Hey! Ezra again, and welcome to Part 2 of my Q4 Playbook.
Every year, Q4 teaches us something new…
And last year at Smart Marketer, we learned SO much by running campaigns for dozens of companies—including our 7+ figure agency clients as well as our own ecom, info and SaaS brands.
During that time, 3 tactics consistently drove the biggest wins. If you want to maximize revenue this year, start here.
1. A Single, Dedicated URL
In Part 1, we talked about using different offers in different phases to avoid buyer fatigue and capitalize on different audience segments.
However, you DON’T need to use separate pages for your offers.
One of the simplest but most powerful moves we saw was driving all Q4 traffic to a single landing page.
Here’s why it works:
- You control the shopper experience—best sellers and bundles at the top, or anchoring to the featured offer for a given campaign.
- Emails and ads from weeks ago still send traffic to the right place.
- And you can swap out offers behind the scenes without breaking old links.
The page doesn’t have to be fancy; even a clean collections page built with Zipify or Shopify would work.
2. Tiered Discounting Over Flat Discounts
In previous years, we often recommended a simple “20% off sitewide” approach. But in 2024, tiered discounts consistently outperformed.
Example:
- Spend under $100 ? 15% off
- Spend over $100 ? 20% off
This resulted in bigger cart sizes and higher AOV. Some brands even layered in “buy one, get one 30% off” to drive multiples.
And by incentivizing customers to spend more per order, it becomes easier to make holiday acquisition profitable so you can invest more in ads.
3. Old Creatives with Holiday Frames
Here’s a counterintuitive one:
Instead of spending time and resources producing new holiday ads, many brands simply took their best-performing ads from earlier in the year and added a festive border or holiday frame.
Suddenly, they were fresh again—and they performed.
Not only did this save brands from creative burnout, but it also allowed them to re-enter the auction early with evergreen ads that could run all season long.
Bonus: Doorbusters
For brands with the appetite (and the systems) to pull it off, doorbusters were huge.
Example: A jewelry brand ran 13 different flash sales on Black Friday alone—from “50% off best sellers for two hours” to “40% off sitewide for one hour”—and customers placed multiple orders just to snag different deals.
This isn’t for every business, but if you have the product line and traffic volume, layering in doorbusters can create urgency like nothing else.
What It Means for 2025
The big takeaway? Don’t overcomplicate Q4:
- Use one landing page
- Lean on tiered offers
- Repurpose proven creatives with holiday overlays
- Add scarcity with doorbusters if you can
But the biggest difference maker is planning out your 5-phase framework that we went over in Part 1. From there, use these 3 tactics to see even bigger wins.
Wrapping Up the Q4 Playbook
Okay y’all, let’s bring it home.
- Q4 still rules. It’s bigger than BFCM, and it applies to every business type.
- Structure matters. Use phases to avoid buyer fatigue and appeal to more audience segments.
- The fundamentals win. Dedicated URLs, tiered discounts, and refreshed creatives outperformed in 2024.
If you build around those principles, you should have a huge Q4.
And if you want expert guidance on how to build the perfect product page for your sale, check out our new Product Page Blueprint.
In this quick and high-impact training, conversion expert Kurt Elster gives you the proven formula he’s used to craft winning pages for hundreds of brands.
That’s it for this post—thanks for reading!
