Black Friday Part 4 - The Mom Test and 8 More Tips That Actually Work

EP 4 - Outro on 2025-07-31 at 20.46.45
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Matt Edmundson: Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast. My name is Matt Edmundson, and this is episode number four of our miniseries on how to create your eCommerce Black Friday strategy for 2025. Now, we've looked at how you create offers. In the first episode, we looked at new customer strategies in part two and in part three last week we looked at how.

To create a really good strategy for your existing customers. And today we're diving into the bits that don't fit neatly into any other categories, but make sense for you with your Black Friday success. So that's what we're getting into. Uh, it's all stuff that you can learn from by actually doing it.

You know, making the mistakes, getting there, figuring out that's what we've done over the years. That's where these sort of workshops have come from. Um, I'm gonna be talking today about something that I like to [00:01:00] call the mom test or the mom test for my American cousins. Um, how we plan for Black Friday, what about mobile?

Should we be thinking about that in any special kind of way? All those kind of things, you know. Why my favorite trick about Black Friday? Uh, why it's actually, well, I say it as a favorite trick. It's more like my favorite way to think about Black Friday. It's not a day, it's not even a weekend, actually.

It's more like two weeks stretching out into a month and how you can make all of that work for you really, really well. Uh, lemme just say before we get into it, a very warm welcome to you. If you are new to the eCommerce Podcast. This episode is a little bit unusual. Uh, normally we have expert interviews, which start again in September.

In August, we have been doing this little mini series all about Black Friday and how we can, how we can use. Use it to help us, you know, get the best strategy. We've been [00:02:00] taking the content, we've been repurposing content. Oh, yes. And the reason we've been doing this one, I think the content's okay. It's good, it's good value.

Um, two, I'm on sabbatical in August, so I don't get a chance to do much in August. So, uh, it's be able to, it's good to put these out there a little bit shorter. So, uh, I know you guys are also on a holiday enjoying things. You're already busy enough trying to relax. We're keeping 'em shorter. Um, and we're bringing you the.

Workshops that I delivered on Black Friday in e-commerce Cohort, which, uh, was our monthly sort of mastermind group that we ran. It used to be a paid membership. And you know what? Now it is free. It's been revamped slightly. Uh, we're bringing all this content that was behind a paid wall out into. The, the land of the free.

Yes, we are. And if you wanna know more about that, uh, go check out the website eCommerce Podcast dot net. Look at eCommerce co Cohort. Uh, you'll see the information is on there, uh, where you can also sign up to your [00:03:00] eCommerce Cohort groups if you want to join one. We'd love to see you in that. Um, other things to do whilst you're on the website, sign up to the newsletter if you haven't done so already, because like I say, that's also getting revamped in September.

New stuff is coming and all of this extra value content we're gonna start delivering will be in the newsletter first. Um, we really wanna make sure that that newsletter is delivering some great value to you, so, you know, give you a reason to sign up for it. Uh, so do go and do that. And of course you can also give me your feedback on this type of episode content.

You know, uh, for the longest time we've done interviews where we. Predominantly interviewed experts. Like I say, we've done some founder episodes. We're doing more and more of those actually, which I'm really excited about just listening to stories. And of course, if you are a founder, by the way, just as quick sidestep and you are running your own an e-commerce business, which I assume you are doing, if you're listening to this episode, um, then I, and you want to come on the show and show your story, I would love to hear from you.

Just go connect with us on the website eCommerce Podcast dot net. [00:04:00] Um, and who knows, maybe we can get you on here sharing your story with everybody about what you found out about eCommerce. Uh, we would love, love, love to do that. Um, so yeah, that's that sort of our usual content. We're slowly introducing.

More solo episodes where I get deep dive in specific topics. And then like I say, every now and again, we're gonna release these little miniseries, which will be workshops from the e-commerce Cohort. Would love to know what you think about them. Do check out the YouTube videos as well. I appreciate it.

There's a lot of calls to action in here. I should only give you one, but I've given you about 20 now I'm breaking all the rules. I'm really sorry about that. Um, but do all of them or do the right one that feels. Or do the one that feels most right to you? Uh, one of which is subscribe on the YouTube channel.

