00:00

Welcome back everybody to the Ecommerce Unlocked podcast where we cut the fluff. We talk about the strategies and tactics that you can implement in your business to take it to the next level and drive real results. I'm your host, Russell Steed, my other host, Emerson Hammer. The other guy that's here named Emerson that might be a host, I don't know. That's good to hear. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, dude. You know, we just hang out.

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All right, so today we're gonna be going into how to run a successful holiday campaign. So last time we talked about everything that you need to do on the operational side to run a successful holiday season. This is gonna be kind of on the opposite side, maybe not opposite side, because we don't wanna be competing with operations. We wanna work with them as we learned last time. Superior, okay? You're nothing but that. We get that. Whatever. So this is how you work well with ops. This is how you run a successful holiday campaign. And like I said,

00:56

you know, as in everything that these are my opinions, this is my experience. I know there are lots of ways to run campaigns, lots of different things that brands do, but here are just some of my thoughts and things that I've found to be successful. So kind of right off the bat, the way I like to break up the holidays is in the like certain categories, like when do you wanna start, when do you wanna end, right? And in that period, maybe you want to discount the entire time, maybe you do different promos. I like to break it up into three different sales, kind of like three different like distinctive sales. So I've got like my,

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pre-Black Friday sales, and then I've got my Black Friday week and Cyber Monday, like our BFCM week, and then after that I call it like the holiday sale, so that's kind of everything after, you know, maybe giving Tuesday or something like that, I'm running a holiday sale that is just kind of the stragglers, the people who forgot to buy, or like, you know, the procrastinators, you still have a sale maybe a little bit lower. So I can get into kind of what those all look like, but I think it's kind of important to be there. You need to have reasons to...

01:54

to message people, to get in front of them, to send emails, and that's really the purpose of marketing during this period. If you're not sending emails, if you're not sending text messages, if you're not getting out there, then people are just gonna forget about you, and you're not competing with your competitors when it comes to holidays. If you're selling t-shirts, you're not running up against just t-shirts, you're actually running up against everybody else doing a Black Friday sale. And so you're in the running for the share of their wallet. Say they have a thousand dollar budget, which...

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I don't know, maybe that's average, maybe that's on the high end of the average American, what they spend on the holidays. But if it's a thousand bucks, you are competing for that thousand dollars. And that could go to Walmart for some toys for some kids, and that could also go to Costco for whatever. That could go to another econ brand, another five econ brands. So it's not just your competitors that you're trying to compete against. So really, you're just trying to stay top of mind. You're trying to let people know that like, hey, I've got these deals going.

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and to come buy from me. And that's why I recommend kind of running a pre-Black Friday sale, because I don't know about you, but on October 31st this year, I was talking to some of my coworkers, and I basically said, hey, watch it tomorrow, you are gonna get at least five emails or five messages saying like, hey, Black Friday starts now. And one of my coworkers was like, no, that's stupid, like, no way.

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Literally like by 9 a.m. I had five emails, four texts, and who knows however much else, like other things that brands had already started. So, we're coming maybe into this. Even earlier, man. I mean, we had Amazon do their prime in October was this year. Pre-Black Friday. So everyone's launching a little bit earlier for whatever reason. Yeah, COVID pushed it. Everybody started going earlier and earlier. Now it's kind of like a race, and I'm running Black Friday in...

03:45

June, so no, I'm just kidding. Although there are some brands that like they're creative, just still works and it's June, they're running a Black Friday sale and it's totally on purpose. So this is how I break it up. I think you should do a pre Black Friday sale. It has to make sense for your brand, but I'd say most brands, it does make sense. I usually try to lead with the biggest discount first. Main reason is that I'm trying to get as much of that wallet share as possible. And...

04:12

also to reduce the customer service blowback. So if I do a 20% discount as a pre-block Friday, but then on black Friday, I move everything to 40%, you know, that customer's coming back to me like, whoa, I bought last week and I got 20%, but now you're doing 40%, I want a price match. You say, no, they return it anyway. You know, it turns into this whole thing. So you wanna minimize the blowback or the customer service issues that you create and how you structure your campaigns. So you want your biggest deal first, and then you want.

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definitely want something, you know, maybe you move into your Black Friday sale. I think it's super important to actually run something specific on Black Friday. So maybe you start your Black Friday sale on the Monday before Black Friday, and then maybe it's like a totally different discount. So let's say I discount one collection on my pre-Black Friday sale, I discount a different collection during Black Friday, or I discount the entire store on Black Friday, just keeping in mind that I'm not trying to cannibalize sales.

