Happy first day of December!
Hopefully, you’re feeling caffeinated, energized, excited from your Cyber week results, and ready to dive into some BFCM notes and insights. If you didn’t get a chance yet, check out yesterday’s Limited Supply episode — we went through a bunch of numbers, tactics that work, ones that didn’t, and what we would’ve done differently.
The biggest punchlines for me, this year, were:
- Facebook is back, baby!
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The brands who made an advent-calendar-style experience did the most numbers
- The brands that made tons of ad & content variations held higher CTRs
- Food & supplements didn’t get the Black Friday love they deserved (save it for new years)
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Performance marketing STILL is the DNA that you need to win Black Friday — no matter who your celebrity face is, or how well you’re “loved” by your customers
- Landing page conversion rates were 2-3x higher than normal (shopping behavior + efficiency of LPs crushed)
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Gifting messaging + making Black Friday an “event” on your site drove higher AOVs
According to Northbeam’s data, they saw two categories that crushed Black Friday:
- Cookware
- Apparel
They had the largest increase in revenue, compared to the advertising spend that was deployed, over multiple brands in these 2 categories.
One other thing I realized when looking through tons of stores is the brands that have a dedicated person or team in-house that oversees eCommerce, site merchandising, offers, creative and performance marketing — these brands significantly outperformed those that don’t have a dedicated performance marketing person.
Every element (offers, site design, ad creative, bundle names, emails, etc) should be looked at through a performance marketing lens — not just relying on people to be excited about your products. Even brands with a huge celebrity attached, you can’t just rely on that to be the excitement. You have to be dialed in, from a direct response standpoint, in all 10 touch points.
According to TripleWhale, here are the digital channels and their spending increases, year over year (2022 vs 2021):
- Meta (FB & IG): up 24% 📈
- Google: up 44% 📈
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TikTok: up 25% 📈
- Pinterest: up 29% 📈
- Snap: down 30% 📉
What did you see?