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Bonjour Millionaire, On Sunday I told you the hayride’s SO over and it’s all holiday all the time, now. So if you’ve just dropped your holiday store: congrats, and also, you’re not done. Today, we talk drop strategies, and how your launch is the starting line, not the finish. (Sorry for the cliché, but it really is true.) Because the hard part, the part that actually makes you money, is what you do in the hours and days after your drop. Let’s hop in. 🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇 I shouldn’t be allowed to use emojis. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe Here
Sponsored by Shipfusion Inc. BFCM is the biggest CX stress test you'll have all year. And you’ll (necessarily!) spend it glued to dashboards instead of watching from the customer’s side.
So, let someone else be the customer!
Shipfusion (fulfillment geniuses) will place a real order from your store over BFCM and audit every step. Checkout, upsells, post-purchase emails, unboxing. You get: a full report, delivery photos, an unboxing video, even a debrief with their team.
Best part: it’s FREE for DTC brands shipping 3,000+ orders a month.
Spots are limited and signups close Nov 23. So what are you still doing here?? BFCM comes but only once a year, so learn everything you can from it. This is a no-brainer.
ON THIS EPISODE OF GO-TO-MILLIONS Dropped!Presenting: the drop-day mechanics I use for every product launch, before AND after go-live. The moment of launch is just the 1st data point. The very best brands spend the day of the launch learning and prepping better versions to push out, until your drop starts dropping jaws. Here’s how I run a drop so it keeps getting better after it goes live. 💌: BANK A TEST ORDER.
Before you celebrate, go buy something. Literally, purchase: put your own card in, look at the confirmation email, make sure the whole flow is firing before you open to gen pop. I really believe acting like a customer (including & ESPECIALLY spending real money) is how you avoid hearing about the broken thing for the 1st time in the middle of launch, when you have 5x your typical traffic. 👯♀️: COMPARE AGAINST LAST YEAR, HOUR BY HOUR.
Pull last year’s launch moment metrics, right down to hour-over-hour pacing. Be ready with a dashboard that paces the day against it. This is a much better comparison than your typical daily or weekly numbers, for obvious reasons, and it’ll give you a sense of whether pour it on or hold. 🆕: WATCH YOUR NEW-VISITOR %.
I said it Sunday: your new-visitor % better be climbing from every prospecting source. If prospecting isn’t pulling new people in, something’s severely off, and you have to diagnose & fix that really, really soon. : DON’T RE-RUN LAST YEAR’S LOSERS.
You know I love studying the winners! But we must study the negative outliers, too. Study the 2025 November sends, creatives, and store versions that didn’t pull their weight, so you can avoid unintentionally repeating them now. Repeating last year’s misses just piles pressure onto the 2 weeks after. You don’t need more pressure. Neither do I. Moving on! 🎄: REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU LAUNCHED IS A V1.
The store you went out with? That’s not your holiday store. I mean it is, but it’s just version 1.0. The real level up is having a new version queued up before 1.0 even goes live. For example, a few days ago I got a marketing text from a brand outside my category, and ended up loving their holiday store. We immediately started building out our version of a similar mechanic to split-test. (Speaking of which: stealing from outside your category is truly the evergreen move. The reference nobody else is using in your category is usually the good 1.) Building V2 isn’t hard, it’s just effortful. And, as always, effortful is where the opportunity is. ❄️: DROPPED, THEN REMERCHANDISED.
Once it’s live, the testing begins. Someone on my team coded falling snow onto our holiday store graphic (go look, it’s very cute). I also have AI look at the live store and suggest changes based on how each SKU was performing in its spot. The options for optimizing are vast; pick a few focused 1s and see what happens. 🔪: LET AI CUT YOUR DATA IN A WAY YOU WOULDN’T.
Point AI at your drop data and have it search for patterns and groupings that you didn’t catch. You’ll often find slices you wouldn’t have thought of, from creatives to SKUs to traffic sources. AI helps you spot the pattern, then you make the conclusion. ⌛️: NEVER KILL THE LATE IDEA.
Don’t ask me why, but sometimes the best idea shows up the night before go-live. Too late for launch 1.0. But do NOT abandon it. Run your normal plan, then get the 2nd version ready. It’s annoying AF, but I do everything in my power not to kill exciting ideas just because they arrive with bad timing. 🚪: DON’T LET A GENERIC LANDING PAGE EAT YOUR AD BUDGET.
You are fine-tuning your targeting. So why are we dumping all these personas onto the same landing page? If you’ve built a gifting persona, like “mom gifts,” make sure they land on a page that’s made for them as carefully as that ad creative. ⏰: LAUNCH WHEN YOUR PEOPLE ARE AWAKE.
Drop in the time zone of your biggest customer base. It’s shocking how often this gets flubbed! If most of your money is earned in California, don’t you dare run a 9am EST launch just because it’s more convenient internally. You can totally set it live (unless it will sell out) but don’t assume it’s worth it to miss extra hours or to force a time that makes no sense. Just definitely don’t pull the launch earlier if there’s any chance you sell out before your core base wakes up. Early momentum is fine, but early momentum from the right people is what earns you permission to scale within the hour.
Sponsored by Drivepoint →→→→ Free 13-week cashflow template, by the people Graza & True Classic use for forecasting. So helpful this time of year, when BFCM inventory & media is gobbling up extra cash. 🦃
Use it to map out week-by-week, from BFCM into Q1. The template will flag the week your cash dips below your minimum. If I were you, I'd forward it to your finance team and take full credit.
GO-TO-MEME
The drop is just step 1. Get set up now to crush every step after that. Excited you to beat version 1.0. Yours,
Ari | 