05:07

I'm not trying to make it so that I have more customer service issues. So if I'm running a promo during that week, you always want something different to talk about throughout the week and specifically on Black Friday. Because if let's say I launched my Black Friday sale on the Monday before Black Friday, and let's just call it 35% off site wide, when it comes to Friday, I need to have a reason to send out an email. So I like to throw in there like doorbusters or like a buy one. You know.

05:35

Spend over $100 get a free pair of socks or whatever it looks like adding a gift with purchase is a great way to be like Hey, it's black Friday gift with purchase gift with purchase that way. You're not like it's not as translatable for for customers So if you say somebody got 30% off last week You're giving 30% off and a free pair of socks the person who got it last week at 30% off isn't gonna come back I say hey, where's my free pair of socks? Right? That's it's usually like if you're changing percentages. That's when it gets

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you into trouble with your customers. So on Black Friday. As far as your prep for these campaigns, I mean, there's a lot of segments going into it. Is this the one you're saying like, hey, yours is changing discounts? Is there a different messaging or maybe, I know you're going through the whole sequence of it, maybe you kind of touch on like, what are those prep works? Yeah. Or free campaign activity you're doing during those segments or whatnot. Yeah, so once I've kind of identified what I want my sales to look like, so I'll go in and say, hey, I do want three.

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which I recommend, but maybe you just want two. Maybe you want one for Black Friday, and then you do another sale called your holiday sale after Black Friday, which is exactly the same thing, just different wording. You know, it really kind of just depends on what you have the bandwidth to do. Like some brands have a big team where they can kind of crank out a bunch of different assets. And when I've done three different sales, it's when I've had like a designer and I've had an ads guy and that kind of thing. So it makes it a little bit easier. You have more bandwidth.

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When it's just me running a brand, like I'll just probably opt for one. I also do like the 12 days of Christmas and that's a lot of work. So there are lots of different things that you can do outside of your holiday sales to still drive some sales. But the prep work really kind of comes down to, once you've kind of identified, okay, from November 17th to November 27th, I'm going to be doing a, I'm gonna do 35% offsite wide.

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And then on Black Friday, I'm gonna have a door buster deal. First 100 orders, get a free pair of socks. And then I'm gonna actually run that from Black Friday all the way to Monday, Cyber Tuesday. And then once that's over, I'm gonna switch it over to my holiday sale. And I'm actually gonna run maybe 20% off for the rest of the season until shipping cutoffs. And so that's kind of like how I have always structured it. I've seen some good success in doing that. And then once you have that kind of framed out,

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you go into prep mode, right? And so you say, okay, what assets, like what emails am I gonna send? Text messages, like what's my timing on those? So am I gonna lead with a text message? Am I gonna do like a VIP thing? Do I have a loyalty program? If I do, then I'll probably wanna maybe open up the sale to them a couple days early or a day early, or maybe do an extra 5% on top for them. And so you kind of just go through like, okay, emails that I'm sending, text messages that I'm sending. Now I'd recommend that you send

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on Black Friday, three to six emails. Like that's a lot, but you should be sending a lot to get out in front of people. Because if you send it, there's a chance that a lot of people don't see it. So kind of just continuing to get that message out there, even through the whole weekend. Six emails in one day, like we're saying. Yeah. Yeah, no, and typically throughout the year, I would not send more than like one email a day, unless it's a big sale, maybe two, right? But Black Friday, like all rules are out the window.

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and everybody's sending a ton of emails and you're not gonna get really, your spam rates or even your unsubscribe rates. Spam rates are more concerning, but your unsubscribe rates actually significantly don't go up during Black Friday because they're just getting inundated with so many messages, they're not taking the time to go up unsubscribe. So you can send upwards of five or six emails without too much of a blowback. But I'd keep that really specific to Black Friday.

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Maybe you do Small Business Saturday, and then you got Cyber Monday. I'd kind of save it for those days, and then obviously your messaging and sending emails on the days kind of surrounding those, but those are when I would go into it pretty hot and heavy. So from an ops perspective on this, marketing operations on this, are you creating then a Facebook ad for each of these campaigns or a handful of them? It seems like since they're so quick of campaigns or a couple days,

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maybe a week or two, is there much testing going on? Say, hey, which app performs if you're doing paid ads or whatnot, or A.B. testing, email campaigns, or how are you making sure this is landing with such a short time window of a sale and whatnot, and so frequent, how do you- Yeah, that's a great question. So really it kind of comes down to, you don't really want to-

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You don't wanna create assets for ads, for something that's only gonna be one day or two days, maybe even three days. Like there's a learning phase, depending on your spend, it just may not make sense to do something that is that short. If you're spending, let's say, under $3,000 a month in ads, I wouldn't recommend really having more than maybe one sale that you're promoting within your ads. Maybe you start your Black Friday,

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sale ads earlier, you try to make them generic enough that you're able to run these promos, these retargeting ads and let people know that I'm running a deal, come to our site and come check it out, or saying up to X percent off, if that's the truth, across the board. You may just need to be a little bit more simplistic about your sales and not get as complex as having like three with different doorbusters and that kind of thing. You can still do those things and just push it out through your VIP text messaging or your email campaigns.

