Black Friday/Cyber Monday Strategies from 7 Shopify Merchants

0:06Hey, what's going on? Benjamin Gottlieb here. You are listening to this special episode of Shopify Masters. Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It's just around the corner, if you can believe it. And if you own a business, you know how you perform during the biggest shopping weekend. Well, that can make or break your year. In fact, Shopify merchants hit$7.5 billion in sales last Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So yeah, it's a big deal. But the question remains, how should you prepare. Whether you're just starting your own business or looking to maximize your sales this year, we've got your answers on this episode today.

0:46You're going to hear never before aired advice from some of Shopify's merchants we've had on the show this year. That includes folks like Lisa Hickey, the co-founder of the company Perfect White Tea.

1:00There's a lot of preparing and a lot of planning. And I mean, I would say we really started in July as far as like the final planning. But some of the lessons we took away from last year, we started implementing as soon as January. Inventory can be a big problem on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like it was for Perfect White Tea. Lisa says her company oversold some of the most popular products last year. And so they had to deal with the fallout for weeks. Here's a little bit more from her co-founder, Jen Menchaca. Yeah, I have PTSD still. Our inventory systems weren't matching up from the front end of the back end.

1:39And so we were overselling. It was such a learning experience. And we walked away going, we're never going to do this again. And then dealing with, you know, having to tell customers and really just say, hey, take it in the teeth. I'm sorry. We took it in the teeth. We were like, I am sorry. We messed up. We don't have the product you ordered. How do we make it better? So what about this year, 2023? Well, Lisa and Jen say they have corrected the inventory and invested in customer service to handle the expected increase in demand. The company is also prioritizing the DTC side of the business, making sure those individual shoppers have the experience they're looking for so that they keep coming back.

2:23We have to make sure we get all of our wholesale orders out prior to our Black Friday sales so that we can focus on getting those orders out for our direct-to-consumer customers. It's hard to do both of those at the same time. And it turns out Nick West agrees with Perfect White Tea's strategy on customers during this time of year. Nick is the co-founder of Bandit Running. It's a running apparel company. And his focus, not new, but repeat customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We have a membership, which is$125 annually recurring subscription. Gets you a bunch of benefits, both like a standing discount and early access to events.

3:03And we're thinking about how do we make a Black Friday event really special for those super loyal customers and not just blanketing the sale across anybody who might find our site on that day for the first time and is looking for a pair of run socks. So I think it's about making it really special for those people who've been along for the ride.

3:26Nick and Lisa aren't the only founders with strategies this season that are new, that are intended to deal with the increase in holiday demand. Adam Davis is the senior marketing manager at a company called Magnolia Bakery. It's an iconic New York spot for cakes, cookies, pies, pudding, you name it. His team looks to the Thanksgiving holiday as a time to meet some of their performance benchmarks. But last year, something happened. We had these firm goals set of like, we're going to beat last year's growth. We are going to maximize our marketing. We're going to drive a ROAS of whatever it is on our performance media.

4:01And then right away, we saw that we were going to beat those expectations. And we were going to sell out so fast that it was going to leave us with over a week of the pre-Thanksgiving period without any Thanksgiving pies to talk about.

4:21a bakery that ships baked goods across the U.S. without pies for Thanksgiving. Yeah. So Davis says they had to get creative. We still have all this Thanksgiving demand and we still have this beautiful Thanksgiving campaign to play in. Let's just pivot to what we know our customers order, which is banana pudding. Luckily for us, we have apple crisp pudding that we do as a limited time offering in November, which is still something that you should probably order for your Thanksgiving feast. So we flipped the switch very fast and kind of pivoted our marketing to showcase other products, not necessarily pies, to still capitalize on this very high demand that we knew was in the market and actually not lose revenue because of it.

5:05Look, things come up when you run a business. We know that. It's how you adapt when those challenges come about. So getting that inventory stocked, shifting your marketing plan when you run low on product, just some of the advice you should take heed of heading into this big shopping weekend. Another piece of advice, lean on your own channels to drive the conversation you want during the holidays. Charlotte Palomino is the founder of the Shopify brand Do Skin Care. Get your marketing story together, get all of your assets together, what are your goals, and then if something falls through, right, say the click-through rate on something's lower than expected, make sure that you have plan B's and C's.

