Post-BFCM: 9 Reflections From This Year’s Global Shopping Holiday

Hey, happy Sunday!

I gotta be honest… this time change is ridiculous. The sunset today was at 4:29pm. WHO is making money from this? We know it wouldn’t still be the case if someone was NOT making money from this time change!! To whomever is in charge of this… I’m not mad, I’m just very disappointed.

Anyways, I hope you’ve had a great week. It’s cold where I am, so as I write this I’m sitting under a weighted blanket with some hot water with lemon. We finally made it through BFCM 2023. I wanted to use today’s newsletter to talk through some high-level reflections or learnings that I will be focused on for next year’s BFCM season. Before we get right into it though…

Did you fill out the 2024 Trends Survey? I’m putting together a comprehensive 2024 Trends Report that I plan to share here. I’m aiming for 100 qualified brands (spending >$500k in ads next year) to fill out the questionnaire and potentially jump on with me to talk through their answers. Click here to fill out the survey (it will take 4–5 minutes), and reply with your confirmation and if you’re okay to jump on a call to talk through it. Fill it out: nik.co/2024.

Today’s email will review my high-level thoughts and analysis of the BFCM 2023 season. At Sharma Brands, we were in the thick of it, and there were about 9 things I realized worked in our favor that others can learn and replicate. The BFCM season is a personal favorite of mine (but I’m glad it’s over) — the late-night team huddles to fix something or update a promotion… it’s like being on a roller coaster for 7 full days.

Going into BFCM 2023, I was curious to see HOW big it was going to be, given the United States is currently over $1 trillion in credit card debt. Regardless, the Sharma Brands team prepared well, and we exceeded all projections, many times coming in with less spend than expected. Over the week-long, global, shopping holiday, there were 9 things I noticed that I wanted to call attention to as lessons and/or reflections:

High AOV brands did extremely well

Brands that sold products over $150 in AOV did extremely well. This includes furniture, hardware, cookware, high-end apparel, vehicles, in-home products, and more. Those September and October lower sales periods were these people getting ready to jump on the offer you put out.

The key with higher AOV brands, which I’ll talk more about below, was making the purchase journey easy. Deal-specific site experiences, messaging that makes the offer loud and clear, constant reminders that the deal is happening and expiring soon, etc.

Brands with great brand perception and awareness did very well

I’m talking about the brands where you can say their name, and people already know what they want to buy from them, what they’re known for, why their products are great, what their website looks like, etc.

Brand-brands. As soon as the sale flip was turned on, there was an invisible waitlist of people ready to jump on these offers. During the year, it’s easy to focus on things more on the side of performance marketing, but building that brand awareness so that you can capitalize on it during BFCM proved to be extremely effective. If you did a co-branded product with The Skinny Confidential, and got on the radar of a few million people, many of those converted during BFCM.

Unique content, brand/media collaborations, good customer experience, and a product that does what it says are the 4 key ingredients of building good brand and staying relevant.

Brands with a waitlist benefitted greatly from it

In the weeks or months leading up to BFCM, building out a specific opt-in list for those interested in BFCM unlocked the big chunk for many brands, including some being 7-figures. Even if it was a list of people who have, at some point, entered their email for the “Back in stock notification,” it proved to do well.

A “silent” way to build this list is on your page to unsubscribe from your emails (the page people get to after clicking “Unsubscribe” at the bottom of your email), add a box that says, “Only send me Black Friday/holiday offers”.

Brands who could shift and adjust promotions on the fly had the advantage

If your team was online, on the laptop, and able to make promotional updates across the board, you had a huge advantage. I remember Friday night being on a Zoom with a client adjusting the promotion to yield an even larger Saturday, and it worked perfectly. We were able to make updates to the website, the emails, the texts, the ad creative, and go live with no issues.

If you didn’t have the ability to have a team on standby, you were only able to do what you had previously setup. The larger you are, the more likely you want to have a team or your internal team on standby.

Static ads and UGC videos performed exceptionally well

The standard quick-cut paid social video assets aren’t what drove majority of the purchases for the brands we oversee; it was static ads with a clear offer and UGC assets that explained what the product does. The statics make a lot of sense — people want to see the product, the offer, and then decide if they want to click. UGC, I think, did very well because people were at home, on their phones, and were probably more drawn into content that felt like it would be entertaining, not just an ad.

No discount was a successful BFCM strategy

This year, one of the most purchased products was Jones Road Beauty’s Miracle Balm. Jones Road ran a promotion for BFCM offering their miracle balm minis for $68.40. Their “promotion” was this SKU being available to shop, similar to a product drop model.

Jolie also ran a similar promotion. They have never discounted, but they offered a free tote bag with any purchase of a Jolie shower head. They did hefty numbers in terms of revenue, up year over year, and did this without a discount.

