#growth-and-marketing
Thread
@Patrick Crowley asked me to kick off a thread on the results & learnings of BFCM 2024, happy to do that and also looking forward to hear about all the learnings of everyone else!
Results:
• 50k+ orders over the whole month
• Doubled our best month to date
Our overall strategy:
For us the journey of BFCM started as early as September, so I’ll start from there.
September/October:
• We turned off all our evergreen offers in the last week of September, so there was literally not a single offer left on site and everything was full price
• We left this until November 1st.
November 1st-14th:
• 1st of November we turned on our evergreen offer which is gifts with purchase, we didn’t yet put our BFCM offer on site, this already caused a massive revenue spike, and 45% of our total contribution margin for November was made in this period already with only 27% of total revenue
• From 1st - 14th of November we tested lead generation via META, but found out that 80% of the leads were already in our email list and we felt like overpaying.
• Besides this we also set up a VIP list and pushed people with emails into that list
• We launched 2 new products to create buzz and be top of mind, these launches were quite succesful
November 15th-24th
• On Friday the 15th we launched early access and even though the revenue was quite low, we made the most contribution on this day
• On Saturday 16th we launched our BFCM ads and offer, which was 25% off sitewide
• This period we did 52% of our contribution margin for the month with 44% of the revenue
• Here we just ran ads and occasionally followed up on email to let people know about the offer
November 25th - December 1st
• The ads really started performing less but we wanted to keep up spend and revenue to prepare for the big bang in the weekend
• From Monday-Thursday we were operating at a loss, that’s how bad it got
• Then Black Friday hit and we 2.5xed our ad budget + launched a 1+1 sale on refills (mostly for returning customers) next to the 25% off sitewide, from a revenue perspective it was an absolute wild success, but from a contribution perspective it was a nightmare.
• Saturday and Sunday we scaled down massively and our contribution picked back up and we did great
• Sunday night was just wild, people had so much urgency they started buying like crazy.
Learnings for next year
• Push lead generation on META harder because it will push more people to be in-market for your offer during BFCM, even if they don’t convert on the early access sale, they will convert later on with ads.
• Have an offer that more people are in-market for and sounds more appealing, e.g. ‘up to 40% off’, we feel like people weren’t wow’ed with the offer
• Prioritize contribution targets over revenue targets, but set both.
• Do more surf scaling during Black Friday itself instead of upping the budget before hand
• On BF weekend itself increase the offer even more and don’t use same offer as you were running before (eg. up to 40% off --> up to 50% off)
• On Sunday night send out much more urgency emails (eg only x hours left, etc)
My biggest learning is that I should’ve strategized BFCM with many more founders upfront because I believe we haven’t had the best strategy at all.
Hence I’m also very curious to hear about the BFCM stories of the rest of you! 🙌
Unbelievable Sem! Thank You 🙌
Really interesting. Thanks for sharing
🥶🥶🥶
@Sem - Sassy Saints once you removed the evergreen offer from the website in september, did you see that conversion increased again over time.
We would like to do less discounts in 2025, but see a huge drop in sales once we remove the discount. We want to test it for a longer time period after Black Friday, but did you see that the drop is restoring itself again over time?
@Lars van der Wijst the first days are terrible and then it’ll level itself out, but do expect a huge revenue drop.
For October we had terrible revenue but we aimed on break-even and we managed to do that, and in turn our customers were waiting desperately for an offer to come back and at the start of November the results were very good because of this even without the black friday offer.
Clear, interesting
@Sem - Sassy Saints Firstly congrats on a successful BF and for sharing your learnings.
Few things we did that worked really well for us this BF:
• Significantly cranked up Meta spend from August through to end of October. We sacrificed efficiency acquiring more customers, but both our email list size and customer base grew. Come our BF sale we had much larger owned audience to market to, which resulted in our biggest revenue and profit month ever. Non-customers consideration window around 3 months, and new customers on average make a second purchase after 3 months, so this tied in nicely with BF.
• During our BF sale (which started 21st) for the first time ever we ran awareness ads on FB to our engaged audience. My theory was that customers need to be aware of our sale, and so we used this alongside email, sms and our members group to get that message out. Worked really well.
• Kept our evergreen FB ads running, but ended up reducing budgets as performance was dipping longer into the sale.
• An ASC campaign was also live, but again, we saw CPA’s rising the further we got into the sale, so reduced budgets on that as well.
• Offer wise we kept it simple and did 30% off sitewide. Auto discounts at checkout for less friction.
• Also launched some aggressive post purchase upsell offers which bumped AOV. Offered more discount on these offers.
• Sent an email a day. Then last few days of sale upped it to 2-3 with urgency messages. Some of our non-customers have been on our list for months. Way I see it is if they don’t buy now, then they likely never will. So market to them till they buy or die.
• On launch day we did 3 live events in our members group (has around 28k customers in). The morning one did well, but the other two didn’t. Next year we’ll consolidate it into an evening event and gamify it more.
In summary, most of the work for BF is done in the months beforehand (acquiring more customers at lower efficiency and building mailing list). So come sale time we keep everything as simple as possible to maximise contribution margin.
@Tom Reid on the buy or die piece - how badly did this affect your unsubscribe rate compared to normal? & Have you subsequently analysed/bucketed the unsubscribes?
Thanks all for sharing, a very interesting read.