Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, hosts Greg Shuey and Laurel Teuscher discuss strategies for preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, emphasizing the importance of early planning. Laurel, VP at Stride, shares insights from her nine years of experience in digital marketing, particularly focusing on SEO and Google Ads. The discussion covers various critical aspects of preparation, including customer service, fulfillment processes, and marketing strategies.
Video Replay
Key Takeaways
- Start Early: Begin Black Friday/Cyber Monday planning in July to avoid last-minute rush and capitalize on all opportunities.
- Optimize Customer Service and Fulfillment: Prepare customer service teams for increased volume and common issues, and streamline fulfillment processes to handle the holiday surge effectively.
- Prepare Your Website: Update SEO and product images, conduct A/B testing, and use heat maps to optimize the website for better user experience and conversions.
- Strategize Paid and Organic Campaigns: Develop a robust plan for paid ads, including budget allocation and timing, and ensure email and SMS campaigns are well-tested and optimized.
- Finalize and Review in November: Ensure all marketing materials are approved and ready to go, and upload ads early to avoid technical issues, ensuring a smooth execution during the high-traffic period.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Laurel Teuscher LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laureltoosure/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey: 0:27
Hey everyone, welcome to the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. After some technical difficulties, we are live today, so we’re pretty pumped about that and I hope that everyone is absolutely crushing today. I hope that everyone is absolutely crushing today. Today’s discussion is going to be, in the words of my 13-year-old son, lit. Yes, it is going to be lit and we’re going to talk about why in just a minute. So, for those of you who have listened in the past, we have Laurel, our VP, here at Stride back. It’s been a minute. It’s probably been like five or six weeks, so I’m excited to have her back. She’s one smart cookie.
Greg Shuey: 1:08
And today we are going to be diving into Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategy. And yes, it is July. It’s smack dab in the middle of July. So, believe it or not, your brand should be having these discussions internally and with your agency or freelancers or whoever you have on board to help you with your marketing. You should be having these discussions right now.
Greg Shuey: 1:33
Most brands I talk with wait until September or October to start this process and by then you’re really late to the game and you will be scrambling to get everything done and probably will miss opportunities. I think, historically, we see the most leads for our business at Stride in September, and it is everyone wanting help with Black Friday. So I am hopeful that you can all come away with a handful of action items and discussion points that you can take back to your team or, if you are a solopreneur and you’re doing it all yourself, that you can kind of take these things and noodle on them and really start planning around these topics and ideas that we’re going to share with you today. So for those who are just tuning in and haven’t quote unquote met you before, laurel. Would you please take a few minutes to introduce yourselves to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?
Laurel Teuscher: 2:41
Of course, I got my start in marketing, managing Facebook pages for organizations, and I slowly added in accounts on Instagram, twitter, I guess, now known as X, and then YouTube yeah, I really enjoyed that.
Laurel Teuscher: 3:02
But I knew that social media platforms were just one piece of a really big puzzle. They’re just one piece in this whole digital ecosystem. And because of that well, not just because of that In the meantime, while I was managing these Facebook pages, I was getting a master’s in library science and my degree is really about organizing information so it can be found. So it’s kind of in my DNA to think about ecosystems, to think about bigger pictures, instead of just focusing on individual platforms or channels. Like, I just understand the bigger picture. Nine years ago I joined Stride and I came on as a digital marketing manager and I got a crash course in SEO and Google Ads or PPC. I started just learning and realizing how much I didn’t know. So I would take home the books that Greg has on his shelf and just study.
Laurel Teuscher: 4:01
Yeah, and just study. And then I’d come back and I’d read articles and I just pepper Greg and anyone on the team who knew more than me with questions to make sure I understood what I was learning and that I could apply it to our clients. And that’s really what I’ve been doing since then in the nine years is just working with the team, asking a lot of questions and watching how things go with our clients and learning from that and learning how to apply those those learnings to other clients and seeing those patterns.