It’s important to note that both of these brands check the box of being “brand-brands” as I alluded to above.

There was a clear return on organic social content

Everyone is on the same main social platforms — Instagram and TikTok. Many brands were running ads, but not as many were pumping out as much organic content on Reels and TikTok. Those who did saw sales surge their daily revenue by 4–7x each day. Just creating content about the sale being live combined with the content-serving algorithm of these platforms put your sales info right in front of people who are interested in what you’re selling. Seemed like a no-brainer, and it paid off nicely.

For some brands, TikTok was the largest traffic referral in Shopify, coming from link in bios.

I plan to email a lot of the people who bought from organic channels to see what piece of content they attribute to buying the product.

Brands that started sooner didn’t run out of juice

A common misconception is that if you start your sale too soon, you will clear your funnel too quickly and then experience a dip when the real Black Friday or Cyber Monday rolls around. That proved to be false. From what we saw, the brands that had started BFCM earlier, just kept experiencing high revenue days with no slow down in sales.

This proved to be true with brands that updated their offers OR if they stayed the same the whole time. Doing the former allows you to continue tapping your owned customer lists without feeling like you’re sending the same thing over and over again.

It’s not the “Black Friday Sale”… it’s “Cyber Weekend”

If you run ads, listen up. Don’t write “Black Friday Sale” on your ads if there’s a chance you will just continue the offer through Cyber Monday, which you would want to do if the ad and offer is performing well for new customers. Instead, write “Cyber Weekend” as the sale name.

Now you can continue to run the sale through the entirety of BFCM without being confusing or mis-naming the time period.

Landing pages worked *chefs kiss* so well

Creating custom BFCM site experiences with landing pages proved to work its magic again. These weren’t typical landing pages focused on a single hero product, instead these operated like micro-sites.

They had individual slide-out carts, unique offers, value props/benefits, messaging and merchandising. We saw 8–11% conversion with the landing pages, and about 35% CVR if you take attributable view-through conversions into account.

Holidays are not the time to still figure out if you want to use landing pages…. You need to be using them. Otherwise you’re just wasting a percentage of every click you pay for with an ad.

What else was a realization for you?

Reply to this email and let me know what else was a realization for you from BFCM this year. I’ll take your answers, put them together and share it here.

On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Tapcart — The maker of mobile apps for Shopify stores drove over $100M in BFCM revenue this year.

This year, Tapcart tracked mobile shopping behavior via the tens of millions of consumers shopping on Tapcart-powered mobile apps. The data revealed that mobile app revenue, sessions, and orders increased from last year, meaning that more brands across all industries are adding a mobile app sales channel. Here’s a closer look into the data:

• Between Nov 20–27, Merchants using Tapcart processed $101.4M in total app sales, which is a 55% increase from BFCM 2022 and total of 950k orders were processed, a 57% uptick from 2022.
• Brands drove 38.1M shopping sessions to their Tapcart mobile apps. That’s 55% higher than last year. The length of shopper’s sessions in the app is about 300% higher than the session length on a brand’s website.
• Fashion & apparel industry revenue increased 75%, beauty & cosmetics revenue increased 115%, and homegoods revenue 57%.

Tapcart makes it extremely easy for you to take your Shopify store and turn it into a mobile app. Black Wolf Nation, one of my first investments, recently took the leap. So did Simple Modern. Search their names in the app store to see how they function.

If you’re ready to take advantage of the year end’s holiday season with a mobile app that allows for push notifications, higher conversion rates, and better analytics, then click here and book a time to meet with Tapcart about a tailored-solution for you.

LP of the Week:

Today’s landing page comes in for a brand that you’ve definitely seen and probably have purchased before.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!

This page does a great job bringing a “new spin” to the product positioning, making it easy to understand the products benefits, how it fits into someone’s day and making it an obvious purchase. I also like the always-on CTA to choose your color and add the product to cart.

If you want to get a HOOX-made landing page page, book a call with us on this link. We are currently running a holiday promotion to design and develop a secondary hero & shop section of your landing page, effectively giving you two landing pages for the price of one. Click this link and mention the newsletter 2 for 1 deal on your call.

That’s all for this week

Today I was planning to write a longer piece on what all makes for a good brand to launch, based on patterns that I’ve seen. It stemmed from hearing from a friend that she wants to start a brand because she has a huge following, but I don’t think it’s a wise use of her time. But instead of just saying “It’s a bad idea,” I wanted to thoroughly explain what makes for a good DTC business and what doesn’t, and why. Maybe next week.

Until then, I hope you have an amazing evening. It’s Sunday night, which means tonight is the night to get caught up on sleep! We’ve got basically 2.5 weeks left of hard work — let’s finish out the year strong.

See you next Sunday!