Andrew Maff 00:03
First thing next week is going to be August. Get some stuff out there. Start prepping some stuff that maybe you can get live in the next week or two, so that you have a better Q4. Because what you do now is going to really set the tone for what happens in Q4.
Narrator 00:17
Welcome to the E-comm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Andrew Maff 00:32
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E-comm Show. And as usual, I'm your host Andrew Maff, and today is an interesting one. As of the airing of this, it is still July, and I'm going to talk to you about Q4 prep. Now, if you're thinking, Andrew, why would I start prepping for Q4 now, that's not for several more months? This is the exact episode that you need to listen to.
Andrew Maff 01:03
I preach this every year. As soon as the beginning of Q3 hits, I want to be planning for Q4. Now, if you're listening to this and you're going, yeah, of course we're prepped for Q4. We're usually prepared several quarters out, and we plan marketing pretty much on an annual basis. Good, fantastic. That's how it should be done. But unfortunately, there is countless people that will reach out to me. Probably in late October, early November is usually when I start hearing from people that they need help and they want to get this and that done in time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
Andrew Maff 01:46
So, yeah, this is what we're going to talk about. Now, here's now I'm not going to tell you like make sure to have your emails ready. Like yeah, duh. So what I do want to talk to you about is the reasoning around this. Now, of course, if you're not a Q4 heavy brand, this is still for you. Just translate it to whatever time is more relevant. Like there's several brands we work with where they're in peak now. You know, typically like May through July is their peak time. They do really well in the summer. So this is the same concept. You would just want to do prep in like more like Q1, mid q2, so there's something that oddly enough I posted something kind of quick and painless about a very similar concept on LinkedIn and got a lot of pushback, which I was shocked. People think that paying for data is a bad thing, and I A I could not disagree more, but B, you're not really paying for data as much as you're paying for awareness. So I digress. Let me back up.
Andrew Maff 02:49
So part of the reason that you want to start preparing for Q4 now, you want to hammer out your messaging, obviously the overall cadence of campaigns and offers and all that fun stuff, and you want to figure out what you're going to end up offering in Q4. Who are you mainly going after, right? And you're going, yeah, my customers. Like, okay, cool, got it. Let's figure out the audience itself. Who is the person? Give me the demographic. Give me the geographics. Like, let's figure that out. Then I want to back it up, and I want to go, okay, what do I need to do to start to educate that audience? So during Q4, as I'm sure many of you know, costs are obnoxious. CPCs get out of hand. There's new businesses that come out of the woodwork that just take up a ton of real estate for a while because they think that this is the best time to launch stuff, and it just gets ugly, and stuff gets really, really expensive. And so, if you're going to attempt to hunt down completely net new customers, or you're trying to build, you know, obviously a new customer base and prepare yourself going into 2027, you end up spending an arm and a leg, and you do that because not only are marketing costs higher, but you're usually giving up some type of margin for a promotion or a discount or whatever that's also going to eat into that.
Andrew Maff 04:10
So really, what you're doing is you're just crushing your overall profitability to acquire net new customers. Now, don't get me wrong, I love that approach, but you got to make some money too. And so there's a way to actually do this. So if you can hammer out your messaging, your overall offer, exactly what you want to do in Q4, you can then backtrack and figure out what you need to do now. So during as this the airing of this is late July, you're going into August and then a little bit into September. There usually like the first couple weeks September, no one's doing much anything. There's barely any ads going on. It's usually one of the slower months. Mid September is when you start to see things picking back up, and that is the best time to educate people because costs are significantly lower. So what we usually end up looking at is. Especially because in a lot of attribution situations, you know, you can kind of pixel people and keep a majority of that data for anywhere between 90 to 180 days, depending on the situation. And then, of course, if you can actually capture their information like an email or something like that, then you're in a much better spot. But during Q4, those things get so expensive that you end up losing an arm and a leg. So the goal here is to actually start to educate the audience during the month of August and a little bit into September before you start moving it more into conversion-focused campaigns.
