How to Craft the Best BFCM Offer This Year

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: So if we, if we do this simple math of going like, all right, hey we're gonna do, I'm just gonna pick some really round numbers to make the, the out loud math easy.

We're gonna do a million dollars on Black Friday. 500,000 of it is gonna come from our existing customer base. Okay, cool. 400,000 of that's coming from email and SMS. Okay, cool. So a hundred thousand is gonna come from my retention audience on meta. Let's set that aside for a second. Now, $500,000 of it is gonna come from net new customers. Okay. If I go look at, I have. In the last 90 days, let's say 5 million impressions to an existing customer base, can I get to that number of purchases off of a remark functionally a remarketing audience of the last 90 days? Oh, okay. I think that audience is gonna represent $300,000 of potential value capture versus, okay, I'm gonna have to go out and pure play prospect to net new first impressions on this amount of people.

Like, so really thinking through. What stage of awareness is this customer at in this moment? And how much volume do I need from each of these cohorts is really important thought work to consider around the messaging and style of the ads that you're producing.

[00:01:07] Speaker: This episode of the E-Commerce Playbook is brought to you by Omnis End. If you're serious about growing your brand through email and SMS marketing. Omnis Send has your back. It combines powerful automation, smart segmentation, and real-time performance insights, all in a platform that's intuitive and built specifically for e-commerce.

With prebuilt workflows, dynamic signup forms, and full multi-channel capabilities, Omnis Send helps brands scale without unnecessary complexity. Join over 150,000 e-commerce marketers who rely on Omnis. Send every day. Head to omnis send.com/ctc and start on the free plan today. That's omnis send.com.

Slash CTC.

[00:01:46] 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, and I'm joined as I usually am by Taylor Holiday, our CEO here at Common Thread. Taylor, what's going on over there?

[00:01:59] Taylor Holiday: Just dealing with the Luke is just, he's on one. It's Q4. He's screaming in the background and so it's just kind of hard to

[00:02:06] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, I.

[00:02:06] Taylor Holiday: that kind of enthusiasm going on.

[00:02:09] Richard Gaffin: I know, I was gonna say, Luke's been on a lot of podcasts recently and he's on this one too, in a sense. He's, he'll be back there. You can kind of hear him. But so basically what we wanted to talk about today is. Offer strategy. I mean, it is. It's October the first as we record this, which means Q4 is upon us, and it's that time.

If you're not already thinking about your offer strategy, it's time to begin that right now. So we wanted to talk a little bit about some basics around tactically thinking about offer strategy, and then dive a little bit into some of the data in our Black Friday. Cyber Monday offers database, which we release every year.

We recently ran a promotion on it. It's still available on our website. To purchase. This again, is a compendium of 679. Offers from those almost 700 of the biggest e-commerce brands we go through. We take screenshots of every single company's website on the day itself, so you can get some creative inspo from them as well.

And then it also gives you a sense because it's sortable about. By vertical and by sort of day Black Friday versus Cyber Monday, exactly which types of offers people ran and what percentage of people, let's say, did BOGO or did gift with purchase or did a percentage offsite wide, whatever the case may be.

So in that sense, it gives you some insight into what people, what happened, what people are doing. And hopefully it gives you some insight into what you, yourself should be doing or gives you some inspiration for kind of the range of things that are available to you as Black Friday approaches. So we wanted to dig into this a little bit and, and sort of.

Use it as a jumping off point for a broader discussion about offer strategy. So Taylor, I'll turn it over to you. What are sort of some initial things to think about when you think about this?

[00:03:40] Taylor Holiday: Thanks Neil. I think that we have to think about offer in context of medium and user type.

[00:03:49] Richard Gaffin: Okay.

[00:03:49] Taylor Holiday: So when I think about the rhythm of Black Friday and the value capture across different points, a few different things to consider. One is that it is always underappreciated. How much. New customer acquisition potential there is for Black Friday, cyber Monday.

