The Black Friday Budget Mistake That Could Tank Your Monthly Sales

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks, welcome back to The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today, a day before election day, in fact, by Mr. Taylor Holiday, our CEO. Taylor, what's going on, man?

[00:00:13] Taylor Holiday: You may notice a new accessory that I've got now, these are actually prescription. I, for the first time in my life, my, my right eye just quit on me. It just said, I've had enough, I gave you 40 good years. And it's just had enough. So I was at the optometrist and yeah, these are not me just trying to accessorize.

This is me capitulating to being a failing rotting corpse. Literally.

[00:00:35] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah. For 40 is taking things from you one at a time, huh? There's the well, so this is a new era for Taylor's, the glasses Taylor from here on out, huh?

[00:00:43] Taylor Holiday: It is. It is. It begins today. It begins today.

[00:00:46] Richard Gaffin: Awesome. Well, exciting. Okay. And the first thing we're training Taylor glasses, Taylor's mind on today is talking about spend pacing up for black Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Taylor, you came to us with a specific call out that you wanted to bring to the podcast to the folks out there, which is the danger of underspending on black Friday.

So why don't you unpack that idea a little bit for us?

[00:01:04] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So obviously so much of this podcast is an overflow of my day to day conversations with the customers. And one of the experiences I'm having right now is like at the beginning of the month, we're trying to lock in the spend pacing for November. And this month is hard and scary because Black Friday is the 29th.

It's like the last day before the month's over. And so what I'm seeing people do, I don't know if it's just that, or if it's this perpetual narrative around moving your Black Friday sale earlier and earlier, but I'm seeing the spend pacing that people are trying to propose and put forward. Not as consolidated into Black Friday as it should be.

And when I go look at everybody's historical performance, everybody's, it's a hyperbole, it's probably not everybody, but most people's historical performance, what I see is that they underspent specifically the day of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and specifically the weekend of Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Or sorry, specifically the day of Black Friday. And then more broadly, the weekend of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it is hard to understate just how unique that moment is. And I know this is something you've probably heard from us a lot because you're starting your sale earlier, doesn't mean that the concentration of purchase behavior follows that action.

It is still going to be disproportionately onto Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So I would really challenge you to go look. Last year and see like how much more efficient was black Friday than every other day. And could I have spent more money into that opportunity? And I'm guessing the answer is yes.

[00:02:29] Richard Gaffin: So again, like what we're seeing is people are sort of feeling the pressure to expand, expand their black Friday sales earlier and earlier. And as part of what we're seeing, not just that spend is allocated, maybe inappropriately relative to the opportunity, but also people are maybe. Taking away from Black Friday by actually bringing those sale moments further as well.

[00:02:50] Taylor Holiday: That's right. Yeah. They're bringing both budget and revenue expectation forward, which I'm not saying that that's necessarily a problem or not possible, but it is to say that that doesn't mean that you shouldn't maximize the concentration and opportunity on black Friday itself. And that's where I see people making the biggest error is that they're leaving room on Black Friday to get more out.

Because it's the last day of the month, it makes your whole bet of your monthly revenue, a risk you're betting a lot on a single day. And so I think some people are trying to compensate for that by not creating that much risk factor that late in the month, which I get it. That's, that's sort of how we would often think about it is try to front load more of it if we can.

But I would just really encourage as you look at last year's performance, consider Each day go pull your daily performance over time and look at how much better Black Friday, Cyber Monday is than every other day. It's just, it is a unique phenomenon where it is hard to overspend the opportunity. I very rarely see people actually overspend the opportunity.

[00:03:53] Richard Gaffin: So a ballpark then, like how, how much more disproportionately or what's the disproportionate opportunity on Black Friday relative to say like the weeks before?

[00:04:02] Taylor Holiday: It's at least triple every other day. So, that, that's about what I see is that like when people look at their daily revenue from Wednesday, Thursday to Friday, it's three times as much at least. Now I'd say that you could even push for four times that. And so if you think about your budget of a million dollars spread over 30 days, and you start with like a daily pacing of, okay, that's three $30,000 or $33,000 a day, if you were to evenly distribute it.

If you were to go and concentrate 150 to Friday and 120 to Saturday, okay, now you're at closer to 750 for the remainder of the days. And you can sort of get to thinking about it like that for a lump sum concentration. But again, go look for you individually and figure out what that is last year and how disproportionate the performance was, because I think it could be even four or five times as much as any other day if you really get after it and execute effectively.

[00:04:54] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so one thing that we've talked about before, I've talked about with Luke in terms of thinking about offer strategy is that Black Friday is I mean, obviously it's this cultural phenomenon that you can't replicate in any other way, but it's also like the highest going to be our highest volume sales day in terms of number of orders.

And so we've talked about building your offer accordingly to bring sort of the most number of people in and then cyber Monday tends to be fewer people spending more because it's a work day and a number of other factors. But I guess like that, this sort of. Plays into that, or that's just another illustration of what we're talking about here, which is black Friday is a sales volume day.

That can't possibly be replicated in any other way. Right.

[00:05:33] Taylor Holiday: That's right. And I think if you can come up with some way to just even make it a little bit more exciting for those four days, because a lot of, I know a lot of people are running their sales now, and it's just the drag of the same message going on for 25, 30 days, even if it's just a little bit of an imperative in some way.

To just. Juice that core moment to treat those 24 hours on Friday as unique and special. And to really get after maximizing them. And then even Saturday and Sunday, I would say are probably two X any other day of the year. And then you get cyber Monday, which can be even bigger than black Friday to really treat those as special and novel within the sequence of the broader story.

I think is really important. So I, I think that that's, I feel like coming here and just saying, we don't need a long podcast today. What I need you to do. Is to walk away from this right now to go look at your daily pacing last year and ask yourself, do I have enough budget concentrated into specifically black Friday?

Do I have enough budget on that day? Is there more opportunity to concentrate, to maximize the efficiency of the overall allocation by putting it into my best performing moment?

[00:06:40] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I think is, is there anything else we need to hit on this? Or is that,

[00:06:45] Taylor Holiday: No, literally like if, if, if what I can give you the day before the election is, it's all going to hopefully start getting better Wednesday. So you're probably listening to this. Maybe tomorrow is going live. I don't, I think so. It'll actually be election day. So hopefully go vote. That's a. Hopefully you're taking some time to go do that.

And then let's make sure that once we kick things off, let's get the energy going with our sale. I know a lot of people are launching right after this week or maybe even there's a presale or some moment, but, but make sure that you really have thought through, can I actually spend more than I think on specifically black Friday?

And get that budget allocated to maximize what is truly a special moment. Don't let the length of your sale or the length of the narratives around how sales are going earlier and earlier, pull away from you, how uniquely important that specific day is.

[00:07:30] Richard Gaffin: That's right. All right, folks. Short and sweet. I think that's, that's all we need for today. So thanks for joining us again. Go vote and then go spend the majority of your budget on Black Friday itself. Folks. Cool. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.