Your Peak Season Campaign Checklist

As the holiday season approaches, ensuring a robust strategy in place for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) and the entire fourth quarter is crucial for eCommerce success. By methodically ticking off every item on this checklist, you can position your brand ahead of 90% of competitors. From prepping your offers and warming up your audience to implementing creative best practices and managing campaigns during the holiday weekend, a comprehensive and well-executed plan is key to optimizing sales and customer engagement.

Tick off every item on this list and you’ll likely have a better BFCM & Q4 than 90% of eCommerce brands!

Getting Prepped & Warming Up

1. Design and test a simple offer that is structured to achieve your goal (eg. new customers or high AOV)

2. Start teasing your offer any time from the 1st of Nov

3. Run warm-up advertising campaigns NOW to ensure warm audiences to hit when buying peaks - video ads and organic video help here too.

4. Run a lead-gen campaign to collect emails now - 'be the first to hear of our offers' - make sure you have a dedicated flow to warm this list.

5. Create a forecast and target KPIs so you know what to gun for and what your profitability and contribution margin will be

6. Change your lead-capture pop up to focus on holiday and offers coming up

Creative Best Practice

1. Consider using UGC content, PR logos, testimonials if possible to objection-bust up front.

2. Use contrasting colour and/or size to attract attention to the offer. 

3. Keep videos under 15 seconds.

4. Introduce the discount in the first seconds of the video while you have captive attention.

5. Use flashing colour, light effects, text, arrows to stand out in the newsfeed.

6. Use grids to divide a composition and make it more interesting.

7. Use gif/loop style videos with simple animations to attract attention and convey the message in an easy way

8. Use light effects if you can to highlight key parts of the creative, such as the discount or
   main USPs.

9. Use psychology:

   1. Price anchoring - visually showing the value of your desired product or bundle

   2. Strike-through pricing - make it clear

   3. Exclusivity

   4. Scarcity

   5. Urgency 

   6. Fomo

   7. Highlight benefits 

   8. Use emotion and pain-points 

Prior to Black Friday Weekend

1. Make your offer clear across all web-pages, check site speed and mobile usability

2. Make sure your Meta and Google account has a backup credit card and do a security check and change passwords now to avoid getting hacked during peak

3. Clean up your coupon codes and refresh email flows for the gifting season - shorter, faster flows, with an emphasis on gifting.

4. Set up product sets for DPA ads and upload frames that clearly highlight your offer

During Black Friday Weekend

1. Run retention and past-buyer ad campaigns - download list of your buyers from last Q4 to target and run lookalikes against in both Meta and Google

2. On Meta leave your evergreen campaigns live throughout the peak and launch your offer/sale ads via dedicated campaigns with a heavy focus on retargeting warm audiences.

3. Send 2X emails per day during your offer

4. Be prepared to adjust and scale budgets throughout the holiday weekend - morning and evening budget adjustments are essential

Early Dec Gifting Campaigns

1. Switch out your ad creative to focus on gifting and change your targeting to a gifting-friendly audience (partners and grandparents for example.

2. Remind customers via email when your last shipping date for Christmas is

3. Prep any Boxing Day or Xmas Day sale creative and start planning January!

And that’s a wrap - let us know in the comments if there is anything else you would add!