[00:04:08] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:09] Taylor Holiday: and so if we think about, for a lot of brands, this is the days that they will spend the most money on paid media any day of the entirety of the year. And that communication is happening primarily through meta, maybe, you know, whatever alternative app, 11 paid social, whatever other channels you're on. And this is a communication and offer design that is about taking that customer that has been considering the possibility of purchasing with you. We're looking for awesome opportunities on this day and giving them the feeling of the best available opportunity to get your product at the best available price. And this is somebody who is trying something novel new, like they, they are an entrant into your brands. And so if you think about that as a medium of communication, I think it leads you down a different path than does as an example, an opportunity to message specifically to your existing customers email and SMS. With a little bit more insight into who they are, what they buy, and what matters to them. so there's an opportunity where I would spend my efforts getting specific and tailoring maybe a broader set of offer design to people who I know more things about around their consumption of my brand. I know their loyalty.

I know the last time they purchased, I know what color skew they bought. I know lots of things about them that allows me to maybe be more specific. I think we have to think about. The medium of communication, who the offer's for. And then on that day, are you a brand where 80% of the revenue's gonna come outta your existing customer base, or 80% of the revenue's gonna come outta your new customer base?

And then how do I put my effort and energy into the offer design and communication relative to that expectation? So there's a forecasting component thinking about software design as well.

[00:05:51] Richard Gaffin: So talk to us a little bit about what it would look like to build an offer around a new customer base as opposed to building an offer, let's say around a 80% returning customer revenue brand.

[00:06:01] Taylor Holiday: So if it's new customer acquisition and I'm going onto social, I want clear. Simple communication about something that has time sensitivity and novelty to it. So this is where you get to up to 80% off this weekend only like that, that, that kind of very simple, clear messaging or the best price you'll see all year. hours, only off site-wide today, only that kind of action oriented message can be clearly understood, driven forward. Now, you may still also need a little bit of product introduction in this, so you also have to think about your level of unaided awareness. So one of the things that I think brands also need to consider is. Are you truly pure prospecting on this day? In other words, is this your first brand touchpoint? Are you a newer brand or do have you not done a lot of sort of funnel development leading into this moment where someone is encountering and you still have to explain who you are. In that case, the offer might sound like, let's say I'm selling, I don't know, weed wacker, whatever the

[00:07:14] Richard Gaffin: Sure.

[00:07:15] Taylor Holiday: that I'm selling, and it still says the world's best weed wacker. best ever price, like you still need to not let go of the introduction of who you are versus maybe you're a brand where you've spent a lot of effort driving awareness over the previous eight weeks, and now it's just about clearing the funnel and you know that most of your advertising's gonna be going into. A warmer audience that has been to your site lately, and you're gonna be trying to clear out the funnel and it's gonna be less important and it's gonna be more focused on the offer. So those little subtleties matter in the communication of thinking about, okay, who am I really speaking to? Do I still have to introduce what my brand is and what the product is?

In which case, like a bright red. 50% off graphic might leave people going, I don't even know who you are. 'cause your brand name doesn't really communicate who you are and I've never seen you before.

[00:08:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:04] Taylor Holiday: this No, no, no. This is gonna be frequency, at least number two for the vast majority of these presences.

And so that kind of ad, the sort of classic Nordstrom's big red graphic, 50% off today only. Sufficient to go out and capture all the attention and demand that you need. And so I think that's like another layer to the new customer acquisition side that says, okay, I want simplicity and clarity, but I have to ask the question is, is this frequency touchpoint number one?

In which case, I can't let go of the explanation of who we are and what we're selling and the value proposition, and then I want it to feel like scarcity of price really closely tied thereafter.

[00:08:38] Richard Gaffin: So give us, give us a sense of the number, like how, how are you determining the frequency in this case? Right. So is this just a matter of like, Hey, for the last eight weeks we've been spending, spending, spending on

[00:08:48] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I think,

[00:08:49] Richard Gaffin: the

[00:08:49] Taylor Holiday: I think you could back into some simple math of like the expectation of revenue for that day

[00:08:54] Richard Gaffin: mm-hmm.

