After knowing the revenue that you want to achieve and analyzing the right data in your Facebook ads manager, we’re now at the third step of our strategy, where you’re going to learn how to leverage in the best way possible the Black Friday calendar. With no further ado, the second part of our Black Friday Strategy. 

(Nate) So what exactly are these other important periods? Well first you have Black Friday Week. I remember we had received a presentation deck from our partner-manager at Facebook, and one of the things that was highlighted that really struck us was that 50% of the holiday shopping was completed before Cyber Monday and that global shoppers bought earlier throughout Black Friday Week. This means you can connect with engaged shoppers way before Black Friday day or Cyber Monday. You shouldn’t be afraid to maybe add pre-launches, or exclusive accesses to your offers into your whole marketing scheme during the Black Friday week. 

(Antoine) I think it’s important that people understand that Black Friday, it's a day. But if you really, really think about it, it's almost a complete week. It's a complete week, right? It starts on Monday, and then you can do sales on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, [and] Thursday in different ways. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Then clearly, you have Black Friday, Black Friday Weekend and Cyber Monday. So, I think we're using the term ‘Black Friday’ because that's what everybody knows, right? But at the end of the day, it's way more all week and even more, and even more than that.

(Nate) Yeah, exactly. Like, there's definitely a hype around that whole period. Not only that on Black Friday day. And I think if you understand that and you leverage these other periods, other people won’t and it will give you an advantage. It will give you an edge on your competitors, for sure.

The other period that I'm talking about also is, simply put, November. So the whole of pre-Black Friday. This really has to do with expanding and warming up your audiences. So at that point, we knew we had to focus on building our audiences before the main happening and the first few weeks of November became crucial in our strategy. That period would allow us to have people opt in and strongly consider our products. And since Black Friday gets so much hype and attention, people are considering what they'll end up buying way before the deals come out.

And again, if you use that, you understand that you'll have an edge on your rivals and it's a great time to engage with your audience and let them know what you're planning, basically. It’ll further hype them up. And when the day comes, they won't hesitate to click on that order button for sure. They know what they'll order before they even hop on your website.

(Antoine) Of course, and I think you just need to consider yourself a consumer at some point, right? I'm pretty sure that people listening to the podcast today, [they know] what they bought last Black Friday or what they're going to buy next Christmas. 

It's not something that just happened in one day. They thought about it for a couple of weeks. It's the same thing online.

You need, as an e-commerce, to make sure that your clients understand exactly what you're going to do as a promotion for Black Friday. And it doesn't happen one day before. It happens a number of weeks before. And I'm pretty sure we're going to discuss that a little bit later. 

But by doing so, you're able to make sure that they understand what they're going to buy. Because, remember, the client that we're [talking about]the case...that we're doing the case study around today, this client has a sales cycle of almost four weeks. It took, usually, 28 days before people were making a purchase. If we go back to the numbers, we will be able to see that. I think the conversion was three to four times higher after 28 days compared to 1 day.

So first, it takes more time for people to make a purchase. It’s just normal. They need to shop. And two, again, it's very important to remember that by doing that, you're able to just have a competitive advantage since if you only advertise during the Black Friday period, it's too expensive. It's just too expensive. So, there's so [much] leverage that you can get by advertising massively before the Black Friday day or before Cyber Monday.

(Nate) Definitely. And if we take a step back, I think we could have even added a fourth period because we emphasize a lot on preparation and building up these audiences. 

And the fact is that many of the people who will end up buying on Black Friday Day or during that whole period are people that you warmed up for the whole year. A lot of audiences that you're building throughout the year will end up being the people who buy on Black Friday. So, they're considering your product for many months and then you just want to make sure you kind of warm them up again in the weeks prior to Black Friday. And on that day, I mean, they've considered your product for many months. Now's the best time for them to cop them. So, it’s just naturalthat a lot of people will end up buying on that day. And, it's just super important for businesses to understand that and to leverage these warmed up audiences.

(Antoine) Exactly. Nate, so let me just do a recap a bit because I think we're giving a lot of detail and a lot of information to the audience.

