Black Friday Game Plan For Candle Brands

#025.  Shoppers are sprinting for 50% off electronics, but your candles can still win the weekend with one bold, simple offer, fast shipping, and a clear story. We break down the exact Black Friday-to-Cyber Monday system we use to spark action, reduce friction, and turn first-time buyers into repeat customers through December.

We start with discount psychology and why 25% often blends into the noise while 30% creates a meaningful pause and 40% unlocks fence-sitters. From there, we design a single storewide offer and explain how automatic discounts and clean banners speed decisions. Prep is everything: lock your inventory and graphics by mid-November, test codes end-to-end, and structure email flows that welcome, thank, request reviews, and drive bounce-back purchases with expiring incentives.

Then we map a practical marketing cadence. Tease the sale without details, grant VIP early access on Wednesday, and schedule four emails across Black Friday to match shopper behavior. On social, repeat the core message with straightforward visuals and heavy use of Stories, knowing algorithms limit reach. Keep operations tight with simplified packaging and same or next-day shipping to build trust that fuels December reorders for last-minute gifts. As momentum shifts to Small Business Saturday and Sunday, reuse strong assets with new subject lines and keep your story front and center. When Cyber Monday hits, refresh the creative and switch the offer—think buy two get one free or a new percentage—to keep attention high as people shop from their desks.

We close with a December plan: a 12 days sequence that rotates incentives and ends before the USPS cutoff so delivery is guaranteed. The through-line is simplicity: one clear offer, consistent messaging, and speed. Subscribe, share this with a maker who needs a plan, and leave a review telling us the offer you’re running this year.

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Transcript

Setting The Black Friday Strategy

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So it's officially crunch time. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner. And this can be one of the biggest opportunities of the year for candle makers. We've done this for several years now at Garden Beacon Candle Company. And every single year we tweak, test, and improve what works. So I want to help walk you into this weekend prepare. Now you don't need to do everything, you just need to do the right things. Sales don't work without clarity. So let's talk about your offer. Choose one main offer to have during your Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday promotion. Now you can do those separately, but let's just talk about Black Friday in general first. Choose just one main offer. We do not want to make this hard on our customers. Keep it really simple. Buy three get one free is an offer that works really, really well. Also, doing a 30% off site wide minimum also works well. We want to make sure that we are offering the best prices of the year. Now for us, we actually do buy three get one free almost quarterly in our stores and online. We run ads for buy three get one free pretty often. We also do buy three get one free out of markets all the time. So buy three get one free isn't our best deal of the year. Essentially, buy three get one free breaks down to 25% off. So we got to go better than that. Our customers are going to know that we're going to have buy three get one free throughout the holiday season at some point. But if I want them to buy from us during Black Friday, I need to have an even better offer. Now, 30% off is where I'm going to be at this year. It's where we have been starting last year. We were at that as well. And it did really, really well for us. Now, previously, we had tried 20% off. We tried 25% off the year before, but the amount of sales went up dramatically from 25 to 30% off. And I think it's a lot of it is the psychology of our customer. We see 25% off often. You can go to Costco, you can go to Macy's, you can go to the mall. They're going to see stuff 25, 35, 45% off all the time. So seeing 25% off isn't going to get someone to, instead of going to that electronics store, they're going to go and go to your website and buy it from you on Black Friday. We got to remember that most Black Friday deals are just going to be for that day or for that weekend. I would definitely recommend doing it for the entire weekend. But we have to realize that people are looking for the best money saving overall. So if we want to kind of interrupt that idea of them just going and buying clothes at 50% off or electronics at 50% off, we have to have something to entice them to, after a full day of shopping, to make sure that they are still going to come to your website and buy from you. And 25% off might not do it. It didn't do it for us. We definitely had great Black Fridays, but when we went up to five more percent to 30% off, it made a huge difference in ourselves. Over double our revenue last year on Black Friday versus the prior year. But keep your offers simple. Don't try to do 30% off of candles, 20% off of rediffusers, 25% off of wax melts. Keep it very simple. 