[00:08:54] Taylor Holiday: it's gonna come from. Right? So if we, if we do this simple math of going like, all right, hey we're gonna do, I'm just gonna pick some really round numbers to make the, the out loud math easy.

We're gonna do a million dollars on Black Friday. 500,000 of it is gonna come from our existing customer base. Okay, cool. 400,000 of that's coming from email and SMS. Okay, cool. So a hundred thousand is gonna come from my retention audience on meta. Let's set that aside for a second. Now, $500,000 of it is gonna come from net new customers. Okay. If I go look at, I have. In the last 90 days, let's say 5 million impressions to an existing customer base, can I get to that number of purchases off of a remark functionally a remarketing audience of the last 90 days? Oh, okay. I think that audience is gonna represent $300,000 of potential value capture versus, okay, I'm gonna have to go out and pure play prospect to net new first impressions on this amount of people.

Like, so really thinking through. What stage of awareness is this customer at in this moment? And how much volume do I need from each of these cohorts is really important thought work to consider around the messaging and style of the ads that you're producing.

[00:10:03] Speaker 2: Still juggling multiple tools for email SMS and Push Marketing. Omnis Send brings them all together in one powerful platform built for e-commerce, you can launch prebuilt automation workflows, build audience segments based on shopping behavior, and even gamify your signup forms without spending weeks learning the tool.

It just works and it's built to scale with you. Every account starts on a free plan, and unlike other platforms, Omnis Send gives you 24 7 human support. No matter your tier, check it out@omnisend.com slash ctc or click the link in the description.

[00:10:34] Richard Gaffin: So something that you're sort of alluding to here as well is like the idea that. As opposed to just having that single sort of splashy, public facing offer. Like say, for instance, a lot of the offers that are pictured in the database there's also so much value in segmentation of offers as well, perhaps, right?

Like hitting your returning customers with something specific to them via email as opposed to just hitting everybody with the same, like 50% off, whatever. Like that's where we get into like early bird specials, like that type of thing.

[00:11:00] Taylor Holiday: So I, I think this is the, the part where I would spend a lot of time and energy is trying to think about how to make the customers that I do have feel special and unique in some way. So we, a great example of this is like. BP born primitive, who I reference a lot 'cause they just do good

[00:11:15] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:15] Taylor Holiday: They do a good job of like, they give early access to their customers or to their v they call them VIP customers. Customers who have spent a certain amount of money with them over a period of time. It grants them early access to the sale. They get, you know, two hours early to make sure that all the skews are in stock, nothing sells out.

And they kind of message around that like, Hey, these leggings are gonna gonna go quick or these shoes. We have limited quantities. You guys get first access. And so that email sort of kicks off the momentum of driving a ton of demand for them early on, and creates a sense of urgency and scarcity for a subset of people. That's an example of a thing you can do. Other things you can do is like, if you know, hey, everybody here has bought black sneakers before in the last 60 days. Maybe you go to them with an offer for a different color skew that you have excess inventory on, on a slightly bigger flash sale, right? Like so where you can take different components of your inventory base and find ways to say. Hey, for the next three hours, only orange leggings are 60% off. Well, you're not gonna do that on paid social. Like it doesn't actually connect to the idea that there would be, you know, machine learning and optimization over time to do da da. But it's a really great way to find good reasons to send a lot of emails over these days to different segments of your customer base in a way that continue to be interesting and worth checking in on. And so I think that's where. I were to spend a bunch of effort on the design and messaging and mapping side for specific offers of select SKUs, which we saw become a more common practice last year. Which we'll go through that data in a second. That's where I would spend the effort is text, text and email of excess inventory where I would grow the offer base to liquidate some of the inventory in a way that made people

[00:12:56] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:14] Taylor Holiday: in some way based on some demographic attribute about me. It just is gonna, little ways to spike open rates and CTRs amidst a very crowded inbox is how can you play with a more diverse set of unique offers? Inside of email and SMS versus what you do on paid social or search.

