Welcome to Q4 …

• Rising ad costs
• Crowded inboxes
• Fierce competition

The biggest opportunity of the year.

🤔 Connor Rolain with 6 non-Meta ways to reach more holiday shoppers

🤩 MacCoy Merkley reveals Portland Leather’s 55-day calendar + checklist

😎 Sean Frank reveals his mobile-game ads playbook for the next 3 months

Plus, the top five headlines in consumer.

Connor Rolain Head of Growth, HexClad

6 Non-Meta Ways to Reach Your Customers During Q4

Every brand is trying to squeeze more out of Meta right now.

But there are lots of other places you can reach your customers.

☐ Direct Mail
☐ AppLovin
☐ Influencer
☐ Email + SMS
☐ Amazon
☐ Linear TV

That last, in particular, is one of my favorites.

According to VIZIO, streaming time climbs 20% in Q4 compared to the rest of the year.

• Holiday movies
• Favorite shows
• Live sports

At HexClad, we use ​NeonPixel​ to get our ads on those screens.

They get us placements on HBO Max, ABC, NBC, Paramount+, and a bunch of other streaming services.

Plus, it tracks conversions across devices without cookies and attributes them back to CTV. That allows us to:

• Target by household
• Run incrementality tests
• Suppress existing customers

After switching, we improved our targeting, increased iROAS by 60%, and saved ~20 hours per week.

If you want to reach holiday shoppers through CTV, now’s the time to get your campaigns ready. Book a free demo with NeonPixel to see what it can do for your brand.

MacCoy Merkley CMO, Portland Leather

How to Build a 55-Day Holiday Selling Season

In 2018, my Q4 plan was simple.

Run a sitewide sale on Friday, come back two days later and change the banner to Cyber Monday.

No surprise, that was expensive and dumb.

By the time we showed up, customers had already made up their minds about where to spend their holiday budgets.

We now plan a 55-day selling season. November 1st all the way through Christmas.

That means giving different customers different reasons to buy throughout the entire holiday.

You don’t need to follow our entire plan. You can start with just a few good offers and build from there.

Here’s our playbook for Q4 (and how you can copy it):

1️⃣ Create Your Promotional Rolodex
2️⃣ Nov: Ramp Up to Black Friday
3️⃣ Dec: Keep the Momentum

 1. Create Your Promotional Rolodex 

55-day selling season does not mean we run a sitewide sale for two straight months. The key is variety.

• VIP
• BOGO
• Bundles
• Launches
• Shipping

Assuming your parents are boomers, you probably recognize a “rolodex” as that thing your dad kept on his desk with phone numbers in it.

We’re making a rolodex for promotions.

Grab a piece of paper. Create two columns.

First, Returning Customers

Taylor Holiday dropped this bomb recently:

“The number one predictor of your success in Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the size of your active customer file on the day of Black Friday … every customer that’s purchased from you in the last six months.”

Existing customers are the key to a profitable Q4 for at least two reasons, probably more.

1. They already trust + like your brand
2. You can reach them via SMS + email

That means you don’t need to pay Meta more money. So write down lots of good excuses to make them buy during Q4!

☐ VIP Early Access
☐ Loyalty BOGO
☐ Personalized Bundles
☐ 12 Days of Christmas
☐ Double Loyalty Points
☐ Refer-a-Friend Discount
☐ Free Shipping for VIPs
☐ Self-Gifting Offers

Second, New Customers

Now fill in the second column.

These customers haven’t bought from you yet. Give them a compelling reason to make that first purchase.

☐ Clearance or Overstock
☐ 1st Purchase Loyalty Bonus
☐ Free or Expedited Shipping
☐ Hero Product BOGOs
☐ New Product Launch
☐ Giveaway, Sweepstakes

The point is to create a list of ideas that will last you the entire holiday season. Now let’s schedule these offers.

 1. Nov: Ramp Up to Black Friday 

What you should not do is tape each offer to a dart, close your eyes, and throw it at the calendar. There’s a method to the madness.

Let me walk you through our calendar for November.

Nov 1-7: VIP Early Access

We offer our app users early access to what will later become our Black Friday sale. This gives existing customers a reason to buy early without turning the homepage into a giant Black Friday announcement on November 1st.

Nov 8-14: BOGO Offers

Buy-one, get-one can help customers stretch their gift budget, try another product, or pick up something for themselves. Keep the offer simple. Make it obvious which products qualify and what the customer gets.

We ran both these ads mid-December last year.

Nov 15-21: Screaming Deals

Look at your inventory. Where are you overstocked? Put them in a dedicated collection. Feature that collection on your homepage. Make the discounts pop out in the product listings.

You can even add extra loyalty points for returning customers.

Nov 22-28: Sitewide Sale

Now it’s time to go loud.

Send your “Black Friday came early” emails. Launch the sitewide offer. Turn on your ads. Use those first few days to see what CPMs look like and narrow down your winning ad and landers.

Then add newness.

At Portland Leather, we launch new bags on Thanksgiving night and Black Friday morning. That gives customers who already shopped the sale another reason to come back.

Nov 29-30: Cyber Monday

We launch new bags on Cyber Monday morning, too. Across Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, that can mean as many as six new bags.

Why? When we show up in someone’s inbox again, we have something new to show them.

Pair those drops with clear “final chance” messaging for the offers that are ending. Tell customers what’s available and how long they have to shop. Keep email, SMS, and app messaging coordinated through the finish.

 3. Dec: Keep the Momentum ​
​
Your customers are humans. They procrastinate. They still have gifts to buy. And good thing, too. Because you still have products to sell. Here’s how we keep the season moving.

