Question · Paid ads
When should I start promoting a Black Friday sale to cold audiences?
Asked by a retail client · Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
Start your cold audiences six to eight weeks before the sale with an early-access sign-up campaign, then spend the final month on warm audiences. Ad costs climb from mid-October as everyone piles in, so you want the list built before the noise.
From mid-October through to early December, everyone is in the ad auction at once. Costs climb, feeds get noisy, and reaching someone new gets more expensive every week. So the cold work has to happen first, while impressions are still cheap.
I’d run a “register for early access” campaign to people who don’t know you yet. Exclude your CRM and your recent site visitors, because you’ll be talking to them later anyway and you don’t want to pay to reach them twice. Run that for say 30 days. Every sign-up is someone you can reach later without paying cold prices for them.
Then in the last 30 days, you’re hitting the warmer audiences: your email list, your site visitors and everyone who registered. CPM is going to be higher by then. Accept it. Those people convert, and because you built that audience before the noise started, you own it when it matters.