to move quick and if you miss their window of getting prepped with them, you might just miss it entirely. So. So yeah, prepare as much as you can. And then last section I want to get into is basically option cx. So this is usually, you know, this is kind of the other side of really good customer acquisition is you just get a lot of people who are generally newer to the brand they're coming to buy because it's on a discount. So they have a lot of questions or a lot of issues or maybe things they want to know. So number one, prepare a proper BFCM FAQ that you use internally. So what are all the shipping times? What are all the shipping carriers? What kind of questions might somebody ask? What's the return policy? You know, Google and TikTok and a few others prefer if you have longer return policies. That's just a side note, but if you have a different return policy like I saw on TikTok, they're accept some brands are accepting returns until February 10, 2026. Make sure that that's clearly outlined. Any and all discounts, whether they' scripts that are evergreen, whether they're automatically applied, whether they're coupon codes, whether they're creator codes. There should be almost like a Google sheet of all the discounts that your CX team has. So that way if somebody emails in and says, hey, I used sour cream 10 as the discount code and you know, it's not one of your traditional BFCM ones, they can go quickly, look up the offer, you know, in a Google sheet or whatever, see the code when it was run, who it was for, et cetera, and just validate all that. You also want to make sure that you have that because you don't want people using discount codes that they shouldn't be using. So if somebody does try to use it and then emails in and says they tried to, it didn't work. You know, you can provide them with that information. Preload macros, of course, any, anything related to here, you know, ideally around shipping times, around Shipping delays maybe I would make sure that you have fulfillment expectations set. So you know, on the marketing side we love to over promise and ideally over deliver, but we do like to over promise. So make sure that from your CX side you are under promising and over delivering and hopefully there's not really any issues on the 3 PL side. But if there are, you want to make sure that you are flagging it to your 3 PL about any sort of expected order volume spikes. Typically you just go through prior year's data and you know, make sure that they're aware of what's about to come. Make sure that your CS staff is on call and on slack. You can create a dedicated BFCM issues channel. Ideally you add maybe one person from marketing, one person from web, you know, one person from the retention side. Just so you have kind of a mini SWAT team where you can bring about issues or errors. A lot of times too, if you've got a coupon code that's not working on the website, this is where it'll get flagged first and that way. So in order that in order to get it changed and updated the right way. Jumbling my words. Have a proper, you know, incentives or reply structure when it comes to people complaining, whether it's order delays, shipping delays, you know, whatever it may be. So have, you know, if it's their fault, maybe it's like a five dollar code. If it's our fault, maybe it's a $15 code, whatever it may be, but each brand has a different one. And then lastly is just make sure that your order confirmation emails that are going out, you know, those tend to be evergreen setups. Make sure that they are updated maybe with dynamic blocks to also reflect BFCM language. So the fact that hey, we are working as fast as we can, but our order still may take a little while. Whatever it may be, you just want to make sure it is really obvious to the consumer that these are BFCM orders. And so you know, there might be delays, there might be just something that's a little different. Okay, last couple things I want to go into is one, you know, if you, if you can try to gamify your first 500,000, 5,000 orders, right. Depending on how big you are, that always does well and maybe it unlocks a free gift or a bigger discount or a gift card that they can get and use in January and come back, that always does well, you can add a small mystery gift to orders to boost aov. So mystery gift might be something where you market up or rather you you say like hey, this is a 25 or 50 mystery gift, but you offer it for half the price or 40% off and you basically are telling them like, hey, this is a bit of a gamble but I'm giving to you as a discount. Make sure you've got tailored bundles already on the website. Make sure you've got replenishment upsells or just any sort of upsells on the thank you page once somebody's placed an order. If somebody clicks no on the first one, I recommend having a second one. You can never really go wrong with two upsells or an upsell and a downsell. You could definitely run the founder's trick, you know, founder, email, founder Instagram ad. I would also recommend just making sure you've got the sale on the founder's actual Instagram as well. Verify every link and every email ad pop up and text message, stress test your checkout and then do do every every few hours. I would recommend going incognito and doing test purchases. So I would, I would just basically keep testing it non stop. The really the rule of thumb is like even though everything might work properly, something might still break. So just keep testing everything. And lastly, make sure that you get some espresso ready, you hydrate, you text your team, block the calendar, do what you need to do because this is the super bowl and everything that goes right or everything that goes wrong is your fault. So make sure you get it done. That's all we've got for this week. So good luck on Black Friday. Hopefully you found one or two tips here that saved you and I'll see you next week. We'll go through a full recap of Black Friday. What I saw that was interesting, what was not interesting and what I'm excited for going into December. So that's it. Hit me on Twitter if you've got any questions. My email is just nicknick co and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and E commerce. 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