Remember: This isn’t about individual customers buying over and over. It’s about giving different customers, different reasons to buy while still leaving room for repeat Q4 purchases.

Dec 1-12: Give Them Newness

Our most popular non-BFCM promotions is “12 Days of Christmas.” The 9 Operator hosts kind of s*** on that idea in a recent episode. But they’re CEOs. Us marketing people in the trenches know you have to do what works.

We launch roughly 18 to 24 products across those 12 days.

• Limited-edition colors
• Special versions
• Requested styles

Many are products our returning customers have been asking for.

New customers buy them, too. But we plan these launches around what our existing customers want next.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. But do what you can. If you can get three good launches, work with three. Give each one a moment and support it with your emails and texts.

Dec 13-19: Solve Shipping

As Christmas gets closer, the customer’s biggest concern becomes: “Will it get here in time?”

Make the answer obvious:

• Clear order deadlines
• Last-chance gift guides
• Discounted expedited shipping

Use your shipping cutoffs to schedule these promotions. You can also refresh your clearance collection (the “screaming deals”) with products you still need to move.

Dec 20-24: Show Them Where to Buy

Your website’s shipping window might be closed.

Customers are still shopping.

If you sell through Amazon, your own stores, or wholesale partners, point people toward the places they can still get your products in time.

We have physical stores, so we push retail after our shipping cutoff. Simple Modern does the same thing. So does Ridge.

 Don’t Overthink It 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and yelling at your screen, “We don’t have the team to pull all that off” …

I get it. We didn’t go from a two-day sitewide sale in 2018 to a 55-day selling season in 2019. It took us years to build this much activity into Q4. You don’t need 24 product launches in December to make the approach work.

Start with what you have.

Open your calendar and mark your shipping cutoffs. Add the product launches you can realistically support. Then pick three offers from your Rolodex:

• Existing customers
• New customers
• Overstock products

Give each offer a window, an audience, and someone responsible for getting it live. Assemble your creative. Build the ads. Schedule the emails and texts that will support it.

Then add more each year as your capacity grows.

And if you want the full calendar, this article is fraction of the bombs I dropped at the Operators Black Friday Event.

Write back to Aaron …

May you have a profitable-as-hell holiday.

MacCoy Merkley is the CMO of Portland Leather Goods. He’s appeared on the most-popular Marketing Operators episode of all time. Follow him on Twitter (X) or LinkedIn.

This week, MacCoy’s recording his first 9 Operators episodes on the “5 Things Every CEO Needs to Hear, But Are Afraid to Ask Their CMO.” Out soon!

Sean Frank CEO, Ridge

Mobile gaming ads crush this time of year- I have proof

I do not own shares in applovin.

I spend money wherever I can get a return.

If that is meta, then it is meta.
If it is podcasts, then podcasts.

And in Q4 last year, the best channel for Ridge, in terms of scale and results was applovin - ad platform for mobile games.

Northbeam, haus, post purchase, applovin was incremental.

We will do it again this year.
You should too.

Applovin just put together its Q4 playbook​

- what to run
- who to target
- how much to spend
- when to scale

Plus if you are not advertising on applovin they have a bonus for the Operators audience.

-Spend $5k, get $5k in ad credits

You can have your ads live in under 60min.

THE FEED

​$100M+ Operators Get Honest About Launching Brands​

​AI Tools We’re Using To Build Our New Brand From Zero​

​How to Sell During Your Slowest Months & Create Demand​

The Trends

The five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. Holiday Deals Go Beyond Gifts: Adobe​

Adobe expects U.S. online holiday spending to reach $275.1B, up 6.7% YoY. But it’s not just from gift buying. Shoppers are increasingly using seasonal discounts to stock up on essentials.

The forecast projects Cyber Week sales of personal hygiene products will jump 150% versus September averages, with clothing basics up 210% and pet products up 93%.

2. Something & Nothing Raises $6.4M: BevNET​

Premium soda brand Something & Nothing secured $6.4M in equity funding led by Venrex, with participation from Rianta Capital, ACF Investors, and The Source Ventures. Founded by Olly Dixon and Rupert Pugsley, the UK-born brand now generates more than 65% of its revenue in the U.S.

The company built that business with a team of three and almost no marketing spend. Fresh capital will fund consumer marketing, hiring, and production.

3. Shopify Adds Product-Level Reporting: Shopify​

Shopify added category metafields to Analytics, allowing merchants to break down sales by color, material, fit, size, and other product attributes without exporting data. Brands can now group sales reports by those attributes or filter for specific values, such as organic cotton or a particular color.

The update works across Reports, Explore, and the query editor. For merchants with products already categorized, the attributes appear automatically.

4. Sephora Partners With M&S: Marks & Spencer​

Sephora is teaming up with Marks & Spencer to bring its beauty assortment to 100 M&S stores across the UK. The partnership begins rolling out in spring 2027, alongside an expanded offering on M&S.com.

Stores will feature specialist beauty teams and a mix of established brands, emerging names, and exclusives. The final brand lineup is still to come, opening another distribution channel in the £5.2B UK beauty market.

5. Tresalis Acquires Vyrao: PR Newswire​

New beauty and wellness platform Tresalis acquired a majority stake in fragrance brand Vyrao. Backed by ATHOS and Dr. Fernando Tamez, Tresalis plans to pair long-term capital with hands-on operating support.

Yasmin Sewell, who founded Vyrao in 2021, will continue leading its creative and strategic direction as Chief Brand Officer. Sewell and existing investors retain minority stakes. Vyrao is the platform’s first acquisition.

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to NeonPixel and AppLovin for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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