S14 E9: Last Minute BFCM 2025 Playbook

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34Nik:Think about your best friend and how they shop. Totally different than how you shop online, right? You should never be getting the same cart reminder email. That's where Instant AI comes in. In the last few weeks, Instant rolled out AI flows for over 500 brands. The momentum is crazy, and one of my favorite brands tripled their email revenue in just 60 days. That's one of hundreds of wins they've had so far. Here's why it works. Instant can immediately understand who's on your site and what they've been looking at. The discount, the copy, the imagery, the on-site promotion, all of it is pulled dynamically into personal email flows.

1:07Nik:Then it sends it at the exact moment that that shopper is ready to buy. BFCM is behind you, and now's the time to build for your biggest year yet. Old and lame retention emails are so 2025. Book a demo by December 31st and get 50 % off your first 60 days at instant.one.sharma and set up your brand to dominate 2026. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today is, I'm recording this on Monday, November 24th. So we are just, we're on the same week as Black Friday. And I know a lot of people are just gonna be moving and grooving, trying to get everything done and ready for Thursday, Friday, all the way through next Friday.

1:47So I thought, let me just make something that's quickly tactical, easy, fun to digest. You can listen to it as you're on the go or in between hanging out with family. So what I did is I just went through all of my newsletters on Black Friday and I just made a very quick, you know, 70 point checklist. All the things that you want to make sure you have and double check at the last second just so there's no issues

2:11Nik:around, you know, your codes going live, your products working, coupons being applied, discounts, all that stuff. So let's get into it and get started. So this is the last minute BFCM checklist, everything to double down and double check before your sales starts. So we're going to go in different sections. I'm going to start with the website and just tech. Then we'll go into email. We'll go into paid media, organic and social, influencers, ops, and then just some last few things we can add at the end. So starting with the site, number one, test every variant selector, add to cart, slide out cart, and checkout button.

2:51Basically, every CTA should be double and triple checked. I recommend checking it for mobile. A lot of times, mobile development layouts can be different than what the dev layout is. It's not necessarily always a super responsive coded page. So especially if these are landing pages, if these are extra collections pages, If these are alternate PDPs, anything that you built custom and kind of away from your normal, you know, collections or PDP template, double and triple check that on mobile and desktop, all the things work. Variant selectors pull the right color. They show the right imagery, you know, maybe change any information down below.

3:31All the buttons add the right products with the right quantities, with the right selling plan, aka is it one time or a subscription, and with the right subscription, right? If you're running a promo where you're doing 30 % off the first order and 20 % off or 15 % off the subsequent orders, then making sure that that button adds the right selling plan. And then of course, making sure that your slide out cart works, everything, you know, testing an empty cart state, right? Do you have, ideally you have some sort of social proof or a quote or something in there. And then when you have a product, do you have the right product being cross sold or upsold?

4:04Are you offering to go to subscription? And then, of course, if you have a coupon code slot at the bottom of that slide-out cart, make sure that that works and applies. Ideally, if you prep for this, you also are highlighting your discounts and savings in the slide-out cart before somebody goes to just kind of that Shopify checkout. So anyways, that's number one. Number two is basically the same thing with all the promo codes. So there are likely going to be automatic, you know, auto-apply promo codes that you have going on as well as manual promo codes, meaning people enter it once they get to the site.

4:37My recommendation is that anytime you have a link, so let's say you've got a link going from an ad or a newsletter or a text to your website. if there's a code to be applied, let's say it's small business Saturday and you've got Saturday 30 is your code, then the link that you give out in text or email should already include that code and redirect them either to a specific landing page, a collections page, or maybe it's also just the homepage. But you can do it in a way where the code auto applies. Honestly, you can just ask ChatGPT to give it your My Shopify URL, which you can find in your Shopify backend.

