If you’re an e-commerce business preparing for a busy Q4, you already know that the ads you run on the build up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday are just as crucial as the big offer ads themselves.

Success this season hinges on two things: knowing which creative, copy, CTAs, and placements are hitting the mark with your audience, and warming up valuable retargeting audiences in advance. This prep work will give you a head start when ad costs skyrocket during peak sales periods.

Building up retarget audiences efficiently

Here are three campaign strategies to implement in October that can help build your audiences without breaking the bank:

• Video views: Cheap and effective retargeting

  Building an audience of video views is one of the most cost effective routes to retargeting. Depending on the video, we’d recommend keeping the bar fairly high, minimum 50% of the video viewed in order to drop into a retargeting audience.

• Drive traffic to key pages

  Run traffic ads to specific pages on your website and retarget based on website views. Traffic ads are generally cheaper and can be great for driving new audiences to articles, product previews, or educational content. This warms up potential customers so they're more likely to convert when you roll out your Black Friday/Cyber Monday offers.

• Boost email leads now for big payoffs later

  Growing your email list in October can pay off massively when ad costs surge in November. By increasing your subscriber base now, you’ll have the opportunity to nurture relationships and build rapport before dropping your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. Emails will give you direct access to customers, bypassing the high competition in paid ads.

Launches and sneak previews on new products

Got new products launching in Q4 2024? Now's the time to build hype. Come November the jostle for space in the feed will be lively, and it’s no place for shrinking violets. Even if its not launched yet, if your audience aren’t already hanging out for its release, start talking about it so it jumps out at them in a month or so.

Build social proof for maximum impact
Working on the social proof on your ads in October is a bit like plumping the cushions up on the sofa before your most important guests come over. Social proof is all the positive engagement on your ads which potential customers find confidence in. All year round you should be busily replying to and engaging with all the comments on your ads… but if you’ve let this go over the summer, now is the time to work back through your notifications and engage. Great engagement and social proof on your ads will be a vital string to your bow come peak sales season.

Why wait? Run a pre-sale for lower ad costs

If you’re feeling like you have your house in order, and you’re confident that you have the audiences and ads you want for Black Friday/Cyber Monday, why not run a short sale on the same offer in late September/early October. Ads costs will definitely be lower, and you could find yourself scooping up a load of new customers at a fraction of the price you would have in November. As well as an injection of new customers you’ll have added learnings and engagement on some of the ads that you may reuse in November, and depending on your business, if your model is largely single product sale followed by subscription, you could be ready to convert all of your Sept/Oct sale buyers into subscribers in over Black Friday/Cyber Monday, setting you up for a strong start to 2025.

And the people who browsed but didn’t buy in your first sale - prime (cheaper) retargeting fodder for November.

We’re currently deep into prepping for a bumper Q4 for our clients - if you have any questions about optimising Q4 campaigns, we’re happy to help.