For most retailers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday can make or break the year. But with billions at stake, how can brands stand out in an increasingly crowded market?
To find out, we decided to seek out the advice of an expert.
Kelly Stancil, a seasoned data engineer at Mason Interactive, offered to share his insights on mastering seasonal sales. From the importance of early preparation to understanding the complexities of customer journeys, Kelly offers valuable advice for brands gearing up for the holiday season.
Kelly Stancil, data engineer for Mason Interactive
Start early: Christmas begins in July
In truth, holiday retail planning starts well before even those early-bird decorations hit store shelves in October. One of Kelly’s key strategies is planning for Black Friday as far out as summertime.
While these planning discussions previously kicked off in late September or early October, the growing length and importance of the holiday shopping season mandates even earlier starts.
“That’s why, this year, we held a seminar in July with our e-commerce clients to emphasize the importance of starting preparations earlier,” Kelly explained. “As soon as the back-to-school season is over, we’re discussing plans for Q4. It lessens the excuses and regrets from both the agency and the client in the post-holiday retrospective.”
As part of this planning work, Mason Interactive works with its clients to establish clear goals for their Q4 strategies. It helps to keep everyone focused and on the same page.
“You’ll commonly hear, ‘I want to do better than last year.’ Well, technically, making $1 more than last year is ‘better.’ Yet you, as in the client, would be none too pleased with that outcome,” said Kelly. “Goals can certainly be open to interpretation. The more astute client will say, ‘I want $X in net revenue for Q4.’ Now, that’s a tangible goal, but it’s massive and requires smaller benchmarks to achieve.”
That’s when follow-up questions come in handy:
- Based on average order value, how many customers does that amount to?
- What percentage of those customers have to be new?
- Based on lifetime value (LTV), how much can we predict from existing customers?
- What’s the churn rate?
- Does this company want long-term growth or prime itself to be acquired?
At this point, it’s like organizing a large dinner party. You’ve set the overall goal: to host X number of guests, expecting each to spend Y, so you reach your desired total of Z. But you know your loyal friends (existing customers) will only cover a portion of that. So, to meet your goal, you’ll need a certain percentage of brand-new guests (first-time customers) to join the party. By breaking down the big goal into manageable pieces, you can better plan your strategy — and ensure your dinner party (or business) succeeds.
Moreover, it’s good practice to make a conservative and ambitious goal relative to the above-mentioned questions for clients who lack goals, whether due to a lack of time or not being as data-savvy. Present the two with an outline of a strategy to meet each goal. Based on empirical data, establishing a floor and ceiling tends to temper a client’s expectations.
Starting early isn’t just about getting ahead either. It’s about building brand awareness to potentially new customers. Kelly emphasized, “After all, people can’t engage with you if they don’t know you exist.”
According to Kelly, the initial phase of any good Black Friday and Cyber Monday efforts is about targeting customers who are already familiar with your brand and preparing to buy gifts. Consumers typically only have room in their minds for about seven brands that they truly care about, and these are the ones that will receive priority when it comes to spending during the holiday season.
In short, brands aiming to secure their place in this competitive space need to plan ahead to capture consumer mindshare early.
Leveraging programmatic advertising
In order to capture as much mindshare as possible, brands need to be as visible to customers as possible. To enhance brand visibility, Mason Interactive has integrated programmatic advertising into its tech stack through The Trade Desk, expanding beyond the typical Google and Meta ad platform offerings.
“Programmatic is great at generating many impressions at low CPMs to build widespread brand awareness,” Kelly said.
By focusing on building up the programmatic-led awareness from September through November, Mason Interactive lays the groundwork for their clients to capitalize on with impulse- and offer-driven messaging during peak holiday shopping days. According to Kelly, this is where the payoff of upper funnel awareness comes into play.
“Even if we couldn’t get a brand in a prospect’s top seven, it’s part of the top 15, which means they’re considered for a smaller purchase or simply an impulse buy,” Kelly said.
Unique challenges of this year’s Black Friday
Since the pandemic, retailers have been trying to keep up with drastically different Black Friday dynamics (from limited inventory to overstocked shelves to exploding demand). And this year seems set to be another unique case. According to Kelly, this year’s U.S. election will delay consumer shopping by about seven to nine days compared to last year, as many Americans will wait to see the election outcomes before feeling comfortable shopping.
Additionally, there are five fewer shopping days this year due to Thanksgiving falling later in the month. These factors must be considered when setting goals and comparing performance to previous years.
“Comparing performance to previous years is standard practice for any business,” said Kelly, “but providing meaningful context to those comparisons is what sets an analytics-driven agency apart. It’s not just about the numbers — it’s about understanding the factors behind them.
“For example, when did your promotions run? What was the final day for ground shipping to guarantee December 24th delivery last year versus this year? Did you face any shipping delays, website glitches, discount code failures, ad platform disruptions, or inventory shortages? By reflecting on past challenges, you gain the insight needed to navigate them more effectively in the future.”
Understanding the customer journey
Kelly also highlighted the phases customers experience during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Running up to the shopping spree, customers are much more deliberate in their actions, often looking to make planned purchases with brands they already know and trust.
Then, when Black Friday starts, consumers shift into “deal-seeking mode,” where brand loyalty subsides as they hunt for the best discounts.
