🤑 Cody Plofker on full-funnel monitization for the holidays
🎁 Mehtab Bhogal shares five easy wins before Black Friday
🍬 Derek Lauermann on the what and why of Meta’s “GEM”
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Cody Plofker
CEO, Jones Road Beauty
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Why Full-Funnel Monetization Beats More Traffic
During Black Friday and the holiday rush, when traffic spikes 3-5x, your upselling strategy needs to work at every stage.
- Cart additions
- Checkout flow
- Post-purchase
- Thank-you pages
Every one of those touchpoints is either revenue you’re capturing or leaving on the table.
The math is simple.
If you’re doing 10,000-20,000 orders in a normal month at a 40% margin, that’s one number.
But during November and December, when you hit 50,000-100,000+ orders?
The difference between optimizing every step versus just acquisition is millions in incremental profit.
But here’s the move most people are sleeping on …
Monetizing pages you already have.
Rokt Pay+ lets you earn money by suggesting payment gateways you’re probably already using. Rokt Thanks lets you display exclusive offers from blue-chip companies on your order confirmation and thank-you pages.
Your customer just bought. They’re in a shopping mindset. And now you’re getting paid when they engage with premium offers — generating an additional $1+ per order in pure profit.
We’re running this at Jones Road Beauty.
The extra cash flow during peak?
It’s the difference between holding spend and actually scaling when it matters most. While competitors pull back, we’re increasing budgets. Because we can.
Want to see your numbers?
Aftersell’s Revenue Forecast Calculator shows your monthly and yearly profit potential across the full funnel.
Plug in your order volume and approximate gross margin to see what’s possible.
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Mehtab Bhogal
Karta Ventures
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Easy Wins This Black Friday, You Can Still Harvest
I’ll keep this dead simple. Five things you can do to add real dollars to your Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
1️⃣ Use ringless voicemails
This is free money.
It’s worked 100% of the time for us across 10+ companies.
Take 30 minutes to make a simple recording you can send to all active SMS subscribers.
Breaks through the noise.
For the script, treat it like a text message because it will be transcribed. Be sure to spell out your brand.
2️⃣ Put “Black Friday” everywhere
Seriously, insert “Black Friday” verbiage everywhere …
Homepage, banners, collection descriptions, PDPs, cart, checkout, landing pages, announcements bars.
It's easy for people to miss.
When someone navigates to a product, they want to know if it’s part of your sale — and how much they’re saving.
Make it stupid obvious, including …
3️⃣ Black Friday in your pop-up
Every year, I see huge brands slam their holiday offer and merchandising into every nook and cranny, except the one place with the most eyes and thumbs.
Their pop-ups.
Same old evergreen offer.
Not only is this wasted real estate, it’s confusing + makes your brand seem like it doesn’t pay attention to the details.
I think teams forget pop-ups because they don’t QA on desktop and mobile Incognito.
Update your pop-up, then update your email + SMS welcome flow with the exact offer holiday shoppers opted into.
4️⃣ Sort collections
Applies to ads, emails, SMS, your site, everything.
Most high-SKU brands butcher this.
If you’re in apparel and sending people to a best-sellers collection, but your top product only has XXS, XXL, or some weird size in stock … you’re burning money.
As you lose size coverage, demote products.
I have a long-form blog on this, which dives in deeper. But this is a huge mover during the holidays.
5️⃣ Slam SMS + email frequency
Send a lot and keep deliverability high by doing things like encouraging replies to win free stuff.
Don’t be afraid to be aggressive. You should be sending daily. Even 2–3x on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Recent purchases, if your offer hasn’t changed.
If your offer has changed … send more!
Open any of your relatives’ email accounts (that isn’t a nerd) and look at how many promo emails they receive per day.
Nobody is going to care that you sent a lot of emails.
Black Friday Just Got Wild
Ad Snack is a new weekly column by Derek Lauermann, the Director of Paid Media at Grüns. Connect with him on X (Twitter) or LinkedIn.
2025 Belonged to Andromeda. 2026 Will Belong to GEM.
If you follow Jason Yim on X (he runs client solutions at Meta), you’ve seen the signals.
“In Q3, we doubled the efficiency gains. Same compute power, twice the performance improvement.”
How? Through something called GEM: Generative Ads Recommendation Model.
What is it?
GEM learns from long-term user behavior across Instagram and Facebook. It processes organic + paid interactions to predict purchase intent at scale.
It solves the core problems of digital advertising — too much noise, too many data types, and massive compute requirements to make sense of it all.
You can learn more here, which is where the images are from.
My take? GEM is a flywheel, not a feature
🎨 Creative must fuel GEM
Variation beats volume. Different personas, angles, stories, and tones help GEM understand intent.
Snack
Create concept-led ads for distinct personas. Syndicate them from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel to curated landing pages for the ultimate experience.
🚨 Signal hygiene is your moat
GEM sees billions of interactions, but only a few are “yes” moments. It needs clean, structured signals.
Snack
Audit events this week. Ensure ViewContent, AddToCart, Lead, Purchase, etc. are tracking correctly through CAPI. I also recommend tools like Elevar to keep tracking accurate.
💪 Flywheels are a must
GEM learns across Facebook and Instagram in one system. Organic content can fuel paid and vice versa.
Snack
Post Reels or Stories organically first and then boost the winners. Don't forget organic in your strategy, it can help fuel paid!
TL;DR: Create tailored funnels for your personas from organic to paid, and you will be ahead of the game in 2026.
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓
Chief Content Officer
Disclaimer: Special thanks to Aftersell by Rokt for sponsoring today’s newsletter.