Greg Shuey: 4:31
So that’s what I do. Well, thank you for sharing. You know, I strongly believe and this is kind of getting off topic just a little bit but the best marketers are the ones who take initiative. They’re the ones who aren’t sitting around being kind of waiting and being told what to do. They’re the ones who are studying. They’re the ones who are going out and trying to figure things out and uh and and testing, and so that’s one thing that I’ve absolutely loved about you, and I hope you continue to be that way, thank you, you’re awesome, so let’s jump in, you ready.
Laurel Teuscher: 5:11
Yeah, let’s do it.
Greg Shuey: 5:13
Cool. So Black Friday, cyber Monday, it’s July. Why should brands start planning now? I mean, it was 104 degrees last week here in Utah. It’s the furthest temperature away from fall and winter weather. We’re not thinking about winter, we’re not thinking about Christmas, we’re not thinking about Black Friday. But why is that important? To get started right now?
Laurel Teuscher: 5:36
Well, it’s the biggest shopping season of the year, is that Q4. So everyone looks towards it, that Q4. So everyone looks towards it. Even when it’s January, people are looking, they’re looking back on their Black Friday and saying was it a win or was it a loss? And then they’re looking forward to the next Black Friday because they know every e-commerce business knows Q4 is huge. They, you know, put holds on vacations. They ask people to not schedule it because they know it’s a big time of year when people are in a buying presence of mind. They are, they’re looking for gifts for the holiday season, but it’s also when deals are left and right and so there’s competition. And if you’re not thinking or planning for Black Friday, even like a little bit, throughout the year, you’re missing out. And what I mean by that is definitely using the sales and we’ll talk about this the sales throughout the year to test offers, to test different things, to make sure that you’ve got a really successful Black Friday. It doesn’t happen once a year, it’s planning throughout the year Black.
Greg Shuey: 6:45
Friday. It doesn’t happen once a year, it’s planning throughout the year. Yep, I love it Cool. So before we dive in to marketing, like what are some of the very first things that brands need to get dialed in Again before they start thinking about promotions and offers and those types of things?
Laurel Teuscher: 7:04
Start thinking about promotions and offers and those types of things. Yeah, so I’m going to give you, give everyone, two places to start. That has nothing to do with marketing. First, look at your customer service process and the second is look at your fulfillment process, because if these two things break during Black Friday, cyber Monday, your business is going to well, your business will be in trouble, but your customers are going to feel it.
Greg Shuey: 7:28
They’re going to feel it and they’re going to remember it.
Laurel Teuscher: 7:30
They’re going to remember it. So let’s break it down. The customer service first. So people, when they’re doing a lot of buying, they’re going to run into errors. We know that, like a code doesn’t work or they type in a code wrong or they order the wrong thing and they need their order to be adjusted. It happens regularly, regardless of Black Friday. It’s just it happens a lot more on Black Friday because the volume is higher and the first thing they try to do is reach out to your customer service team.
Laurel Teuscher: 8:02
So is your customer service team prepared to handle these questions? Do they know what to do? And it’s really good to evaluate that right now and then make sure you’ve got training. So a couple of things that I would recommend looking at Response time, like how long does it take your team to respond to customer service queries? Do you have a dedicated team or do you need to look at hiring someone or outsourcing it or using an AI tool Like these are all questions that you should be evaluating right now. The second is what are the methods for customer service? You know, do people have to fill out a form on the website? Do they send an email? Can they send a text? Is there send an email? Can they send a text? Is there a chat feature? Can they call and is this really clear? Somewhere on your website Do you have like a contact us page or some sort of customer service? Is it clear how people should talk to you if they have problems?
Greg Shuey: 9:04
Can I chime in really quick? Go for it. I will also say it’s critical to have people on call, staffed up on Black Friday and the Saturday and the Sunday after, Because a lot of times people place an order and then they’re like, oh crap, I ordered the wrong thing. People place an order and then they’re like, oh crap, I ordered the wrong thing, and by Monday customer service is slogging through 200 support tickets and then the product ships. And so you know, I know it sucks having someone on staff and ready to go over those three, four days, but it’s also absolutely critical.