30% off store wide is the minimum that we're going to do. We may actually, in fact, go up to 40% off because it's all about bringing in revenue and potentially new customers, people that have been on our email list for a while, but they haven't bought. If I'm offering them 40% off and I can turn them into a lifetime customer, I'm still making a little bit of money, but the lifetime value of that customer is going to be a lot, a lot more than just that one day. So think of it that way. Ideally, we used to be going into doing any type of seller promotion with the idea of these are going to be customers that are going to be coming back to us over and over and over again. So I would make sure that your offer is completely clear. So it's very visible, they really understand what you're offering. And it has to be big enough for them to be enticed to buy with you on that day. Okay. So the next step we have to do is make sure we're prepped. Make sure that we are ready to go a week or two in advance at a minimum. Now, I get it. We are always doing things last minutes. There's always changes happening. We do a lot of pivoting, but we really try with intention to have everything ready to go at least two weeks in advance. So this year, Thanksgiving and Black Friday is going to be later in the month. So our goal is to have everything ready to go by November, November 15th. That is our day this year. November 15th, let's have all of our inventory ready to go. Let's have all of our sale images and social media graphics all ready to go. And make sure we have our website banners. Make sure that we have our email flows. Email flows is when someone goes to your website, they see a pop-up, which you want to make sure that your pop-up is enticing as well. But less than 25%, you're not going to get anyone to give you their email address for free. So you got to bump those up. It's a dramatic increase in conversions of people that will give you their email address when the discount is right. So, but back to this, uh you want to make sure you have all of this ready to go in advance. So your website banners, your email flows, your pop-ups, um, do a test with that Shopify discount code to make sure it actually works. Nothing is worse than running a sale and a customer not able to use the discount code. Now, if it's just friends and family, they might reach out to you and say, hey, you know what? This discount code's not working. What do I do? But if I go to Macy's website uh to try to use a discount code and it doesn't work, I'm not reaching out to them. I'm just moving on. I'm just going to something else, right? So you're going to lose a ton of business if you don't just do this simple testing of your Shopify discount code. So go ahead and plug your discount codes in and then go and just do a dummy test to make sure that you can go through the entire process uh smoothly. Make sure your email flows not only are working for your thank you emails that go out after your checkout, but also that you have a sequence lined up that is going to bring those customers back to you. Uh, we talk about this a lot in the inner circle. We actually have a lot of email marketing workshops where people will we help you set up all of your uh email flows. And you would do the exact same thing for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Um you're just gonna tweak some of the language a little bit as well. Um but you should have um not only an email that goes out when someone gives you their email during a pop-up, but once they purchase from you, you should have a thank you email that goes out. You should also then a couple days later have an email that goes to them for uh to capture a review because we want to have reviews. It's just another trust factor on your website. Uh, and then you're gonna want to have a bounce back email uh about a week later to entice them to come back and buy from you again within a short amount of time. Uh, you don't want to have a discount for them to come back at any time. You want to have it where it's going to expire, say within seven days, to get them to buy from you again uh rather quickly. So make sure that you have all of your prep ready. Make sure that you have all of your candles made, uh poured, labeled, uh, organized, ready to go. Uh also make sure that you have all your shipping supplies. Nothing's worse than getting a bunch of orders and then not being able to ship them out in a timely manner. Uh, we want to always get things out as soon as possible because what's going to happen is if someone orders on Black Friday and if they get a shipping notification from you on that day or the next day, they're going to trust that if as they get closer to Christmas, if they need last-minute gifts, oh, you know what? Sebastian got those candles out or Garza Beacon, whatever the brand is, got those candles out to us right away. They didn't take a week, they didn't take five days. So they'll say, oh, you know what? It's December 15th. Hey, I'm going to order some more candles. They smell great. They're going to be fantastic to gift. Let me just buy more of those that I did on Black Friday. Let me go to that website. And in fact, they got a coupon code that they sent me. So let me use that. So that's ways of making sure that you're good to go. And shipping out right away is going to be so crucial uh during the holiday season. Okay, so now let's talk about the marketing plan. The sale is the headline, but your story sells it. So you got to start telling the story of your brand, making sure that anyone that's on your email list or anyone on your social media understands your brand and understands the story that you're conveying. Uh, what is your niche? Who are you trying to connect with with your brand? Start making sure that you're sending out some teaser emails. Now you don't have to tell them exactly what the deal is going to be, but you want to start warming them up. So, in fact, the week prior to Black Friday, send an email out with a subject line that's it's almost here. Uh, it's almost here. It's the best time of the year to get the best, steepest discount on our candles. Um, we look forward to serving you. We are going to have super fast shipping, uh, quick turnaround times, same day, next day processing. Start teasing information like that to get them confident in their upcoming purchase with you. So send those teaser emails out. Um, also announce your offer the night before or um do what we like to do, and we like to send out an email to it's to our entire email list. But since they're on our email list, we were we're gonna call to them or refer to them as our VIPs that day. So we're gonna