🥗 The ONLY CRO Playbook You Need This BFCM

Hey there,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

I hope you’re having a great week thus far and are crushing your to-do list!

In today’s newsletter, we’ll be diving into the world of CRO and talking about how you can squeeze the most juice out of this BFCM season.

We recently talked to Ned Macpherson - CRO expert & founder of Endrock CRO agency - on the latest episode of Chew On CRO.

… and the only thing we can say is;

He dropped A TON of gems. Click here to check out the episode.

In this newsletter - we’ll try to distill down parts of the episode into a 6-page newsletter on how to think about your offer for BFCM.

If you find this newsletter valuable - make sure to forward it to a friend.

Without any further ado, let’s dive straight into today’s newsletter

Don’t start your BFCM offer early…

When should you start your offer?

Beginning of November?

Beginning of Black Week?

On the day of Black Friday?

This is a question that every founder and marketer asks themselves every single year.

So let’s dive into this first. 

Until this year, we always used to start our BFCM offer in early November for all customers.

Our thought process behind this has always been: “The earlier we start, the more juice we can squeeze out of the holiday season - as we give people more time to shop our great offers” 

After speaking with many DTC founders, we know that this is the natural assumption many have - and also the exact approach many take. 

BUT… 

… It’s not necessarily true

In the first episode of Chew On CRO, Ned talked about the results he has observed after A/B testing “Start offer early vs. start offer late” for 100s of brands over the last few years. 

… and the result has time and again been; “The brands that started their sale early demonstrably had a lower overall net gain than those who started the week off”

Here’s the reasoning behind it:

When creating offers, there are two buckets of users to keep in mind - existing customers and new customers.

1). Existing Customers: When brands launched their BFCM offer early, this bucket assumed that the brand would come up with a better offer on the week off - hence they didn’t end up buying as much as they wanted to - leading to a huge missed opportunity.

And even worse, when the “real BFCM offer” hit (which was the exact same) - the customers forgot about it and didn’t end up making any purchases.

2). New customers: Now, since you can't directly interview customers who didn’t convert - we can’t say the definite reason for them not buying. 

But, if you think about it, any new customer would also think the same. 

When they land on your website and see your “Early BFCM offer” they probably wonder if that really is your best offer - which ultimately makes them delay the purchasing decision to see if they can get a better offer down the line

But there’s another aspect to this strategy that goes beyond the psychology of consumers = gross margin lift.

If you run a discount the whole month - obviously you will see a decline in your gross margin.

But running the discount only for that BFCM week - you will save the cost of being on discount for the entire month and therefore have an overall lift in gross margin for the month.

So a win-win for everyone.

The key takeaway here is to NOT start your BFCM offer early and start it on the week off.

At least that’s what we’re doing with all three of our brands this year.

Simplicity always wins…

How many times have you visited a brand’s website and been confused about their offer??

Recently, we stumbled upon a brand that was having an “Early Bird Black Friday Offer”. This is how their (confusing) offer was structured:

1), Spend $50, get $10 OFF

2). Spend $100, get 10% OFF

3). If they get a bundle then it's a BOGO and none of the above offers apply

You see how confusing this is…

Based on our data at Obvi (and the brands that Ned is working with through EndRock) the engagement time of a consumer is around 40 seconds from A - Z including writing all their information in checkout and whatnot.

Which essentially means…

They WON’T sit there and do the math…

The consumer has to understand your offer in a split-second. 

Otherwise - they probably won’t buy.

What offer should I run? 

Alright - now let’s touch upon another very frequently asked question…

Which offer should I run? Or rather… How much of a discount should I give? 

Here’s how to figure it out

If you’re the type of brand that does heavy discounting (50-60%) frequently then going with a 30-40% for BFCM won’t cut it.

Why?

Because most of your consumers are used to seeing that 50-60% discount and BFCM being the biggest sale of the year - they’d literally expect that.

So you’d need to have the BEST sale of the year to stand a chance.

If you can’t beat it, you need to at least match it. 

On the other hand, if you’re the type of brand that doesn’t do any discounts all year around…

Then even a 10% discount for BFCM would crush it for you.

Why?

For the same reason as above…

Because your customers are not used to seeing any discounts from you and your 10% OFF is really the BEST sale of the year (in their minds).

Hence, you can’t generalize in this case, and what offer you should run is solely a factor of your consumer archetype and your historical offers.

Should you A/B test new offers during BFCM?

Hell no!

Do whatever you’ve always done.

• - If you’ve always done plain discounts, then do that

• - If you’ve always done free gifts, then do that

• - If you’ve always done BOGOs, then do that.

Stick to the offer format that’s always been working for you, and don’t get too fancy. This is NOT the time to A/B test new things

Again, it boils down to the point we made above about simplicity. 

Your consumers may not be used to seeing free gifts or BOGOs from you and seeing it for BFCM may confuse them.

Again for the people in the back… 

 BFCM is NOT the period to test a new offer. The time to test is the rest of the year and then go through all your data to see which offer/s crushed that you can repurpose for BFCM.

Segmenting your offers…

Now, let's talk about how you can put your BFCM offers on steroids.

Start segmenting your customers into different behavioural buckets like…

• “Used to be high value but no longer purchasing”

• “Super high value - have been purchasing since the past two times”

• “Not purchased since the past 8 months”.

Now, of course, these aren’t the only buckets that you can segment customers into.

These are just examples of buckets you can think about. 

After segmenting your customers into these different buckets, start creating offers personalized to each of these buckets that are highly valuable to that specific bucket.

I.e

Don’t run the same generic offer to every single customer

For instance, the customers who haven’t purchased from you for a long time - be more aggressive in terms of your discount or add an additional gift for them just to win them back.

Now this same offer probably wouldn’t fit the people who are your loyal customers and for them, just a simple discount would do.

So creating these highly personalized offers leads to a more personalized experience for the consumers.

Now you might wonder, “Okay I get I have to segment my offers, but then what do I show on the website?”

The answer to this is pretty simple… 

Instead of making several changes on your main website, create specific landing pages for each of those buckets with specific offers and messaging catered to that bucket. 

And keep your evergreen offer on the website as is. 

But if you want to be a “super-saiyan” about it you can create a personalized experience on your website as well - but that’ll require more sophisticated tools

Now, if you’re a brand that’s just starting out you don’t have to worry about this too much as this mainly applies to brands that have a good amount of historical data.

The main point here is this window is a great opportunity to win back all those customers who haven't purchased from you in a while.

Tool of the week

Another thing you absolutely NEED to test out for BFCM is Proxima.ai

A few months ago - Proxima came to us and said that they had built this AI-based look-a-like audience with data from 55 million shoppers and 10 billion dollars in spending.

In the beginning - we were like: “meeeeeh - this probably doesn’t work”

But then they offered us a free trial to test it against our broad campaigns on Meta and PROMISED us that it would outperform our broad audience

So we thought… “okay - let’s give it a shot and A/B test”

And the results have been pretty damn good, to say the least.

Like - this has surpassed all of our expectations.

Here are some of the results that we’ve gotten over the last few months…

- Our NC-CPA dropped by 6.2%

- Our NC-ROAS increased by 7.5%

The best part is we’ve been able to scale it pretty efficiently and it now takes around 30% of our Meta ad spend - which is a good chunk of money.

Definitely worth giving a shot!

Go here to book a demo with them and get yourself set up before BFCM

Because they offer a free trial - it’s basically just like any other A/B test. Literally a no-brainer to test

#ProudPartner

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read this. We hope we were able to provide some value to you and look forward to serving you again on Sunday.

All the best,

Ron and Ash