Laurel Teuscher: 9:40
Yeah, and I would. Honestly. This goes into. The next thing is, if you do have someone who’s doing customer service right now and they may or may not be there or they’re going to be doing training have them start documenting their processes right now, the frequently asked questions, how they handle certain things, so that you have a training manual or an instruction guide for anyone who’s coming in on call. Or, let’s say, I’ve seen it before where, like, the marketing team has to take over some customer service time to cover all of it because it’s happening so quickly. This just having that training guide right now built out will help you have a really successful and not stress the team out when it comes to that Black Friday and they’re running into all of these frequently asked questions. But again, the volume is much higher than it is right now.
Laurel Teuscher: 10:36
And then the last thing I would think about with customer service is actually and we’ll talk about this more but your return time. So are you going to extend your return policy for the holidays? You know a lot of businesses are doing that Amazon, I know for a fact like they move it out till January 31st. Again, we’ll talk about it more later on in the podcast, but that may be something you want to evaluate and make adjustments to. So that’s customer service Fulfillment process. That’s going to be really critical to look at, because people are buying, most of the time, these items as gifts, usually during this time period, so there’s like an expectation that they would receive that product on time or in a timely manner. So you want them to receive it on time, which is all about your fulfillment team.
Laurel Teuscher: 11:30
So things that you can look at because you also don’t want to overwork that team is like how is fulfillment currently going? You know, are they quick? Are they able to get it out with a manageable with your day-to-day, or is it kind of pinched? Do you need to evaluate there? Are there bottlenecks in the process? What could that look like and then start to fix those?
Laurel Teuscher: 11:55
And then, lastly, you asked that question if we doubled the current output, what would break? Yeah, and just evaluate that, because if you don’t think about that, again, the problems that are not seen right now, like you’re doubling, tripling, like the volume increases in orders and therefore your fulfillment team’s having to take care of that. So what could break and again it’s similar to customer service too is, if you have an instruction manual. Anyone who comes and fills in. They know what the process is. It’s documented. They can refer to that. So definitely take a look at documenting your processes and then, like once you kind of ask those questions, evaluated your fulfillment process, start, like now to fix those.
Laurel Teuscher: 12:44
What do you have to adjust? What do you need to change, so that you’re not trying to make changes or solving problems on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or throughout the holiday season in Q4. You don’t want to be doing that. You don’t want to mess with processes in. That’s the worst time to do it. You want to have everything running smoothly. So evaluating things now is a really good thing for you to do.
Greg Shuey: 13:07
And ask what’s going to break One of my favorite questions ever.
Laurel Teuscher: 13:11
Yeah.
Greg Shuey: 13:11
Regardless of type of company.
Laurel Teuscher: 13:13
Yeah, one more thing is also start checking shipping deadlines for holidays, because you’re going to need to know that for your marketing. After Black Friday, cyber Monday is what’s the latest that people will need to purchase or for you to send out for it to arrive in time for Christmas, whether that’s their standard shipping or expedited shipping or whatever your shipping carrier requires. Make sure you start collecting that they have that information available. It’s good to know it so that you can start planning your marketing plans accordingly. Awesome.
Greg Shuey: 13:51
Cool. So for the rest of this episode, we’re going to try to take it in chronological order so that we can give you kind of a roadmap and a framework to start working against. So let’s talk and this is probably one of our broadest kind of timeframes here. Let’s talk July to September. That gives us what? July three, three months, 90 days, but we’re halfway through July right now. So you know we’re more like what? 70 days, something like that. What are the things that brands need to be doing on their website to make sure that they are ready to capture as much traffic and revenue as possible? Remember the key there was on website?
Laurel Teuscher: 14:33
Yeah, um. So I’m going to talk about the fun stuff first, because everyone gets excited about that. So one thing I would say is start gathering user generated content for social media, or you can ask some of your customers to send in pictures or videos that you can collect. Gather favorite reviews or favorite stories that you have that copy, that creative all of that to get people excited. The second is booking your holiday promotion photo and video shoots. Don’t wait too late on these, because you’re going to need to get the stuff, get the files back from your photographer, and then you’re going to want to review them and you’re going to want to select your favorites to then, um, use in ads or on the website, update the website.
