Ep 563: 3 Moves to Win Black Friday While It’s Happening (Pilothouse Playbook)

0:00It's an opportunity to acquire new customers. Like a lot of our clients, being smart with your ad dollars and your pay-per-click, we are shifting a lot of our spend towards more top-of-funnel and towards acquiring customers during this time period on PPC and letting retention and those outside platforms pull in those returning customers because it's cheaper. Are there any website optimizations people listening could even make right now? Always, yeah. we were kind of letting the algorithm guide the direction that we would go in with the business and with the ads and the angles. And now there's kind of this taking it back.

0:35And now we want to guide the algorithm and not let the algorithm guide us. The truth is, if you're looking at the overall market, there's certain shifts happening that the algorithm hasn't caught up to yet.

0:52it's all killer no filler i'm eric and here with jocelyn with a last minute black friday recording this is we're recording this on the wednesday this is going to come out on friday actual black friday happy black friday joss how you doing happy black friday doing pretty good honestly it's our super bowl we prep all year for it so so we're here just to talk a little bit about things you can be looking at on the day. If you're listening to this, here are some things you can be doing on the day to be maximizing it. First of all, CPMs are doubling. CPMs, is that what we're seeing? Are CPMs already really just skyrocketing?

1:26Yeah, I mean, if anyone's been doing this for a long time, you just know what to expect. CPCs and CPMs will definitely double and there's kind of some things you can counter to navigate those costs so that your overall efficiency doesn't get sacrificed. even the day of like a lot of us are doing this you know when we see our peaks um this last week of launching you know early access is those scrappy creatives which we always preach at pilot house like all of us were kind of sharing internally what our top creatives were all of them were scrappy you know the box shot the um mass product shots or even like the organic stuff so you know if you're seeing really high costs don't freak out you can actually help alleviate that even the same day, a little move I have in my back pocket that I do for all my clients, because I recently just saw this where our CPMs like double and our CACs doubled, which is rough.

2:19It's rough when you're trying to spend efficiently is I do a really easy iteration in like Canva, a top like scrappy organic product shot, and then add just a border to it, a black border and just say Black Friday all around the border. And usually even like on meta, there's like a three day learning cycle, those scale overnight. Like we already saw purchases within the hours that it was, without it was mixed in. So it's kind of being aware of that. If you are seeing some costs creep up, especially day of to just be really aggressive and don't be scared of the organic and pushing spend behind the organic, or even letting your evergreen and legacies outperform the black Friday specific ones.

2:57That's also pretty normal. Um, I feel like a lot of people who maybe are newer to the space are just not as aware that they think that those Black Friday creatives make more sense logically, right? Because they have Black Friday written all over it and they're loud. But if they cost more and they're not converting as high as your evergreen, let the evergreen shine. Usually it makes sense because they're legacy. They've had learnings all year. Just continue that and let them kind of push even higher and allow the algorithm to kind of help lead you a little bit and leading it with those creatives.

3:30We've spent a lot this year talking about sort of top of funnel brand building and these sort of higher minder exercises. But on the day, shake out that bottom of funnel any way you can basically. Oh, yeah. Shaking the tree. But even like it's an opportunity to acquire new customers. Like a lot of our clients being smart with your your ad dollars and your paid per click. We are shifting a lot of our spend towards more top of funnel and towards acquiring customers during this time period on PPC. and letting retention and those outside platforms pull in those returning customers because it's cheaper.

4:04So it's like, why pay to get someone into the door and convert when you already know that they're going to convert? So there's actually been a little bit of a push for those clients that we've been kind of, you know, implementing strategies all year and gearing up for it, where we've actually pushed like 75 % of our budget towards more top of funnel, bottom, middle funnel. And then within that segment, we will push them bottom of funnel, but they're not returning customers. So we actually using taking advantage of, you know, the higher people that are online and the higher purchase intent to find new to brand customers and kind of get into the door to retarget them when it comes to, you know, Q1 and Q2 of next year.

