If you work in DTC, you know we’re entering the busiest (and hopefully most profitable) period of the year. Being prepared is the secret to staying ahead of the game, and if you’re like a lot of brands, you’ve had your plan ready to tackle Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) for months.
READ MORE | Start Your Peak Prep Early! Acquisition and Retention Strategies for BFCM
Being ready also includes having the tools to keep you agile during BFCM itself. Things can (and will) change on a dime, and the ability to make quick decisions on the fly can make or break the biggest sales event of the year. Luckily, we’ve got the tools to help you succeed.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
While the retail environment has been a little chaotic, we still expect BFCM 2024 to be the biggest on record:
According to Adobe, online sales will hit $40.6 billion during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024 — a 7.0% increase from last year. Cyber Monday will remain the top day for online sales, with $13.2 billion projected for 2024.
Despite the economic uncertainties that DTC brands faced in 2023, many of them experienced sustained growth during BFCM.
In our BFCM 2023 Retrospective report, the data showed a shift in consumer behavior. When we looked at all cohorts combined, we found that 60.51% of all purchases during BFCM in 2023 were made by new customers (a +1.48% increase over 2022), which indicates new customers are increasingly waiting for BFCM to make their initial purchases with known brands.
For newer, smaller brands, there is a clear opportunity to get in front of motivated consumers and take advantage. Our data showed that brands making less than $1M in annual revenue actually had a +6.94% increase in new customer sales year-over-year during BFCM, with new customer revenue making up 75.63% of all BFCM sales. Depending on your business’s growth stage, it is likely advantageous to focus on targeting new customers as well during BFCM.
When it comes to advertising platforms, Meta and Google continue to dominate the advertising budgets of the businesses in our analyses, as they combined for a total of 94.98% of total ad spend in 2023.
The cost of acquiring eyeballs is on the rise, with Google Ads CPA increasing by +31.01% and CPM increasing by +21.3% compared to BFCM 2022. As a result, many brands reduced their ad spend on Google, shifting their budgets towards more cost-effective channels.
Meta saw a slight boost in return on ad spend (ROAS), but the real star was TikTok, which delivered a +58% year-over-year (YoY) growth in ROAS and a staggering +89.66% increase in conversion value.
Given these insights, it’s crucial to use data-driven strategies to guide preparations, and the following tips will outline how to use historical knowledge to take care of your sales during BFCM 2024.
So, how do you make sure your DTC business is ready to rake in some sales during the biggest shopping event of the year?
Triple Whale Product Manager Logan Brown has some specific and actionable tips for BFCM:
Just how much does it cost to acquire a new customer? BFCM is a competitive time to spend money on new customers, but if you set up your sales with a healthy understanding of how much your products cost, variable expenses, and desired contribution margin, you can win the marketing game.
New Customer Cost Per Acquisition = nCPA = Total Ad Spend / Count of New Customers Acquired in Time Frame
Here’s how you determine your nCPA target:
If Chubbies Shorts were running a BFCM offer where you get 30% off when you buy any two shorts, this is how it would break down:
Discounts: $47.70
Estimated Shipping: $8
Pick/Pack Estimate: $2.50
Transaction fee estimate: $2.78 (assuming 2.5%)
Returns: $5.56 (assuming 5% returns)
Total: $66.54
How much does Chubbies stand to make in this hypothetical calculation if they run this promotion?
$159 (gross value) - $66.54 (expenses) - $39.75 (COGS) = $52.91
How much do you want to spend on advertising?
In this case, Chubbies may know that on average, every new customer returns an additional 20-30% on top of their original average order value (AOV) within the first 90 days. If they choose to lose more money on the initial order to bring new customers into the ecosystem then lean on their retention marketers to bring them profit on those customers in the following 90 days, it just might work out!
There’s nothing quite as annoying as receiving countless emails from DTC companies with the same sale offer that you already purchased. That’s why you should exclude subscribers that have already purchased during the promotion period from about 90% of what you send during that time.