Andrew Maff 05:33
I still usually run them through September, even sometimes into the beginning of October, so that that way when I go to do my bigger campaigns around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays and all that fun stuff, really I just end up adjusting those campaigns to be more focused on a middle of funnel audience. So they already know who I am. I paid to educate them before when costs were lower. Otherwise, if you're doing a lot of top of funnel initiatives during peak Q4, it's so messy because there are some people have already decided on what they want to purchase, whether it's for themselves or for a gift. And by the way, the other issue around that too, which we saw this during Prime Day. If you go back to your Amazon data during Prime Day, I'll bet you that leading up to Prime Day, the week before things were a little bit slower than usual. You probably saw maybe decent click through rates on your ads, but you just didn't see as much conversion. So maybe you saw a conversion rate drop. That happens all the time because what these users end up doing is they start the shopping process early. They're getting excited. They know that there's going to be a sale. They know that there's stuff going on, and so they start to shop right away. They add it to their cart, and then they let it just sit there. So they wait until the time comes. Then they see if it's on sale, and then they decide if they want to buy it or not. So you end up with much higher click-through rates. You get a lot of people that add to cart, and then they just sit there and kind of wait.
Andrew Maff 07:02
The same thing happens around Black Friday, Cyber Monday. People start the process usually a week or two early, and then they sit around and wait for the sale to come in. So when you look at your revenue that's coming in during that time, your ads are all of a sudden going to start showing a ton of conversions. But the reality is the education started much earlier, and if you're going to get them to add to cart, you got to start the top of funnel education even earlier than that. You know, you look at the rule of seven, right? It's a standard advertising rule. It's been around since advertising existed, almost where someone basically needs to see your brand name or your product approximately seven times before they really start to remember it, now in what time period it's kind of a there's pros and cons to both sides of it.
Andrew Maff 07:48
But if you're looking at Q4 stuff and you're obviously looking in this day and age where it's you know people have the attention span of a goldfish, basically, you pretty much want to factor in that rule of seven within about a month ahead of anything that you're trying to do, so if you want to do a big old sale during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, September, October, you better make sure that they've seen your stuff at least about seven times. So take a look at your frequency levels and make sure you're hitting that. So basically, what I'm getting at here is that during the month of August and September specifically, those are the best times to really put out a ton of content, it could be social, it could be SEO initiatives, and then it also could be just more top of funnel ads, running ads just for video views or landing page views, just to get some engagement and get people interested in learning about your product, so that when the time comes, you have a significantly larger middle of funnel audience to work with, and then you just pour gas on that, as opposed to leaning into top of funnel. So if you've run ads before in the past during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, during the holidays, and you go after a completely net new audience, so you're basically prospecting new people, you will always see a lower ROAS. If you go back to your data, I'll bet you money. That's what you saw comparative to your retargeting, right? Standard.
Andrew Maff 09:36
We went into an account, it had like, I don't know, 10 products, maybe like that, and it had 330 something live campaigns, like what? Why? No, there's no need. So then the issue becomes when you, when you spread your campaign so thin like that, A even if you've got automation in place, it's very hard to like manage that with like a close enough eye, and what ends up happening, especially with some of these automations, depending on how you've set up, they'll scale up budget, they'll scale back budget. Sneeze. We might edit that out. I don't know. We may not. We might leave it in. Sorry. So we scale up budget, scale back, scale up bids, we scale up, up and down, blah blah.
Andrew Maff 09:04
So it's kind of the same thing, really, during any time of the year. The problem is that during Q4, top of funnel is pretty limited. It's unlikely people come across a new product and then purchase it like pretty much right away. There's definitely certain products where that's the case, but it's usually uncommon around Q4 because they already know what they want to buy. They've already thought through the process, and they only have so much money that they want to spend. So that's usually when it becomes very interesting to start doing earlier campaigns to educate the audience, and then focus middle of funnel come Q4.
Narrator 09:38
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Andrew Maff 10:11
I kind of mentioned this earlier. Here's the other thing to think about. q4 is, I think it's an e-commerce business owners, it's like sweet and sour kind of... What is it like? The yeah, sweet and sour, something like that. Where there's the sweet part is there's a lot of vanity metrics that look super sexy, high conversion rates, ton of revenue, everything looks awesome. The reality of it is you know unless you planned properly you end up with lower profit and you're not making as much. But I feel like the biggest problem that most brand owners have is they need to look at it in a very different light. Now, if you have a product line where hey you know someone only buys this once and that's it, or you know, maybe they only buy like once every couple years, kind of thing. This isn't as relevant, but if you're looking to extend that LTV, you're looking to bring in net new customers. Q4 is the best time to do that. So if you can start to educate people now, get them to convert during q4, that should really prop you up going into 2027. You just have to make sure that your retention is in a really good spot.
