How a DTC Ecom Brand should Prepare for Q4 and Black Friday

Plan your sales targets. This is not as easy as it sounds. You need to look at your historic data if you have it. Look at what worked and what didn't. How much inventory did you have? what promotions did you run? How much did you spend on advertising? From there make your new targets. Make them realistic and brief your team on them: 2. Plan your inventory. You have your sales targets so you can now plan how many units you need to have in stock for Q4. Make sure to get delivery well ahead of time. There will be many delays due to how busy the season is. Make sure to have inventory for december as well! i see so many brands running out too early. 3. Plan your media buying activities. If you work with ad agencies, now is the time to get them up to speed. what is your ad budget per channel for each month? Do you want to capture emails for an early bird promotion? Who will create new ads and creatives for your campaigns? Make sure you have everything ready to go.. Agencies are busy too and they can't do everything a week before. 4. Setup your email campaigns early. all the campaign emails can be done way ahead of time! consider launching winback ads for the customers who have not bought in a while. Now is the perfect time for them to shop. Consider A/B testing titles, offers, content for 10% of your list, then send the last emails to the winner of the test. 5. Create irresistible offers We have all heard this by now. "100M offers" by Hormozi goes into why you need to create a no-brainer offer for your clients. In ecommerce you need to present the offer through the customer journey. You can do this in your ads, email campaigns, popups, on the PDP/LP pages and the list goes on. Things that work well according to our data: Good Return policy +45 days (no questions asked) Test period for clients to try the product XX result or money back bonuses / gifts Discount for a very limited time Limited stock and the list goes on... 6. Improve your AOV We all know CPAs go through the roof in Q4, so if you can increase your AOV, you can afford to pay extra for clients. Here are ways you can improve it: Implement a discount ladder in your cart showing different thresholds for free gifts, discounts and bonuses.. add pairings and bundles on your PDP page. Add upsells on the cart + checkout page. Add a "shipping protection" upsell for $4-5 in the cart Add a post-purchase up sell for more of what they in their cart 7. Improve your conversion rate The same as before but you want to do your testing before the high season. This is important so your marketing budgett is as efficient as possible. You can setup your own tests via tools like convert.com or via AB Convert on Shopify. 8. Test your free shipping threshold. This is one of the best ways to improve conversion rate but also AOV. You can use a variety of apps for this on Shopify. You can also A/B test adding a $5-$10 extra charge by upgrading them to express shipping. Most people will love getting asked to pay instead of having it forced upon them.