Happy Sunday & happy belated Thanksgiving to you and your family!
I hope you have an incredible Thanksgiving, felt grateful for someone or something, and got to eat some good food. I’m personally not a fan of eating dry turkey, so our family opted to make Thai food from scratch and it was delicious!
If you’re a marketer or run a brand, which I assume you are if you’re reading this, then hats off to you too for balancing your family and all the work going into the biggest shopping holiday of the year! So many of our clients broke revenue records for single-day sales and our core team has slept probably around 5 hours a night. West coast clients require updates at midnight to change or update offers, and then east coast clients have hourly updates starting at 7am. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’m extremely grateful for our team at Sharma Brands who pushed through and did it successfully.
Yesterday was Small Business Saturday, so I hope you all sent a plain-text founder email to your email list of “BFCM sale non-buyers,” aka those who haven’t purchased your BFCM offer. Tomorrow is Cyber Monday, and then don’t forget to do something special for Giving Tuesday as well!
I’m going to keep this email short as it’s a holiday weekend and I want you to have time to rest and recharge. I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled Sunday emails next week where I have an exciting deep dive planned (get ready for that Sharma Sunday 8 pager!).
I spoke to Moiz and we’d love to do a Limited Supply podcast episode on all things BFCM 2023 to highlight various perspectives and stats from both brands and consumers. Early numbers from Shopify claimed there was another record-breaking year of $4.1B in sales (our clients represented just under 1% of that). Stripe’s dashboard (check it here) is currently at $8.3B at the time of writing this. According to Barrons, Black Friday 2023 did about $9.8B in revenue.
All that said, we want to hear from YOU about what all you bought, or if you’re a merchant, what all you sold! If you are willing to share, I’d love for you to fill out these two forms below. It can be completely anonymous, or if you want, we can shout you out on the pod if we use your reply.
So with that in mind, I have 2 requests for you this week.
If you are a consumer:
I’d love for you to hit reply, copy + paste the questions from below, and include your answers.
I’d love to know:
- What items did you buy this year for BFCM?
- Where did you buy from? I.e on Amazon or from the brand’s site or in store?
- Did you primarily shop on mobile, on desktop, or in person?
- Which brands did you shop from?
- What was your favorite deal of the weekend that you saw?
- How did you hear about that deal? i.e social ads, word of mouth, influencers, email, sms, articles from popular publications etc? What stood out?
- If you feel comfortable, how much did you spend on BFCM overall this year?
- How many products did you buy?
- Did you spend more or less on BFCM this year or last year?
- What percentage of your purchases were for yourself vs gifts?
- What percentage of your purchases were for new brands that you’ve never purchased from before vs buying again from your favorite stores?
And that's it.
The first 50 people to email me back this will get a $10 Starbucks gift card from me — my assistant will send them as he sees them come in.
If you’re a brand…
If you are a BRAND or a marketing leader at a brand, I’d love to know how BFCM performed for you?
I’d love to know:
- What was your AOV?
- What was your RoAS?
- How much did you spend on marketing this year?
- Which channel did you spend the most on? I.e Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, YouTube?
- Did your brand do better or worse during BFCM in 2023 vs 2022?
- What percentage of sales came from social ads vs email and sms?
- How many emails or SMS campaigns did you actually send throughout BFCM?
- What surprised you the most about BFCM 2023?
- Were there any hacks, tactics or tricks, that seemed to perform well for you this year?
- Did you use TikTok shops and if so, how was your performance?
- What learnings, if any, will you take with you into BFCM 2024?
The first 50 brands to reply with the answers to this, get a $25 Uber card (you can use it on Uber or Uber Eats). Lunch on me!
To qualify, you must submit all of your responses in an email reply to this email.
And, if you want one last chance to earn some goodies from me and you plan to spend more than $500,000 in advertising spend next year, fill out this 2024 Trends Survey. This will be anonymous, so just email me back saying you did it, and we’ll send you a $15 Starbucks gift card.
Boom… that’s $55 on me for you in exchange for 10 minutes of your time. That puts your hourly rate at $330 just for reading this email. Damn!
Now, on to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Chargeflow — Your Chief Chargeback Officer, automating the process of identifying, data gathering, and submitting chargeback appeals.
Next to ADA lawsuits that are sent by money-hungry attorneys, the next thing on that list that irks eCommerce store owners is customers who send chargebacks for no good reason. They never try to remedy their issue through customer service, they are generally a Karen, they submit a chargeback and the bank will almost always side with the customer.
You have to get all of the exact right data to submit an appeal, and then when you do, you still have a good chance of losing it. It sucks. You lose hours of people’s time on your team, you have to monitor the situation closely, and you still have a high chance of losing. I was at a 40% win-rate with chargebacks (not bad, right?). The problem is that 40% took hours from my team to gather the right data, appeal, and follow up.
One of my close friends had issues with huge spikes of chargebacks due to fradulent orders and he came across Chargeflow as a tool to eliminate all headaches around it. With Chargeflow, their system finds the chargebacks, gathers the evidence, prepares a report, and submits it on your behalf. We went to a 55% win rate over a couple months, a 37% increase in wins (that was just over $25k for us in money that didn’t come out from the bottom line).
You should be using it. It takes 3 minutes to setup — you install the Shopify app, login & authenticate PayPal, same with Stripe, and then you’re good to go.
If you haven't figured out how you are going to deal with incoming chargebacks from the Black Friday campaign yet, Chargeflow is running a special BFCM promotion to show the Shopify community what they are all about - with a completely FREE chargeback recovery until the end of 2023.
Sign up to Chargeflow now - and get your chargebacks handled for absolutely free until the end of Q4 (4 days left to claim this offer)."
LP of the Week:
Today’s landing page is for an iconic DTC brand that I would imagine everyone has heard of… Daily Harvest.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!
Above all, my favorite thing on this landing page is the copy that the HOOX team wrote for the page. The copy makes it dead-simple to understand what Daily Harvest is, what the value it brings into your life, and how to choose the right plan. This type of a page is what we call a Click-Through LP — the page’s purpose is to get a customer who has some interest in the upper-funnel to choose the type of plan they want and get to the next step in becoming a customer.
Don’t miss out on HOOX’s Black Friday deal!! If you buy a page for $5k, we will design and develop an additional hero section (the above the fold part of the page) and a shop section for free, so you can get 2 pages out of a single LP. Schedule a call on this link and I’ll chat through it with you this week!
That's all for this week
I know today’s newsletter was a shorter one, so apologies if you were getting your hot chocolate or tea ready to sit down and dive into something deep — be ready for next Sundays email! If you’re still reading this email, I’m extremely grateful for you. Thank you for being a reader and a consumer of these emails. They’re fun for me to write and put together, and I love that it’s helpful for you too.
It’s Sunday night, and it’s also Cyber Monday Eve, so I hope you get some good rest (9 hours if you can), and get ready for another big sales day.
Got any good Netflix recommendations? Reply with any good movies or shows you’ve watched recently!
Alright, I hope today’s newsletter was a quick read for you. I’ll see you next Sunday. Same time. Same place. Hope you get all $55!