Ep 637: "Find Them Now, Sell Them in November": Pilothouse's 8-Week Black Friday Prep Playbook

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media, and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to Pilothouse.co and now on with the show.

0:30Jacob:A lot of efforts that are going to get a lot of eyeballs on your product aren't going to come to fruition immediately. Not everything needs to be by now, by now. It needs to be like there's millions of people out there that we can sell to that aren't even aware of us. Let's make them aware of us now and let's really reap those benefits when they're in a high buy and intent period like Black Friday. Pre-warming Meta's algorithm. How do you warm up that algo? You're going to want to spend a lot more in November, December. You're not going to want to jump from let's increase our budgets 500 % on day one of November.

1:06Jacob:You're going to want to gradually ramp up towards that.

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2:39How are you doing?

2:40Jacob:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm doing good here. How are you? Always good. I was just saying, just got back from this awesome festival, top secret festival on the island here. Look forward to doing that again next year. I got vacation coming up next week before the Q4 craziness kicks in. So what are the main things? I know we've talked a lot over the years. This is our seventh Black Friday together, which is what I know you were even doing it probably before then a little bit. But what are the things that you're thinking about in terms of meta mainly, I guess, that you're thinking about right now to make sure that we're ready to hit Q4 with our utmost?

3:17Jacob:Good question. It's really starting with the mindset of like, you don't want to be running through roadblocks and doing the prep during Q4, right? You want all your focus on maximizing value and maximizing purchases, maximizing revenue growth. So really it does come back to September, August, September, leaking a bit into October. And that's when all the prep should be doing, should be getting done, making sure all your cylinders are firing, making sure your lists are warm, making sure you've tested offers and we'll get a bit more into the weeds. But like, you know, as an intro, it's it's that.

3:56Jacob:And a lot of people are getting in through their summer sprints right now. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, crap, you know, it's already end of October. No, we got to prep our Halloween sale. Oh, no, now it's Black Friday and we haven't we haven't done what we need to do. And you're definitely not maximizing your value if you're not starting to get ahead of that stuff. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about. And I know I feel like we've done a similar podcast kind of every year at this time, but there's some new stuff, you know, popping up every year, things you can really do with your brand to make sure that you really maximize Q4 and see that year over year growth that you need.

4:32So we're covering a couple of key topics. You have it here is pre-Q4 warmup and signal strategy, and then offer architecture and creative playbooks, which I think covers quite a lot. And this pre-Q4 warmup is what we used to call, to some degree, part of it is stalking the pond, as we say. I don't know if we still like using phishing metaphors, but is that still accurate?

4:53Jacob:For sure. That's still a big part of it. It's a great time to potentially launch some lower cost lead gen campaigns, engagement campaigns, pushing out a lot of efforts that are going to get a lot of eyeballs on your product that maybe aren't going to come to fruition immediately. You know, not everything needs to be by now, by now. It needs to be like, you know, there's millions of people out there that we can sell to that aren't even aware of us. Let's make them aware of us now on top of everything we're already doing. And let's really reap those benefits when they're in a high buying intent period like Black Friday.

5:31Jacob:You know, let's get on meta and let's push out a low cost lead gen campaign, maybe spends 5 % of our total ad budget. let's change the uh the optimization event on that campaign to engagement rather than purchase so that meta gets more eyeballs on it for a better cost sure we're going to get a lot of window shoppers um but because it's you know five percent of our budget it's not going to eat away at all the margins we currently have maybe it's even less than five percent and it's just going to cut like i said really really uh come to fruition in in q4 when now we have them on our our pixel we have them on our website we can retarget them directly with our messaging and we don't need to find them and sell to them in q4 we just need to sell to them right just a quick one before we get back into it i want to know how deep are you planning to discount this q4 most brands are guessing so we're building a benchmark report called beyond the discount if you run a d2c brand we want your data the survey takes five minutes and your answers stay confident confidential.