So we have – the strategy that we're talking about today, it's a four step strategy. So, if we just go back, first things first; making sure that you know exactly what you want to achieve. You need in the first bucket of the strategy, [to] know the exact revenue that you want to achieve. And from the moment you understand the kind of revenue that you want to achieve, you're able to plan your inventory.

You are able after that, to plan your marketing budget and at the same time know what kind of offer you're going to do for the Black Friday period. Remember, the client that we are talking about today had a lot of inventory. He had a marketing, not a marketing, but a revenue objective of $500,000. So half a million to one hundred thousand dollar investment. And with that in mind, he knew exactly what kind of profit margin he could generate from that. So, he gave us a 60% offer that we could use for the period.

From the moment we are able to know exactly what we want to achieve – Nate said it – we need to analyze what we have in front of us. And what we analyzed...we analyzed what the client did the year before for Black Friday. So, the year before! We analyzed three things.

First, the CPM – how much it costs to reach 1000 customers. Number two, the conversion window – how much time it takes for a client to buy your product after this client saw an ad on Facebook. And number three, what kind of audiences are performing more? Is it cold audiences? Is it warm audiences? So we needed to know what kind of people are converting more during the Black Friday period. And after that, when we have this information, when we know that we cannot invest massively during Black Friday –we need to do that a little bit before – we've been able to look at what kind of period we have in front of us, right?

What kind of period [do] we have in front of us? So the first period, Nate, correct me if I'm wrong, that we talked about was like just Black Friday. Normal, right? The Black Friday day, Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday. Second period, the Black Friday week. So, the week just before Black Friday that you mentioned, [where] so many people are buying stuff. And then the third period, which is the complete, whole month of November where we need to warm up our audiences.

(Nate) Yeah, exactly. Great recap, honestly. And that really leads up toour fourth point, which is building the strategy and timeline.

Once we understood everything in terms of the base for our strategy – which was really that we needed to emphasize the warming up of the audiences, focusing a lot on audience expansion, [and] building audiences before the Black Friday itself. So, we needed to invest a whole lot of money during November, before Black Friday, [and] a week before Black Friday itself. And so we decided to segment our strategy into two main phases that had very distinct goals. 

Phase number 1 was building momentum. It was really meant just for that. That would last from November 1st through November 26th. And then phase number 2 would be revenue maximization. So that would last from November 27th to December 2nd. So November 27th in 2019 was the Wednesday just before Black Friday and December 2nd was Cyber Monday. 

(Antoine) And for people who are listening. We chose November 27. We started our Black Friday revenue maximization phase for this specific client on a Wednesday. But you could also start it on a Monday. It doesn’t change that much. Just as long as you understand that you don't start all your Black Friday promotion during Black Friday, you need to do it a little bit before.

(Nate) Yeah, exactly.I think it's a great thing to point out. You don't have to start it on Wednesday. The idea here is just to leverage that period before Black Friday. 

So a lot of people are already engaged shoppers at that point. So you don't want to be missing out on these opportunities because other people will open up their deals at that point. It's just a matter of making sure you secure some revenue during that week. 

And so in preparation for the both of these phases, we decided to split up the budget with 50% of our investment going to build momentum. 50% of the whole $100,000 that we were given was meant just to warm up and build audiences. 40% of our budget was going to maximize our sales, so the campaigns that we were going to run from November 27th to December 2nd. And then we also had this 10% buffer that we kept in case in case we  just understood anything from the data that we would get in the first couple of weeks. And we just had this little buffer to make sure we could use some opportunities if the data indicated anything relevant. 

(Antoine) It’s always important to have a buffer, right? If you don't have the buffer, because at some point maybe you'll be like, ‘Hey, I think I could invest more during the revenue maximization phase,’ or ‘Hey, since the CPM is way cheaper than I thought for the whole month of November, let me just invest 10K more to warm up my audience a bit more.’ So always keep in mind – you said 10% for a buffer. Is it something that for any other campaigns you would recommend for people who are listening today to keep in mind? A 10% of your budget as a buffer?  