[00:13:32] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So thinking through like, I mean, I was thinking through some sort of like basic frameworks for thinking about how you personalize these specific offers. So you pointed out one, like if you're going to sort of a VIP list, giving them something that feels exclusive is really important. But, but one other thing that, like for instance Luke and I talked about recently on our D two C hotline podcast is the sort of like interplay between.

Inventory availability and the sort of how deep the discount is, I guess. And as the kind of holiday season goes on, this is sort of what Luke's talking about, those kind of things sort of invert, right? So as you get closer and closer to, let's say the shipping date, you're gonna have less things in stock, but your discount's gonna get better so you can move more of it.

Whereas like on Black Friday, or even in some of these early bird offers maybe the discount isn't so deep, but the trade off then is that all this stuff is still in stock already, right? So that's like maybe another thing to think through as well.

[00:14:21] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, there, there's definitely a trade off there between like the demand curve you want to map to the best offer that you really want to,

[00:14:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:31] Taylor Holiday: you don't wanna restrain that too much where

[00:14:33] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:34] Taylor Holiday: and then you end up having to liquidate a bunch of inventory because you didn't. Offer enough into that peak demand moment. 'cause the reality is like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still the days in which most people shop. And you can't really fake the funk there. Like this is

[00:14:45] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:46] Taylor Holiday: try and do all the time where they're like, oh, I'm gonna bring my offer way forward.

Well, it doesn't really matter 'cause you don't impact culture that way. Like you might be able to move your existing customers. But most people, there's still this cultural behavior bold pattern that they're shopping on Black Friday, Saturday, Monday. So you do want to meet that. And I would be careful to try to be too cute about it,

[00:15:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:05] Taylor Holiday: in terms of where you're at.

But I do think that this is a moment where especially if you have stock that is aging, not like clear it. Bring in the cash, put it

[00:15:17] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:17] Taylor Holiday: pocket now. So go really deep on that. Select crappy inventory. To get it out of the funnel. And you can do lots of things like last minute gift sales that, that are less brand damaging than it's the middle of March and your site is 70% off.

Like there's just a behavioral pattern that people expect brands to, to act this way. So move that inventory. So I do agree that as you, as you move through it, there's sort of this like curve of like, okay, I tried to move it at 20%. want to go into January with these jackets,

[00:15:47] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:48] Taylor Holiday: it might be.

So they've gotta go. So I will move further and further and use each incremental moment. And with the ultimate one, culminating like the last day to ship kind of vibe. Where you're, you're you are moving that inventory out.

[00:16:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:16:00] Taylor Holiday: also different to, relative to whether you have one evergreen skew that's the same all year round.

This probably doesn't apply in the same way. Right. So,

[00:16:06] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:07] Taylor Holiday: I think that there's so much nuance to the individual brand, but these principles. For me where there's like a, I would call it the core foundation offer. This is generally the 30 plus percent site-wide. I'm not even gonna call it 25 anymore. I think that the expectation is gonna continue to rise, especially 'cause I know a lot of you are gonna bullshit your way by

[00:16:26] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:16:26] Taylor Holiday: the base underlying MSRP here.

I know that's happening all over the place because of the COGS increases. So the baseline expectation of 30% off last year, I was just looking at the data. 80 plus percent of the sale offers in our like 3000 brand database, 80% of them were more than, or 25% or more. So it's like, it like the, the expectation just keeps going up in terms of what really is the consumer expectation that they're gonna get excited about. So I think 30% off, or I like the idea of that the frame is up to 60% off and the SKUs have some variable discount relative to the demand for them.

[00:17:02] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:03] Taylor Holiday: where you sort of like, where it's hard to sort out what the actual percentages are at the end of the day, but the headline offer is somewhere on the site there's a SKU that's 60% off.

And so the headline offer that goes out on media everywhere is up to 60% offsite wide. And then, and then you work from there to get specific around the flash sale style for email and SMS. But that foundational messaging prompt that leads all your graphics, that leads all your paid social, that leads the banner on the website, I think needs to be simple and clear and a a, a blanket percentage off.