Greg Shuey: 15:30
So don’t wait too long for this and if you’re not doing those, in-house photographers book up, models, book up. You know staging homes that do staging, like everything, books up really fast, and so get that on the calendar.
Laurel Teuscher: 15:45
Yeah, and then I would definitely say, like, plan out your stock, like what items do you have in stock? What items have performed well in the past? What do you want to highlight this year? And make sure you have enough stock for Q4, not just for Black Friday. I mean, if you’re holding it until Black Friday, that’s fine, but just knowing like you know your customers you should know your customers. If not, there’s plenty of episodes in this podcast about knowing your customers. But you should know what products they are going to love and that they want to buy. And so make sure you have stock.
Laurel Teuscher: 16:22
Because it’s so hard to get, like, more stock in during Q4 because shipping takes forever, like people take more vacations. So if you’re ordering overseas containers, customs, like all of that, I don’t even want to scare you, but it’s just plan your stock now, between now and September, so that you’re not worrying about it. So that’s the fun stuff, I would say the exciting stuff, the stuff that makes you be like, oh, I can’t wait. Now I’m going to talk about the not so fun stuff, which is like the to-do list. So the first thing I would recommend is double check your SEO work. So, are you ranking for keywords. What keywords do you need to expand to? This is where an SEO consultant or an agency can sometimes help you if you don’t know those. But making sure you have that visibility because a lot more people are searching, they’re trying to find you and especially as you get into October, early November, people are making searches and kind of like saving things in the back of their mind because they know Black Friday’s coming, they’re preparing for it.
Greg Shuey: 17:30
Now is also the time to build really strong gift guides as well and be able to build out that content, optimize it, start getting some links back into it so that it’s ranking decent when people start researching gifts to give during the holiday season. Yeah, that’s great.
Laurel Teuscher: 17:46
The second is I would start A-B testing on the website, like, if you haven’t started, I mean you can. I know it costs money to do that. If you haven’t started, I mean you can, I know it costs money to do that. The other thing you might want to consider is just adding a heat map to your website to start recording consumer behavior, what’s happening. There’s really there’s. There’s paid tools, there’s free tools at stride. We really like to encourage clients to use Microsoft clarity. It’s an awesome tool.
Laurel Teuscher: 18:13
It works really well and it’s free and it’s free, but it’s just really good not to just install it but actually to look at the heat maps and looking at those reports and seeing what barriers you can potentially remove from your website. That would help people your customers to actually purchase faster. So by observing their behavior now you can make adjustments that will improve the conversion rates. When it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
Greg Shuey: 18:43
And make sure that you’re looking at both desktop and mobile.
Laurel Teuscher: 18:47
Yeah, yeah, most of our clients, their majority of traffic and majority of revenue is now coming from mobile, but there’s a good portion where a lot of them are seeing it on desktop and then tablets, like kind of down there. But like, just evaluate all of them, make sure you’re not missing something, okay, uh, updating your product images this kind of goes along with that photo shoot we talked about, make sure, and you don’t have to do it necessarily in September, but it’s a good idea. So Google recommends that you have three high quality images per product for their product feed on your website to get the visibility. So make sure that you’ve got the most up-to-date product images that you want to show off your products or build your plan of like, which needs to be updated. And then it is now July, but you can still test those offers. So, even though Mother’s Day has come and gone Mother’s Day tends to be this really big holiday for sales you can still test. There’s end of summer sale, there’s back to school sales, there’s Labor Day or even first day of autumn. You need to start testing your offers to see what will help your customers convert, and here are just a couple of ideas Like you should test whether you should have a code or maybe just a site-wide automatically applied discount, and the reason why.
Laurel Teuscher: 20:19
If you go back to customer service with a code, you can like measure how many people use it. But often people run into issues. They don’t spell it correctly, they have it’s case sensitive and so they don’t have it right. It’s case sensitive and so they don’t have it right, and that can lead to more customer service problems. Whereas a site-wide discount, it’s automatically applied, it makes it easier. It removes one of those friction points that would cause somebody to bounce and not make a purchase. But do you want to have a site-wide discount? What should it be? These are things that you can test now in your sales and should have been testing throughout the year, but you still have time to test. The other thing is, if you’re trying to do like a tier discount I’ve seen this like buy this much and save this much, buy this much, save this much You’ve got to test out like how to make it really really clear to your customers and fast that for them to understand what the discount is.