Another bonus is that the segment will automatically update with anyone who fits the criteria, so you can set it and forget it during this busy time.
Just make sure you include them if you’re sending a brand new offer they haven’t seen yet or if you’re sending an important update regarding inventory or shipping timelines.
Here’s something very important you’ll want to set up before your BFCM sales begin.
Whenever you run big promotions, you’ll inevitably bring customers into your ecosystem that aren’t really your customers — they’re just buying gifts for your real customers.
To make sure you understand which customers are gifters, set up a Post-Purchase Survey that asks: “who are you buying for?” Then, you can store that data in either Klaviyo or Triple Whale to build a segment of customers who purchased for a friend, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend.
When you set up your marketing efforts for 2025, you can differentiate messaging for these folks as they won’t engage with your brand like the true consumer (the person who received the gift). However, you can still target them at key buying times like Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, or whichever holiday is most appropriate for your brand/who made that initial purchase.
READ MORE | Why Post-Purchase Surveys Matter: Using Zero-Party Data to Uncover Customer Insights
There’s no bigger let-down than clicking on an ad for a sale and seeing “sold out” on the item you were hoping to score! By using the Product Analytics feature in Triple Whale, you can ensure you’ve got enough stock to support the promotions. If your best-selling size/color of a T-shirt sells out, performance for that page or promoting it could hurt your conversions.
With Product Analytics, you have access to a robust array of real-time KPIs for every product and variant. Additionally, you can see which ads drove sales of each product, which can help you to iterate and improve on your ads, or decide which ones to keep running or put a stop to.
There’s a lot of metrics to keep track of, and a lot of decisions that need to be made quickly with the correct information at your fingertips.
That’s why we built these two boards specifically for mastering BFCM:
The BFCM Mission Control Board should act exactly as it sounds: your anchor in the craziness of BFCM. It’s full of useful widgets that cover everything you’ll need to keep track of during the event. It should be used to, first and foremost, take a look at your metrics from last year to set goals for how you expect to perform in 2024.
This board should be your best friend during the holiday period, and we’ll outline some of the key widgets that will help manage your moments here.
The best way to stay on top of your key metrics is to keep them front-of-mind, which is where they feature in this board. Keep an eye on your new customer cost per acquisition, contribution dollars, total spend, and blended ROAS at the top of the BFCM Mission Control Board.
Logan suggests setting a goal for contribution dollars ahead of BFCM, since it’s a huge time to push sales. If you have a 20% discount available for a product that costs $100 to purchase, $25 to manufacture, and it costs $25 to acquire a new customer, you might not have very much profit left at the end of the day. Ensure your contribution dollars are set to hit the profit you need to succeed during BFCM.
As you scroll through the rest of the BFCM Mission Control Dashboard, you’ll see important metrics you can monitor as the weekend progresses. For example, the traffic conversion funnel will help you understand which visitors are converting.
Another useful feature is the benchmarks included by industry, so you can compare your performance for specific ad metrics against your competitors. For example, if you’re a clothing store you can compare metrics like AOV, ROAS, CVR, MER, and more to other businesses in your industry to ensure you’re either performing in line with them, or better than them.
You can access industry data anytime to benchmark your metrics compared to your peers – access the Trends tool here!
With page views available per session, you can determine which of your pages are drawing in the most views. It’s important to also take a look at the conversion rate by landing page, to investigate the bounce rate to iterate on and improve pages that are causing people to leave the website. You can also break these down by source medium to understand which of your ads are converting the best.
You’re running multiple ads during this time, so it will be convenient to easily view which ads are driving the most return on investment. One smart way to get ahead for this year is to use this widget to investigate which ads performed best last year, find the best flows, and duplicate them.
This widget allows you to see which products are performing best during the event, as well as the available inventory numbers for that product. There are a few ways to stay agile during the BFCM event using the product performance widget. If you’re nearing depletion and selling thousands of units per day, you might need to adjust your ads and pivot to another product you have a lot of inventory available for. Or, you could offer a discount code on products with high inventory to start moving them a little quicker.