Our YouTube channel is small at the moment, uh, about 99 point, what was it? 7 99 0.987 or something like that. Besides, I should really remember the right number, uh, of people that consume the content, do it in an audio way. We're trying to grow the YouTube channel. Um, and these workshops do have [00:05:00] slides and some visual stuff, which may help you learn and get to grips with it a little bit more.

So do go and check. That out on YouTube. If you like visuals like I do, um, just go to youtube.com/ eCommerce Podcast and it will bring it all up for you. I think I've asked you to do enough. Uh, I think that's enough calls to action. Uh, I'm very, very sorry to all your marketing people that are just twitching right now because of all the things that I've done, but I just, let's just get it all out there.

It's fine. We we're, you know, it's, it's okay. It's probably not the best way to do it, but it's fine. Anyway. That's enough from me. Let's get back to me and jump into Black Friday. Tips, uh, that can give you the edge.

Okay, so let's look at Black Friday Top Tips, uh, in this last part of our Black Friday workshop. So hopefully by now you've started to put together your compelling offer. You've started to think about your first time buyer strategy. You've started to think, if not got sorted out and planned to the helps your, uh, [00:06:00] repeat customer.

Plan, um, or returning customer strategies. So let's look at some other top tips, which I highly recommend for Black Friday as you're putting all of this together, things to think about. The first one being the mum test. I talked about this, I think I talked about this in the coaching video. This is very simply.

Right where I will send to my mum the landing pages and the offers to see whether she can understand them and buy them and use them. Does it pass the mum test? Uh, because my mum is not the most technically savvy person on the planet, so if she can. I know other people will be okay with them as well. So have someone like your mum or whoever that you send stuff through to test who may be not your perfect ideal target market, but technol, technologically wise, they're a little bit, um, limited.

That's a good way to put it. Uh, the mum test, uh, the second one is site [00:07:00] speed. Uh, this is one of those things that SEO guys go on about all the time. It affects your SEO massively. Um, and what you can do now, running up to Black Friday, is really hone down your site speed and make sure that your site speed is absolutely.

Buzzing and singing. Okay, so check in with your site speed. There are, if you Google site speed checkers, there's a whole bunch of them, uh, which you can use to check the speed of your site and what's making it fast. What's making it slow? Make sure you check it both for desktop and mobile. Okay? You want to know how it's performing for both and try and fix anything which is slowing your site down, especially for Black Friday.

'cause it's gonna get rammed. So. Number three, customer service, top tip. And I've put here extra staff. What do I mean by that? Well, the kind of clue isn't the title, I suppose. Um, the. Eight. Ordinarily our customer service staff may be work Monday through Friday, 9 2 5, right? Whatever your standard [00:08:00] operat hours are, I'm gonna suggest to you that over Black Friday weekend, you are gonna want customer service staff to man.

Um, the emails, the live chat, and the phone. Over the weekend, not necessarily 24 7, unless you are shipping globally, but your peak trading times, uh, you're gonna want somebody answering questions, especially on live chat and email and just responding to people quickly because if you leave it until after the weekend, you're gonna come in on Monday.

They're gonna feel they're gonna forgotten you. Um, and you're gonna have so many customer service emails on Monday. It's not even funny. Okay, so plan four, increase customer service inbound stuff. This is another reason why you test your offers with the mum test because I know if my mom understands it.

Um, a lot more people will understand it and that will mean less emails sent to the customer service team asking them questions, right? Uh, because that's mainly the kind of emails you're gonna get. What about what if dot, dot, I can't use this code, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of those kind of things.

What can I do to [00:09:00] minimize the load on customer service? Uh, think that through ahead of time. If you've done Black Friday in the years before, think about what? Go talk to your customer service team. What? Is the problems that we experience on Black Friday? What are the common questions? Let's make sure our offers, our landing page, our emails address, those things so people don't need to contact customer service.