5:44For us, we always are looking at email and text as kind of like our core because we have hundreds of thousands of people that have signed up for this. So that's piece one. But then piece two is, okay, what's our social media strategy? What's our press strategy? What's our affiliate marketing strategy? What is our creator strategy? And so I like to call it like different arms. And so making sure that all the arms kind of like are holding everything together so that it's not just overly weighted on one side. In other words, don't rely on just one channel or one distribution strategy. Make sure that your brand's marketing is cohesive.

6:18Marguerite Mariscal agrees your marketing plan must be ready to go, but she says don't sleep on the back end of your store. She's the CEO of the culinary brand Momofuku. I think a lot of times effort and time goes into the, you know, maybe the marketing emails, into what the offerings are. but an equal amount of work, if not more work, needs to go in on the back end. And whether that's, you know, working with your 3PL, working with your co-men, making sure that operationally you're set up to succeed, because, you know, it's not just you that's trying to sell, you know, a high volume on Black Friday.

6:52It's every single other account in your 3PL. And so whatever you can do to make it logistically easy for your 3PL to execute on these products, being able to give them projected volumes, if you can do bundling and kitting out product beforehand. So when it's picking and packing, it's not starting from scratch. Whatever you can do to set yourself up for success, I think those are the smoothest Black Fridays. And the worst Black Fridays are when you have the demand, but you don't necessarily have the back-end support to be able to execute on it smoothly. Having your top products in stock and making sure your customers know about them, that's one thing.

7:31But execution, Marguerite reminds us, is just as important.

7:38To help execute this year, ceramics brand Jono Pandolfi isn't taking any chances. Here's Nick Pandolfi, who looks after operations for the company. For Black Friday, it's a huge part of our business. So a few things that we're doing, we're onboarding a new agency to sort of increase the amount of paid ads that we're running. So there's a lot of focus on generating content, video shoots, cutting together paid social ads. So that's a big piece of it. We also release a bunch of new products in November to sort of generate buzz and get people coming back to the website and making sure we're top of mind leading up to Black Friday.

8:21But Nick says he and his team pay the most attention to production leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Things that customers don't see, but new business owners often struggle with. For us, our sales are always capped by our production. So it's really a function of making sure we're producing exactly the right products, kind of at the right scale to hit those Black Friday numbers. So there's a lot of inventory meetings and production meetings and looking at spreadsheets and looking at what we did last year and sort of figuring out how many times we have to fire the kiln and what needs to go in the kiln to make sure that come really November 15th, the inventory is there and ready to ship.

9:03And then the week following Thanksgiving, everyone is in the warehouse. It's like Santa's little elves kind of packing orders. And there's just like a huge spike the week of Thanksgiving. So it's sort of all hands on deck to make sure everything ships out and gets out of the studio on time.

9:28If you don't make your own products, Black Friday, Cyber Monday can be a hard time to work with your suppliers. That's something that Emily Miller of the cereal brand Off Limits has been thinking about a lot. Her strategy? Try to anticipate any potential misfire that might disrupt your success. It's just making sure, based on historicals, that you have enough set up in your warehouse, that your warehouse is prepared, obviously, for the flux. Like just you have to be overly communicative with everybody. Everyone is stressed. Everyone is dealing with it. No one wants to deal with, you know, a big dilemma during that time.

10:07So I think being respectful about letting people know as soon as possible whenever you have a forecast is the most helpful. A forecast might be the most helpful thing for suppliers. But for customers, maybe the idea is to offer a little incentive, something special to set your brand apart from others. We might do a like a free glitter with purchase kind of thing. And I love the idea of doing like glitter bombs or there's just something silly about being home with your family. And you kind of like maybe you are a kid or you kind of end up acting like a kid again. And there's just something really silly and fun about glitter, maybe to break any tough conversations during the holiday either too.

10:55If you're launching a new product in November or trying a new marketing campaign for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we want to wish you the best of luck. As always, Shopify is here for you wherever you are on your entrepreneurial journey. Shopify Masters is produced by Megan Coyle and Gogo Zoger. Our engineers are Matt Schwartz and Miku Betlam. Our host is Shuang Esther Shan, and I'm Benjamin Gottlieb. Please make sure to subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll catch you next time.