Holiday Playbook

Black Friday 2024 is almost here! While this year has FLOWN by, here at Pactx, we want to make sure that your team is able to maximize the fullest out of your holiday season sales plan. This Q4 has the added challenge of it being an election year and while we won’t get into politics, we will share a few learnings from elections past that have affected the economic landscape and a few tricks on how to navigate them. Let’s dive into it!

Starting off with when to start your sales. This is a question we get asked frequently and the answer is simply, it depends. It depends on the growth stage of your business, your margins, how much you’re spending on paid channels, and how promotional you want to be. One thing we cannot stress enough, is that during Q4 and especially around the major shopping holidays, like Black Friday, you HAVE to run a promotion because consumers expect it.

They expect them because of the holiday and not because your business has historically run them, so if the fear is that you don’t want to train consumers to wait and purchase during a sale – well you can get that fear out of your head. They expect a sale due to it being a shopping holiday and are going to buy and prioritize brands who are running a promo over a brand that isn’t. So plan to at least have a sale running on Black Friday thru Cyber Monday, we encourage a pre-Black Friday and an end of year sale to clear excess inventory but those aren’t necessary.

Now with the added challenge of it being an election year and candidates HEAVILY spending I would say to hold on any major sales and spending until after the election on 11/4 due to the increase in cost per mille (CPM’s) on paid social channels.

Next I’m sure you’re thinking, okay now that I have an idea on when to run these Q4 promos, how much should I offer? And again, it depends on your business. I would look at what your gross margins look like and decide what promotion still keeps you in the black. For example if you have a 60% gross margin on products, you could easily run a 20% off offer during Black Friday. Here are some top promo contenders to also consider:

Sitewide % off sale: offers less than 20% are no longer a meaningful discount due to brands offering that to first time customers to build their email lists
Gifts with Purchase: when they spend a minimum amount
Tiered Promo: something like, “Spend $75, save 15%; spend $100, save 20%”
Buy X, Get Y free: when a consumer buys a more expensive item they get a smaller item for free. This is a great way to get consumers to spend a little more especially if they can see the MSRP of the free item and it holds value to the consumer
Bundle sale: Bundles are a great way to increase AOV while providing value savings to the consumer.

The most important thing to remember with promos is that you want customers to seamlessly be able to checkout and not have to remember or find promo codes causing them to leave the cart in order to search for it. Therefore, having the promo code automatically applied at checkout is the most effective way to get a customer through checkout quickly.

Finally your ad creative! You want any ad promotional creative to be clear as to what the promo is and how long the promo will be live for.

Your ad creative strategy should take a 3 pronged approach. This will ensure that your messaging covers all ad placements and ad placement types and gives a variety to what the sales creative will look like while maintaining the ad content that are your top converters.

You want a split of Videos and Static Images. Meta has been heavily pushing video placements so you want to be sure that you have enough engaging video content.

Our final thoughts for a successful Q4 are as followed:

Build your lists: Starting now take the time to fill your upper funnel. This means creating campaigns centered around growing awareness and leads. This is important because come Black Friday your team can focus on email which is usually your strongest channel and can focus on retargeting ads to help drive max efficiencies with the budget you have.
Re-engage subscribers: Take some time to scrub your email lists. Create a pre-holiday email campaign to see if you can win back as many inactive email subscribers as you can and if they are still not biting, then remove them from your lists. You want to be sure that you have strong engagement and conversion metrics via email to improve deliverability so remove those that are no longer interested and invite more subscribers who are!
Make Shipping Deadlines Clear: Make sure all consumers are aware of your shipping deadlines so that they don’t wait too long and are then disappointed when they dont get their gifts in time for the holidays. Have a sticky banner on your website, in ads, emails, any form of communication with customers to make it known when their last day to get it by the holidays is.
Prepare for post Black Friday dip: We see it every year, the post Black Friday/Cyber Monday hangover. Be proactive this year and plan ahead for it, look to pull back on ad spend for a few days (depending on what your historical data shows). Starting now is your time to be less efficient with your ad dollars to drive as much awareness as you can and then post Black Friday/Cyber Monday is when you move back to efficient spending
Q5: Q5 is this hidden quarter which begins after your final holiday shipping dates and goes through 12/31 and a time of year where we see great performance. This is your time to move excess inventory! Look to close out the year with a final sale at higher discounts to move inventory you don’t plan on restocking in 2025. Be mindful as you may see some decline in performance come Christmas day when people are spending time with their families, but generally this is a highly effective sales period.

We hope this list of helpful hints is exactly that, HELPFUL! We know this is a big sales period for most brands, so focusing your attention on increasing the upper funnel now and switching tactics come post Black Friday with a final push in Q5, you should be able to crush your holiday sales goals. Happy Q4 everyone, let’s make it a great one!