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But when it comes to ads, it's just too much work to have like a different set of ads for every single campaign or every single email that you're sending out. So typically what I've done in the past when I've got an ads guy and a designer, I'll go in and say, hey, okay, we're for this week, week and a half, we're doing this, this is the sale. And here are the assets that we need for this. And then the next two weeks, we're gonna be doing a different promo. And so we need new ads there.

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we'd kind of change the look, maybe the color, maybe the look and feel is really similar, but we just kind of tweak the colors so that like this ad set is green and this ad set is more red focused. And so it's kind of like seems different for the people that we're serving up ads to. And then we'll also kind of change the name. So we'll have the BFCM or a Black Friday sale, then we'll have a holiday sale. So there are just some like little things that you can do that, do there, so that it's not a huge design lift to totally create new assets for a different sale. But let's say you're doing less than $3,000 a month.

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on ads or maybe sub 1000, just pick one, create one set of ads and start running it at the beginning of your sale and stop it at the end. Just because you're probably not getting enough conversions anyway for it to learn super quick and to really optimize those ads during that period. And ads get more expensive, so you're, you know, it's gonna be, you might need to up your spend or, you know, there's a whole nother thing to ads.

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But yeah, no, that's a great question as far as like not over complicating it. So try to like least common denominator, create ads around those, still make it interesting so that people come to your site, if that makes sense. I would, I would say also when you're trying to come up with your promos, don't go out like you don't have to give away the farm, right?

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And every brand is going to be different. Some brands will only discount 10% and that's great. And people love it. That's fine. Cause you don't do any other sales during the year. I'd say probably the average brand probably is willing to do some sales. So people wait and people know that you're going to be discounting. So I would say probably at least a 15% discount is kind of expected. Uh, when it comes to black Friday, 2025 is pretty norm, uh, going 30, 35, like, yeah, if you've got inventory that you got to move, I would go upwards of 30, 35%, maybe even 40%.

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I have a clothing brand and the old styles, I'll discount up to 50%. Sometimes I'll do 60, but I really don't like being seen as a discount brand, so I don't like going that high even if I'm trying to clear out old inventory. So with these Black Friday deals, do what makes sense for your brand, but don't give away the farm, right? You don't have to discount everything a ton. Maybe your best sellers, you discount, you can always use the wording up to 50% off.

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and you got your lowest movers, your C stock at 50%, you got your B stock, your okay sellers at 35%, and then you've got your best sellers sitting around 20%, 15%. So you're keeping your margins on the stuff that you sell the most of. And that's it, it's a good way to get people in. Once they're there, they'll be interested, they'll buy, and you're not giving away the farm. As far as employing those sales,

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I use Shopify for most everything, most of the stores that I have and that I've done in the past. And unfortunately, if you want to use a coupon code, it's got to be one percentage across the board. I've seen brands do like, hey, for this, for 35% off these products, it's this code. And then if you want these other at a different percentage, then you have to use a different code. That gets really convoluted. I think there are some apps out there that can do some tiers. They've been kind of clunky in my experience. So I don't know how well they work.

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But what I do if I really decide that my strategy is gonna be like hey I'm gonna do up to 50% off these products 50 these products 40 these products 30. I'm doing tiered discounts I will do You know basically a mark down on the products You'll use the compare app price on Shopify mark it down on the actual price so that it shows up on Shopify that it's a That it's on sale the discount or the the disadvantage to doing that

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is that some of your reporting gets off a little bit because the retail price comes at the lower price and then Shopify doesn't report on saying like, hey, this item was discounted by 10% or 15, 20%. It's gonna show it as like, hey, this was bought at full price, even though the compare app price was higher. So just reporting gets affected a little bit when you do it that way. There's some really good apps out there that do bulk discounts. If you're on Shopify Plus, there's like kind of a more native app if you don't have Shopify Plus.