Andrew Maff 11:27
So, if you can educate people at a really inexpensive rate now, right August September, you can get them to convert at a higher rate during Q4 because you've already educated them. So you're only going after a warm audience, which is always the one that's going to convert the most. You can now get net new customers at a lower cost, and then if you want to make sure that it really props you up in 2027, you've got to make sure that you've got solid retention in place. This could be just making sure that email SMS is in a good spot. I never say sleep on direct mail. I find that to work really well for certain brands. Rewards programs are fantastic. If you can push subscription, that's obviously very great. So anything you can do to retain those customers. So what becomes kind of interesting, and this is something we looked at for a handful of brands, and everyone's data was kind of different, but it helped us kind of make a thought, like kind of guide us in future thought processes, was how many net new customers did you gain during peak Q4 that stayed with you, and what was the LTV of those customers? Because what you end up finding during Q4 is you know you get brand owners that kind of lean in a little heavy on revenue, and they don't really stay focused on what it's going to do for the overall business in the future.
Andrew Maff 12:44
It's more about let's get revenue now, and then the thing that drives me crazy too is that no one wants to talk about q1 until we're in like February, which is ridiculous. But that's probably for a podcast later this year. But basically, they're so focused on bringing in the revenue and having that vanity metric, that they don't focus on A where their CAC is during that time, and then B to me it's a different CAC, like it's a different customer because a lot of people either A really wanted to shop with you but didn't want to spend them the full price for whatever your product is, so they waited until that time. So they might not be an ideal customer depending on the product. And then B, the other side of it could be a gift, in which case you're now retargeting someone that's not interested in the product, but they just know someone who is. So the problem there is we've found that in some scenarios, the LTV of customers that convert during Q4 is lower than customers that convert during other times of the year. So, if you actually invest a ton of money into acquiring net new customers during Q4, thinking that you're looking at your CAC to LTV ratio, and then it turns out that's not the case, where they're not as good. So it's something interesting to always look into. That's not always the case. There's several brands we work with where that was not what we were doing.
Andrew Maff 14:08
So they were even on in some cases the people that came in during Q4 were even better. So it always depends. Everyone's data is going to be very different, right? One of my favorite things that we get questions about all the time is you know, results, expectations, and guarantees. Which that's a hilarious term. And like, you know, what do we expect? I hate projections. I think they're stupid. Only because, like, yeah, it can kind of help guide you in decision making, but it's all just a guess. Like, until you've got the data behind it, you can't really figure that stuff out. And so you just have to look at your own data and kind of go from there. Anyway, so looking at the quality of the customer that is converting during q4 is something very interesting to look at. You can always go back to 2024 20 what year is it? 26. Wow.
Andrew Maff 14:59
So you look back. Last year, 2025, and see how many of those customers that you acquired in q4, maybe even just during peak q4, actually stayed with you and purchased again and again for the rest of this year. If that's the case, and you're seeing that that's a really low CAC, now you can actually look at, oh wow, I can actually spend way more money in q4. Maybe I don't want to focus on such a high profitability during that time because I know that these customers are going to stay with me and shop with me X more times, which is going to generate me X more dollars. So you could actually look at Q4 into a very big investment into the following year. So you look at your CAC LTV ratio. You look at how many new contacts you can gain. Obviously, how many new customers you can gain. And then, as long as you have retention in play, what you really could start to focus on is going into next year. What can you do to increase average order values, or ideally, obviously, increase lifetime value? So, you know, it's not just oh, let's do 20% off this year. Like, okay, like, cool. Like, there's a billion other things you could do. First of all, and second of all, there's so many more data points that you have to factor in because if you're giving up 20% on a product that you doesn't have a ton of repeat purchases, or maybe it's well, yeah. Even that 20% off a product that doesn't have a ton of repeat purchases, and then you're spending an arm and a leg on higher CPCs, and you didn't do anything to educate the audience ahead of time. So now your CPCs are definitely higher. Your mar, your costs and marketing are going to be higher.