5:17and then put it into ChatGPT, tell it the discount code and the page you want to redirect to. It'll make you those links. But that extra 30 seconds you spend to make those links and put them in your newsletters or your text messages is going to increase your conversion rate a little bit. You're not going to be able to quantify it right away, but trust, it helps. Number three is confirm that all the discounts start and end at the right time zone. So a lot of people get this wrong because they just do sales for their own time zone. But you have to, especially in the US, you have to really think about starting in the East Coast.

5:51And I always say you can end in the West Coast. Most brands don't ship to Hawaii. So you don't really have to worry about that. And Hawaii is generally not a huge market from an e-commerce standpoint. So you can just do start 12.01 AM EST. Or whenever you want to start the stale, you start that on the EST side. Whenever you end it, you end it on the PST side. So for example, let's say you're starting your cyber week. You start it, let's say, Sunday, right? A day early than Cyber Monday. You start it Sunday at 12.01 a.m. Eastern Time. You're going to end that. Let's say you're ending it Friday.

6:25You're going to end it Friday, 11.59 a.m. PST or 2.59 a.m. EST on Saturday because that's 11.59 p.m. on the West Coast. So you want to make sure that your West Coast people are always taken care of. And the other thing you want to do too is make sure that that happens because the West Coast, a lot of the shopping happens late night. So you'll probably notice, I mean, you've probably just noticed in general pattern wise, there's usually two bumps in the evening in terms of traffic and purchases. And that's what you want to make sure you account for. The next one is to update your homepage hero with your Black Friday offer.

7:05A lot of brands somehow forget this because the homepage hero is generally something that a lot of brand sites nowadays aren't really like, they don't change that often. So it's sort of set and then it's not really changed. Maybe the copy's updated. But I would 100 % think about this like the way a Nordstrom would or an Amazon would, right? Use that real estate at the top of your banner to really push the sale and exaggerate what it is. Make it very stupid simple for somebody to read it and digest it and know exactly what the sale is. Even if they leave then, they should have it in their mind so that they can come back later and remember the sale or maybe they talk about it with somebody else.

7:47The announcement bar is another one at the very top. That, even if you don't update your banner, you should at least do the announcement bar. It's super easy to do. I would make it clickable in a way so you get to the sale right away. and I would also make sure that you have two to three messages in there. I'm also a fan of making sure it's even. So, you know, you don't have one line full of a sentence and then line number two has one word in it. I think that looks weird. So make sure it's formatted nicely and nice and easy on the eyes. Number seven, add a countdown timer to landing pages and key product pages.

8:21So this you can add. You can also add this at the very top. I've seen some brands do this well where you just have a timer for when the sale ends or maybe when the current offer on the sale ends. But that's something you can easily add in. And while it might sound tacky for like evergreen time periods, I think it's totally fine to do when the entire world is all about getting a deal. Number eight, site speed. Site speed is probably one of the biggest factors in if this person is going to convert or not, especially during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. if you're taking extra time to get somebody to convert, people don't really have patience.

8:59They want to see the product they want, they want to buy it and they're out. They don't really care about your brand. They don't really care about much. They just want their deal. That's why they're buying your product on Black Friday and not on Black Friday. Next one is to make sure all your pixels fire. So everything from your Pinterest, your Google, your TikTok, your Pinterest, your Klaviyo, your Meta. I said Pinterest twice. All of those, you should make sure they all fire. They're all sending events back properly. If you use something like a blot out, then you're probably able to send your events back and confirm that.

9:30I know Elevar has like a match rate number. It'll tell you every week compared to where it should be versus where you're actually at. So just double, triple check, make sure that everything is properly firing. You know, if you're using landing pages on a sub domain, then make sure that those events are properly firing and that whoever your data, you know, consolidation and segmentation partner is like a blot out, for example, make sure that they're also aware if you've got subdomain pages running traffic so they can properly route that data in the right way. Next one is to validate that all your onsite, you know, really just heat maps, scroll depth maps, things that you can understand consumer behavior and why something may or may not be working.