Laurel Teuscher: 21:18
You don’t want people doing math. The only people who like doing math are the math people like the STEM, which would be like my whole family. They all love math. I don’t. I don’t do math in my head. I have to, like write it down. If you’re making it that hard for people, they’re going to bounce. So think about your offers being really simple and easy, um, for them to figure out. And then oftentimes, like, when you’re thinking about offers bogos, uh, they’re not as good as you think they might be. Um, really like it has to be the best product that’s on your store, like that’s the one that people will potentially buy one get one free. But otherwise, like I, I would just recommend usually a discount Like that’s.
Laurel Teuscher: 22:04
My biggest tip is, like most customers are expecting for Black Friday, cyber Monday to be your best offer. So, um, I’ve seen people most of the time like the standard that I saw last year and I see most of the time is between 20 to 30% based on margins. But I’ve seen some marketers across LinkedIn X, formerly known as Twitter, that whole thing, um, not the mouthful. Anyways, I’ve seen marketers suggest that 25% or more is really the lowest. You should go with your offer on Black Friday, cyber Monday. Make sure it’s high, make sure it’s a big discount, because otherwise people are so acclimated to a 15% or a 20%, that it’s not worth it for them and they’ll bounce and they’ll head somewhere else. Percent or 20 percent that it’s not worth it for them and they’ll bounce and they’ll head somewhere else. Yeah, um. And then lastly sorry it’s a lot, I told you this is the not so fun stuff, um is, have you tested out buy now, pay later options? So in 2023, like from the black friday, the usage of buy now, pay later actually increased by 47%.
Greg Shuey: 23:16
It was insane.
Laurel Teuscher: 23:17
So more people were using that solution, and if you don’t have that on your website and you have maybe a really high average order value or your products are more expensive, it might be worth testing this in your sales to see if that helps people convert faster.
Greg Shuey: 23:35
And just given the state of our economy right now, purchasing power’s down, right Disposable income’s down, and so giving buyers option to tap into. I don’t know that I’d necessarily call it credit services, but solutions like that is only going to benefit you in the long run. I think I’ll chime in on one more thing, Laurel, and this is kind of yeah, what did I miss?
Greg Shuey: 24:03
Well, the big one for me is product pages to make sure that your product pages are absolutely dialed in.
Greg Shuey: 24:08
You talked about the product imagery, which is great, but I still see way too many product pages that have like a two sentence product description and then maybe some care instructions right, if we’re talking about clothing or or some sort of soft good whereas, like the, the sites that I see that convert super well have very detailed product descriptions, very detailed descriptions about the materials, care, those types of things, robust, frequently asked questions and, of course, customer reviews.
Greg Shuey: 24:40
I can’t believe the number of websites I look at that still don’t have customer reviews on them. And so, just making sure that you have all of that built out and enabled and I know it can seem overwhelming and daunting, and I think I wrote a LinkedIn post about it a few weeks ago just start knocking out 10 a week. You know, if you start right now and start knocking out 10 to 15 a week, it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours a week and start with your most popular products, your highest margin products, and start just going down the list and you’re going to be very well prepared going into Black Friday, cyber Monday.
Laurel Teuscher: 25:13
Awesome. Yeah, that’s a really great point, thank you.
Greg Shuey: 25:16
Cool, all right. Once September rolls around, what should a brand shift their focus to?
Laurel Teuscher: 25:22
Yeah. So I feel like I’m giving a lot of lists in this episode. I’m really sorry, but there’s two areas that I would focus on, starting in September is the first is paid channels and then the second is your SMS and email. So paid channels, definitely like. Start evaluating.
Laurel Teuscher: 25:42
What campaigns should you be running and how are you going to use your budget? What is your budget for Black Friday, cyber Monday? So questions to consider besides those ones is like if you have a small budget, are you planning to spend it all during that weekend? Are you going to just run retargeting ads? So you need to like drive traffic to the site so that you can be retargeting people. What channels do you want to focus on?
