Imagine going on a first date with someone wayyy outside your league and screwing up?

Now imagine you get another chance with them.

And another.

But you keep screwing up?

That’s what I felt like.

I have had a first Q4 thrice in my life.

And all 3 times, I was less prepared than I would have liked to be.

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Fortunately for you, if you follow the steps mentioned here, you will not have to suffer the same consequences I did.

Okay so how the hell did I screw up THREE different Q4s?

The first time, I was leading growth at a unicorn D2C brand. Q4 looks very different when you have a half-a-million-dollar monthly budget and targets that are more unrealistic than the fictitious girlfriend I had at 14.

The 2nd time, it was my own D2C brand. I overestimated demand, overstocked inventory, and did not invest in the right kind of marketing. 

The 3rd time was recently in 2022 when Porcellia had started growing a bit and we had to manage Q4 for multiple D2C brands at the same time. This was more about managing team morale, and output & discovering their mettle during what could best be described as the “coming-of-age” for some of my current team leads.

Let’s get into it now.

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If this is your first Q4, here’s everything you need to know:

Depending on your category, 50-70% of annual spending in India happens in Q4.

Electronics

Luxury Goods & Fashion

FnB

Travel/ Holiday

Gifting 

These are some of the categories where upto 70% of your annual sales can happen during this time.

If you are a wellness brand owner/ daily essentials brand owner, this will be a tough time for you. For you, Q4 is more about surviving because consumers will allocate spending to other categories (mentioned above). 

And if you are a founder operating in one of the categories mentioned above, AND you’re reading this in June - you have a massive opportunity to capitalize on.

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Here’s a summary of what’s going to happen

CPMs are going to 2x

Your conversion rates are going to increase by 20-30%

Your AOV will increase by 20-30%

Your overall CAC will increase by upto 60% (assuming you change nothing)

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What you need to focus on (high level)

1. We know we can’t control our CPMs

• But we can most certainly, intentionally increase our AOVs and CVRs further 

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2. And this is also the time to capitalise on your existing users.

• If your current share of new to repeat users is 80-20, let’s aim for it to be at least 70-30 during Q4.

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3. Stop spending money on influencers ASAP, and save it all for Q4

• Organic reach of influencers remains the same in Q4 and influencers are not yet smart enough to increase their prices in Q4 - this means that the ROI you get on influencers when compared to meta ads is at an all time high during this period.

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4. Optimisation of current numbers

• Do you think your current CAC, ROAS, CVR etc. is all optimised to it’s maximum potential? Ofc not. This means that the next 2 months you need to work harder than you EVER have to identify key levers to bring down your BAU CAC. 
• This is the time to run as many tests & experiments as possible because honestly, meta will be quite expensive to run traffic/branding campaigns/ experiments in Q4.

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5. Spend more on TOFU NOW

• Saying it again - you will most likely need to turn off TOFU campaigns during Q4 because it is just not worth it. Users are going to prioritise buying from brands that have invested in them all year long. The next 2-3 months is YOUR last chance to do this.

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Okay but how do I do all of this?

Fair warning - this may be too much information and I will try my level best to condense and break it down as much as possible.

1. Creative optimisation

Sheesh - another marketing company talking about ad creatives?

Do you know why that is so? Because getting this piece right is the single most important piece in bringing down your meta CAC. Everybody is trying to crack or hack ad creative production and tracking at scale and if you give me 5 mins, i’ll show you what every other agency is either gatekeeping or does not know. 

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If you can get this right, test these angles & find your winners before Q4 CPM frenzy begins, you will sleep much better those 3 months, this much I can guarantee. 

We came up with this process when my current head of marketing (psychology major) could not stop coming up with BANGER ad concepts one after the other back in 2022. 

but it was all intuitive and gut-based and I could not replicate her success for the life of me.

It took us over 1.5 years to convert this into an SOP.

