I’m excited. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner. AND in 2020 more and more brands are pushing their holiday sales earlier and earlier. In fact, Amazon’s Prime Day just ended yesterday.
A good Black Friday can be literally life-changing for a business owner. I vividly remember my first big Black Friday event:
It was Black Friday in 2017 and we did ~$16,000 in revenue in 24 hours. Before that, we had never done more than a few thousand in a single day. This was singularly the most stressful and most fulfilling day of my life. We had no idea what we were going to do to fulfill all of those orders (remember, my biggest company owns its own manufacturing facility and everything is made to order). It drove me crazy, but at the same time, it let me know that we could actually drive revenue at scale.
Now, our Black Friday plans then were as simple as having a sale. Throwing a discount code up, and just praying. This is bad execution, and I want to make sure you don’t ever repeat my mistake.
To prevent that, I want to a list of my favorite resources to get ready for Black Friday. If I had to set-up a winning Black Friday / Cyber Monday strategy from scratch, these are the resources I’d use.
Klaviyo’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday Crash Course – This is an amazing crash course on BFCM strategy. Especially on how it should tie into your email marketing. The segments they teach you about are great for Black Friday and teach you how to think about segmenting for sales in the future.
The one Caveat is they’re going to really dive into a Thursday through Tuesday Black Friday which is generally shorter than I would go. I typically run a pre-Black Friday Event, Black Friday, and into a Cyber Week event. This gives you lots of time to promote a variety of different offers to different segments (VIP, Window Shoppers, etc.)
Shopify’s Black Friday Checklist – This checklist gives you a really good baseline of everything you should do to get ready for BFCM. It also has a lot of insight into things that you should be doing year-round. I’d recommend going through all 27 points and make sure you have everything ready to go. It’s also a good practice to make sure you’re doing the majority of this list regularly.
Common Thread Collective’s Black Friday Social Media Campaigns Blog Post – CTC is one of my favorite agencies in the direct to consumer space. This is an S-tier resource full of tactical takeaways for your paid strategy. One of the key sections is the timeline they give for preparing and how to follow-up BFCM. Their timeline starts in September, but if you buckle down, you can knock out all of the September tasks before the end of the week and dive into scaling your prospecting for October.
Going through these three links and executing should be the #1 goal for the next 7 days. Here is what I would do over the next 7 days to get ready:
Thursday – Ready all three of these resources. Create your Strategy for the event. This is where the CTC blog post is helpful. Use their calendars, or create your own.
Friday – Get Prospecting started. Your goal should be to fill buckets of customers up. Obviously, we always want to prospect profitably; however, BFCM is going to be the biggest conversion lag event of the year. This means you want to have huge pools of customers ready to go.
Saturday + Sunday – I’d take the majority of this time off (rest + recharge). If you’re feeling ambitious you can start making creative briefs for the holidays.
Monday – Start Going through Shopify’s Checklist (or having your ops team go through this) as an audit. I’d make my goal to have an audit of what needed to be done for all 27 by the end of the day.
Tuesday + Wednesday – I’d be attacking the checklist over the next two days making sure that I had a solid strategy to get through it. This would be my highest priority followed by getting as much creative put together as possible.