They will, because people don't read stuff, but hopefully less of them will contact customer service. And you'll also have on extra staff over the weekend at the top tip. Uh, shipping and returns. Actually, this is really important when it comes to customer service. One of the big questions, um, that people are gonna have is how do you ship and what do I do about returns?

Uh, again, you can put that information really clearly on your website, and again, we're trying to minimize the amount of products that is returned to us. So to do that. We want people to buy the right product in the first place, right? We want to help them in the first place, not miss the offers to get the right product that's right for them, so then they don't send it [00:10:00] back to us.

And to do that live check customer service always really helps. Over the weekend, be really clear on your website about your shipping policy. Be really, really clear about your returns policy. Again, they're just common things that customer service get asked, so be clear about them. Number four, be creative with paid media.

It is gonna be expensive. Yes, it is. Every man and his dog is gonna be wanting to do paid media throughout Black Friday weekend. Okay. Uh, I will be one of them. Um, and so I'm aware that there will be a bidding frenzy. Uh, from people trying to outbid everybody else to get those all important paid media slots, given that they are limited in supply.

So bear in mind it is gonna be expensive. So, um, as a result of that, you might want to be creative. Um, I know people that are just gonna switch off their Facebook ads campaign over the weekend and [00:11:00] they're gonna do other things, which I think is very, very brave and actually something that we should, as a company think through.

Uh, so what are the creative things can you do with paid media? Uh, either that's gonna bring the cost down. So if you invest in paid media now to grow your email list, your VIP email list or your SMS list, your in effect negating your need for paid media later. So be creative, right? And test your ad creative early.

We've talked about this many times. Um, if you are gonna spend a small fortune over that weekend on paid media, make sure it converts and that you've done the testing already, because it's gonna cost you more money than normal, right? So, uh, don't put on duff adverts, put on stuff that you know already works 'cause you've tested it.

Okay? So test your, um, uh, creative early. Run acquisition campaigns early. That's another top tip. Uh, I've mentioned that. So we, I would run campaigns which get people onto my email list, my SMS list, and get them on [00:12:00] early. So when it comes to Black Friday, I don't have to, uh, run the ads to them. They're already on my list.

They're already ready to buy. I've already done the buzz campaigns as there's, as they're warming up. To get ready for Black Friday. Okay. Uh, I'm testing audiences. I'm warming up audiences so I can maybe remarket over Black Friday, which is much cheaper than trying to get new audiences. Okay, so I'm running those acquisition campaigns.

Early. I'm not waiting until the weekend. Number five, social media build anticipation on social media. So you've got a great opportunity, right? With, um, your social media profiles, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, whatever it is you're doing, you can start to build that anticipation, uh, and start to get people ready and aware of what's going on.

And again, funnel them onto your email list or your SMS list, right? That's what you want to do. So start building anticipation, uh, you know, end of October, early November around Black Friday. Giveaways work super well for social media, and that's something that you can do on social [00:13:00] media over Black Friday is just do giveaways.

Let's get some product, give it away. Um, and people, you know, enter the giveaways with their emails or whatever. The downside to, I mean, we've done this on, on various times, but the downside to this is you do get just the freebie hunters, and so the emails aren't as high quality as you would. Necessarily hope.

Um, but if you are just doing it on your social media to your existing followers and you're engaging them that way, um, then you know it can work better. Just bear in mind that you will get freebie hunters on their, and their email addresses aren't always great. So you might wanna do things like double opt-ins just to confirm email addresses for you, do any kind of giveaway.

Okay? But it's always nice. Number six, mobile. Remember, 70% of sales on average on Black Friday weekend are gonna happen on a mobile device. So you want to test your websites on your mobile. You want to test your offers. I want my mum in the mum test to do everything on [00:14:00] her mobile. I want to go. Talk to a friend who's got an Android because my mom's got an iPhone.

I've got an iPhone. I want to test it on Android as well. I want to test it on an iPad. I want to test it on a tablet. I want to test on a desktop, but I definitely want to be aware of mobile because a lot of the sales are gonna go through that device and you want to check it. Okay. Tip number seven, cart abandonment is gonna be a massive issue, much bigger than normal, especially, um, on Thursdays.