6:37Every brand operator who completes it is entered to win a$1 ,000 gift card. We're expecting a few hundred entries, so these are probably the best odds at a grand you'll ever see. The link to the report is in the show notes. It closes August 23rd, and we award the prize August 24th. All right, back to the show. What are the most effective lead generation strategies for e-commerce brands? Are we talking about just giving discounts that people may come back and news later? Are we actually talking about creating lead magnets or what's the best way to lead generate this time of year for fruits that will bear in Q4?

7:12Jacob:Yeah, it's a good question. There's kind of the two pronged approach where one is engagement and you don't even need a lead gen campaign. You're just telling Meta to like get these ads. You know, you might want to use like some of your top UGC ads, some of your top videos, or maybe some of your top influencer partnerships and just put them into engagement campaigns where you're getting your ads in front of thousands of people for maybe a couple dollars, right? And people are just viewing those. Even if they're viewing that ad, they get added to your view audience on Meta. So you can actually retarget them based on the views as well.

7:48Jacob:In terms of getting more of that first-party data on lead gen, like you said, there's a few options there. There's things like pre-sales you could potentially do if you have new products coming out. Sign up now to ensure you get the best price when this product releases. Sign up now to ensure you get stock. We allocate stock to you because it's going to sell out fast. Those kind of type of campaigns. There's also things like giveaways that we see a lot of success with. Find a product that you can give away or maybe you have a partnership with other brands. Just as an example, if you're a beer company and you have a partnership with a beef jerky brand, figure out a way that you can do a big giveaway of a bundle of that stuff.

8:35Jacob:You're going to get tons of people that sign up for that giveaway that aren't going to purchase your products right away, but now you have their email, you have their first-party data, and you're going to be able to hit them into your email engine, sending them those drip emails. You're going to be able to upload them as an audience on meta. So giveaways are a really good one. And all it really requires is figuring out, hey, what are we giving away? Okay, it's$750 of stuff. That's really nothing, right? There's no cost behind that. And then you just have this squeeze page that explains the giveaway, shows images of what it is.

9:11Jacob:And then you're just launching a few ads around that and optimizing to lead gen. And make sure your leads fire when they sign up on the site. And you'll see a lot of leads coming in that you can then retarget. And once the giveaway ends, hey, we're going to have this giveaway end on October 15th. You know, you want to do it before Black Friday. Everyone that signed up that didn't win, there's a bit of FOMO there. And a lot of the time they're going to come purchase anyways. And that's typically when that giveaway ad spend, you know, breaks even and gets into the green. once that giveaway is done.

9:45Jacob:And then it's just all profit from there when you're just dripping them after that. So is there any change that you have to make to your engagement campaigns in light of the sort of shrinking conversion window or cookie window that we have with meta audiences? Like to keep them engaged on the pixel, do they need to continually engage? Or if you engage them now, will you be able to recall them in November? Yeah, you can still recall them. For engagement audiences specifically, it's like, you know, it's up to 180 days that they stay within your ecosystem. That is more related to like purchase attribution and how long those like events are attributed to your campaigns.

10:29Jacob:But in the sense of them building as an audience, that's actually not an issue. And it's actually kind of gone the opposite way where with the purchasers now, you can actually build a list. I think it's like 720 days. so you can actually retarget people at a longer outlook. I think we talked about it in a previous podcast, actually. But no big issues there. If you're getting people engaged now, you'll be able to retarget them come Q4. You just need to make sure your conversions API and everything is set up correctly and feeding those server-side events back to your account. All right, next topic, pre-warming Meta's algorithm.

11:11them. How do you warm up that algo? Yeah, I mean, so you're going to want to spend a lot more in

11:19Jacob:November, December, you're not going to want to jump from, you know, let's increase our budgets 500 % on day one in November, you're going to want to gradually ramp up towards that. So recommended like start increasing your spend, you know, around two months early, which we're starting to get towards now, right? September, October, start finding your wins, start building that spend up where you can, where you do have margins. And just know that, you know, if you're seeing slightly less, less of a profit margin in the short term, building that spend is still going to pay dividends in the Q3, Q4, you know, sprint.

