#52 Emanuele Maragno & Daniel Bidmon – $5M Black Friday Secrets: Automation Rules, Ads, Offers, Mistakes & What To Do In 2021

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Welcome to the first episode of Black Friday Cyber Monday post-mortem. A podcast series where Deividas will be bringing on other marketers and entrepreneurs in the eCommerce space to talk about their BFCM results and marketing strategies.

The best time to start preparing for the next BFCM is now. So, without further ado, it’s time to welcome our first 2 guests: Business partners Emanuele Maragno and Daniel Bidmon.

In this episode, Deividas speaks with Emanuele and Daniel and goes into the nitty-gritty of how they generated $5M in November, their eCommerce funnel, strategies, offers, and more.

Meet the guests:

Daniel Bidmon is an entrepreneur who’s been in the online marketing and eCommerce space for over 7 years now. He has launched his own eCommerce brands and recently (in 2018), he launched a marketing-eCommerce podcast which is now one of the biggest in the German-speaking market. This year, he and Emanuele Maragno launched an agency to run performance campaigns and scale brands to higher levels.

Emanuele Maragno is a Facebook advertising strategist, specializing in scaling business internationally in the last 2-3 years. He’s spent around $10M on ads and has helped over 50 businesses scale over to 7-8 figures worldwide.

Together with Daniel, they’ve created a combination that works really well and with the agency, they’re focusing on scaling businesses mostly in the European market.

The 2 met this year (in 2020) when they both wanted to go to a mastermind that got canceled due to COVID. So, they decided to just meet up instead and found out they had the same vision, wanted the same out of life, and more.

The first question Deividas wants to know – how did they found their ‘Why’?

For Emanuele, it’s being able to align his passion with his job. And when he does something right, how much of an impact it has. Many of the eCommerce owners they’re working with are driven by passion and a mission. Through Facebook ads and other marketing, Emanuele says he’s amplifying their reach and helping customers.

Daniel says he found his ‘Why’ a couple of years ago. As an introvert, doing presentations in school was always a scary experience. When given the opportunity to speak in front of 50 entrepreneurs, he was scared but decided to do it anyway. In the end, it was a huge success and people came up to him and thanked him for solving their problems. This feeling was the main ‘Why’ behind starting his podcast. In short: helping others is his fulfilling ‘Why’.

Next question: What’s the main difference between brands that scale and brands that don’t?

The product is at least 50% of the game, says Emanuele. If it’s helping people change their lives, you just need to find the right way to amplify it and it will scale.

If the value is not there – it simply cannot scale.

The product-market fit is the best explanation. You can’t “force” people to buy the product. You can convince them, yes, but in the end, there has to be a need. From there, you focus on the desire for the product. If the end-customer is not happy, they won’t buy from the brand again.

The question Emanuele likes to ask eCommerce brands is: “Is the end customer referring to what you’re selling to their friends?” If so, then you’re doing it right.

Then, they move onto the main topic of the podcast: Black Friday. Deividas wants to know how did they generate $5M in November? What were their thought-process, strategy, and overall gameplan?

Planning and preparation were very important, says Daniel. It wasn’t the first Black Friday for them. So, they had to fill the funnel upfront first. They had a huge audience list of warm and hot people in their traffic they could target with messages.

In the beginning, they were constantly buying traffic and testing offers and landing pages. They were filling up the funnel waiting to cash out on the ROAS later.

Daniel recalls a concerned client asking about their ROAS not changing in the beginning, but luckily, they knew what they were doing.

They managed to reach the biggest amount of people who knew about the brand but weren’t engaging with the brand recently.

Because there are a lot of offers and bargains during Black Friday, Daniel says he was checking lists on other websites and adding products to his carts without buying. Then, by optimizing for view content or add-to-cart, they managed to increase their reach and have people add products to cart.

This way, they were ready for Black Friday.

During Black Week, they generated $2.8M but for the whole month of November, it was $5M.

For their offers, Daniel and Emanuele were testing them before Black Friday using smaller sales and different discounts.

