7 ways to prep for BFCM in early November

The big week is almost here.

For the majority of ecommerce businesses, there’s something to be gained from a successful BFCM.

Hopefully you’ve spent September and October building your lists, improving your sender reputation, and preparing your marketing content for the big moment.

But, while it’s good to plan months in advance, there’s still plenty of prep work to do in the first two weeks of November to ensure success and limit issues when the day comes.

At Zettler Digital, we’ve managed hundreds of brands using Klaviyo for email, SMS, and push notifications over the last decade. Here’s what we try to do every year in early November.

1. Plan your sending cadence in detail

The first week of November is a great time to think through your BFCM sending cadence.

Some questions to consider:

Which days will you promote each offer?

The timing of your sales or product releases during BFCM can either make or break a successful week.

You might launch a sale to VIPs on the Tuesday or Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. Or, that “launch” might be Thanksgiving evening for everyone, just as shoppers are finishing up their Thanksgiving meal with family and sitting down on their couch ready to watch the last football game of the day with a phone or laptop in-hand.

The pacing of that roll-out tends to be dictated by the offer and general size of your subscriber lists.

If you have a wider assortment of products, consider sending VIP/early bird-exclusive offers on specific products only in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

If you have a limited array of products and are keeping one consistent site-wide offer throughout the week, think about general expectations for sales volume based on prior years’ performance and inventory.

Ask yourself if your brand can sustain running a sale for a week, assuming you launch it on Tuesday. If this answer is no, it might be more effective to run it for fewer days.

There is no perfect answer on this one. Every business is different. Generally, I recommend considering some level of an advanced rollout to users you would qualify as VIPs or who would otherwise be interested in earlier offers.

Most consumers are used to brands launching “Black Friday” sales days before Friday. So, that could mean Wednesday—and usually keeping Thanksgiving morning off limits, but then doing a “full launch” in the evening Thursday.

Who wants to receive your messaging?

Frequent buyers and subscribers who are clicking are your best audience. Reward their trust and continue to build relationships with them throughout BFCM by sending offers early.

What segments should you send to that wouldn’t normally get your messaging?

Identify those groups of subscribers who don’t typically engage, but have bought from you before. BFCM is a great time to reach out.

Let’s say you have several thousand subscribers who joined your list over a year ago, but they haven’t bought anything or clicked at all. If your deliverability strategy is sound, you stopped sending to them months ago. But BFCM is a great time to send 1–2 messages to that group.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure to protect your sender reputation—divide your sends out over several hours.

Predetermining how to segment your campaigns a few weeks before BFCM is key—there’s no reason you should be figuring this out during the stress of the holiday. It also frees you up to make spontaneous decisions if necessary.

Say there’s a particular product you weren’t expecting to do well, but people are buying it on Black Friday. If you’ve micro-managed your messaging strategy and cadence, you’ll be able to see where you can fit in an email feature or other additional messaging.

2. Identify which groups you’ll exclude from BFCM messaging

After working out which segments you’ll send to and when, there comes a crucial step: identifying which groups you won’t send to. That’s right—there are some folks you shouldn’t send to even during BFCM.

I recommend not sending any BFCM messaging at all to the same subscribers you would typically exclude on every campaign throughout the year:

• Recently bounced addresses
• User profiles that get passed into your account via third-party marketplace orders that aren’t real customer addresses
• Highly unengaged user profiles

3. Micro-manage the customer journey

Depending on your BFCM offers, you may need new or updated:

• Sign-up forms
• Landing pages
• Product pages
• Post-purchase messaging

Early November is also a great time to schedule your automations. Klaviyo makes it easy to set an entire automation live in just 1 click or pause all activity quickly by setting a flow to manual or draft. The weeks leading up to BFCM are the perfect time to think through your customer journey, and schedule automations to make sure they align with what you want to communicate during that time period.

For instance, you can schedule a flow to go live and then switch to draft after the event ends—say, midnight on Giving Tuesday after your BFCM discounts expire. This saves you the stress of doing it in the moment.

BFCM is also a time where you may want to modify welcome, abandoned checkout or other flows that contain discount-oriented messaging to better align with your offers during the sale period. Scheduling flows allows you to do that with ease ahead of time.

4. Set up a new a pop-up on your site

In addition to your standard sign-up form to gather new subscribers, we recommend implementing a pop-up for existing subscribers who are visiting your site.

Give them an opportunity to sign up for early, exclusive BFCM messaging. You can then build a campaign just for that segment of super-engaged customers.

You can also segment that group out further into “the super-engaged” and the “bought 1–2x this year”. That second group might not be VIPs (yet), but they may want to be in the know. Getting personalized messaging from you might just push them into VIP territory.

BFCM pop-up tip: In these BFCM-specific pop-up forms, make sure there’s an opportunity for folks to sign up for SMS as well.

5. Build hype via exclusive content

If it makes sense for your brand, consider making certain content exclusive. This can be an especially savvy move for brands who want to do well on BFCM, but simply aren’t in a position to offer a big discount.

You might, for example, offer an SMS-only deal for a product category, or even a certain product. Make the deal available only via SMS sent at a certain time. Announce it via social, an email campaign, and a banner on your site. This can help to build excitement, community, and your SMS list, leading followers and subscribers to sign up for SMS in time to get the deal.

Or you might consider a “mystery box promotion,” available only via certain owned channels if you have a high SKU count or a big variety of products. Goods that may add up to $50–60 can be bought for $25–30. Use your social channels to announce the mystery box, at whatever discount makes sense for your brand.

Mystery box pro tip: Make sure your terms and conditions are buttoned up. When people are buying something, but they don’t know what it is, you open yourself up to potential customer service issues and returns.

6. Promote your gift guide

Remember: some of the people visiting your site on BFCM haven’t heard of you except from their loved one who requested something you sell. BFCM is a great time to guide those people to the best gift for their person.

A BFCM buying guide also serves to:

• Show what might be available for shoppers to buy for themselves, or other people they’re buying for.
• Show curated list of products that you’re looking to move.
• Balance your your promotional content. Email and SMS campaigns that share buying guides are a nice counterpoint to the endless promotions your subscribers are seeing in their inboxes.
• Communicate shipping deadlines not only for BFCM, but for the upcoming winter holidays.
• Give less dialed-in shoppers opportunities to get your discounts after Cyber Monday. What can you offer them that Tuesday or Wednesday?

Gift guide tip: Promote your gift guide on a banner on your homepage in addition to in your email and SMS campaigns.

7. Schedule everything that you can control ahead of the holiday

Echoing back to our first tip for this month, early November is really your last chance to get ahead. Even in a best-case scenario, BFCM is a chaotic several days. So, pre-schedule, pre-set, and pre-plan everything you can.

I recommend the brands I work with wrap up everything they can by Monday of Thanksgiving week. That way, you and your team will be freed up to attend to anything that comes up during the holiday rush.