Don’t waste your last 10 weeks before BFCM
Skip the Q4 panic. Make this to-do-list BEFORE anything else.
As November gets closer, the pressure starts to rise.
Eventually, everything starts to feel like it needs to be decided with the little time that you have.
Not everything on your Q4 list is actually still up for debate.
• Some decisions have already been made by the calendar.
• Some are still completely within your control.
• And some just feel urgent because November is getting closer.
I call these three buckets:
LOCKED. OPEN. THEATER.
Marketing software is getting weird. In a good way.
Every ESP bolted an AI onto its dashboard this year.
Omnisend did the reverse and moved the ESP INTO THE AI.
The MCP connection runs your Omnisend account from inside Claude or ChatGPT. Reports, segments, deliverability audits, campaign builds, all from the chat.
V2 added the piece that makes it worth trying: granular permissions with read-only access, so you decide what the AI is allowed to touch.
Steal this prompt and run it on your own account this week:
"How did my campaigns and automations perform last week compared to the previous week? Don’t just give me a number. Tell me what changed and why it matters."
Your account answers with a mini-briefing you can share with your team every Monday.
You now can spot trends before they become problems.
The Locked / Open / Theater Ledger
Your next 10 weeks should look very different depending on which bucket something belongs in.
If something is LOCKED: Stop treating this like a future decision when its timeline has already started.
Take your November email list. If you want a bigger BFCM audience, you can't suddenly create months of subscribers during Black Friday week. The list you're going to email in November is largely being built now.
Same with inventory. If a product takes eight weeks to manufacture, the November inventory decision isn't really a November decision. It is a September decision.
If something is OPEN: That's where you should spend your attention.
This is the most important bucket because these are decisions where you still have enough time to make a meaningful difference.
• Your offer is still open.
You still have time to decide:
- discount depth
- promotion structure
- which products to push
- what kind of customer you're trying to acquire
• Creative is also still open.
Meta CPMs can rise 50% to 150% during Black Friday week compared with October averages.
If you wait until Black Friday to discover whether an angle works, you're learning when the auction is expensive. You move the learning earlier so the expensive period can be used for execution.
• Post-purchase is still open.
This is the less obvious one. If holiday customers behave differently, you can decide before BFCM what happens after they buy.
For example:
Customers receiving normal post-purchase flow vs. customers receiving messaging designed around the fact that they purchased during BFCM.
The point isn't that one specific flow is correct. The point is that the decision can still be made now.
Then there's THEATER: This is the activity that feels urgent because it's happening during the event, but doesn't necessarily improve the underlying system.
• Changing the discount halfway through the event
(giving up margin to chase demand you may have captured anyway)
• Launching an untested creative because yesterday's ad slowed down
(paying the highest CPMs of the year to find out whether it works)
• Sending another campaign to the same list because revenue is soft
(burning deliverability to revisit a decision you should have made in September)
These things can absolutely change the day's numbers, but they might not solve the actual problem. You're just reacting to a problem you should have prepared for earlier.
Q4 creates the illusion that everything is urgent.
You'll Want Receipts in January
A real post-BFCM review needs the receipts.
Whatever you decide from the OPEN column, write it down now.
Because when you review BFCM in January, you'll want to know what you actually planned before the pressure arrived.
Otherwise, it's very easy to look backward at the results and convince yourself you knew what would happen all along.
List down the decisions you already made:
1. The offer you committed to.The discount depth, promotion structure, and products you decided to put behind it.
2. The customer you decided to acquire.The angle and cohort bet you made going into BFCM.
3. What you pre-decided NOT to do.Your own theater list, written while you're calm, before November gives you a reason to ignore it.
The specific metrics and standards I'll use to evaluate November are a separate discussion, which we'll have soon.
Nord Media helps DTC brands between $5M – $100M+ in revenue scale by driving profitable growth utilizing Meta, Google and Creative Strategy.
Book a call and let's see how we can help you grow 👉 book a call with me.
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