(Nate) Yeah, I think if you're planning a promotion or something like Black Friday, which lasts many weeks, I think it's always great to have a little bit of security. For instance, if you, after a week of doing your preparation campaigns, your momentum building campaigns, you realize that your cost per lead is super low right now. You're getting tons of engagement on that campaign,cost per lead is very low, and you usually have a lot of success in your marketing emails. Well, having that 10% buffer, it’s just a great opportunity for you to invest a little bit more in that campaign and it will probably increase your chances of maximizing your revenue down the road. So I think it's whenever you're planning a promotion for several weeks, it's always a good idea to have a little bit of a buffer for sure.

(Antoine) Interesting. 

(Nate) And we also decided to segment the offer in order to build additional momentum and create further engagement with specific audiences. We decided to segment our offer to again leverage that period before Black Friday. So we decided to have a VIP offer, which was a 48 hour exclusive access to our Black Friday sales. So that was the offer that was meant for the Wednesday and Thursday just before Black Friday. And then we had our Black Friday broad offer [which was] basically super simple and easy to communicate, as we pointed out earlier. 60% off everything on the website. 

And again, I think it's super important to have a clear offer. It helps with conversions, because it prevents people from having doubts on whether or not the product they're interested in is actually discounted or if the discount promoted on your website will actually apply on their cart. So you want to make sure that your offer is super clear, concise and easy to understand. That's absolutely – you should definitely think about that when you do decide on your offer.

Don't over overdo it. I think it’s like, a lot of people will tend to want to separate their discount between different collections, different amounts of product or amount of, well, how much it costs in their cart. And I think it's just a bad idea to have a promotion like that, that's not super easy to understand for the customer. It will just basically, down the road, it will prevent you from converting a lot of people because they're just confused. 

(Antoine) Because I think people need to remember one thing. If you're an e-commerce, if you're a brand and you're advertising during Black Friday, remember one thing. You are not the only one. So your client, the consumer that you're looking for, that you want to sell your product to, this person will also see ads from other companies. This person will also see ads from your competitors. So, if your offer is super complicated, how will this person [make] his or a choice, right? It will be almost impossible. So if you can make your offer very, very simple…

Here, what I like is I see that you have a specific offer during the week, which is the VIP offer that I'm pretty sure you're going to talk [about] and an offer for Black Friday. It's really simple, right? You have one message. You can create different iterations around this message with different ad formats like video, fixed images, carousels, and then at least it's always the same thing. So people remember exactly what you're trying to achieve compared to other companies that sometimes will do twenty five different offers on their website during the Black Friday period. It's impossible to remember what they're offering. And I'm pretty sure that by making more, you're going to generate less 

(Nate) For sure. I'd be curious to have a study on that made by Facebook or Shopify. I'm pretty sure it negatively affects the conversions to have a more complicated offer.

(Antoine) The clients that generated the most last year with us for Black Friday were the clients that had the same offer. Very, very simple to understand. So clearly it's something that we'll keep in mind again for Black Friday 2020.

(Nate) Definitely. So, let's take a look at the specific campaigns that we built out for each phase of our strategy. For Phase 1 building momentum, we had three main campaigns.

First one was the warm up campaigns. So these were related to our broad offer. So they weren't specifically made for the VIP offers. It was just, basically, they were traffic campaigns and we were literally telling people what our Black Friday offer was going to be. We told them to come visit our website, shop different products and collections, and we told them that these products would be 60% off during Black Friday.So basically, we were telling people, don't shop well, (laughs) come and shop right now, just engage with the products, don't buy right now. These products will be 60% off in 14 days from now. And we had a timer on the website as well. And so the idea behind this campaign was to build momentum. It was to warm up these audiences, have people consider the products, make decisions, shop, add some stuff to their cart, add some stuff to their wish list and just decide.

The idea was to leverage the fact that at that point it was inexpensive to have people come on the website and that these people would remember our brand, remember the product, and it would increase the chances that they convert during Black Friday. 