4:43So we're starting to see things ramp up already. A lot of brands have probably have started their sales already. I'm curious what you're seeing in overall purchase behavior this year. I think there's a lot of, maybe there's a lot of, uh, unsurity in the economy. What are we seeing with like overall purchase behavior, this Q4? Yeah. So it's interesting. Like if you look at, if you isolate your Shopify year over year of like the whole month, I'm actually seeing for the majority of my clients, they're following the exact same trend line. So I like to say, or I like to warn my clients. I'm like, Hey, there's going to be like three peaks.

5:16So don't freak out when we, you know, we get through the first peak and then we're kind of waiting for the next one. It's pretty standard. So the first peak happens when you launch that sale, you launch that email. A lot of people did it last Tuesday. So we did see that high peak kind of roll out last Tuesday through Thursday. Right now we're seeing the second peak roll out for most people. And then it's kind of more maintaining that spend heading into tomorrow and obviously Black Friday the day up and through the weekend when this does come out is trying to maintain that through the weekend to Cyber Monday.

5:46And then obviously the last peak is Cyber Monday. Some clients kind of bottom out or are able to maintain it. But if you do look at your year over year kind of trends for how your specific demographics are responding, it's pretty on par. Like I see the peaks following it. There's a slight shift just because the date of Black Friday is a couple of days different, obviously, which is naturally how the calendar moves, but it does follow a very similar trend line. So if you do know that, like say, you know, Black Friday was lower than the Saturday itself last year for you, then you can kind of say, okay, we know we can push or double your budgets on that day of and like paying attention to those trend lines because they're following pretty on par.

6:26But a lot of our clients are up slightly, you know, like 50 % or 100 % year over year growth, but still following that same peak line. Are there any website optimizations that people listening could even make right now? Always. Yeah. Even same thing as I said before, you know, we saw those costs creep up and to counter some of those costs, you want to make sure that your conversion rate is as high as it can be. Your AOV is as high as it can be. Anything that you can do to manipulate that to counter for the cost to keep your ROAS strong. You know, the most common sense one is if you have a banner at the top, just make sure it's just, it's static and it's not moving.

7:02A lot of people have the one that like flipped through, like just try to alleviate how much brain energy someone has to use and like get them as clear to the page to check out. So making that static, making it black, making it very in your face, like the Black Friday offer, this is it. Simplify the offer. So if you have like a stacked offer where there's like thresholds, right? It's like you get a certain percent off a certain dollar amount, just stick to one and say, okay, it's up to 40 % off. So they don't have to think even further obviously the header like the on your home page that should be black or you know static and calling out the black friday offer and i think some clients also miss kind of looking at mobile versus desktop so desktop you know you see the header you see the button in the header and then if you look on desktop the button is actually below the fold so you have to scroll and just simply moving that button up above the fold literally bumps up your conversion rate that same day.

7:58Little things like that. Clicking through your full cart and just making sure that everything's running smoothly. If you do have thresholds with your offer, just making sure that the upsells that you offer in the cart do match that threshold. So it's kind of like, okay, if you do add this, you do get for the free shipping, you get the offer and whatnot. Just alleviating any kind of road bumps that could happen. Go a long way. Take the speed bumps off the runway. You mentioned some clients being way up this year. Anecdotally, without mentioning any client names, can you tell me the story of a client hitting 100 % year-over-year growth and what sort of the strategy or thought process behind it was?

8:38Yeah. I can think of this one client. It's kind of funny because their goal was only 20%. They had very low hopes for Black Friday. This isn't their peak season at all. Their peak season actually is in spring. So we don't think it'll be that successful. you know of course our team being very ambitious we're like we're gonna try to unlock revenue wherever we can and so the biggest thing is looking at the ecosystem as a whole and not just isolating you know one platform so of course you have meta that's where most of people's revenue is driven from but you have to remember there is CRO and there's email and there's google and there's all these other pieces that play together and if you play them well together you can be really efficient and that's what we did so we started implementing you know rebuy I'm sure We've talked about it many times on the podcast, but we started implementing Rebuy on their website because they have so many different product SKUs and making sure that all of the widgets and the smart searches and the upsells and the post checkout are all AI optimized towards that consumer's behavior and the segmentations that we determined for them.

9:39And within the week that we started implementing it, we saw like a 20 % lift in top line revenue. and that of course is helping us right now like we're optimizing every single day with that 100 % year-over-year growth same with email so using meta more as a top of funnel driver or more of brand awareness and acquiring customers and being lower in that spend but then knowing that our email is going to capture those returning customers and you know that's a lot cheaper than trying to push traffic towards them as well so yeah it's a full funnel approach I think this time last year when they were working with us, they only had one platform.