If you're still fighting chargebacks manually, you're doing it wrong with charge flow. Merchants automate the entire dispute process from Shopify to stripe. Charge flow plugs in, collects evidence, builds the case and submits it automatically. No more late nights at bank portals, no more disputes slipping through.

Just clean automation and real results with merchants recovering four x more revenue compared to manual handling. See for yourself. Try charge flow free for 60 days at the link in the show notes.

[00:18:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So let's let's, speaking of the data, let's, there's a couple things we could dig into here about at least year over year changes from 2023 to 2024 that maybe are indicative of, of trends in 2025. So a slight downtick in 2024 in site-wide. Sitewide offers, sorry. And then a big downtick in people offering no discount, which I think is interesting because this is something that we've talked about in previous years, like the sort of benefit of not running any offer on Black Friday, but that's kind of coming down.

And then the number of discounts on select SKUs as opposed to a Sitewide offer coming up. What do you think that sort of means and, and do you think that has any indication for 2025.

[00:18:42] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it's interesting. I think they're, they're pretty small percentage changes. So like you said, we went from select SKUs from 16 to 2017 to 22 to Sitewide from 29 to 28. So Sitewide continues to be the dominant narrative. Select SKUs, I think represent. The complexity of inventory demand that exists and that people have recognized that this is a moment to move through inventory.

And I think people are getting more sophisticated around cashflow management is part

[00:19:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:05] Taylor Holiday: there's just a reality that aged inventory is not good in an e-commerce business, and so you

[00:19:09] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:19:33] Taylor Holiday: so this is like the classic example I've used where if you go on Nike's website right now, the bright royal blue sneakers are cheaper than the black ones every day of the year because they recognize that that demand curve is not the same every

[00:19:45] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:46] Taylor Holiday: Even if you offer like a site-wide 20% discount, the baseline MSRP starting point for all those SKUs is not the same.

[00:19:52] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:52] Taylor Holiday: so I think that's just another thing that people are getting a little bit smarter about, I would say.

[00:19:58] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so you alluded to a little bit the, the, some of the changes that potentially are coming or are already sort of coming 2025 in terms of just the sort of cost of goods overall going up and, and the way people are treating that and the need to discount more deeply. Is there anything else in 2025 that makes it feel like the approach to this strategically or tactically is any different than the way that we've approached things in the past?

[00:20:19] Taylor Holiday: I just think we need to understand we're in an inflationary environment where especially D two C prices are going up. If you don't believe me, go look at particles inflation tracker. Like we know that tariffs are going to impact consumer demand. We're seeing softening consumer demand generally already there's already been some downturns.

And so I think meeting people in that moment, You have to be aware of what your potential value capture is at any moment. So sometimes what I think brands miss is that today you have a brand reputation and demand that warrants some level of pricing power in the market. And this year that might just be less than it's been in the past.

Or maybe you're in a brand that's in an awesome position that's not true for you. 'cause there certainly are people that are still crushing it, but you just have to win less. And that's

[00:21:06] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:21:07] Taylor Holiday: And that expectation rather than trying to be ignorant or have the hubris to think that you can maintain the same level of margin capture that you could in the past, I think you have to get really clear and look at your last 60 days, look at those comps and go, are we in a position to hold the lines that we've held in the past?

Or do we need to win a little less? Get ourselves healthy from a cash position, survive and fight again next year. And I

[00:21:31] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:32] Taylor Holiday: important to be as honest with yourself as you can about that, which is part of what we try and help people do by bringing them into reality around the spending.

Power models and things like that is like get a third party view of what is the power that you have in the market to drive demand at certain price points and at certain levels of.

[00:21:48] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, I think you, you're illustrating nicely why a third party point of view is so important because it's sort of a difficult thing to, let's say, bring up in the board meeting and say like, Hey folks, this year we're gonna win less. Not necessarily the most popular thing to say, right.