10:16So whether you use a clarity or use a heatmap.com, both are great. Heatmap gives you a lot of those AI suggestions, but make sure that those are live and those are working. You should also run cross browser and device checks with browser stack. There's another tool, I think it's called litmus, if I'm not wrong for you can do that for email and kind of look at all your emails in light and dark mode across a bunch of different device sizes, but definitely use browser stack because you want to make sure that in both iOS and Android, mobile, desktop, tablet sizes, and just computer desktop, all those are working properly.

10:48And, you know, you don't have, again, if you've got pages that you're like coding custom for Black Friday, special landers, special collections pages, that's really the ones you want to check. Next one is to freeze your code. So for some reason, brands just don't freeze their code, especially during this period too. and they might still make updates. My suggestion is if something is not mission critical, if it's not gonna compromise your sale, just leave it, deal with it after, it's not worth it. All right, next one. Okay, this one you probably should have done before. This is probably too late to be a last minute, but it's to merge reviews across duplicate SKUs.

11:24So a lot of brands have bundles they sell and depending on when you set those bundles up, whether it was before or after, Shopify made it easy to kit bundles in Shopify's backend. You may have duplicate SKUs. And what happens is when you do duplicate SKUs, you don't make sure that the reviews are properly displayed across all the products. Carraway, the cookware brand does a phenomenal job of this. If you go to any PDP, you'll see that they do a really good job matching bundles and individual SKUs to make sure that the reviews are shared across. And it just looks overall really, really strong.

11:59All right, next one, validate redirect logic for all the vanity URLs. So for example, you've probably got vanity URLs. If you don't, you should. You should never have these long URLs in your Instagram bio, on Instagram stories, over text. Honestly, even over email, I'm a fan of trying to use vanity short URLs, but nobody's copying emails there or links, so you don't really have to. But for text, for sure, Facebook groups, influencers, creators, all of them should have vanity URLs. That's, you know, for example, uh, apple.com slash Sharma, right? That would be a vanity URL. And when I, when somebody clicks that, it might redirect to apple.com slash products slash iPhone 17, you know, question mark, UTM source equals influencer UTM medium equals Nick Sharma.

12:46And that way on their end, they can still see it and properly track it. But for me, if I share it to my audience, it just looks like apple.com slash Sharma, which is a lot cleaner. And especially if you're working with creators, influencers, bloggers, affiliates, it's much easier to give them a URL that's just easy for them to remember. Another example, when I worked at Hint, our domain was drinkhint.com, still is. And I bought the domain hint.co and used that for all our creators. So if you go to hint.co slash Sarah, it went to Sarah Dietschy's specific offer and landing page. And we could track all that traffic and look at the individual conversion rate.

13:23We can then tag those users as people who came in with the UTM. When we look at customer cohorts in six months, 12 months later, we can see how that cohort does. A lot of reasons to use these vanity URLs. Next one, ensure that your back-in-stock alerts are active and configured and ready to go. There's been so many times where products run out of sale on Black Friday or run out of stock rather because the sale is so good. and there's just never a back in stock widget or thing ready to go. There's actually a couple months ago, I did a vibe coding night with Billy Howell, who was also on the podcast.

13:58You should listen to if this sounds of interest, but we vibe coded a back in stock widget. So a lot of those people are gonna have their own coded widget for their website. If you wanna learn how to do that, I recommend checking out the episode I did here with Billy. But make sure those are ready because as soon as something's out of stock, you want to start collecting that demand. Obviously, you're collecting emails and phone numbers. And if you use something like Instant, you can get their anonymous data without even collecting it. But you want to try to get more segmented, more product-specific back-in-stock information.

