Black Friday/Cyber Monday is over. What do you do now?

Our strategies for avoiding the post-BFCM slump.

Author

Dmitry Fesenko
December 06, 2023

For us Ecomm people, Black Friday/Cyber Monday period feels like running a neverending marathon. You’ve probably spent the past few months leading up to mid-November feverishly preparing for the most important few weeks of the year. And after your campaigns went live, were you anxiously glued to your sales and ad dashboards checking performance every few hours? (Or maybe it was a good excuse to get out of awkward conversations during Thanksgiving with your family?) Regardless, you are probably ready to either sleep for 20 hours straight, or, go on an extended vacation to a faraway land where “Surprise! We extended our Cyber Monday sale!” emails don’t exist.

But unlike marathon runners, we can’t relax and take a few months off before starting to think about next year’s marathon. Because Christmas is right around the corner. And don’t forget about your New Year campaign! We don’t get the luxury of rest. *Cue a tiny mouse playing an even tinier violin. If you feel like you’ve run out of steam and just want someone else to figure it out, don’t worry, WE GOT YOU.

Keep reading and you’ll get:

  • a high level recap of Black Friday Cyber Monday.

  • a plan of action for what to do in this ‘quiet period’ (lol) to avoid a BFCM slump and ensure strong sales during the Christmas shopping season.

  • 5 ideas for holiday promotions that you can use for your business.

Prior to this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday season, there were some doom and gloom predictions that online sales would decline compared to last year. But, in a surprising turn of events, people were still in spending mode. According to Adobe Analytics, shoppers spent a whopping $9.8 billion on Black Friday, up 7.5% compared to 2022. Cyber Monday fared even better, with consumers spending $12.4 billion, up 9.6% compared to 2022. Harvey Finkelstein, President of Shopify, shared that Shopify merchants saw $4.1 billion in sales on Black Friday, up 22% compared to 2022. (Side note: this means that Shopify accounts for roughly 40% of all online sales, which is a pretty wild stat.)

Now that we’ve gotten the better-than-predicted BFCM data out of the way, let’s turn to how you can keep the momentum going for the last month of the year. We’ve developed a 3-step blueprint to help our clients optimize their ads and sales funnels for the Christmas shopping season.

Our 3-Step Blueprint to grow your business after BFCM

Step 1: Analyze

  • Conducting a post-mortem of your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign and performance is probably the last thing you want to do right now, but I promise, it’s worth taking the time to do this exercise. It will set you up for success down the road. While the data and performance is still fresh in your mind, do an in-depth analysis of:

    • what worked

    • what didn’t work

    • key learnings

    • implications for the future, broken out by marketing channel: what you would double down on, what you would do differently, new ideas to test

Step 2: Plan & Test

  • If you haven’t started working on your Holiday campaign yet, here are a few key things to plan & implement:

    • Offer: decide what your offer(s) will be for the holidays.

    • Creative: develop your holiday-themed creative. You don’t have to spend a lot of time and money shooting new content - it can be as simple as editing your existing content to make it feel more festive and holiday appropriate.

    • Landing page: create a landing page showcasing your holiday offer and creative. (This is a great place to include your holiday gift guide.)

    • Ad campaigns: don’t forget to create a new ad campaign promoting your new offers. Like BFCM, we recommend keeping your evergreen campaigns active during the holiday season.

    • Launch new products: we know it’s too late in the game to launch brand new products, but are there ways you can get creative? A few ideas that our clients have done successfully:

      • use holiday-themed packaging to make your existing products feel new and more giftable.

      • partner with other brands to create themed gift sets. We like what Haven Athletic did for a holiday-season gift bundle.

      • create branded merchandise. We love Vacation’s merch strategy.

    • Have you been wanting to dip your toes into ads on Tik Tok? Pinterest? We typically seem CPMs drop by 50-60% after BFCM, so now is a great time of the year to test new ad platforms.

Step 3: Cultivate

It’s important to build relationships with all of the new leads and customers you acquired during BFCM. While your brand and products are still fresh in their minds, now is a great time to deepen that relationship by implementing an email strategy that helps people get to know your brand better. A few ideas for email topics:

  • Personal Thank You: a personalized thank you email from the Founder and ask them for feedback.

  • About Us: tell the history of the business, share the founder story, share more about the employees at your company.

  • Behind the Scenes: share behind the scenes of your business, how you make your products.

  • Our Values: share more info about your brand’s core beliefs and values.

Bottom line: people want to buy from other people, so show the personal and human side of your business.

These are some other simple ideas to cultivate relationships with new customers and leads:

  • Introduce other products: share more info about the other products in your portfolio that your new BFCM customers did not purchase.

  • Send invitations to join your loyalty or referral programs.

  • Treat everyone like VIPs: share sneak peeks into upcoming new product launches, give them early access to holiday sales.

5 Holiday Promotion Ideas

To help replenish your creative juices, here are 5 promo campaigns we’ve implemented for our clients that gotten great results:

  1. Promote Buy Now Pay Later option: (BNPL payment method was at an all-time high during BFCM, so we expect this trend will continue through the Christmas shopping season.)

  2. Gift cards: position your gift card as a great option for last minute gifts or as an alternative if shipping deadlines have passed.

  3. “Treat Yourself”: didn’t get the Christmas gift you wanted? Buy yourself the gift you actually want!

  4. Buy One, Gift One: putting a holiday twist on the good ‘ol BOGO promotion.

  5. Out With the Old, In With the New: last chance sale on current products and best-sellers before they’re gone for good

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