For a long time now, Black Friday / Cyber Monday has been one of the biggest revenue opportunities for small businesses.

But ever since the pandemic sent more buyers (and businesses) online — the size of this sales event has gone into the stratosphere.

Personally, my brand made $10 million in Q4 last year, and $4 million of that was just in November.

My goal for this year is to generate $750,000 on Black Friday alone.

Let me show you how I plan to do it.

Between the chaotic state of global production and transportation and the recent changes to Facebook and other marketing platforms, this holiday season will also bring new challenges.

So let’s start by looking at what makes BFCM 2021 different for online merchants.

Broken Supply Chain

If you are struggling with a broken supply chain and you don’t have any product to sell, you can still take advantage of BFCM by running a pre-order campaign.

This is when you run a promotion for a product that is not currently in stock but that you will deliver at a later date.

The keys here are to focus on building anticipation and to make sure to offer a discount. (I will dig into anticipation campaigns later in this article.)

My brand runs this type of campaign all the time, as do a ton of other brands on websites like Kickstarter.

iOS 14.5 & 15 Updates

There’s no way around it: with these new updates from Apple, tracking ads and emails will be much harder.

Here’s the bright side: while these are big issues, they’re issues that affect everyone. (What you don’t want is something that only affects you.)

The marketers with the best tactics and the best storytelling will still win, and just by reading this article you’ll probably be ahead of most other sellers.

Delayed Shipping

Shipping will also be less reliable this year. But again, this affects everyone equally (more or less).

The solution here is to start your sale early so you can get products out the door before the shipping volume ramps up.

More on that in a second.

Let me start this section by saying that I covered a ton of info in this training — and to toot my own horn a little, I think it is all super important.

So if you have the time to watch the full 90-minute session, I highly recommend you do.

But in the meantime, here are 10 takeaways from my presentation that will help you have a successful holiday season this year (I even threw in a bonus tip at the end of the article).

I divided these takeaways into 4 categories: Sale Strategy, Offers & Offer Pages, Ads and Email.

It’s important to understand that your main goal for Black Friday / Cyber Monday should be to monetize the customers you already have. 

Acquisition isn’t easy this time of year: the ad auction is really crowded so it’s expensive to get your message in front of cold traffic.

Plus, everyone’s social feeds are packed with offers, so if someone doesn’t already know your brand then it can be hard to break through the noise.

But if you already have audience assets — like an email list or pixeled audiences — then this is the perfect time to take advantage of the holiday buying frenzy.

Want a tip for building remarketing audiences?

Some people think they can just create a few generic ads and bada-bing bada-boom, they have their creative done for the holiday season.

But the truth is, if you want to run an aggressive marketing campaign (which you should) without fatiguing your email list and Facebook audiences, then here’s the secret:

Mini-campaigns.

These are quick campaigns — usually only a few days long — that focus on different chunks of the holiday season.

By isolating individual sales opportunities, you can run campaigns throughout November and December while using different messaging and not overwhelming your audiences with repetition.

Here are some mini-campaign ideas:

An Early Bird Campaign can increase the effectiveness of your sale considerably.

Your brand faces more competition during the holidays.

You’re competing for your customers’ inboxes and social feeds, and even when a prospect gets to your website, the competition isn’t over.

If a visitor finds that your page is slow to load, it looks unprofessional, or your offers aren’t compelling, they’ll happily abandon the sales cycle and continue their product search elsewhere.

You can’t let that happen.

Sometimes, we even include some content on desktop that we hide on mobile. This is a simple feature available on all landing pages made with Zipify Pages.

Also make sure that your pages use conversion-driving features like countdown timers and social proof.

To see everything I do to optimize my holiday sales pages for conversion, check out the full training here.

One of the most important features you need on your pages are order bumps.

Also, make sure you do multi-channel retargeting.

Facebook and email are a great start, but you want to be everywhere your customers are — including Instagram, YouTube and other social channels.

You really don’t want your ad creative to fatigue during the holidays.

A great way to avoid this problem is with mini-campaigns, which we already talked about in Tip #2.

It always surprises me to learn how few emails most brands send during their holiday promotions.

When I ask the owner why, the answer is usually the same: “I don’t want to annoy my customers!”

That’s understandable, and honestly, I used to feel the same way.

Until one day, I thought, “What if I send two emails a day and see what happens?”, and the result was surprising:

My unsubscribes didn’t go up!

Then I tried sending 3 emails a day, and the same thing happened. People weren’t annoyed.

Here’s the takeaway: send more emails!

Last year, we sent out 45 emails during the sale, with an average subscriber receiving around 30–35 emails.

Every single email made money, and it didn’t fatigue my list.

The secret is to have compelling offers and strong messaging, and to avoid repetition by leveraging mini-campaigns like I’ve mentioned throughout this article.

So someone bought from your sale — that’s great!

But that doesn’t mean your job is over. I’ve learned that you can get these buyers to purchase again (and again).

We created special messaging for folks who had bought once already and communicated differently with them than we did with people who had yet to buy.

Here are 2 emails we sent to customers who purchased from our holiday sale.

Over the last 2 days of our holiday sale, we did about $300,000 in revenue from people who had not bought up until that point.

In other words, these people had received about 20 emails and still had not made a purchase decision — so what finally got them to buy?

I already mentioned iOS 15 earlier in the article, but I wanted to give you some bonus advice on how to adapt your email marketing to deal with Apple’s new updates.

iOS 15 affects your email in 2 important ways.

It Inflates Email Open Rates

This means you should no longer use open rates to measure engagement. Instead, use site browsing and clicks.

Those were my 10 takeaways from my Black Friday Bonanza training! I hope these tips help you have your most successful holiday season yet.

For more in-depth training on all these topics, as well as a bunch of other useful info from my presentation, make sure to watch the full 90-minute training.

This has been Ezra Firestone — thanks for reading!