(Antoine) And remember why we were doing that. We remembered that it takes a couple of weeks for the client to convert. It's not a 24 hour day thing, you know? It's not...it will not only happen in one day. It took us – we mentioned the numbers earlier– three to four weeks. With the three to four weeks, the conversion window was three to four times higher than on a one day thing. So very important to remember that. And also what it does, if you bring a lot of people in your website automatically, it creates big, big, big remarketing audiences. And, you know, I think everybody would say yes to a bigger marketing audience, right?

(Nate) For sure, especially considering that on the day of Black Friday, it costs so much to advertise. You want to make sure that the money you're spending on that day goes to the proper audiences. We took a look at it earlier and we saw that our warm audiences were performing around four times as much or better than our cold audiences.  So on the day of Black Friday, everyone's bidding on the platform.It's super expensive to advertise. You want to make sure that that money goes to the right people. So why not warm up these audiences before Black Friday? That was the whole idea behind these warm up campaigns. 

The second campaign was the lead generation campaign that was related to our VIP offer. And our goal here was to make people commit by giving their email address. And the way we built the funnel was we were basically telling people ‘We have this VIP offer. Some people will get 48 hours exclusive access to our VIP offers. A lot of products will end up being sold out.’ So we were playing on scarcity a bit, also on urgency, and we were making people commit to something by giving their email address.

We also had different types of funnels also on the thank you page where we were telling people to come on the website and shop different collections. We had warm up emails as well. So any time someone would opt in, they would receive a first email, a second email talking about this collection or that collection and just reminding them that the deals were coming and that they opted in for a reason and keeping them warm, basically.

(Antoine) And remember this email – sorry to interrupt you –but this email works a lot because it’s not only someone who gave you their email to participate in a contest.

We mentioned it earlier. We were doing a VIP offer starting November 27. So, I think it was on Wednesday. If you want to be on this VIP offer, you need to give us your email. The point I'm trying to make here is clearly this email...the person who is giving you this email has a big purchase intent, right? You're clearly telling us that you want to receive the offer before everyone. So it means a lot. It means that this email works a lot. So I guess maybe that's one of the conclusions that we made. But knowing what we know now, I think we should have invested a bit more on this campaign for sure. (laughs) 

(Nate) We'll talk about the results a bit further on. But, yeah, definitely, I think we could have added a few extra thousands on that campaign for sure. 

And the third campaign to finish up these campaigns for phase one, which was building momentum – the third campaign is the Black Friday Countdown campaign. So the main goal here was to give people a reminder and hook them up one last time before our offer was launched. So we were retargeting our already warmed up audiences – so, people who visited our pages during November – to just count down to the launch of the offers.

So there was... I think that the content was segmented into three phases. So we had like 72 hours before the launch, 48 hours before the launch, and then 24 hours before the launch. And we were targeting all these people that we had warmed up previously during the month just to give them that final hook, that final reminder before Black Friday. 

(Antoine) So let's do just a recap here, because we're getting a lot of information and I think it's very important that the audience remembers most of the things that we're discussing today, because clearly it's a playbook for your next Black Friday. What we're telling you right now, most of the information that we're providing today, it's information that we're going to use again for Black Friday 2020 with maybe new strategies that we learned during the year. But basically the foundation will stay the same.

So we were [saying] that we have different phases before Black Friday. Phase number 1 was – we called it building momentum – from November 1st 2019 through November 26th 2019. So, just before the Black Friday weekend. 

Then the 2nd phase: revenue maximization. So, November 27th to December 2nd. 50 – very important to remember – 50% of our $100,000 investment was, so 50% of this investment that was made before Black Friday. OK, so clearly in our building momentum phase, with this $50,000, we warm up our people by bringing them on our website, telling them exactly what kind of offers we are going to do. 

We generated a lot of emails also by doing some lead generation campaigns.

And last but not least, we did what we called the Black Friday Countdown campaign. So, all the people who interacted with our brand in the past couple of weeks, past couple of months, we showed them a countdown, telling them, ‘Hey, you know, Black Friday is coming in 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours. Be ready.’  