Those who plan ahead receive early gains from the determined shoppers at the start of November. So, while the dependence on deal seekers is still present, it’s to a lesser extent. Goals and benchmarks are also clearly established prior to this phase, so only calculated risks regarding greater discounts / scaling up paid media spend are made.
Those who didn’t come into this phase with a plan will see lackluster sales before Black Friday and will engage in a race to the bottom by cutting prices and paying so much more in acquiring these deal-seeking customers (versus what planners paid to acquire determined shoppers).
Navigating the post-Black Friday shopping landscape
After the Black Friday celebrations, customers often return to familiar brands, shifting from online to more in-store purchases. For e-commerce companies wondering how to navigate this change, Mason Interactive employs a programmatic approach.
Whether consumers are passing by a mall store or traveling, programmatic advertising can capture their attention, allowing them to make purchases on their mobile devices.
“We track what regions performed well online, then focus programmatically to go after those same hotspots on the ground right after Cyber 12,” Kelly explained.
Managing expectations and realistic goal-setting
As we all know, the agency-client relationship experiences a unique set of pushes and pulls. For instance, agencies don’t like clients with unrealistic goals. At the same time, clients don’t like agencies that underperform from what they promised.
Kelly advised that both parties must take a sober, objective look at the brand's current state and have a cautiously optimistic outlook on its future if they put in the necessary work to achieve that.
“That is why we have Funnel, which gives us a panoramic view of a brand and illustrates through data that every decision was the best with the data provided at that time. It becomes even more complicated with long-term strategies, where benefits aren’t revealed immediately,” said Kelly.
Examples of Google Sheets to track seasonal sales
Below is an example of one of the Google Sheets Kelly uses to keep track of everything.
You can see the revenue and orders for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 by the hour. The bold row is the total for that day, and the cells are a series of sumifs formulas pulled from a Google sheet that Funnel refreshes.
The color-conditioned section in the middle compares KPIs to those of the previous year.
Green means equal to or surpassed the previous year, while orange means fell below the previous year. This visual representation helps them analyze year-over-year performance and see where they are making progress.
The last screenshot below shows the Google Sheet that Funnel updates and where the above tables derive their numbers from (for context, these are Shopify numbers).
Data challenges and the role of forecasting
Collecting performance data, as the Google Sheets above illustrate, is essential for predicting the success of future marketing campaigns.
Forecasting models are often based on historical data of paid spend and associated revenue versus overall revenue. And by doing regression analysis, one can gain a perspective of future performance. Yet, as Kelly pointed out, this kind of analysis does come with limitations, since you rely solely on past data, which tells you nothing about the future.
“We always have to be prepared for the unexpected and know how to pivot,” Kelly explained.
Funnel handles the hard part of aggregating and categorizing data. Then, finding that narrative in the datasets is essential as it informs your next steps.
Unexpected pathways to conversion
Kelly shared a compelling story about a luxury brand that, through programmatic advertising, unveiled a less glamorous pathway to conversion.
“We leveraged first-party data to build the audience and launched the campaign with the primary KPI of ‘purchases,’” Kelly said. “A majority of ad placements were what you would expect: luxury fashion and lifestyle websites and apps returning moderate results. However, the ad placement that was the most prominent touchpoint in a new customer journey was in the mobile app game Words with Friends.
“It’s something we would’ve never thought to do on our own, but preconceived notions don’t hinder a programmatic algorithm. It’s in those blind spots we can find opportunity.”
Initially, the client winced at their brand being associated with the game but quickly shifted to smiles once they saw supporting data showing the insanely high ROAS and how it’s been attributed to their recent bump in sales.
Another brand, Kelly recounted, was in the health and wellness vertical.
“Since onboarding that brand, we’ve been under the assumption that it takes two weeks on average for a customer to go from seeing an ad to buying their product,” Kelly said. “The data at the time would show that as truthful. A year or so later, we pulled a path to conversion report from The Trade Desk for the same brand and discovered the average is now 4.5 weeks, nearly double of what was assumed.
“Throughout this time KPIs were healthy and revenue growth was steady, so there wasn’t a call to investigate this detail; it was something that we stumbled upon out of curiosity of the programmatic platform. Now that this shift in behavior has come to light, there have been modifications in email lifecycle management, brand messaging, frequency, etc., producing greater results than continuing as is.”
The key takeaway: keep an open mind when data points surface and counter those long-held beliefs. Is what you see a pocket of opportunity, a neglected flaw in process or simply a fluke?
Focus on experiences in modern retail
Kelly also spoke about a growing trend of associating products with experiences, especially in today’s social media-driven landscape.
In platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where users often showcase aspirational lifestyles, products tend to resonate more with consumers when they are tied to experiences rather than just presented as standalone items. This shift from purely tangible goods to experience-driven marketing is crucial for brands seeking to engage customers in more meaningful ways.
Final thoughts and recommendations
As the conversation wrapped up, Kelly underscored the importance of setting realistic expectations with clients, especially when navigating the challenges of seasonal sales. He advised that brands and marketers should start their preparations early, focus on building brand awareness and develop a deep understanding of the customer journey. Flexibility is key. Strategies should be adaptable to evolving consumer behaviors and market conditions.
For those gearing up for the holiday season, Kelly’s insights offer a strategic guide that emphasizes the importance of fostering long-term brand recognition and loyalty, rather than focusing solely on immediate sales. By prioritizing experience-driven marketing as part of this strategy, brands can cultivate stronger customer relationships and position themselves for continued success beyond the holiday rush.