How we turned Black Friday into the most profitable period of the year for a premium beauty brand, driving +3541% Net Profit YoY with tiered promotions and an integrated paid media strategy.
PPC
The client is a luxury haircare eCommerce brand with a strong presence across the US, UK, and Italian markets. Their online store, powered by WordPress and WooCommerce, features around 60 premium haircare products designed to match haute-couture hair care around the world. Every formula is meticulously crafted in the heart of Italy by a team of hair artisans and specialists, blending innovative skincare technology with the artistry of Italian hair design. Despite its global reach and exposure to diverse hair types, needs, and cultures, the brand remains firmly anchored in its Italian heritage, where every product is 100% designed and made in Italy.
We manage their Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta Ads campaigns with a monthly budget of approximately $20K, strategically distributed across the three target markets to balance brand awareness, luxury positioning, and online sales growth.
The complexity of the project lies in maintaining this premium brand identity while adapting communication, creatives, and strategies to different audiences, languages, and consumer behaviors. Each market demands a tailored media approach that aligns with local search intent, seasonality, and price sensitivity, while preserving the brand’s signature tone of elegance and sophistication across every paid channel.
During Black Friday, the client faced three key challenges that significantly limited performance and profitability.
Historical data revealed that acquiring new customers during Black Friday had become too expensive to sustain. Competing in a market where major players significantly increase their budgets during the season drove up CPCs and CPMs, meaning that maintaining previous performance levels required progressively higher spend, making the strategy less efficient and sustainable over time.
Their previous Black Friday offer (a flat 20% discount reserved for subscribers) ran for seven consecutive days but failed to create urgency or differentiation. As a premium brand, offering deep discounts would have undermined their luxury positioning, leaving them with little room to generate excitement while maintaining brand value.
Despite consistent sales volume, the brand registered little to no profit in previous years. This required a meticulous focus on margin optimization and cost control, ensuring that every campaign decision contributed to sustainable, profitable growth rather than short-term revenue spikes.
To address the skyrocketing nCAC, we shifted focus from acquiring new customers to nurturing existing ones, encouraging them to purchase during the Black Friday season. This required a revision of the media plan throughout the year, with a strategic reduction of investment during the peak period. Rather than competing directly with larger players, we optimized spend by 42% and targeted audiences with higher conversion likelihood. This approach maximized Net Profit while controlling costs, reserving new customer acquisition for less competitive periods.
To address the ineffective past promotional structure, we redesigned the Black Friday offer into multiple promo waves, testing a mix of BOGO (Buy One, Get One) mechanics and flat discounts with tiered thresholds. Thresholds for receiving free products or discounts were based on the AOV (Average Order Value) of existing customers, ensuring relevance and achievable targets.
Each promotion was carefully designed to generate urgency and perceived value without compromising the brand’s luxury positioning:
Free products were selected based on inventory needs and customer appeal, guaranteeing that every offer felt valuable, relevant, and aligned with the brand’s premium image.
To address minimal profitability, we adjusted budget allocation to focus on the most profitable areas. Spend on awareness and acquisition was reduced, while investment in remarketing and conversion activities was increased by 70%, leveraging prior heavy investment in acquisition to effectively convert those audiences.
From a technical standpoint, we updated ad campaigns across all managed channels to ensure seamless alignment with the Black Friday strategy. Given the multiple BOGO promotions running, we focused our copywriting efforts on testing two creative angles:
This allowed us to identify which approach resonated best and whether results varied significantly across the three target markets.
Collaboration was key. We worked closely with the client’s marketing team to receive all promotional assets well in advance, starting our Black Friday planning three months prior to ensure everything was ready ahead of the peak season.
Behind the scenes, all activities were carefully pre-scheduled. We added holiday-specific ads to existing campaigns and automated their activation and deactivation according to each promo wave. Given the account’s compact structure, we intentionally avoided creating new campaigns to prevent extended learning phases, especially in such a high-cost, competitive period.
To further enhance visibility and streamline execution, we implemented:
Once the setup was live, we continuously monitored and optimized performance in real-time, ensuring promotions activated and paused as planned, verifying links and on-site information, monitoring feed health and inventory levels, and adjusting bids and budgets to capitalize on strong-performing areas. We also stayed in close contact with the client to accommodate any last-minute updates or strategic shifts seamlessly.
By combining budget efficiency, tiered high-value promotions, and technical optimizations, we created a strategy that maintained the brand’s luxury positioning, generated urgency, and significantly improved overall profitability without relying on aggressive discounting or unsustainable acquisition spend.
The new Black Friday strategy delivered a remarkable turnaround, transforming what had previously been a low-profit period into the most profitable of the year.
By shifting focus from sales growth to profitability, optimizing promo structures, and tailoring offers by market, the results speak for themselves: the brand achieved a +3541% increase in Net Profit, jumping from £223.77 to £8,148, while Net Margin soared from 0.74% to 27.85% (+3644%). Despite a slight decrease in Orders (-6%) and Revenue (-2.7%), overall profitability per order grew exponentially, with Average Net Profit rising from £0.56 to £21.5 (+3772%).
All this was achieved while reducing ad spend by 41.7%, confirming that smarter budgeting and value-driven promotions could outperform aggressive discounting.
Performance varied across markets, providing valuable insights into regional consumer behavior:
Through careful planning, creative testing, and data-led optimization, this strategy not only preserved the brand’s luxury positioning but also proved that profitability and premium branding can coexist, even during Black Friday.
Ecommerce plus physical stores? B2B and B2C under one roof? One market or eleven? The businesses other agencies find too complex are the ones we make shine.
