Q4 ECommerce Playbook
Pregame
So ideally, you’ve been testing all year long with the battleship method and have zeroed in on what kind of messaging, creative and audience targeting works best for you. The deadline for testing and getting your ducks in a row is Halloween (or bitcoin whitepaper day if that’s your inclination).
Consumers have been trained to expect promotions and deals, so a little softness in sales in the few weeks prior to 10/31 is to be expected. Most gift and Q4 related sales aren’t impulse purchases so many are waiting for you to drop prices and many will wait.
Make sure that you’ve got some additional ad budget during this time so you don’t miss out on some of the biggest selling days of the year. Additionally, make sure that you’re set up for invoicing on your paid channels, or at least have a backup payment method or two set up. You don’t want a blockage of payment to shut down your ads unexpectedly which can happen when there’s a spike in ad costs.
Grey November
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still a big deal and it's important to mark those dates on your calendar. It used to be that marketers held off until the week of Thanksgiving to really start pushing, but in recent years, we’ve seen advertisers start to go hard in the paint as soon as 11/1 rolls around. Sales and promotional messaging are persistent throughout the entire month and you can expect CPC’s to go up substantially during this time. Expect to pay 15-20% more per click and adjust your budgets accordingly.
Don’t be afraid of those increased CPC’s, however. Conversion rates will ramp up more than enough to compensate. Increased CPC’s make it a rough time period to swing and miss, but that’s why you’ve done so much testing earlier in the year.
If you’re looking for more volume, expand your targeting with keywords/campaigns that were a little less profitable or audiences that relatively underperformed for you in slower parts of the year. Increased conversion rates can bump you into profitability that’ll pencil when you’ve already expended your core audiences.
Cyber Week
The days leading up to Thanksgiving and the weekend between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday are going to be big sales days. Keep a close eye on your budgets for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday - you don’t want to miss sales because your campaigns hit budget caps. Do what you can to make sure that budgets on those days, specifically, are ramped up. Thanksgiving day is also no slouch, so keep budgets appropriately high.
Christmas Deadlines
The next big sale deadline is Ground-shipping. If you have a digital product or no physical inventory, you can push right into 12/25, however if you’re in the business of transmitting atoms from one place to another in exchange for money, you might have to work more closely with your shipping partners to make sure that you get the dates dialed in. Be conservative with that messaging as you don’t want to create a customer service nightmare with late shipments. Winter can be an unpredictable time of year so a storm in a mountain pass could create some logistical problems that you’ll want to try and anticipate.
Make sure to message those shipping cutoffs prominently on ads as well as on-site so that the consumer is clear about the window of urgency to make the purchase.
If you’re able to give expedited shipping offers, you can continue to message those shipping deadlines, but expect that the vast majority of your customers are unlikely to spring for additional shipping cost.
Post-Holiday Hangover
So the consumer’s wallet and credit cards have been thoroughly punished. Ground shipping cutoff dates are likely your last large sales day of the year so you can expect ad inventory to really let off and the CPC inflation in the channels will back off. Conversion rate will also back off significantly so you can reduce your daily budgets heavily between Christmas and New Years. The first few weeks of January are also generally slow as consumer behaviors seems to slow down, everyone’s recovering from NYE parties and getting back to their regularly scheduled programming.
Conclusion
So there you have it, that’s the general playbook for eCommerce in the biggest selling months of the year. Make sure you’re thinking proactively about your budgets and when/how you spend your ad dollars.