Okay? So on the Thursday before Black Friday, uh, in fact, I put this on my slide here. Look, let's go to that one next. Uh, high on Thursday. So quite abandonment. I'm just getting ahead of myself, is gonna be high on the Thursday before Black Friday. People are just being, uh, you know, they're just adding stuff and just seeing what happens.

And if they don't quite get what it is they need, they're just gonna go, oh, I'm just gonna wait until tomorrow. We need those people, we need to connect with them, right? So you wanna make sure your email campaigns are in, if people are putting stuff to [00:15:00] their cart and they're not customers, we've got stuff on the website that's incentivizing them to sign up to the email so they, we can remind them.

To come back to the next day. You may even want to segment people that sort of sign up to your newsletter and have put stuff in the cart, right? And send them a separate list. So make sure your abandoned cart emails are set up. Make sure you can try and capture their email addresses and remember you on the Thursday, you're gonna have high abandoned cart rates.

So try and mitigate for that with ad copy. Try and mitigate that with landing page copy. Um, things like, Hey listen, we appreciate this is a Thursday before Black Friday, but I want you to know. Uh, what you're seeing now is, is, is a blinding offer. Uh, so if you take advantage of it now, you're not gonna be disappointed tomorrow, which is a big fear that people have.

So maybe you could take advantage of that and mitigate for it. Okay. On the website. Number eight. Remember, it's more than a day. Black Friday now lasts two weeks. [00:16:00] Uh, so play the two week game in your head. It's the week before and it's the week after, right? Starting with Cyber Monday, the week after going through.

So you've got this two weeks. You've got a week either side now of Black Friday where you can run offers, where you can engage audiences. It's not just, I'm gonna do an offer for an hour on Black Friday, and that's it. You've got two weeks. It's a two week marketing opportunity. Think of it as search. Um, and you'll always do much better.

What stuff can I do during those 12, uh, 12 weeks? During those 14 days, those two weeks? Over the years, we have done something that works super well. We called it the 12 Days of Christmas, which meant we could run something every day, a different offer every day. That was really, really engaging. So think of Black Friday as.

Two weeks plan for that in your marketing. It's not just a one day event or two day event. If you do Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it's two weeks. The peak's obviously gonna be the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday, the Monday. So you're gonna get that kind of, um, sort of bell curve effect, aren't you like that?

So this is. Uh, you [00:17:00] know, the key sort of buying time, but if it starts here and ends here, there's a whole lot of stuff there that I can take advantage of, right? So think about that in your marketing, in your emails, on your website. What can you do to take advantage of it? Tip number nine, uh, think about a year long.

Black Friday page, same page, fresh content. What do I mean by this? This is something that SEO experts are commenting on a lot now in the sense that historically, uh, and we've been guilty of this as well, we create a, a landing page for Black Friday with Black Friday offers. Um, we set it up, we launch it, it's out there, and then we forget about it and we take it down.

Right. So the search engines don't really have anything to go on, and next year we do a, a completely new Black Friday page. So what companies have now started to do is they've started to do Black Friday pages, which they leave up all year round. Now that doesn't mean they have Black Friday offers on it all year round.

Um, but it's there. The search engines find it and it gets [00:18:00] indexed around. Black Friday offers into your niche market in terms of what you are doing, and so you can put on there what your current offer is throughout the year and adapt it and change it. So that when people find it, but when you come to your next Black Friday, it's the same page.

It's the same URL, it's already indexed by Google. The search engines are loving it, and you're just gonna put some fresh content on there and you can start to build up the buzz and stuff around that Black Friday page. So have a permanent year long round Black Friday landing page, uh, is what the SEO guys are telling us.

And actually, I quite like that strategy. I like that thinking. Uh, if I'm honest with you, so have a look at doing that. So there you go. There's some, uh, just nine simple Black Friday tips, which I think will help you. Um, so go ahead. Creates your compelling offer. Write your strategy out for your first time buyer.