14:29So that's where you collect phone number or email on the PDP itself. It is Black Friday, so it should be enough to just get their phone number or email. If that carries over into the evergreen period or to the non-sale period, you can always do something like offer a discount or, you know, say that, Hey, if you enter your email today, you're guaranteed that your order of this product will ship by this date or that you, it'll be available for you by this date. Um, and yeah, I recommend doing that. A lot of people don't. Um, okay. Every customer who comes in, that's a new customer during BFCM tag them, just tag them BFCM 2025 so that later you can track these people differently.

15:12And last thing on the website, number 20 is confirm that your Shopify scripts don't conflict with any discount logic during this period of time. So what that means is a lot of people have scripts that go. So for example, a new customer offer, okay, we'll add these three items in the back. Add this other item to be pick and pack so it shows up on the shipping side. Or discount happens this way. Or this person adds this to cart, automatically add this product to cart as well. all these different scenarios that exist. You want to make sure that you test all of your offers with all the scripts that are live so that you can make sure that you're not double or triple discounting or doing anything that will harm you in the long run.

15:55Nik:Brands like Third Love, Liquid IV, and NeuroGum all swear by instant. They've tripled their email revenue and some like Karen Kane even see a 5x increase. Why? Because AI can build hundreds of conversions you'll never have time to make. While you're running your brand, Instant is running the experiments, figuring out what works, and then continuously optimizing to keep conversions growing. BFCM's over and your next growth run starts now. Grab a demo by December 31st and get 50 % off your first 60 days at instant.one slash Sharma. And now we're going to move to email and SMS. So the first one is prep your entire email schedule.

16:34This is something that's probably already done. So you don't really need to do this, I would imagine, or hopefully you don't. But you want the first one to kick off at 12.01. You want to then build out segmented, didn't open and open but didn't click resend groups. So these are people who have shown some level of interest, either because they're on your list and maybe recently shown engagement or because they opened but didn't click. And you're going to hit them back. You're going to set exclusions. So buyers during this period stopped getting sale blasts. You want to add dynamic banners, which you can do for sure in Klaviyo.

17:09But these dynamic banners are basically, they show the sale. So whatever the ongoing sale is that day, that's the dynamic banner that gets inserted. And because it's dynamic, you change it once. It applies to everywhere. You update your pop-ups. So, you know, I've recommended using Alia. I'm a fan because of just how, I'm like the one Indian who does not a code. So it's very easy to set up a pop-up and get your opt-in really high. But make sure that you have something like you call out the discount in the pop-up. People should think they are entering their email in order to unlock the discount.

17:41You don't want to just have sign up for updates as your email pop-up during this time. You want to make sure from an SMS standpoint, you get an announcement, you get one kind of midday push or mid-sale push, and then maybe a last call. SMS, you probably want to be a little bit smarter about how you segment just because it is significantly more expensive to send. So, you know, if you've got people you've sent text to before, uh, who've joined the group and never purchased, maybe not really need, you don't need to send it to them. You can let email kind of capture that. Um, but yeah, you can kind of, depending on your price point, your purchase frequency, you know, um, and sort of how these people came in, you can kind of decide and figure out what, but how you segment those lists out.

18:25Just because this has happened in the past, I would recommend pre-writing three different emails. One is a site issues, kind of a plain text emergency email. So just have it ready to go, right? You can have like 80 % of it filled out, except maybe that 20 % that decides exactly how it's going to get handled. You can pre-write a shipping delays emergency email. So basically it's pretty common for warehouses to get backed up or for orders to get backed up, especially if you're using a 3PL that is just maybe smaller, as a lot of smaller brands do. So you can have a shipping delays email ready to go, and then a product sold out email ready to go with a waitlist CTA.

19:07So again, that would go back to the back in stock reminder I talked about before. Next one is to add an email reminding customers that your discount expires in X amount of hours. So we talked about the announcement, launch reminders, and last call. This would probably go in the reminders category. You can do another founders plain text email that goes out during the sale as a reminder as well. Make sure you segment your VIPs on both SMS and email for early access slash preview. And the last thing I wrote is just test your emails across devices and it is Litmus. That is the app. All right, moving on to paid media.