It’s also valuable to evaluate the product performance for last year’s BFCM period. Do you have enough inventory of last year’s best selling products? Because, chances are, they will be your hero products again this year.
What better way to analyze your performance to stay quick with your decision than with an hourly performance review? Here’s an easy way to see cumulative revenue, cumulative contribution dollars, and total revenue, hour by hour, throughout the day. The goal is to keep the band between total revenue and contribution dollars really tight; you don’t want to see total revenue getting too far and too wide apart from contribution dollars, which would mean too much of a discount.
As you’re spending money, you’ll have a clear view of your top line metrics. As you are running ads, you can analyze performance and understand which of your ads are performing well to iterate and improve on them.
In the hourly performance dashboard, you can see the total orders broken down by hour, which makes it easier to see where your campaigns are making an impact. For example, if you send a Klaviyo campaign at a certain hour, you may see its impact with a bump in orders you can visualize. This helps you ensure the spend you’re putting out is actually attracting new customers.
One way to optimize BFCM based on last year’s data is to evaluate your hourly performance to determine the best time to send a campaign (and repeat it). Or, if there was a specific hour of the day, let’s say on Cyber Monday, that specifically underperformed, try to send a campaign to a specific subset of customers during that period to boost the hourly performance year over year.
This view gives you the aggregate of all channels per hour, which can give you a great visualization into how your ad spend performs as a whole. Did Google Ads ebb and flow? Is Facebook driving all of the revenue?
You can determine a plan for 2024 based on your data from last year, and use the knowledge to scale your efforts incrementally throughout the day.
With this view, you can answer the question: with every hour, am I successfully bringing in more new customers? If you spend a lot of money during one particular hour, the sales from those ads may come in later in the day as it can take some time to get the flow to come to fruition.
Want to learn more specifics about how to use these two custom-built boards to master BFCM? Watch this video where Logan Brown explains it all!
Most of us know how to deal with stress by now (or, perhaps, you’re used to running on straight cortisol. It’s not recommended, but I’m familiar with it). The final thing to consider here is how all of this affects you personally, which the retail machine doesn’t really care about. However, you should give self-care a little consideration if you plan to keep your body for the long haul.
Here are some tips for taking care of your sanity:
1. Go outside. Touch grass. Self-explanatory, but it’s important to spend some time unchained from your desk. There’s a world outside, and you could probably benefit from a little Vitamin D and sun exposure.
2. Schedule time with friends/family. It’s very easy to forget you have a life outside of your DTC business, but chances are there’s a friend waiting to grab a coffee or cocktail. As a busy business owner, your calendar is likely overloaded. Make it a point to set aside a few time slots for recharging your social battery. Bonus points if you also get a little exercise in
3. Download Triple Whale’s mobile app. With the app on your phone, you can keep the quick details about your business performance right at your fingertips. This also makes it easy to make quick changes as necessary. And anything that makes business easier makes life easier. Search for Triple Whale in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store to get it on your device!
4. Make time for mindfulness! The benefits of meditation are plenty! Once thought to be a practice only attainable by hiding out in a monastery, apps like Calm and Headspace have made a mindfulness practice more accessible than ever. Schedule in 5-10 minutes per day where you’re not looking at your sales, and your brain will thank you!
5. Sleep enough, eat breakfast. Don’t skip out on sleep, it’s truly where your body repairs itself. And a great breakfast is the first thing you should do in the morning to get the day going!
6. Trust your team, trust the process. Let good people do good work. If you’re a one-person show, see above (give yourself a break). If you’ve got a full team, delegate appropriately and let them do their jobs.
When we look at previous years, we know that even with economic instability of 2024 that we’re still going to see a record year for BFCM. With the tips from Logan outlined above, you can be sure you’re making the most of your marketing efforts.