Uh, your existing customer strategy, your Black Friday top tips. Okay? So they're the things that you are gonna do. Um, now, next week in Cohort we are gonna [00:19:00] have a q and a. Okay, so I am gonna be answering your questions. Um, there is a very slim chance that I'm gonna have a guest. Actually, let me just double check my.

Dates on the computer here? Uh, yes we are. Hopefully so that q and a is gonna come out on the 27th of October. So hopefully next week's q and a will be with myself and a very special guest answering your questions. Who is just a wonderful person? We are gonna be talking about Black Friday, so if you are working through, you've worked through the coaching, you've worked through this workshop and you've got questions, do send them into me.

And I've got some questions already from folks. Do send them in and we will spend a bit of time answering those questions in the q and a, which will come out next week. So as you work through this, send them through and we will do our level best to get them answered in that Q, q and A. Okay, so I want you to work on your plan.

I want you to work on your strategies. [00:20:00] Your offers, you know, your first time buyer strategy and your existing customer strategy, think of the questions that are gonna come out. Write them down, send 'em through to me. I will get those answered hopefully in the q and a, which is coming out next Thursday, the week after that, the, which will be the, uh, 3rd of November.

Um, that's a week that I would love for you to submit your work, sending your work. Um, so I'd love to see your offers, your first time buyer strategy and your, um, your existing customer strategy. Send those in to me. If you are watching this and you are on the startup sprint and you've kind of sneaked over, you can also send me your questions, uh, relating to startups and we'll get those answered as well.

Um, and you can also submit to me your work next week as well based on the, uh, product stuff that you have been working through. So hopefully. That has answered all of those questions. Um. Obviously super [00:21:00] keen to hear your questions. We obviously wanna help you as much as we can, so do get those sent in. Um, you can just email me, Matt at eCommerce Cohort dot com.

You can hit the support button, send them to that email address as well. Um, or hit me upon social, what have you. You wanna contact me, genuinely don't mind, but send me your questions and we will do our best to answer. So that's it, uh, for this coaching session. This is Black Friday, part one. We are gonna get into stuff a little bit more in the next sprint, uh, in terms of how we engage people that purchase from us.

Um, so remarketing and all that kind of stuff we're gonna get into in the customer service side of things, which I am excited about. But before we get to there. Obviously we've got the q and a, obviously we've gotta submit your work to go through. So, um, uh, hope that is helpful. Like I say, I'll be back next week with you questions, so send 'em in if you've got any.

Uh, I think that's it, so bye for now and enjoy your planning. So there you have it. The fourth episode of our Black Friday [00:22:00] Strategy, uh, strategy, our Black Friday Strategy Workshop series. Um, I hope you are enjoying it. We're just here to try and help you get properly prepared whilst everyone else maybe is still thinking about, you know, the PIMS and lemonade by the pool.

Maybe that's where you are, or listening to this episode if you are. Hats off to you. Hope you've got sun cream on. Anyway, that wraps up episode number four. Next week we have our fifth and final installment in this miniseries, which is the q and a, uh, which a lot of people find really helpful. When I did these workshops over Cohort, um, we had four weekly workshops the same way we've delivered it on the podcast, and then in the final.

Um, workshop is a q and a section where we answer all the questions that came in as a result, and hopefully you'll find some extra value in that as well. And just remember in all of this, we're talking about Black Friday, but it is okay to opt out of Black Friday and not do it. Hopefully you've got some stuff outta this, [00:23:00] even if you're not doing Black Friday, which will help you with all of your other strategies, um, you know, around new customer acquisition and stuff like that as well.

So hopefully you've got some value out of it. Uh, but that's it from me. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Genuinely am loving what's going on in EP at the moment. Thanks for being part of it. Thanks for helping this channel grow. Really some really good stuff and love the fact it's grown every week and uh, it's such fun to be a part of it.

So, yeah. Appreciate you guys. Uh, have a great summer. Have a great week. If you're away this week, whatever it is, whatever you're doing, stay blessed, stay safe, and I will see you next week. Bye for now.

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