Laurel Teuscher: 26:12
I think that a lot of people forget Black Friday, cyber Monday that your competition isn’t just your normal competitors that sell the same products as you. Every other small business, big box store to the almighty Amazon is going to be your competition because they are pushing apps, they are trying to capture people’s dollars, they’re trying to get the sales. So you need to decide how you’re going to spend your ads. We’ve had clients before who they just say I don’t want to be in the mess of Black Friday, cyber Monday. So they actually do a sale that we have advertised on meta ads two weeks early and we say this is the sale and they still have like that sale, that discount code available through black Friday, cyber Monday, but we turn off the ads. We don’t run that or we run retargeting ads. We don’t like try to play the game because we know that that’s not like, it’s just not going to go far, the money won’t go as far Ad costs are higher.
Greg Shuey: 27:16
Like it’s ridiculous.
Laurel Teuscher: 27:18
Like ad costs that whole week it starts to just creep up versus what you were paying earlier in the in the month, in November. So, like, really take and evaluate, like how do I want to, how do we want to spend the budget, so that we can be really smart about it. And then just looking at, like what are these campaigns? Again, this should have influenced some of those photo shoots you had taken before and the video shoots, like we’re going to need these types of assets to run. But just taking a look at your paid channels I think is really, really important and trying to figure that out in September.
Laurel Teuscher: 27:57
Email and SMS, though. What I want you to be doing in September is starting to test your cadence, if you haven’t already. Like how often should you be emailing? How often should you be doing SMS? Again, this helps maybe earlier if you have a sale to test on. That’s about the same length or longer where you can be doing, you know, should I send an email per day or an SMS, like once per day?
Laurel Teuscher: 28:24
What’s, what’s the cadence that works best for my customers, so that I’m reaching them and not annoying them? And then I would highly, highly, highly recommend looking at all of your flows or automations, like your abandoned cart, your site abandonment, your browse abandonment, your added to cart abandonment, like make sure they’re running properly, make sure that they’re up to date, that they’re clean, that the designs. You might even want to look at the coupon codes that you may have in there and see if you want to make a note to remove those come November, because you know that it won’t work with the discount code that’s going on. You don’t want to double discount things and so like just clean it all up, take a look at that, and doing it in September again helps you get prepared for November so that you don’t have to worry about it.
Greg Shuey: 29:19
Got it All right On to October. What’s next?
Laurel Teuscher: 29:23
Already October. That’s crazy, okay. So, coming back to email, in October, I want everybody to spend time cleaning up their email list. Many businesses don’t do it. They just think it’s enough to have that like unsubscribed or suppressed list. But there’s also people who haven’t opened or clicked an email in the last like 90 days, 180 days, and these people just aren’t engaged and, in fact, they’re bringing down your. They’re sending signals right to the email providers that your emails aren’t good because they’re bringing down your. They’re sending signals right to the email providers that your emails aren’t good because they’re not even opening them. So create a sunset flow. You can. You can do this in September, you can do it in October. But create a sunset flow and remove them. Get them unsubscribed, like if they’re not engaging, they don’t want to do anything. If they’re not engaging, they don’t want to do anything. They’re not a valuable customer for you. The number of emails on your list is not a badge of honor anymore. You want to focus on the customers who are coming to the website, who are engaging and who will ultimately bring you revenue. I love it, okay.
Laurel Teuscher: 30:34
So then the second one is just continue to decide like what your creative should be. Testing it out Again, testing out your budget. You built that plan in September. You figured out your offer. So make sure you’re testing out the creative, what images work the best, and make sure you captured those images in the photo shoots and then start making your designs in October. And the reason why is you don’t want to wait till November. You want to make sure you’re tweaking it. You’re looking at the designs. You’ve um. Your designers have time. You don’t want them to rush so you can make adjustments and make sure everybody’s happy with the final result. When it comes to your ad creative Um.