OK, so $50,000 and Nate, can you tell me how much money we made with $50,000 from November 1st to November 26th? I remember it’s not a lot, right? (both laugh)

(Nate) I can't remember exactly the amount of money in terms of conversions, but I do remember that the ROAS was sitting at below 0.2 for the whole of November. 

(Antoine) We didn't see any... I don't remember if we were generating sales, but if we were generating sales – 

(Nate) Hardly

(Antoine) Yeah hardly, so maybe $1000 for the month of November. (laughs)

(Nate) It was a stressful time. And we'll take a look at the results in a few minutes, but you'll end up seeing that the ROAS actually shot up for, I don't know, even probably 30 times as much as it was during that period. Because the way Facebook works is it will actually give the conversion to a click that might have happened during that phase. But, yeah, definitely for the whole month of November, we were looking at the data on the ads manager, recognizing that we weren't doing any sales. The ROAS was like 0.2 or hardly.

(Antoine) Yeah, it was nothing. 

(Nate) And yeah, it was pretty stressful. But as we mentioned in our it kind of recap at the beginning, there's like this fifth step, which is hold your breath. 

(Antoine) Yeah, stick to the plan.

(Nate) But there were good reasons why we were building the strategy that way, investing so much money before Black Friday. It was backed up by data. So, we were still confident. It was scary, but we were confident for sure.

(Antoine) So, you're going to tell us a little bit [about] the phase two, revenue maximization. But before we talk about these different offers, let's agree on one thing. Maybe we didn't generate a lot of money from November 1st through November 26th. Remember, we invested $50,000 and like Nate mentioned it, [we] hardly, hardly saw you know, transactions on the back end on the website of the client. But – but our remarketing audiences became so big.

(Nate) Huge!

(Antoine) It was huge remarketing audiences. Bigger than what we've ever seen I think, right.?

(Nate) Yeah. They were sitting at tens of thousands of people. And that whole strategy was also backed by maths. What I mean by that is we understood that if we were able to invest, for instance, 50% of our budget, we would probably end up building audiences that would amount to 100,000 people.

And by knowing the CPM or approximately what the CPM would be during Black Friday, we understood that by keeping $40, 000 of our budget for the Black Friday revenue maximization phase, we would probably be able to have a view frequency of around ten for these warmed up audiences during the Black Friday period. So, we were, one, building great audiences that had tens of thousands of people in them. And we were also confident that we had, still, the budget to make sure that everyone during Black Friday would end up seeing our ads.

And so that was really comforting in a lot of ways. We had the math behind it. And as the month went [on], we became even more confident because the audiences were large and we knew we still had the money to make sure that everyone would end up seeing our ads. It was something.

(Antoine) Yeah, it was very interesting I agree.

(Nate) Let's talk about the specific campaigns for phase two, which is revenue maximization. 

So the first one was the VIP exclusive offer that we spoke about. In terms of conversions, what we had to help with that was mostly emails. So we had a series of different email campaigns meant for this audience. We had a specific promo code for this audience that was meant to be used in order to apply that 60% off for the VIP exclusive 48 hour offer. Because you have to remember that also during that time, we were still sending people on the website. And you want to make sure that these people don't get that 60% off exclusive offer during Wednesday and Thursday. 

So we had emails with a promo code, but we also had specifically targeted campaigns. And what I mean by that is that we also made sure that we backed up the emails by having campaigns on the ads manager, which were only meant to target leads that we generated during the month. And we were reminding them that today was the forty eight hour launch offer. And we'll take a look at the results we got for this specific campaign in a few minutes.

But well, actually I can pull them out right now. So for that specific campaign, because I think it's important for people to understand that whenever you're generating leads for a whole month for a promotion, I think it's definitely important to also target these people on Facebook. So if you're generating leads for 20 days and you have a two day offer for these people, you want to make sure that one, you send them the emails for sure, but also you need to remind them that the promo is on Facebook, so on their devices, because not everyone's going to open the emails.  So you want to make sure that you have a second way to make these people know that the offer is launched. 