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There are just a bunch of apps out there that are like $10 a month that make it really easy to do bulk discounts across your website. And then, you know, or you can just use a discount code. I do like discount codes. Makes it really easy. You don't have to go in and pick all the products and create these tiers and stuff. It's just across the board, really easy, super easy to message. And I'm a big fan of just like laying it out there. This is exactly what the deal is and not complicating it for customers because a confused customer is not a customer. They don't buy when they're confused.

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Um, so we've talked about, um, the type of structure that you want for your discounts, um, you know, kind of front loading it. We've talked about like when you start and when you end, um, I guess I didn't, I briefly mentioned when you end, that should be right around when, uh, when the shipping cutoff is, that's where I usually take it. Um, you know, if maybe a day or two before, so that our operations can, can ship out those products. Um, and then I.

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while we're at the sale never ends. I know you did holiday sale and then we did a winter sale into a Valentine sale. And it's went on for like four months after the holiday sale it was doing so well. So there's rebranding keep going. It's working. There's one brand that literally they turned on their sale and like it was, I saw their ads in June or July said Black Friday, but it was totally intentional. Like they just, it really got kept.

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getting really good ROAS, so they just kept going with it. So do what works for your brand. Like if you wanna keep going past the shipping cutoff, just make it clear, this isn't coming in time for Christmas, but here's our sale, holiday sale is still live. And then, so I typically run it until the shipping cutoff, nobody can really get anything until, in time for Christmas. And so...

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I'll have a little bit of a break there and then I'll do something on Christmas, the day after Christmas, maybe the week in between Christmas and New Year's. It's always good to throw out maybe a gift card sale. Those are okay. You'll probably see a bunch of brands doing that, but I don't think it's really well adopted. In my experience, some people will buy, but it's not a huge mover. Some other really cool...

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ideas that I've seen from brands are saying that like, hey, buy $100 now and you'll get a $25 gift card valid in January or February. So they're kind of like incentivizing you to buy right now and we'll give you some money to buy again during our slow season, which is January, February. So you can use apps like I think it's Rise AI is one of those. There are some couponing apps out there that can help with that.

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But I also wanted to talk a little bit about the tools that I use to implement some of these marketing automations, some tools that I use, like such as Klaviyo for my emails. I've actually recently moved over to Sendlane, really kind of enjoying that platform. It's totally different, a little bit, not quite as robust in my opinion, but as Klaviyo, but it definitely has a better price point and it's got a lot of the core functionality. I use Postscript for SMS, but there's some other good ones out there. I've looked at Emotive.

19:00

I've used attentive, not a huge fan of them, but I know a lot of brands that use them. Cent lane also does SMS, Clayview does SMS. So it really kind of just depends on what you have set up, what works best for you. But in the end, there are lots of different tools that you can use for that marketing automation. And then in the end, if you're a one-man shop, like I currently am a one-man shop, I'm doing the design, I'm doing...

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the implementation, I'm doing everything. It's a lot of work, but kind of just planning it out up front is really important. Just getting into like, hey, this is the sale that I'm gonna do, try to make it simple, work out your messaging, create a bunch of different emails. You don't have to have a totally different email every time you're sending. Like I said, if you wanna send four emails on Black Friday, just design the first one and then maybe tweak it a little bit, maybe change the header image for the second, maybe same thing for the third, and then the fourth one, you're like, hey,

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You know, it's ending now, Black Friday's almost over, don't miss out, that kind of thing, creating some urgency. But you don't have to totally redesign every single email, every single piece of creative, just be efficient with it and recognize not everybody's gonna see every email you send out, so it's okay if it repeats. It's okay if it's very similar. And it's okay if it's exactly the same, like why not? People aren't gonna be that upset, like oh my gosh, I already saw this email. You can definitely do that. I don't recommend it for every single email, every single email, but it's totally doable.

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SMS, I just want to call out there. I would be a little bit more sparing with SMS. I've done some really cool campaigns with SMS where it's like I send an email and say, hey, if you want to get our best deals, go to SMS. I'll give like an extra five, 10% on SMS, or I'll do like specific like daily deals when it comes to like the 12 days of Christmas or our pre-black Friday VIP deals where every day this week we're dropping a crazy deal on a specific product so you only discount one product and this is the discount. You got to subscribe to get these discounts. Kind of trying to push people to the SMS.

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And then I'll kind of go crazy for maybe a couple days on SMS, but then I really kind of try to chill out and not bug people too much when it comes to SMS. I'll definitely leverage it and utilize it when it comes to Black Friday and the sales, but I'm not blasting them out three, five times in a day, maybe just once. So a lot of these mediums you're talking about are more of seem like a retention marketing tool, SMS, email campaigns, stuff like that, or for current customers you have or have had in the past.