[00:22:01] Taylor Holiday: well totally not, absolutely not. And this is where I think the reality of this moment of Black Friday, cyber Monday is that it is so rare that I have actually seen people create an action, a marketing action on Black Friday itself that suddenly fundamentally altered the dynamics of that day. The reality is it's a culmination of a behaviors and an investment and actions taken for the months leading up to it. That puts you in a position to realize value in that day. And so sometimes we have to ask ourselves, have we been making the constant new customer acquisition investment? Have we been spending consistently and growing that demand and awareness leading into that moment? Or do we need to realize that we've cut spend a bunch, we've gotten a lot leaner, and so therefore, today we're not going to have that same level of built up demand. To realize the value. And, and so I think it's just really being conscious of the potential that you have to capture in that day and to where you don't waste it.

Because thing you would wanna do is overspend into negative efficiency or vice versa, underspend into opportunity. So I think it's really an important day to be thoughtful about getting right.

[00:23:03] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So I think like the, the point you just brought up there is like an interesting thing to explore maybe is like other. Potential pitfalls. So there's obviously like underspending or overspending on the moment, or being sort of overconfident or attempting to win more in a case in an environment where that's not really possible.

But what are some other sort of like pitfalls that you have to be cognizant of as you move into this time?

[00:23:26] Taylor Holiday: I think that the reason we share the profit calculator is that doing the math on the right ROAS target for this moment is often underappreciated, and people don't understand that if you added 30% to your discount, your percentage margin per order is likely lower, even if your A OV is up and therefore

[00:23:44] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:23:45] Taylor Holiday: target. Needs to change. It needs to be higher to realize the same value. So I think that mental adjustment of going, okay, are we all clear on what we think the margin profile of this offer is going to produce and therefore at what level of, of efficiency we need to go and drive demand? And are we clear on that? with an incrementality factor for both new and returning customers in this moment. And so I think that it's, it's a harder thing to get right than you would realize. And so often I, people, I see people just roll forward their ROAS expectation for the year, but then they go, oh wait, I had a 30% off discount order. And they confuse the idea that they're getting higher a OV with the idea that the margin profile is worse from a percentage basis. And, and if you don't do that calculation, you could really mess it up.

[00:24:31] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so I mean, it sounds like essentially what we're saying here is like you just have to get clear on your reality, just understand what the numbers are. I mean, it's sort of what you're saying is that Black Friday is only a multiplier on whatever the base performance already was in a sense. So it's not like that's going to become that act sort of the multiplier is going to grow or shrink or whatever.

It's just that you have to have some clear understanding of like. Who you are going into this and what's likely to happen then? Yeah. Any other sort of like tactical thoughts I guess coming into this moment?

[00:25:01] Taylor Holiday: No. So I, I, I think, I think if we could sort of sum it up, we'd say, do the work on the front end to build the math, ideally with an incrementality factor to understand the targets for new and returning customers. Understand how much of your revenue expect to come from existing customers,

[00:25:14] Richard Gaffin: I.

[00:25:15] Taylor Holiday: to audiences you've already reached, and to net new customer acquisition.

Allow that to inform your core. Offer structure and then tailor your email and SMS with as much specificity and as many cool ways to move through aged inventory to give your customers a sense of value and unique proposition. Design those to demographics that cut through the noise and create increased open rate in CTR, and you'll have yourself a holistic approach to Black Friday and Cyber Monday that will lead to the most effective outcome possible.

[00:25:41] Richard Gaffin: That's right, folks. Well, and if you want to do, to build this offer with somebody who knows exactly how to do it, who's done it many, many, many times before you know who to call go to common thread code.com. Hit that hire us button, check it out. And also, if you want to have a look at the Black Friday Cyber Monday offer database, just get a sense of kind of what was going on across all of e-comm and get some inspo from that, particularly creatively.

There's two. 2,700 screenshots of all of the different sort of websites on those days. A really, really valuable resource. You can check that out too@comthreadcode.com. Hit the learn from us button. Click Black Friday, cyber Monday, offer database and you can check it out there. Alright folks, I think that's gonna do it for us.

We'll talk to you next time. See ya.