And so we invested $1000 on that campaign and it actually generated over 25k of revenue for a ROAS of 33 for that one campaign. That was really something.So that was the first campaign or...well, yeah, definitely the first campaign and also the first email campaigns that we had for our revenue maximisation.

The second one was the broad Black Friday and Black Friday weekends campaigns. We had different content for each period, we were playing a lot on scarcity using our retargeting audiences at that point. We were telling people that a lot of products had already sold out during the VIP offer.

(Antoine) Which was true!

(Nate) Which was true. A lot of the product would end up being sold out during the first day of Black Friday. So we were planning on scarcity and having content really adapted for each period and also for Cyber Monday as well.

(Antoine) So I think I think it's important that people... it's debatable because maybe people will say, OK, if I create [or] if I integrate new creatives during the weekend created during Monday, it will start the learning phase on Facebook. And maybe because of that, Facebook will not optimize my ads the best way that usually they would do. 

But here, we use different creatives almost every day, right? Because we wanted to work and use the scarcity effect, because it’s true. People sometimes will see an ad and if we're telling them, ‘Hey, Black Friday is finishing in a couple of hours,’ it's true. It's Black Friday. Then you can say, ‘Hey, Cyber Monday is finishing in a couple of hours.’ It's true. It's Cyber Monday, and it’s finishing in a couple of hours. Even if the offer is the same...even if the offer is the same, these events are so important. People know these events so much that you can work with different creatives and use the scarcity effect to see if it's worked out very well here. But maybe other times, it can be a bit against you because of the learning phase of Facebook.

(Nate) Yeah, I think it definitely depends a lot on the budget you're allocating to each day. You have to remember that for the system to exit the learning phase, it just requires 50 conversions. So if you're setting a $5000 budget for your Black Friday day and then your Black Friday weekend, I think it will take like 20 to 30 minutes for Facebook to exit the learning phase with a budget that large. So at that point, I think you're well... in that context, you definitely have an advantage of using scarcity or different hooks by changing your visuals.

And the messaging and the learning phase won't affect so much your results down the road, I think. So you're better off using different hooks and changing your visuals if you have the budget to back it up for sure.

(Antoine) Okay, cool. So we know what you did to warm up your audience. We know the structure that you have in mind to make sure that your revenue maximization phase performs a lot. Now, the big question, what kind of results did you get?

(Nate) So for the 48 hour exclusive VIP access... so, during the whole Black Friday period, we generated over 7700 leads at an average cost of $3.69. Overall, we spent $28,000 on lead generation campaigns and they generated around $123,000 in revenue for ROAS of 4.33. And as I pointed out earlier, one mistake that we did was underestimate the effectiveness of our Facebook campaign to target these lead users.

We invested only $1000 on this campaign that I spoke about earlier, and it actually generated 25k of revenue for a ROAS of thirty three. So I think we could have invested more on lead generation and even more on retargeting these leads during the 48 hour exclusive offer. And the actual revenue that we've made during those two days was $314,000 for the first 48 hours of our exclusive VIP access. So that was really a good time for us because we were basically validating our strategy on the first day of the opening of the exclusive offer.

(Antoine) And remember one thing. Remember one thing, guys, we're now I'm looking at the numbers. $314,000 in sales with the 48 hour VIP offer. And let's say...that’s exactly what happened! You start your Black Friday with already $300,000 in sales. So it shows the effectiveness of this Black Friday week. If you only start advertising your offers for Black Friday, you can lose so much. It generates so much confidence to just have this amount of sales already made just because of a strategy that you planned earlier.

Now you start your Black Friday weekend, your Black Friday day and this extra $10,000 of buffer that you kept aside. Now you're like, ‘Hey, with all the money that I already made, I feel very confident to invest it right now.’ So I think I just want to put a bit of emphasis on this specific aspect. The Black Friday week is a thing. It's a thing because with $28,000 invested in lead generation and $1000 invested in remarketing and after that, only with email marketing campaigns, we generated over $300,000 in sales. 