Laurel Teuscher: 31:15
You also like we talked about the return policy, but you can extend your return policy during the holidays In Merchant Center if you go into like returns, there’s the return policy that you should have and you can click on that and there is an add a return window extension where you can specify the dates and you can say, like this is how long you have to return it. And it’s just one more place where you can give people more confidence from buying from you, because they know that they can return these Christmas gifts after the holidays if it’s not something that worked for them. So that’s especially important with clothing Like, does it? Is it going to fit? I mean, I did this when I was a little girl. Like my mom would buy me clothes and I’d have to try on all of them on Christmas day so that if it didn’t fit, we were headed back to the store to do exchanges, like just after Christmas. So it’s not abnormal to do that, but it’s easy to do that now and show people, hey, there’s an extended return policy so you can make a purchase, and again, just give them a little bit more confidence in your business that it’s okay for them to start making those purchases now.
Laurel Teuscher: 32:34
And then I am switching back. This isn’t very organized, I’m sorry, but switching back to email SMS. Um, you’re cleaning your list, but start growing your list. So maybe change up your pop-up offer or make sure that your pop-up on your website makes it really clear that, like, they need to start signing up if they want to be the first to know when Black Friday offer hits or any sales that are happening during the holiday season. Like, make sure that you’re gathering more of those emails, more of the phone numbers. Invite those people to be on the list, because people who are coming to the website in October, they are shopping. They’re window shopping, they’re getting ready, they’re trying to figure out who they want to buy from. So that’s something really effective to start doing in October.
Greg Shuey: 33:24
So what finishing touches need to happen at the beginning of November?
Laurel Teuscher: 33:28
Okay, so you did the ad designs in October. You’ve already decided what the offer was and hopefully you’ve gotten the stakeholders to sign off on the deal, the offer, the sale dates. But what you need to do in that first week is get all of the stakeholders to sign off on the ad creative, the designs, all of it, so that you don’t have to be making even more changes. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to make those changes at the last minute, so try to get that done the first week of November. The next thing is we highly recommend and we do this on our team is that we start uploading the Black Friday ads or any of these ads in November, about two weeks before the sale starts. So if that’s on Black Friday, two weeks before that, but if it’s earlier, again two weeks before that. And the reason why is because there’s been several times I can think of, like 2019, 2021, 2022, where Meta Business.
Greg Shuey: 34:35
Manager Pretty much every year.
Laurel Teuscher: 34:36
Yeah, meta Business Manager shuts down in some capacity.
Greg Shuey: 34:41
Crashes yeah.
Laurel Teuscher: 34:43
And no one has access to it, or they can’t edit anything, or they can’t do anything, or you can’t upload images, or you have no access to anything access to anything. So it becomes this very, very stressful moment where, if you have them and this is what we’ve been implementing since, I think, 2019, is two weeks before we get it all set up and then it’s ready to go, it’s scheduled and so if we lost access, those ads would still be running. But usually Meta figures out the bug, like the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. But you just don’t want again like, planning all ahead is helpful for your team so that they’re not having to put in the long hours, so they’re not having to stay up all Wednesday night till midnight to make sure that these ads go live.
Laurel Teuscher: 35:33
You want everybody talks about sorry, I’m going to get on a soapbox Everybody talks about, like, the work-life balance and trying to just incorporate everything. And being aware of that and planning ahead will help you, help everyone on your team, have a much better and calmer experience during a very stressful time. We know it’s stressful. We experience that as marketers, as we can feel the anxiety and the tension and the buildup to Black Friday. But doing these plans will help have a better organized and just allow everyone to breathe a little during that really amped up time of year.
Greg Shuey: 36:15
All right, take us home. What about the week of Black Friday? Cyber Monday.
Laurel Teuscher: 36:23
Okay. So the first thing I would recommend is that your subscriber list gets a first shot at the Black Friday deals. There’s a bonus for being a subscriber, or there should be right. They shouldn’t have to wait until everybody else does. So, whether you want to give them two hours or 24 hours or two days, I mean whatever it is but give them something. Give your emails and SMS, like those subscribers, something to look forward to, something, some bonus, and then you can actually measure how much. How much did that get them to to make a purchase?