11:57Jacob:So you want to warm that up, you want to be, you know, increasing 10, 15%, you know, every week or so, and just start to work on a timeline for yourself that make sense based on your your results and budgets um but that's that's kind of one part so gradually bump up and then when you're you know in november you can go more aggressive versus just all at once and then um you can do a few things like you know build value-based lookalikes um you know we're not doing as much of this with andromeda it is a lot more broad targeting but we still do see success and you know go in export your top 500 purchasers based on who has spent the most at your company at your brand who has bought the most product even over the career of your brand export them upload them as an audience and then build look-alike audiences based on those people so tell meta hey i want one percent of the u.s population most closely related to these people start to hit them across the board.

12:58Jacob:And that's just like, it is warming up your algorithm, your pixel to find those types of people in congruency to you increasing your spend and you're kind of attacking it from both sides there. Making sure your conversions API, like I just said, is feeding server side signals correctly. If you're going to your events manager and you see weak conversions API scores, like a five out of 10, six out of 10. Okay, why is that? Typically, it's because you're not sending enough parameters back. And so you can go in and you can make sure you're sending, you know, click IDs, event IDs, name, email, phone number, everything you can, you want to send as much as possible back, you know, while still staying within ruling.

13:45Jacob:So that's sort of the other side. So it's really those three things, you know, gradually getting spend up where you can. Think about that now, two months ahead of Black Friday and Christmas. Start building value-based audiences to kind of lead your pixel towards them. Start launching those lower-cost engagement lead gen campaigns and making sure you're tracking and KP is sending strong signals. You typically want to see like an 8 or 9 score at least out of 10 on Cappy. And then finally, also just make sure that your budgets are ready to roll. Make sure that you're not going to get capped with what you do want to spend in Q4, even if you're not spending it now.

14:24So you've got to proactively request ad spend limits.

14:27Jacob:Yeah, good point. It's a really good time. Make sure you go into your payment settings in Meta. Check if you do have an ad account spending limit. A lot of brands have also been shifted over to monthly invoicing by Meta. So make sure you don't have this massive outstanding balance that, you know, manually needs to get paid because sometimes that can actually cause your account to get paused until the payments happen. We've seen that where it's just like you have to manually pay a monthly invoice because it's a new thing where they're not just, you know, automatically charging your credit card like they used to.

15:02Jacob:And if you don't do that or forget or whatever, all of a sudden Meta flags the account, pauses it until it's resolved. And that could be crucial during a Q4 push. So make sure your ad spend limit is good. Make sure it's way higher than you want to spend just in case you see a ton of success and really want to push up. And yeah, make sure you're checking on your invoicing and everything as well. Which they have now fully switched over to. I see it was April 1st that they sort of really began the full phase out of credit card payments. Those are all fully phased out now. Everything is on invoice?

15:34Jacob:Yeah, I think for the most part, pretty much everything is monthly invoicing now. A lot of people have the credit lines set up as well, but it's out of just the daily credit card charges that brands would see. And a lot did prefer. So there's been a few pushbacks from certain brands and things like that, just based on how their company operates. But yeah, Meta's kind of forced that switch through. This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale, the AI operating system for e-commerce. Here's a question worth sitting with. Is your ROAS actually good or is it just good for you? You know your ROAS, you know your CPA, your AOV, but how do those actually stack up against brands you're competing with?

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17:37All right, well, on to offer architecture and the creative playbooks that we're testing out right now. We're actually working on a big report called Beyond the Discount, which is funny because I think probably a lot of the results that we'll get from that are like, no, we're still doing a lot of discounts, especially this year, I think when people are feeling the financial squeeze. So I feel like maybe brands may be squeezing themselves in order to kind of meet them where they're at. But what are your thoughts on how to craft your offer or how to, how to be testing your offer ahead of time to make sure that, you know, it's, it's going to be the most effective it can.

18:13Yeah.

