An Unconventional BFCM Tactic

Hey there, 

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

We hope you’re having a great week thus far and are crushing your TO-DO list.

BFCM is just around the corner, and many brands are showcasing their “biggest discounts of the year” and taking a hit on their gross margins.

BUT…

… we decided to do something out-of-the-box for one of our brands: Coffee Over Cardio.

This strategy is not talked about a lot on Twitter, but it is a great way to increase your customer LTV without taking a hit on your gross margins through huge discounting.

This is also attainable by any brand of any size and just requires some upfront work on the team’s end.

Now, don’t get us wrong - having huge discounts during this time of the year is essential and does increase your sales drastically but it doesn’t hurt at times to think out of the box.

So… without further ado - let’s dive straight into today’s newsletter

Something is coming….

Does this ring a bell about what we did?

Okay, enough of the hiding…

Drum roll, please….

PRODUCT LAUNCH

We launched an entirely new product line in collaboration with @postcereals and made it an “exclusive BFCM” product.

Now, you might wonder:

1). Why did we do this, especially during Black Friday?

2). How would this offer be able to compete against a huge discount from a competitor?

Both of these are really great questions and let's break down each of them.

A)

In today's environment, there is almost no loyalty left among consumers.

Consumers have a plethora of choices to choose from, so you have to do something different and exciting to stand out. 

That’s why launching new and exciting products is a great way to give your customers a reason to buy from you again. 

At Obvi, we launched 26 different products last year, giving our customers 26 different reasons to buy from us again.

Now, this is a great way to increase your customer LTV and the best part is you don’t even have to rely on discounts - and therefore, you can outspend everyone else on your advertising.

Especially during a time like Black Friday, when CPMs are already way too high, having additional ad dollars can be a lifesaver for you.

B).

During this time of the year, all consumers are looking for the best deals & huge discounts. 

So, you have to ensure that whatever discount you’re giving - it has to be the BEST one to grab their attention.

But…

… if you think about it - having 50% OFF is great on the front end as you get more sales but it may lead to you being unprofitable on the first order - which for us was unacceptable for this year.

Of course, there are ways to get around it - for example by increasing AOV through bundles and whatnot but it's still an uphill battle if our front-end offer in itself is sooooo big.

The way to stand out and compete against these heavily discounted brands, yet give consumers the BEST deal of the year is - launching a new product/flavor.

… and if you want to put a cherry on top of that - you make your product launch exclusively available for BFCM shoppers only

So, if consumers don’t make a purchase now they won’t have access to this new flavor.

Now, this inherently builds a sense of scarcity and urgency in the customer’s mind making them:

1). Grab their attention

2). Not even think about a discount

This strategy is a win-win for everyone - the customers get to try a limited-edition flavor and we (as a brand) get to increase our LTV, also not take a hit on our gross margins.

Okay, now that we spoke about the strategy and the reason why we decided to go ahead with it - you might wonder how we ended up finding the flavour we want to launch.

Great question, let's dive into it!

Ask and you shall receive

Everybody has heard this old saying, yet only a few make an effort to actually ask their customers and listen to them. 

Step 1 to researching new product ideas is to ask your customers what they want.

So that’s what we did…

We created a Typeform survey and sent it to our existing customer base. Here are the answers we wanted to know:

1). What products would they like to spend their hard-earned money on?

2). What are the products that they would wish we'd create for them?

Almost 65% of them mentioned they wanted some nostalgic flavors like Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles that would remind them of cereal.

You see how easy this was… no need to go through a product research firm and whatnot. Let your customers tell you themselves what they want from you.

To make this process easier for you, here are three critical lessons we learned from sending out +30 surveys;

1). Always ask open-ended questions

2). Never ask more than 4-5 questions

3). Give your customers an incentive to answer the survey if you don't have super-loyal fans who'll do it for free. (Ps. we always attach a $30 gift card at the end of every survey ;))

Hyping up…

This is the most exciting part…

Once you’re done with surveying your customers - you’ve gotta hype up this product/flavour launch to make it seem like it’s “ONE OF A KIND”.

Your ability to create hype is literally what's going to make or break your product launch.

The first thing we did was work with your supplier to get 4-6 mockup variations of the coming product as soon as possible.

This allowed us to create our ads, prepare some website banners, and get some samples out to our creator roster list so even they can hype it up on their accounts (we incentivize them as well ;)).

Once we had these fundamentals set up, we got our community excited. 

Let them know something new is coming, and most importantly, make them feel heard - since they were the ones who chose that flavour.

We hyped it up almost everywhere possible - on our IG’s, the FB group etc.

Here are some examples:

This is how we teased this new flavour launch. 

Once we revealed the flavours to our audience, we created a Facebook event where people can RSVP to get reminded, and will be sending our emails and SMS’ to get notified the day it drops.

Another thing that we’re doing is going live in our FB community the day the flavor drops and announcing it. 

This is what we’ve done historically at Obvi and will be repeating it here for Coffee Over Cardio as well.

But…

… in all of this, our biggest cheat code to a successful flavor launch would be our Tapcart app.

Since push notifications are pretty much FREE to use - we would be sending them out like there is no tomorrow, “72 hours left", "48 hours left", "24 hours left",... you get the point. 

Attention is basically the oil of the modern world, and with an app - you can get people's attention without having to worry about landing in spam folders, opt-outs, or lost tracking.

Bottom Line

One thing we want you to take away from this is that you don’t lose anything in standing out from your competitors and there’s no ONE way of tackling Black Friday.

Challenge your beliefs and the status quo - just because your competitors are running huge discounts doesn’t necessarily mean you should too.

The main point of Black Friday is to offer something you’ve NEVER offered to your customers whether that be in the form of discounts, new flavours, giveaways etc

Tool of the week

In this week’s tool of the week - we want to highlight a company that we’re not personally using at Obvi, but which we’re looking into using for some of our upcoming brands in our DTC Venture Studio

Shipping from China has always been A) very expensive and B) a big mess when it comes to shipping times.

A handful of our close advisors have been recommending us to use a company like Portless that ship directly from a 3PL in China to our US customers in 6-8 days with a 40% reduction in the cargo shipping cost (due to Section 321)

Now - as said; We’re not actively using this company right now in any of our companies - but we’re investigating the possibilities of working with them.

And since their offerings look lucrative and we’ve heard great things about them - we wanted to share them with you in today’s “Tool of The Week”

You can check them out here, and see if they can be a good fit for your business

#Sponsored

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