10:14And that was retention, I believe. And so this year we saw the opportunity and we kind of, you know, rubbed up all the platforms and that's kind of where they're hitting that 100 % year over year growth when they thought they were only going to get 25. So it's pretty significant. I've been thinking about like what cruel fate for all the Americans to have to have one of their most significant holidays of the year, Thanksgiving. We already had our Thanksgiving a month ago, But to have it coincide directly with this Super Bowl of advertising. And I think of like so much of – I think on the Amazon side, a lot of like on these big days, on Prime Days, it's those day of optimizations and those things that you make sure that everything is funded, make sure your accounts are spending.

10:55And I know there's a lot of – all the American agencies out there are going to be really on it as well. But you brought up a point here that Meta is randomly putting some daily spend limits on accounts. So that's a nice feature that they decide to do at this time of year. Yeah. Oh, and there's a few other things that we're noticing too. This morning, we're seeing a lot of delayed attribution, more so than the average year. We don't know if it's like because everyone rolled out their AI, the servers are just overloaded. Obviously, last week and the week before, we had a couple of servers go down and everyone was scrambling back at that.

11:26We've seen this happen. There is quite a bit of delayed attribution happening right now. so I think just being aware of that and not worrying as much and kind of paying attention to multiple data points like for Google we're seeing a couple of purchases coming in pretty delayed but then the add to carts are there so then the ROAS looks really bad day up so if you pull back spend it's really going to be hard for you to catch back up so just kind of looking at where you were last year also leveraging you know third-party data apps if you are using it just making sure that you're looking at the triangle.

11:59It's like what I like to call it, like the platform, the third party attribution, like triple whale or North beam or whatever you're using. And then Shopify, because even on Shopify, we're seeing conversion rate be lower than what it's reporting in revenue and in triple whale. So it's this nice little game of attribution. But just remember, don't freak out when you see something on one platform, make sure you look at it across the board and make like a sound decision when you are optimizing hourly and that day of that, you know, it could be a little bit delayed. There could be something else in there, skewing the data a little bit.

12:36So try to find a better picture before you kind of jump the gun on bringing back spend or pulling up spend before you kind of just look at all the data points first. Beautiful. You mentioned Rebuy, TripWell. Are there any other apps that have kind of bubbled to your attention that certain clients are seeing good success with? Honestly, I think Rebuy is probably one of the biggest ones. Let's tell everyone what, we have talked about Rebuy a lot, but just tell everyone what Rebuy does. Give a free ad read for Rebuy Boys. They do so much. I'm going to get a DM from one of them. It's basically an app that optimizes, they have different widgets and different features that optimize on the website.

13:13A lot of the features that we like to use are kind of like the upsells on the PDPs themselves, And then you can optimize it based on the purchasing behavior of that actual user. We really love smart search. So, you know, again, when you're searching a specific thing, they can give recommendations that are very specific to that user. It just tailors the whole customer journey. Like there's so many things it does, you know, making sure it's pairing certain products that make sense instead of you having to manually think about it. it really helps for people who have like mass product catalogs and there's just so many mix and matches.

13:50So setting those in the behaviors, there's also like A-B testing tools at the post checkout or even at checkout to see where the best kind of upsells are there. But also you can, we're split testing right now on that same client that's about 100 % year over year up, is looking at the kind of USPs and the widgets within the checkout and which one kind of gives the best communication of trust. So we're split-testing that. It's basically all, I don't want to say free money, but every single time that we implement rebuy, we see a good chunk of top-line revenue bump. The day it gets implemented very quickly.

14:26I am actually really excited for this one client that I keep alluding to. We'll probably have a case study out on them here pretty soon because everything's just working very well. But yeah, it's a great tool, and they have a lot of different pieces within it that you can use and leverage. And even if you don't have a massive product category, just leveraging those widgets themselves and split testing alone is just always great and your checkout flow, so. Very cool. One of the themes that I'm talking about on the podcast all the time is something we've talked about for ages, which is this idea of deep angle testing, going deeper than your audience segments, getting down into your actual personas, their actual needs, wishes, wants, desires.