19:44If you didn't already upload your cyber week ads, do them right now. This is also, you know, regardless of whether or not you have a rep, the approvals go slowly during this period of time. So not only is everybody approving a ton of ads, but they're also fighting a bunch of ads that probably got disapproved. So the overall process is a little bit slower. Make sure those are in. Your best evergreen ads, I would duplicate them and add sale overlays. This is, again, something you probably already did. if you have evergreen winners that you're planning to turn off, my recommendation is to not turn them off, but instead redirect the URL that it's going to.

20:21So for example, if it's going to a landing page, but you instead want it to go to a holiday theme landing page, just do that redirect, but do it in Shopify or whatever your CMS for the website is. Don't do it in Facebook because if you do it in Facebook, it's going to reset the learning for the ad entirely. But if you have something that's working, right, the click-through rate is strong, the CPM is good, then just change the URL redirect on the back. And that works out really well. You've probably scaled your budgets up. Make sure you also scale your retargeting budgets proportionately, right?

20:54Because this is a period of time where you get a ton of extra traffic, but also this is a time where you want to hit everybody and let them know if they haven't bought, but shown intent that you're running a sale. And this is their best time to buy as well. Make sure that you've got TikTok shop set up, TikTok ads going. Make sure you've got product feeds uploaded or updated rather. So if you're using like a MarPipe to run your sale catalog creative and pricing, make sure that that's properly updated and synced out with all the other platforms, whether it's a GoPuff, a TikTok, a Facebook, a Google, whatever.

21:30And then the last thing is just make sure that all of your DPA ads are also just showing the right price. So do it in MarPipe and then go validate it in Ads Manager and make sure that it's all working properly. All right, we're going to get to the next section here, which is organic social. Organic social is one of the things that, for some reason, a lot of the brands miss. And I think it's just because most brands tend to focus on customer acquisition with paid media during this time.

21:57Nik:So organic gets some love and some attention, but not necessarily a lot. But right off the bat, update your bios with your BFCM offers. So if you've got different offers throughout the days, make sure those are being updated. I recommend also just adding a pinned story highlight called BFCM. And every time you've got a new story or you have something that relates to BFCM, throw it in there. But as the sales go on, delete them from the beginning so that if somebody joins on Monday, right? If somebody comes to your account Monday and they click the BFCM highlight, they shouldn't see everything from Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

22:30You know, if you're adding a bunch of stuff in there, I would remove it. But if you've just got maybe a summary slide of what the sales were Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then it goes into Monday, I think that's fine. But I'm not a fan of making it too hard once somebody gets in that highlight to see what it is. You also want to make sure you've got bios updated. So a bio should have the offer, the link in bio, whether that's in the actual bio itself or it's within that cluster of links to click. Another suggestion there, if you have more than two, If you have two or more links in that bio, it's two clicks to get to the site versus one.

23:07So if you've got more than two, make sure that you absolutely need more than two for this period. Otherwise, remove them and just keep one. That way, it's one click to get to the website. And ideally, you're going to a sale landing page. Ideally, you're using an apple.com slash Insta or apple.com slash Insta BFCM, something that signals that it's traffic from Instagram and it's unique to that user coming from Instagram because that's also a perk and a reason to click. And then BFCM just hints to the person that, yeah, the sale is going to be on this page when you get there. But then on your end, that might unravel and include UTM parameters for where it comes from.

23:44And then, of course, again, like I mentioned earlier, you can tag and track those people down the road. In addition to updating all your bios, making sure that pinned posts are on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, or X announcing the sale. I would create story posts every day that talk about each of the sales and what they are, what products are in it. Are there any bundles? You put a timer. Is there any UGC? Basically, think of your story as sort of like an advertorial slash longer version of a TV commercial maybe, right? TV commercial, you have less intent behind the viewer because they're watching for something