Thread by @kmx411

Last November (screenshot below) I started my first @Shopify store ever

It did over $70k on Black Friday weekend

If you’ve ever considered selling something online, start right now - Black Friday is almost a guaranteed success

Here’s a deep dive on my ads strategy for BFCM:

First a look at the overall ad campaign

Notice how high the CPM is? That’s because every advertiser on the planet is buying ads this weekend, so getting reach is expensive

Good news is conversions are stupid high as well, so it gets offset

Because it’s BF, you need to compete with every other seller for the buyers attention

The key is making your offer very clear - include “Black Friday Sale” in the ad copy, and make sure your ads have a text banner on them with a huge discount number

Then take those ads and target as broad of an audience as possible (got this tip from @Julian)

This is because small audiences can’t scale, broad audiences can by just increasing budget

I targeted all women in US/CA that are “engaged buyers”

As you get purchases, make a lookalike audience and show them the same ads

As you get visitors, make retarget ads for view content and add to cart

Here’s a screenshot of all my ad sets for that weekend

Here’s the most important piece: you don’t need to do anything fancy to make ads “work” - Facebook is smart and will figure out who to show your ads to, just let them do that

I had no custom placements and did no manual bidding, just optimize for conversions at lowest cost

~30% of sales came from email marketing, and I had almost no email list built up before the weekend since I had just made this store

Use a shopify app that offers a discount to customers that share their email address (you want to collect as many as possible)

Then send a lot of emails - minimum 3 per day

Don’t be afraid of unsubscribes, this is the weekend to really fight for attention

Offer exceptional deals over email, if your ads are already profitable then selling to your email list has no advertising cost

Which means you can probably give over 50% off, or a free additional product with every purchase

That’s all for now - feel free to AMA

I’ll do other dives into the specifics of landing page design and email marketing later next week

For anyone wondering - this site was selling a single product - blankets