All of this money, it wouldn't have been possible without this strategy for the Black Friday week. So I think it's important that people who are listening today remember how important this period is if you want to generate a lot of, a lot of success here. 

(Nate) Yeah, absolutely. And following up on that for the Black Friday day and Black Friday weekend, we generated $329,000 and then for Cyber Monday, $35,000. And at that point I think we had already sold out many of the products. So that's one of the reasons why it shot down like that.

But in total, we invested $100,000 throughout the period and generated $678,000 during these six days of revenue maximization. So that's a ROAS of 6.78. And just following up on what we pointed out earlier that throughout the month we had a rise of like 0.2 or something like that.

And then if we take a look at it today, that ROAS actually goes up to almost 3. So 0.92 looking at the 28-day conversion window. So that, again, really validates our strategy of investing so much money before Black Friday and making sure the traffic was coming on the website. We were warming up audiences, creating engagement, and those audiences ended up being the ones that converted during our revenue maximization phase.

(Antoine) That's the thing that people need to remember today, it’s hold your breath, right? Because 0.2 – I'm looking at the numbers right now. It can be stressful to invest so much money and not generate anything. But if your strategy is well planned, if your remarketing audiences are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, just stick to the strategy. Because it means that you're doing something good! It means that you're doing something good. 

If you're able to look at your cost per view content, your cost per add to cart, your cost per email, which are the most important metrics to look [at] when you're building momentum. You will know just by looking at these numbers if they're good, if they are better than the benchmark that you had. You will know that it will be fine at the end, right?  (laughs) It will be fine at the end. But on the other hand,if your metrics are not great, if your numbers are not great, maybe rethink a little bit the strategy. But overall, I think you need to stick to the plan if everything was validated with data before you launch your campaigns.

(Nate) Yeah, exactly. It's a matter of having a data driven strategy and making sure the data that you're using will be aligned with your strategy down the road. And I think it's safe to say that honestly.

I think if we hadn't done that 50% of investment before Black Friday, we definitely would have never gotten these types of results because we would have ended up spending way too much money on Black Friday week and Black Friday, then Black Friday weekend, and leading up to Cyber Monday. There's no way we would have maximized our revenue with the way we did with that strategy. So, yeah, I think it's safe to say that it was a good idea. 

(Antoine) Yeah. Okay, cool!  Nate, thank you very much for your time today. Again, this strategy will be in the notes of the podcast. I think people should remember this foundation, right? And let me just bring it back again.

First, knowing your objective, your revenue. After that, from the moment you know your revenue, you'll be able to plan your marketing budget, your offers. With that in mind, you'll be able to order the right amount of inventory, right? Because so many times it happens, people they’re just...you know (laughs). Like I had mentioned earlier, Cyber Monday arrives and then they're already out of stock just because Black Friday was so good for them. 

Making sure that from the moment your planning is done, you analyze the right data. Here, [and] you can analyze more data than that, but here, the three main things that we looked at were the CPM (so the cost it takes to reach 1000 people on Facebook), how long it takes for a customer to convert (what we call the conversion window), and the last thing that we took a closer look was the audiences that were converting more.

Knowing that, after that, you need to make sure that you understand what kind of different phases you have when you're doing a Black Friday. So Black Friday is not a one day thing, right? You have Cyber Monday, you have the Black Friday week, which is so important. We mentioned it earlier. We generated...so we generated it, I think, more than 50% of our sales during this Black Friday week! So it's important to keep that in mind. 

And also, again, the other and the fourth phase that's very, very important to remember is the whole month of November is there and maybe at some point, even October to warm up your audiences.

And for the moment, this is done. You just invest your money the best way you can. And here, we did 50% of our budget for the month of November before the Black Friday, and another 50% of our budget was during the Black Friday weekend. And all of this an investment. $678k in revenue. And I guess next year will be times five, right? (laugh)

(Nate) (laugh) That’s what we expect.

(Antoine) OK, so Nate, anything else to mention before I let you go?

(Nate) No, I think your recap was great and on point.

(Antoine) OK, great. So thank you very much everyone who listened to the episode today and see you soon for a new episode of Social Selling.