Ecommerce merchants must be ready to dominate Q4 as Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022 draw near.
In a study done by Adobe, $8.9 billion was spent online by consumers on Black Friday alone in 2021. It’s crucial that sellers understand how to prepare for this annual event to get the most value out of it.
In this article, we’ll go over:
- The importance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Five ways to leverage campaigns for explosive ecommerce growth
- Helpful tips and strategies to implement into your 2022 Black Friday campaign
Why Black Friday is a great time to grow your subscriber base
Every year, Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday is designated as “Cyber Week.”
These five days involve heavy consumer spending: According to the same Adobe Analytics study, Cyber Monday 2021 generated almost $10.7 billion in online sales. Meanwhile, for the entirety of Cyber Week 2021, Adobe reported $33.9 billion in online spend.
With so many consumers in the mood to shop, it’s more crucial than ever for brands not only to build new relationships, but also nurture their existing customers for better retention. Cyber Week is a great time to grow your subscriber base, build lasting customer lifetime value (LTV), and set yourself up for success in Q4 and beyond.
Wondering how to get started? Use Media Jet’s Ecommerce Campaign Simulator to see what CPA, LTV, and ad spend you need to hit your Q4 goals. From there, use the tactics below to make the most of Cyber Week 2022.
How to plan Black Friday offers that focus on lasting ecommerce growth
At Media Jet, Q4 2021 was one of our most successful quarters yet. When analyzing last year’s success, we found that there are five key things to focus on when leveraging Black Friday for maximum ecommerce growth.
1. Build strong offers focused on LTV
Sometimes, our highest revenue yielding offers hide in the shadows.
According to Help Scout, the possibility of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%, but the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. When you shift your focus to returning customers and their lifetime value, you start to build a strategy that gives your business higher profit margins in the long term.
Something that is often overlooked is the relationship between first purchase and 90 day LTV. Consider your highest-performing offers—ones that encourage customers to not only sign up, but also to stick around. Sometimes, these offers could take the form of a 3-month subscription; other times, they might be a “first month free” campaign or a quiz funnel.
At Media Jet, once we identify, validate, and test your highest performing offers from the year, we start planning and scheduling our email/SMS/remarketing content around factors such as:
- Scarcity (multiple sales with end dates and sale extensions)
- Money-back guarantees (risk reversal)
- Price and payment options (bundled pricing, multiple month, free shipping, etc.)
- Bonuses (gift with purchase, buy-one-get-one offers, gift cards)
- Unique selling propositions (marketing/product angle)
- Social proof (user-generated content, testimonials, product outcomes, and results)
2. Build up your engaged audiences
Engaged audiences allow you to better understand who is actually interested in your brand. Once you know who that audience is, you better focus your marketing efforts around them.
Take advantage of TikTok to build your engaged list
TikTok is a fantastic top-of-funnel platform due to its low cost per impression (CPM). You can go much further running TikTok campaigns compared to Facebook campaigns due to the way the platform is set up. We recommend using TikTok for engaged audience building and even email collecting.
Capitalize on conversions with Google & Facebook
Although TikTok is a strong choice for audience building, we still favor Google and Facebook for conversions. We like Facebook because it provides us with better conversion tracking and remarketing options than any other platform. This helps us optimize future ad spend accordingly.
The Google display network is also one of our favorites because it reaches 90% of all internet users, and 60% on a daily basis. Because of this, we are pretty adamant about having a good portion of our top-of-funnel budget going to Google Display. We’ll go into specific Google Ads account set ups later in this article.
3. Focus on growing your email lists
Consumer spending habits during Black Friday and Cyber Monday are through the roof. Take advantage of this shopping behavior to grow your email subscriber list. Once you build your list, you can segment your customers accordingly in order to show the right offer to the right person.
Segment your audiences accurately first
How do you segment your audiences accurately, you may ask? The answer is simple: You ask! Ask your customers yes or no questions, this or that options, and gauge where they are in the buying journey—whether that’s on a website popup, landing page, or email.
The days of having a large email list and feeding everyone the same offer are now over. It is very important to go above and beyond when segmenting your gathered audiences.
Once customers are segmented, focus on the qualified
Focus on giving your most qualified customers the biggest offers first. You’ve already piqued their interest, so see if you can capitalize on that! If they are not qualified, don’t sell them anything. Put them back into your education campaign, and continue educating them so in the future when they are ready to buy, you will be there. If you apply these principles, you will quickly find that you have segments that are 10x more valuable than others.
Once you’ve grown your list, engage!
Conversation is everything in email. They say the new CPC which is (cost per conversion) is now cost per conversation. Email was created to be a social tool, so be sure to engage accordingly with your list of qualified customers.
4. Optimize your Facebook Ads structures
Account consolidation has been a key part of hyper growing ecommerce stores with Facebook ads. The way you structure your ads will allow you to maximize your ad spend and get the most out of Facebook. Here are two of our most popular account setups for subscription businesses:
First setup: Consolidated structure
This setup is great for big and small budgets alike. It starts with a traffic and awareness campaign, then allocates the majority of the budget into a cold top-of-funnel campaign. Here’s the breakdown:
Second setup: Grouped by offer, product group, or campaign
This setup is best for tracking individual offer performance, large budgets, and big catalogs. It starts by piquing interest to a cold audience, then introducing strong offers to the most engaged users.
Both of these setups are super popular in the ecommerce world today, focusing on broad audiences and grouping audiences together as much as possible to ensure ad sets exit the learning phase.
5. Build successful Google campaign structures
Google Ads are an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your business. These ads primarily focus on the people who’re searching directly for your products or services. Black Friday is a great time to double down on your Google Ad structures and ensure that your offers are reaching the right people. Here are two of our most successful Google campaign structures for 2022:
Performance max campaigns (most scalable)
Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type with the aim of letting advertisers increase conversions across Google’s range of advertising channels. This campaign type promises more conversions by optimizing ad performance in real-time and across all channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max campaigns include:
- YouTube Ads
- Google Display Ads
- Google search
- Google Maps
- And more
You give up some visibility and control by using Google’s performance max, but the platforms and placements it includes gives these campaigns a massive amount of reach. When done right, this approach can be extremely effective.
Search campaigns (most efficient)
Google search campaigns are text ads on search results pages that help you connect with consumers as they search for the products and services you offer. You may target your ads to individuals who are specifically looking for your products, which is ideal for increasing sales, leads, or traffic to your website.
We like to use search campaigns because they are extremely efficient. They can help you scale faster, even if you’re on a smaller budget. Here is the account structure we use most of the time.
Your Q4 action plan
Strong offers for Q4 can’t be prepared overnight. It’s important to go into Q4 having a goal in mind. You want to be confident in your offers, products, bundles, and audiences well in advance.
At Media Jet, we’re testing offers year round and funneling the winners into our Q4 campaigns, organizing some for Black Friday, and placing others in our holiday, winback, and VIP campaigns. Once you have your arsenal, you can play around with it and make it fun and creative for your brand.
Ready to start doubling your revenue online? Follow these tips to have your best Cyber Week yet in 2022, and schedule a free 30-minute consultation with Media Jet to go over your ecommerce strategy, find areas of improvement, and set yourself up for a successful Q4.