Laurel Teuscher: 37:06
Make sure all your emails and SMS and ads are just scheduled to go out and then double check, when they are supposed to go live, that they did go out. And then I would just say don’t sit during that week and watch your analytics Like you’ll have time to do that later to give yourself a pat on the back to rejoice. There’s probably team members on Sia, like your customer service team or fulfillment or that need help, so that’s a good place to go be or your marketing team, like there’s maybe issues with meta ads. And then, lastly, you can also start working on your Christmas or December campaigns, because you’ve been so focused on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That and no, this year, 2024, black Friday is coming really late in the year. It’s like November 28th, 29th the 28th is Thursday, so it’s just really late in the later in the month.
Laurel Teuscher: 38:06
Cyber Monday’s in December, and so in order for you to have a really, it’s just it crunches everything. So make sure you’re starting to look ahead and not just like looking at the dollar signs like increasing because you’re of all of this hard work. That’s what I would do during the week is make sure you’re making clear, like what the deals are and then you know, evaluating how things are, but then getting back to work and focusing on the next thing Because, as we know, cyber Monday happens, but then there’s the shipping deadlines for standard shipping, there’s expedited shipping, there’s the last call to get people to make a bigger purchase in December because they’ve done all the other Christmas shopping and now they need to get the harder to find things. These are all the important things to get done during that week and be thinking about as well.
Greg Shuey: 39:01
Cool, awesome. Well, that was a lot. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our listeners?
Laurel Teuscher: 39:08
Oh man. So I know no one wants to talk about Black Friday. They just don’t. It’s so far away and it feels so aspirational. And I know no one wants to talk about Black Friday. They just don’t. It’s so far away and it feels so aspirational. And I know that this time this year has just been really hard on e-commerce businesses. It’s not been easy, whether it’s ad costs have been higher or it’s just not as easy with interest rates and inflation and you know turn employee turnover, like it’s just not what it was a year ago, two years ago. But I think starting your planning now is definitely going to help your team have a really successful Black Friday.
Laurel Teuscher: 39:53
I talked with a client just last week. We were talking about Black Friday and I said you know, start early. And they’re like oh yeah, we know we made the mistake, like last year, of waiting until October and it was so stressful. So what you want to do right now is you have time, you have space to really think clearly about things instead of trying to make a lot of decisions really fast. So take that time to really think about about things instead of trying to make a lot of decisions really fast.
Laurel Teuscher: 40:18
So take that time to really think about what you did last year, what worked. Evaluate that. I mean it’s maybe even getting together with your marketing team and having that discussion of okay, what did we do last year, what didn’t work? My team what I like to do is, in December, just evaluate that and write it all down and make notes and pull together data that we saw so that when it comes to this time, this, the next year, so six months later, we have all that documented and it’s really easy for us to say, okay, here’s our plan, here’s what we’re going to do for Black Friday of this year. So this is a good time to just like go back, focus, reset and get ready for Q4.
Greg Shuey: 41:00
Cool, thank you. I think, just from my perspective, right, we know that consumer spending’s down. We see it across a number of our clients and a significant number of our prospects that I’m talking to and just other agencies that I talk to right, e-commerce is just down in general. But when we look at the data for the last couple of years, every Q4 has been bigger and stronger than the next and I think my gut tells me that we are going to have record setting numbers again in Q4.
Greg Shuey: 41:37
I think people are just being a little bit more cautious right now and that you know. If you’re down in the dumps, you’re a little bit depressed, you don’t know what to do. I’m seeing, you know, shops folding up right now, e-commerce brands folding up right now and just calling it quits. I think you’re going to make up a lot of that lost ground because people are going to be ready to spend during the holiday season, they’re wanting to provide good Christmases for their families and their kids and know is to start planning right now so that you can be prepped, so that you can be ready to take advantage for when people pull out their credit cards and are ready to start shopping again. So, yeah, I think that was a really fantastic discussion. Thanks so much, laurel. Thanks for taking a lot of time to prep this. I appreciate it.
Laurel Teuscher: 42:35
You’re welcome.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