15:05Do you have any sort of anecdotes or concepts around ways that we've kind of dug deep into actual audience motivations in order to make sales this year? I mean, I think that's all of Pilot House's cadence. I think there was kind of a period of time before attribution got really muddied is we were kind of letting the algorithm guide the direction that we would go in with the business and with the ads and the angles. And now there's kind of this taking it back and now we want to guide the algorithm, not let the algorithm guide us. And so kind of figuring out what makes a person tick and what personas and demographics those specifically lay in and then pushing the algorithm towards it.

15:48one I can think that comes to mind without naming the client is, you know, it's a female jewelry brand where there's a specific demographic that works really well and they've kind of capped it. So it's kind of like, okay, why, why is it capped? You know, looking at the segmentations and what motivates them specifically that like emotional tie, but then figuring out that very, very specific emotional tie to the product itself and then making messaging specifically around that and then pushing it within the algorithm has worked really well. And it's kind of a method that we're doing for a lot of our clients, even with multiple product SKUs and each product SKU speaks to a specific demographic and doing some further research and learning where the trends are shifting as well.

16:34So before even like the algorithm has even gotten there, because it does favor certain demographics more because you know that they're spending money or they have extra cash to burn that it'll just automatically push towards it. But the truth is, if you're looking at the overall market, there's certain shifts happening that the algorithm hasn't caught up to yet. So another one, for instance, is like a medical device, I guess you could speak of, where obviously, I think a lot of people know in this space that there is this shift where under millennials are tending to spend away from, you know, going out and alcohol and, you know, those kind of pleasures and more in the health and wellness space, right, that has a massive growth prediction like now and even in through like 2020 30 new year new you coming up yeah yeah i mean i wouldn't say i would not use that line i think aves actually did a whole podcast she was like stop like no more new year new you but okay more just like the rituals but that does touch upon it it's like the rituals of it of creating rituals and wellness and shifting into that but the algorithm doesn't necessarily reflect that yet because it hasn't been trained towards it So now we're pushing it to go towards that direction and we've able to like unlock new product sales in new demographics without having to kind of let the algorithm tell us what to do.

17:51And we pushed it towards that section and we found like, you know, lower costs overall because we're actually speaking to the demo from, you know, the segment to the creative to the post click. So yeah, I mean, there's tons of examples of it. I know there's a lot of case studies that will probably be rolling out here pretty soon by the end of the year from Pilot House as we've been implementing that and seeing that success. And I think also what's interesting too is for those clients that we've been doing that deeper audience segmentation work, we've just been seeing the overall like on-platform metrics just be a lot healthier and you're not kind of swimming upstream.

18:25Like even with costs increasing, they're not increasing substantially or at least from what I'm seeing on my personal accounts, which is great to see because it just feels like you're hitting everything perfectly and everything's kind of working how it should be. But that upfront segmentation work, it's a lot of time and energy to figure out where those pockets are going to be the best for the business. This is the perfect example of an all killer, no filler podcast. This has been all killer, a little filler at the end. What's number one on your Christmas wishlist, Jocelyn, this year? Gosh, that's a good question.

18:55I don't know. I'm a stocking stuffer person. I love like - Oh, I love the stocking. Yeah. So like any little thing that like someone wouldn't buy for themselves, whether that's like, I don't know, like a lip gloss or like a book or I don't know, anything like that. So I love stocking stuffer stuff. I remember like as a kid, we'd get those lifesaver packs. They don't have them anymore. They need to bring them back. They need to bring them back. Like with the butterscotch and then the all cherry, like, no, they need to come back with that because that was like my childhood and I love them. So that would be on my wishlist if it was out there.

19:26All right. Well, let's lifesavers. If you're listening, get, get nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool. So get back to us. Nice. Just thanks so much. This is awesome. And I think it's a reminder, anyone listening, if you haven't checked out pilot house, go check out pilot house.co check out the case studies we have on our site. We're going to be loading up a lot more in, in the coming, in the coming months. Great opportunity to, to check out our work, but thanks again, just as sweet.

19:56Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer.co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer, no filler services, take off to pilothouse.co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC Podcast. We'll see you next time.