say, hey, as a VIP, I want to let you know this is the deal starting tomorrow. But as a VIP, you can take advantage of this right now. So it would just be through our email list. It's not gonna be our social media, it's not gonna be our Facebook ads, it's just those that are already in our kind of sphere, whether they've bought candles from us before or they gave us their email address on our website already. We let them know and we want them to start shopping with us. This entices us, this makes them feel good that they have this exclusive access to the store using the discount. Um, and then they're gonna beat the rest of the people. So the email that I would send to them, you know, saying, hey, this goes on sale tomorrow. Everything is gonna be 30 or 40% off. Um, whatever you decide, let them know what it is. But as a VIP, you can start using this now. Here's your exclusive discount code. Please do not share this. So that makes it seem even more uh valuable. Please do not share this outside of um just yourself using this. But we would invite you to go ahead and shop with us. And you can send that out on Wednesday. Um, some people will send things out on actual Thanksgiving. You know, nowadays, Walmart, Target, all those places are open. It's your call on whether or not you want to uh do that. We won't do that. Um, we're gonna send this out on Wednesday. On Wednesday morning, uh, because people are usually still working, they're they're excited, they're ready to go into hopefully some family time or having some time off. Um, so I'm gonna send that email to them early on Wednesday morning uh before Thanksgiving saying, hey, real quick, I want to let you know, as a VIP, you have early access. Uh, thank you so much for being on our list. We appreciate you. Uh, this is exclusively just for you. Um, so on and so forth. So go from there. Then we are going to launch on Black Friday morning. Black Friday morning, social media posts, they're already scheduled. Schedule your social media posts in advance. Within um Facebook Business Manager, uh, you can schedule out and we will schedule out for the entire month. We will we have a whole plan. Uh, in fact, if you're in the inner circle, you probably went through our holiday uh plan workshop. Uh, if you haven't, I would highly recommend that you uh join the inner circle just for that reason of grabbing our entire catalog of um workshops. And one of those being our holiday planning schedule. Uh, we have an entire social media guide of exactly what we're posting on what day. Uh, and then we also have a, I could we're doing a 12 days of Christmas with all the different sales and deals for our customers that did extremely well last year. Uh, so I would recommend checking that out if you wanted to come and see the inner circle. Of course, you can find that and all kinds of free stuff in the show notes below. Um, but plan it all out for the entire month, uh, if you can. At least go ahead and do it a couple weeks in advance so that you're not busy prepping shipping and making some channels that you may have ran out of. And then also thinking about social media um and your email strategy. Get all your emails already written. Get all your social media posts already gathered and ready to go. And then go ahead and schedule those if you can. I leave a lot of that to Chad. Chad does all of our social media planning or, you know, we work together on what the the deals are gonna be and what the schedule is going to be. And that's why doing like the 12 days of Christmas and having the entire calendar is easy. So my entire team looks at the calendar that I created within the inner circle and they know what to do on what day. They know, okay, this is uh this is the sale that's gonna start today. It's gonna end on this day. Uh, and these are all the social media posts and emails that need to go out. So being really organized with that. Now, Friday morning, Black Friday, you're going to say, hey, this is a sale. You're gonna want to send several emails, several social media posts that day. Because here's the thing. I'm gonna send an email at probably 6 a.m. Because people are up early. They're going to the electronic store to try and get a TV for 50 bucks, whatever they're doing, they're up early, they're in the shopping mood, they're ready to go. So I want to start early. I'm gonna start at 6 a.m. with emails. I'm gonna probably send another one at 10 a.m. I'll send one at 3 or 4 p.m., and I'll send one that night as well. Don't feel like you're gonna oversend emails. It's just part of the nature of it when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Send a lot of emails. That is that's how we all get pulled in, right? We all get hundreds, if not thousands, of emails over that week. And if they are waiting in line at Best Buy to pick up a TV and they see my email and then they wait a couple more hours, they're gonna forget about my email. They just are. That's just what's gonna happen. They're gonna forget about it. If I post on social media at 10 a.m., the way the algorithm works on Meta, anyways, 10% or less of people are gonna even see your post. That's just the reality of Facebook and Instagram, whenever you have a business page, because they want us to promote those or boost those posts to spend money. So you have to keep putting it in front of them. So put your images out there on social media, say, hey, store-wide sale, 40% off, take advantage of this right now. Um, use code X, or maybe you don't even have a code, which is fantastic. If you don't even know code needed, that just makes it that much easier for them uh when they're checking out. If it's going to be an automatic discount at the end, that's fantastic. Tell them to go shop right now, but post that over and over and over again throughout the day. Make sure if you're using Instagram that you are posting stories all day long, um, because people are still going to be on social media, still