Who the hell starts Black Friday preparation in August?
Brands that generate six and seven figures start prepping early.
This is going to be a 3 part post series.
In this part 1 post, we are going to share our Black Friday strategy and the importance of preparation.
Most mediocre e-commerce businesses just slap 30-50% off one day before Black Friday starts and call it a successful preparation for the Black Friday campaign.
The preparation part is really important because in the past we have had many issues for example
- Inventory ran out on Saturday thus missing hundreds of thousands in sales.
- Bad inventory only 20% of the inventory was best sellers and the rest of the 80% was new products or products that nobody wanted.
- Advertising accounts not being able to spend as much money as we needed
- Ads not accepted in time.
- Terrible offers that were to complicated and didn’t make as much money.
How to avoid this?
INVENTORY
- It’s important to have a plan for how much money you actually want to make.
Answering this question will help you calculate how much inventory you will need so you can avoid running out of it on the first day.
If you want to do $250k in sales then make sure you have enough inventory.
- Analyze your best sellers and make sure you stack them for Black Friday.
No need to have 80% of new products prepared for Black Friday if you already have enough data that shows your best-selling products.
Sell the best sellers and on Cyber Monday you can drop a new line of never-before-seen limited amount of products that people can purchase only at Cyber Monday.
ADVERTISING SPEND
- This one hurt us back in 2020 and 2021 for some accounts. Facebook had a spending limit and due to that, we were not able to spend the amount of money that we wanted.This is especially important for the small accounts that currently spend $100-$500 a day.If you decide to 10x your ad budget on Black Friday there is a high likelihood that you will be capped at a spending limit.
- Write to Facebook support two months in advance to let them know that once Q4 starts you are planning to significantly increase your ad spend.
AD CONTENT
- We like to prepare our ad content calendar at least by the mid of September.In the past when we just started out we launch black friday ads and it took more than 36 hours to get accepted which was incredibly frustrating and cost us money.
- Prepare an ad content calendar and plan all types of ads that need to be created. So you can launch them in time and not worry about it.
OFFERS
- Having a clear and simple offer is really important.Don’t use :
- Complicated bundles
- Spend x get x
- Buy x sets of products to get x (limited product for free)
- Discount codes – you are missing out on a ton of $ if you are using discount codes.
Instead run simple offers sitewide, that are applied automatically and show people how much they save on each product.
I tried to keep this as simple as possible.
In the next part, we will be talking about the importance of building hype.
Thanks for reading, hope you liked it.