5 Last-Minute BFCM Fixes You STILL Have Time to Make

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the E-Commerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today by two very special guests. First of course, we've had, she's been on the podcast before a couple times. She is now, and this is, this is the first time this is being announced.

[00:00:18] Richard Gaffin: Our VP of Creative here at Common Thread Collective, Adrian Austin. Adrian, what's going on?

[00:00:24] Adrianne: Richard, it's so good. And my favorite part about today is our outfits. If you're

[00:00:28] Richard Gaffin: That's right,

[00:00:29] Adrianne: see them. If you're watching, you realize that Richard is wearing a Christmas sweater. Allie's repping green. I'm repping red. We're so ready to talk about

[00:00:36] Richard Gaffin: that's right,

[00:00:37] Adrianne: not even funny.

[00:00:38] Richard Gaffin: that's right. A couple days away. And I'd be remiss of course, if I didn't introduce our other guest. This is her first time on the pod, I believe Ally Sims, who is our Director of Growth Strategy here, and she's, she's the one in charge of kind of guiding our BFCM strategy as we we roll into it.

[00:00:52] Richard Gaffin: Allie, what's going on?

[00:00:53] Allison Simms: Excited to be here. Thanks, Richard. And yeah, lots to talk about. I'll try to keep it brief.

[00:00:58] Richard Gaffin: Okay, cool. Yeah, let's, let's dive right [00:01:00] into it. So what we're talking about today. Is basically like by the time you're hearing this, this will be the 25th of November, I believe. So three days until Black Friday, it'll be right around the corner. So what we wanna provide here is basically some like last minute tips, last minute kind of checklist of what you need to have completely.

[00:01:17] Richard Gaffin: Prepared for BFCM weekend. Things you need to make sure are in place. So we're gonna talk primarily from the lens of growth strategy. Then Adrian is also gonna jump in and talk specifically about creative. 'cause obviously that's the linchpin of a lot of what we're doing here. So I'm gonna throw it over to you to kind of start Allie.

[00:01:31] Richard Gaffin: And so we have five. Kind of, you sent over a, a checklist of basically five points that you need to run through before the weekend itself. And so we'll get into that. So, so I'll just like start with number one here, which you've had listed as lock your spend to A MER targets. But so talk to me a little bit about what you're doing with our teams as Visa V spent a MER targets to, to prepare.

[00:01:53] Allison Simms: Yeah, and so this is really high level like how we operate at CDC. These have actually been set a month out, or at least [00:02:00] hopefully have been set further out than the Tuesday before Black Friday. But ultimately it's about making sure that you, and across anyone who's operating a business heading into this really important moment is that you're really in lockstep between marketing, finance, the people actually executing, that we have aligned ideal rates of return, that we are very, very clear on what we are going after from an efficiency perspective, so that we can really deeply understand how should we be pushing and pulling across.

[00:02:27] Allison Simms: This important moment. And there's been, if you're a listener of the podcast and a follower of Taylor holiday's x then you, then you've seen and know the revenue pacing slides like this is a lot of kind of going through and trying to understand what's the ideal rate of return, but then how does the revenue flow throughout the days and the hours.

[00:02:47] Allison Simms: And so that's a lot of the work that we're doing now. And if you haven't done that yet, the Tuesday before, I highly recommend taking a look and making sure you know that for your brand.

[00:02:55] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So I mean, part of this is, and we also talked to Luke about this, I think last week, which [00:03:00] is the idea of making sure that your hourly. Ba basically having some understanding of like hourly forecast and hourly expectation as opposed to

[00:03:07] Allison Simms: Exactly.

[00:03:08] Richard Gaffin: about, which is daily. But when you talk about the shape of revenue, I think what you're talking about primarily is, for instance, on Black Friday, let's say you might see historically transfer your brand.

[00:03:19] Richard Gaffin: Might you see a spike in in the morning, maybe then you see a lull in the afternoon, then a spike in the evening, something along those lines. Cyber Monday, of course, is famously kind of bad in the morning. Through the afternoon and then spikes in the evening because people have to go to work. So having some understanding of for your brand, what you're expecting on an hourly basis.

[00:03:36] Richard Gaffin: So, so that is essentially if what you're kind of prepping for our brands right now, is that right?

[00:03:41] Allison Simms: That's the root of it. Yep.

[00:03:42] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. Cool. So, I'm just kinda like going through some of the other stuff that you have written down here in terms of spent to A MER targets making sure your incremental incrementality factors. Are in place to set IROS targets. So of course, that's another important thing just to do generally, but in this particular case, because it's [00:04:00] so crucial on an hour by hour basis that you have some expectation there. Yeah. Okay. So, so basically it's just making sure your forecast is in, is in place, or

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