Today, we have 4-5 creative strategists and all of them can come up with, new marketing angles and related creatives at scale just because of this process. Additionally, we have trained in-house teams of several top D2C brands using the same framework as well so it’s stood the test of time and scale both.

• last month (May 2025), we churned out over 2500+ ad creatives across all our brands using this exact process.

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2. Optimising your popup TODAY to collect 3x more emails than before

Remember how I mentioned that you will need to sell more to existing customers in Q4.

Well - they don’t have to be customers - they could very well just be users interested in your brand who have not yet purchased from you. Infact, this has always been our biggest goldmine.

A great popup will ensure that you 2x or 3x the number of people giving you their email IDs/ phone numbers so that you have a larger list to reach out to organically when meta is too expensive.

P.S. for a brand doing 30L of monthly revenue, we send about 5-6 emails per month BAU but send about 12-15 emails per month during festive season. The emails are hyper-segmented and no single user gets more than 5 emails per month from us. Our brands typically do upwards of 30-40% of monthly revenue from email marketing in Q4.

Here is our full (FREE) guide on how to make more $$$ from popups

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3. Optimising your google ads to reduce CPCs and increase CTRs.

I usually don’t give vanilla advice but sometimes, it’s the basics that make all the difference.

Most founders ignore google ads completely and focus all their energy on Meta.

So this is just a gentle reminder to get a professional google ads audit done and implement the steps.

Here’s a simple google ads checklist we have made that you can use to check how well your current status is. Chances are, your agency is more meta-specialised than google and most of these are missed out. If you’re a founder - you should personally look into this because you could be over-spending by 40-50% because of these hygiene aspects not done.

And if you need a more detailed audit/ need help with actual setup - i have a bunch of interns that could use some more training before Q4 begins. Just write to me at ritesh@porcellia.com & ishita@porcellia.com and we will hook you up with someone from my team for a free audit.

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4. Email Marketing

I have always been very bullish on email marketing because when I first started my own D2C brand, i was working on razor-thin margins. We were breaking even month after month until we started doing email marketing seriously. 

• Email made us an additional 2-3 lakhs every month in revenue and that is when I realised that revenue from email goes straight to my bottom line.
• There is no sending fees (like whatsapp) and it’s possibly the only 0 cac channel out there that is this consistent and reliable.

Today, for our D2C clients, email does 8-10x more revenue per month than all other social media channels combined. 

All you need to make sure is you: 

1. Switch out from default Shopify, to either Klaviyo or Omnisend.
   (this will ensure much higher deliverability & open rates)
2. Setup a beautiful popup using a tool like Alia that ensures a 10%+ popup fill %.
3. Have a solid 3-4 series welcome email that is founder led.
4. Have a different abandoned cart email for your top 2-3 SKUs.
5. Have a world-class thank you email flow with 2-3 emails, focusing on post-purchase behaviour.
   Example - if you sold them an electric toothbrush your thank you emails should talk about how to use the product, what others are saying about the product, and then finally ask for a review.

If you have about 10-12 hours to invest over the next few days, i will recommend you my favourite Youtube channel for email marketing.

And in case you don’t have 12 hours to spare, we have taken his learnings + those of some other experts and converted a simple checklist for email marketing - you can find it here.

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5. Invest in CRO

I feel like a broken record at this point.

But the number of unoptimised websites i see is too damn high considering all the free information available to us today in 2025.

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Just take this checklist for CRO and give it to a smart intern and ask them to sit on top of your developer’s head and get the items executed asap. Or do it yourself - the ROI on time invested will be very high because this one time effort can increase your revenue by 10-15% lifetime. (which also means a 10-15% reduction in CAC if you happen to care about that)

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We usually charge a small amount for these checklists but i am so frustrated with founders not putting in the work where they should be putting that I am giving away almost everything that I can for free. And if you still don’t improve your conversion rates, or increase your AOVs, retain more customers, or start making better creatives (faster), then there is nobody to blame but yourself.