Andrew Maff 16:35
Don't get me wrong; conversion rates are usually higher during that time too. Then you're giving up 20% on what is typically an average of like a 30% COGS, a lot of people look for a 3x ROAS. Some are higher, some are lower. I know, but if you look at a 30% you're giving up 20% Cool, you profited maybe 10. Like, what's that doing? Like, that's you know, if you're not going to have repeat purchases going into 2027, what's the point? So it's a metric that I find a lot of brands don't look at because it's a different time of year. People are buying gifts for other people. So are you really okay giving up a lot more margin to acquire new customers if those customers actually aren't going to come and back and shop with you as much as they normally would during other times of the year, it can really help to decide your decision making around what type of sale to do. You know, there's other things around like when you're thinking about prepping for Q4 and you're starting to map things out. Blanket discounts always piss me off. Like there, it's so it's like very it's just a crowded space. Like so many people are running different sales during that time. That if you're just doing a regular X percent off, you're really just, you know, you're really just trying to get people to convert that might have already made up their mind anyway. It's the buildup that's interesting.
Andrew Maff 17:58
So if you didn't know this about me, years and years and years ago, like I think, I've been in e-commerce marketing for 1617, years now. During the first four or five years of that, I was also simultaneously in the music space. So I used to. I was a concert promoter, and one thing that I realized because I was in a band, especially for our band, was we didn't make a lot of fans at the show. We made fans ahead of the show, because what would happen was all the hype of the show, all of you know the build-up, all of the people that were going to attend, etc. started to look into who we were. So we started to really focus our marketing initiatives on pre-show stuff, and then at the show, we just had to make sure that we put on a good show, and then that was really it. And yeah, we would do some other stuff while we were there, but so many people would look into our music ahead of time to see if you know do they want to get there to hear us or do they want to just wait for the headliner if we were opening for someone. It's the same thing during Q4.
Andrew Maff 19:14
What becomes very interesting is so many people make up their minds before the show. They make up their minds before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So the question is, what is the build up? So you've got to get ahead of people. So we found, quote unquote, like VIP clubs or any type of early access is always very interesting. So running, if you can start top of funnel education and audience in August. So let's say you run a long term, a long long term, long long form long form video on like Meta, TikTok, something like that, and you just do video views. Just get people to watch it, get people interested, get people commenting, build up a ton of education from it, and. And run that for a good month or two, maybe even in September. Then in October, run a big campaign retargeting anyone that watched 50% or more of that video, as long as the video is long enough, shows that they showed interest, and offered to them to just sign up for early access to your Black Friday Cyber Monday sale. You can then send them that sale two weeks before Black Friday Cyber Monday. Give them their own code. Don't put it on the website and just promote it to that list. They'll spend their money before Black Friday Cyber Monday even shows up. Works very very well. I'm going to sneeze.
Andrew Maff 20:39
Ah, sorry. Um. That threw me off, so I'm not going to edit that out. Let's leave it. I think it was a good sneeze. I don't know why these. I need to start making these podcasts a little bit more. Just what's going on in my head. So promote before the show, 100% absolutely. Look, it even works. It works for every business, to be honest. Like it works for us. Like when we're going to a conference, I don't really bank on people coming to our booth or coming to a talk that I'm doing or what on whatever. I bank on promoting ahead of time, that to the people that I think are going to be there, to then set up time to come stop by or to come see my talk, whatever it is. So it's all about what you do ahead of time, not the day of. So I think a lot of buildup is going to be what always really helps brands the most ahead of big promotions, so everyone always thinks like, oh, you know, we're going to do a sale next month. Cool. What are you doing now to make sure that that sale is successful? Maybe more top of funnel stuff. Maybe you're doing a VIP club. Maybe you're, you know, doing some kind of secret plan of how you're going to release the information and do a whole like scavenger hunt kind of thing. I've seen that done pretty well before. So overall, there's a ton of ideas. Obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. This is my favorite part to game to like just kind of game plan fun stuff to do during Q4.
Andrew Maff 22:18
But yeah, Q4 prep at the airing of this. It is late July. First thing next week is going to be August. Start doing stuff like get some stuff out there. Start prepping some stuff that maybe you can get live in the next week or two, so that you have a better Q4. Because what you do now is going to really set the tone for what happens in Q4. Cool. Thank you all. Appreciate you joining me as usual. Do the whole normal thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, or head over to our podcast platform or ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. Or it's on pretty much every podcast thing out there. And I appreciate your time. See you all next time!
Narrator 22:59
Thank you for tuning in to The E-comm Show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm Show!