looking for the deals, checking their email to see from those people that they maybe have not bought from in a year. You know, hey, what's going on at Macy's, what's going on at Target, what's going on here or there. Um, so keep putting those emails in their inbox because a lot of people are actually gonna have a shopping list of who they need to buy for. And as they are dwindling that down, by the end of the night, they're still gonna have people to buy for those hard to buy for people. Candles are a fantastic uh gift for people that are hard to buy for. If you've ever received a candle as a gift, you were probably hard to buy for. That's probably why. Most of the time, it's not because, oh, this scent resonates with that person. You know what? I know Sebastian loves that scent. Let me buy him that candle. Usually that's not what it is. A candle purchase is generally a, oh, it smells good. And I bet this would be great for them because I know they like candles or they like um their home environment or self-care. A lot of reasons to buy candles, but in reality, it's a really good gift for that hard-to-buy person because not too many people don't like candles, and that's why they're popular. Um, candles are gonna be more popular than like, say, chocolate or food, because not everyone likes that, right? Everyone likes candles, almost. Not everyone, but almost. Um, so when people only have a few people that are hard to buy for left on their list, you want to put your emails in their inbox and you want your social media in front of them online so that it just makes sense and easy for them to buy from you. So just circling back, we want to keep it simple. Everything we do about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we need to keep it really simple. Don't launch a new collection during this week. Like that would just not be uh something that's gonna resonate with any of our customers. Um, don't stress about having fancy graphics or launching new ideas with your social media, your emails. Keep it very simple. If we're gonna go with 40% off, it's just gonna be big banners that say 40% off, store wide, no code needed, and it'll have a graphic of our candles, right? Now, of course, you we need to invest some time into the graphics we're making, but if you're using Canva, Canva has plenty of just Black Friday ready-to-go images uh and ads that you can just edit. You can throw a picture of your candles on there and work with it. Keep it very, very simple. Don't overcomplicate that because there's going to be other things that is gonna need your attention. And so overcomplicating your social media or your marketing strategy is something that you don't need to do. Also, keep your packaging simple. I know we love to have a super nice presentation. And maybe you have the time, effort, and energy to do that if you already have it planned out. But ultimately, customers want fast shipping. They don't need all the extra stuff when it comes to gifting, right? So think of this as it's a different customer right now. During the rest of the year, a lot of people are buying for themselves. Uh, they're still gifting because candles are making a great gift, but during Black Friday through Christmas, it's gonna be a lot of gifting. So all those extras that you want to add and include, sure, you can certainly do that if you want or if you're already set up for it, but we're not going to add in all these extra things, especially during this time. We will still uh include our little thank you note that we're gonna put in there. Um, a lot of times we give away a free little jar of matches when people spend over$100 with us. They don't know it. It's it's it's just um subject to availability in our mind, right? They don't know it's coming. It's just something we like to do, is throwing this little glass jar of matches. It has like a dozen matches, and it's not very big. Um, this is a nice little treat that we add in with all of our orders um throughout the year. We're not gonna do that during Black Friday through Cyber Monday and probably through the rest of the season because it's gonna be an extra thing that we have to deal with. But also, is this something that the person that's gonna receive it is gonna understand and put it with that candle and gift that as well? Are they going to appreciate it as much? Maybe not. If it's something that they're just turning around and gifting, um, they have an expectation of getting the candles or products that they're buying from you quick and turning around and gifting it. So we want to keep it simple for them. We're not gonna overcomplicate it too much at all when it comes to that. Okay, so after the sale, we want to make sure that we are staying engaged and in contact with those customers that may or may not have purchased from us. Continue to do your social media posts, your email posts frequently throughout the entire season. Now, Black Friday, we're gonna send out at least four emails, do at least four of the social media posts. Next day is small business Saturday. So we just need to turn our uh shift our focus to uh just changing the language up. It's small business Saturday. We could really use your support as a small business, go into your story a little bit. Um, so we are extending our Black Friday sale uh through the day. Um, and we would love your support and send out a couple of emails of one in the morning, one in the evening at least on uh Small Business Saturday, and continue to push out social media. You can, in fact, if you don't have the capacity to create, say, 15 different social media images to use from Black Friday all the way through Cyber Monday, just start reusing the ones that you started with. It's totally fine. Just start reusing the ones that you've used before. Um, don't feel like everything has to be brand new. Same thing with the emails. How many people are opening up those emails and then they're getting distracted and going