21:27

And whatnot as far as all these creators and outbound are there any tips tricks or things like that on? Acquiring new customers during the holiday season is it pretty much all paid ads your Facebook Instagram tiktok ads stuff like that It is tailoring there are they changing banners on those to acquire new customers Or yeah, I just in entirely on that front it's my personal opinion and I know some people might not agree with this is that

21:54

Once it's Black Friday, the time for acquiring new leads or new customers is almost over. I continue to run ads, even though it's really slow during October and even before that, can be a really slow period. Early November can be really slow, but I'm continuing to run ads, kind of trying to fill that funnel. And then when it comes to Black Friday, you're flushing that funnel, right? So you've already got...

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You've built up an audience and some people that have been like, hey, yeah, that's really interesting. I like that. I like that product. And then you flush the funnel when it comes to that sale. And that's where you're using your email, your SMS and those kinds of things. Because hopefully those people that are interested have subscribed in some way, whether they're on your Instagram, on your socials or on your email and SMS. But you can still, not to say you can't acquire new customers during that time. You absolutely can.

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just at, you know, CPM's ads get more expensive during that time. So I don't rely on that being true, right? That I'm gonna just gain a ton of new customers. I have tried to fill that funnel for the previous two, three months so that I can flush that funnel and get those first time purchasers, you know, maybe they look like new customers on Black Friday, but they've been looking at my brand for the past two months. And so they've been waiting for that sale because they know it's coming. Everybody knows that.

23:13

something's gonna happen during Black Friday, so they're all just kind of biding their time waiting for that sale. And so you can absolutely have new customer acquisition. A lot of times it's disguised as people who've already been looking at your brand for a little while. But yeah, push out ads, absolutely. You're doing ads, you're doing the social posts. If you have an influencer campaign kind of set up, totally do that. If you have affiliates, push on them. It just gets really noisy, so that's where you come to this. There's...

23:41

the Omnichannel approach. So there's the kind of the difference between Omnichannel and Multichannel. Multichannel is like, yeah, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, I'm on email, I'm on all these things, but they don't really work together. Omnichannel is where you can kind of try to get everything to work together. And it's a little bit more work, obviously. Sometimes it takes a team to make sure that everything's integrated, some really good softwares that all talk together. But I would say like, you know, Sendlane, I've been really liking because you can have SMS in there, you can have email.

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And then you can also kind of connect in, use a lot of those email lists to drive some of your ads. So you're kind of getting an omni-channel idea right there by kind of controlling your marketing with somewhat of a hub, if that makes sense. Got it, that makes sense. So in the end, there's so many ways to go about this. Like there are a ton of caveats. For example, if you're a subscription brand, you probably don't want to discount more than you already do for a new subscriber, or else you're gonna get.

24:38

If you do like all of a sudden you're doing double what your new subscriber discount is, you're gonna get a lot of people canceling their subscription so they can get the new offer for Black Friday. So you need to keep those things in mind. Make sure that you're not cannibalizing your previous customers or your previous sales or your potential sales with subscriptions. Every brand looks different. Every brand discounts differently. But my biggest points are gonna be try not to make a headache for yourself with customer service. So tear your...

25:07

discounts and your holiday sales in the right way so that your customers don't get upset. The second would be just make it simple. Don't try to make it super complex because a confused customer is actually never gonna be a customer. And then just have fun with it, right? Like just go out there and use what you've already built because it can be a stressful time. Just get it out there and then once it's all over, look back and say, hey, what do I need to do better for next year? Because in a year, you're not gonna remember. So do a quick rundown, maybe an hour.

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write down some stuff like, okay, this worked well, this did not work well. I remember one year we did nothing different on Black Friday. We started our silence on Monday, ran it all through, and Black Friday was really underwhelming, but I kinda had the feeling like, crap, I have nothing new to message to these people. And that's why I decided after that point, like, okay, I'm gonna do a 20% off all week long, and when it comes to Black Friday, I'm gonna add in some doorbusters, or add a gift with purchase, or something like that, something a little bit extra so that I can.

26:05

Or maybe like new products added to the sale. I haven't discounted these ones yet or whatever it looks like. You want something different because people are in the mood to buy on Black Friday. Even though sales started weeks earlier, do something new on Black Friday. Same thing with Cyber Monday. I would say to a slightly lesser degree, but in the end, that's how you run a successful campaign. If you have other ideas or maybe something else that, that we forgot to cover here, we'd love to hear from you. Hit us up on LinkedIn.

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And we'd love to kind of pick your brain and get to know what other brands are doing. Thanks everybody for joining us this week and we'll see you at the next one. Peace. There's the wink again.