18:14Jacob:I mean, it's kind of interesting because a year and a bit ago, like the tariff situation was putting a lot of like pressures on a lot of brands to, Hey, we actually can't offer, you know, anything now, like our margins are so thin for the most part, it's, you know, time has passed and like brands have adjusted as needed, right. To survive. And that has come to a bit more of a, from what we've seen, at least like more brands in a better spot again on that side, whether they found new providers or adjusted their ingredients or whatever it might be. Right. So So we are finding a lot of brands are a lot more free to offer something now again, which is great to see.

18:53Jacob:And yeah, I think like whether that's you adjusting pricing so you can have offers or whatever it might be, you're going to want offers in Q4. If you're just running a buyer stuff, when all your competitors are offering 15, 20 % off, you're probably going to struggle a bit during Black Friday. And you can get creative with these offers 100%. So it's like now is a great time to test these playbooks. You know, what are the offer structures working best for us and our brand and our products and our audiences? You know, let's run them as a end of summer sale. Let's do a little split test. Let's, you know, for two weeks do a site-wide percentage discount, 15 % off all products site-wide.

19:38Jacob:Let's look at how the math is going to back out on that. you know, our investment and our output and our costs. And then let's do a tiered spend threshold where, yeah, maybe you're getting$20 off if you spend a hundred or more. And, you know, theoretically all offers are going to help versus just your evergreen, evergreen like push. But we do find that like site-wide just works a lot better for certain products maybe that have a ton of variants, right? You have a hundred different products. It's really hard to, you know, pick and choose certain collections to give a sitewide discount. Or if it's a product that, you know, you have a hundred of them, but people might want 10 of them.

20:21Jacob:That's a great offer because now they can just go freely pick and choose whatever they want. There's no roadblock there and they're still getting the offer. But then, you know, on the flip side, there's brands that might make sense where it's like our margins just don't make sense on a$50 purchase or it's really tough. We need to incentivize like higher deals and we don't want to offer on, you know, every product because half of our products sell themselves. Everyone knows about them. You know, an offer probably isn't going to make a difference. So let's do a, you know, tiered offer on this new collection that we just launched.

20:57Jacob:And it really does depend on, you know, what is your North Star this year. But I guess the point I'm trying to say is like, you should be testing those now versus just, here's our Q4 offer that we're just going to roll with because we think it'll do good. You need to add reasoning behind why you're doing that. And, you know, August, September is a great time to test those offers at a smaller, smaller percentages. You don't need to go give 40 % off. You could do a 5 % off or 10 % off. Just prove out the concepts. Yeah. Love that. And your next point here was something I was thinking about in the previous as well, is creative as the gift guide.

21:36It's a crafting gift for him or her visual hooks, which just sort of can plant the idea for when it does come time for holiday shopping that, you know, these socks are going to be the perfect gift for your whole family or whatever. Just kind of planting that idea of your product as a gift for the holiday season seems like a great, great angle.

21:54Jacob:For sure. Yeah. And it's a good time to be doing that now. Like you said, a lot of people do do their shopping even earlier. And it can actually kind of circle back to the engagement campaigns and like, you know, gift guides, you know, the perfect gift for your wife, the perfect gift for your husband. Those are actually good ads to run in like a engagement campaign as well, or even like a lead gen, you know, sign up now to be notified of offers, things like that. But just in general, bringing it in the front, even in your purchase intent campaigns, you know, with visual hooks, unboxing reels, people talking about how it's the best gift ever while unboxing it and showing that, you know, process is very real and people are going to relate to that.

22:42Jacob:And Andromeda is going to start to take those signals as it does. And it's going to start to optimize those specific ads to people that are looking for gifts. And obviously in Q4, that's everyone. So to get ahead of that now and start getting those people onto your pixel is essential. So yeah, creative as a gift guide. Think about that. And then as you get closer to these dates, these, you know, shipping cutoff dates, you need to order by, you know, December 10th to get it for Christmas. Have like some countdown, you know, urgency assets added in there, whether that's in the ads or on the page.