another direction, or they even have the or they just haven't opened up your emails yet. Just change the subject line on them. You can have the exact same email if you want. So just something to keep in mind. Now, going from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, I'll just change the language up a little bit. Hey, 40% off because we're gonna do our 40% off all weekend, but we're not going to tell them it's all weekend. On Black Friday, we're gonna say, take advantage of this Black Friday deal, 40% off. Like we're not saying that it's not extending, but we're not saying that it is extending because we want them to buy that day. We want them to see, see it, create the urgency. So we're not telling them that it ends tonight at midnight and then the next day saying, oh, just kidding, we're extending this and doing that over and over again. We're just saying Black Friday's sale. So they don't know. They don't know when it is, which is going to create them, you know, hopefully to just go and buy from you. So from Black Friday to Small Business Saturday, just switch the language up a little bit. Then on Sunday, take a little bit of a breather. I would still definitely send out an email, at least one email, and at least a couple of social media posts. You still have time to support our small business. You know, candles make a great gift for X person, you know, that hard to buy, uh, mother-in-law, you know, whatever you want to do. You know, have fun with it. Um, so still post on Sunday. But then on Monday we go into Cyber Monday. And then this is when we need to kind of change some things up a little bit, have fresh emails, have fresh social media. Um, you may even want to have a fresh sale. Instead of 40% off store wide, we might do buy two, get one free. Just changing it up. The the percentage off might be a little different. It still needs to be a deep discount. Cyber Monday is a huge, it's the biggest online shopping day of the year. With Black Friday, it's mostly people going to big box stores and purchasing those larger, uh deeper discount items like electronics, clothes, things like that. Cyber Monday is all about people back in the office, they're on their computer buying stuff and knocking out their Christmas list. So it's super important to take advantage of Cyber Monday. You may, in fact, find that your Cyber Monday is just as good as your Black Friday or your small business Saturday, if not better, in fact. So make sure you take advantage of that and you don't just rely on Black Friday. Cyber Monday is really big. At least two emails should go out that day and multiple social media posts. Change up your deal. Instead of 40% off, let's change it up to buy two, get one free, buy three, get one free, whatever you want to do, whatever you're comfortable with, uh making sure that your margins and your cost of goods are there. Um, but you want to change it up a little bit for them. So it's something fresh, fresh images for them to see, and then you'll be good to go. Now, after Cyber Monday, we are going to reduce back our sales for a little bit. But with us inside the inner circle, um, and what we're going to do at our Carson Beacon brand is we're going to launch a 12 days of Christmas where 12 days in a row, people are getting a different discount opportunity, whether it's a different percentage off, it's a different buy X get Y free. Um, we will give out just free um wax mounts with a certain purchase, or we'll give out a free candle with a certain purchase. We'll do a free uh shipping at a certain threshold. Lots of different ways. We are so we have 12 different offers that we're going to do. Uh one thing to keep in mind with this, we actually walk you through inside the inner circle, we actually walk people through in our last workshop that we just did, our exact strategy plan for that. Um, one thing to keep in mind if you're if you want to execute a 12 days of Christmas promotion, like what we're going to do, is to make sure that it ends prior to the cutoff of what the USPS shipping deadline is. I believe for 2025, it is on December 17th. So they need your packages by December 17th to promise basically uh delivery by Christmas Day, if that's the goal. So you don't want to start 12 days of Christmas leading up to to Christmas or to Christmas Eve. You need it to end by, say, December 17th. And so, in fact, what we will do, and I'll share this one with you, what we do is we will promote that the the last date of order guaranteed shipping by the USPS um is December 17th. And then on that day or day prior, that that 12-day day of Christmas deal is gonna be like free shipping on any purchase, right? Um, because people generally will stock up. You might get that customer that's gonna only buy one thing and then shipping is gonna really eat your profit away, but that's just the nature of doing business. You're gonna get a lot of other customers that will completely stock up on that day so that they know that they're going to get free shipping and that it's gonna arrive uh before Christmas. So hopefully this has helped you all out. Um, leave in the comments below if there's a different strategy that you're going to try and execute for your Black Friday Cyber Monday, all the way through your holiday season. Let me know what you're doing. And I'll certainly see if it's something that we may, in fact, want to do ourselves. I love that our community here likes to share our tips and tricks. So come hang out with us inside of the inner circle if you want to go deeper with us. Um, also, if your website isn't uh up to date, we also have some website tips for you to make sure that you're gonna optimize um every customer that comes to your website. I'll drop that free uh guide in the comments below as well. Uh trying to help you out as much as possible um with this. So thank you so much for tuning in today. Have a successful Black Friday Cyber Monday, and I'll talk to you soon.