When testing different offers, Emanuele says they were balancing the offers with the profitability of the eCommerce business. They were looking at metrics like how much revenue the offer was generating for the client, how cheaper the cost per acquisition was for new customers, and more.

When Black Week came, their winning core offer stayed the same – they just changed their messaging and the creatives to create even more urgency. This way, they touched customers 3 times during the week, even if they were new.

During Black Friday, the attention span of the user is much lower because they’re bombarded with offers, says Daniel. If in the past they had an attention span of 3 seconds (during Black Week), on Black Friday, it’s around 1 second.

With that in mind, on Facebook, you’re buying impressions. For example, if someone just woke up and is checking Facebook from their phone, their attention span will be even lower.

Compared to midday, for example when they’re having lunch or procrastinating, the attention span might increase.

They realized they should have spent most of the budget between 8 AM and 6 PM for that particular account because people were converting more. They were buying more impressions with higher quality.

During Black Friday, the buying intent is super high and you have only 1 second to capture customers’ attention. When looking at ads, customers need to know 3 things:

What they will buy.
Why they will buy.
How much will they save.

The more we complicate the machine (Facebook), the worse the performances are, says Emanuele.

For the December strategy, after seeing a drop after Black Friday, Daniel says they changed the angles and messaging again. What helped was focusing on flash sales and promoting certain products over the weekend. Some angles they focused on include:

Cyber Monday/Week.
Pre-Christmas.
Christmas is close!
72 Hours flash sales
And more.

Instead of doing lots of offers in December, Deividas says he was considering focusing on product launches during January instead.

We don’t know what will happen in next year’s Black Friday, says Emanuele. But it will be much more planned and we hope to do 3x-4x of what we did this year.

The biggest mistake Daniel says is not spending enough on ads after seeing a positive ROI from the ads.

Results and numbers come first.

And they somehow find you magically, says Deividas.

Here’s what we cover during episode #52:

Black Friday Cyber Monday post-mortem – a series of podcasts in which eCommerce marketers and entrepreneurs will be coming on to talk about their experience
Meet the first 2 guests – business partners Daniel Bidmon and Emanuele Maragno who generated around $5M in November. Here’s how they met and why they decided to start an agency focusing on performance marketing and scaling campaigns
Daniel and Emanuele talk about their ‘Why’
The single biggest difference between brands that scale and brands that don’t (simpler than you might think)
Why eCommerce brands should be cuddling their customers if they want more repeat sales
Simple question eCommerce brands need to be able to answer about their end customer
How to optimize for cheaper traffic and reactivate existing audiences
Simple tactic that will help you generate at least 10% more revenue for next year’s Black Friday
1 Month eCommerce funnel breakdown for November to start preparing for Black Friday
How to find the winning offer for Black Friday by testing smaller sales and discounts months in advance
The different metrics Daniel and Emanuele look at to find the winning core offer for Black Friday
How and why you should change up your messaging during Black Friday
How they created even more urgency during Black Week simply by changing the messaging and the creatives and engaged with customers through another leverage of psychology (copy, urgency, etc.)
Managing CPM via signals and other Facebook ad tactics when launching big promotions
Finding the correlation between Facebook numbers and business intelligence numbers
Lesson learned on customers’ attention span during Black Week and Friday (and why it got shorter)
Optimizing for a certain time of the day to win customers’ attention span
3 Things customers need to be able to understand when looking at your ads during Black Friday and how to stop the scroll – all under 3 seconds
Next topic – targeting and who to exclude in your Facebook ads
Planning ahead for Q4, ad spends, daily budgets, and the biggest eCommerce mistakes of 2020
What Daniel and Emanuele started to focus on after seeing a drop after Black Friday
Offer blindness and the psychological concept of showing something completely different – even though the offer was basically the same
Post-November hangover and focusing on new customer acquisition during January
Other traffic channels aside from Facebook and Instagram Daniel and Emanuele used to increase their reach
Black Friday mistakes and finding the fine line between branding and direct-response
Why media buyers have to be engineers, according to Deividas
Why results and numbers come first, forming a team of A-players, and parting thoughts