Black Friday Marketing Tips & Strategies
As Black Friday is nearly here. Whether you’re an experienced or a first-timer to this holiday, you’ll require all the latest strategies and tips to attract customers and boost sales on the internet.
This guide will present nine practical Black Friday marketing ideas to help you know precisely what to do to start. In addition, we’ll provide five real-world Black Friday marketing campaign examples to help you get inspired.
What Is Black Friday?
Black Friday is a holiday sale in November when companies offer enticing promotional offers and significant price cuts to draw customers. It usually occurs following American Thanksgiving. However, it has become a month-long season of shopping.
In the past, when online shopping was not as popular, people would arrive early and queue up at the physical shops during Black Friday. However, based on recent statistics of eCommerce, it appears that most of Black Friday traffic will happen on the internet.
As you can see in the infographic by Adobe below, shoppers spent $9 billion on online shopping in 2020, a 21.6 per cent increase over the prior year. On the other hand, in-store purchases experienced a dramatic drop because of the pandemic, with foot traffic dropping by over 52%.
A graph of the consumer’s spending habits during Black Friday.
Black Friday Marketing Tips
Numerous big-name brands offer Black Friday deals from the beginning of November to attract early holiday shoppers and prepare for unpredictability in delivery dates.
However, certain online retailers begin with their Black Friday campaigns from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, an exclusive online sale event for the holiday season. They might also offer various promotions for each day during the shopping weekend.
In addition, small and medium-sized companies can participate in Small Business Saturday, an event that celebrates small and local businesses.
While Black Friday originated in the US, Businesses worldwide have adopted the phrase and date to promote their marketing campaigns. Black Friday Marketing Tips.
8 Black Friday Marketing Ideas to Increase Revenue
All businesses will participate in Black Friday, so crafting a well-planned holiday marketing strategy is crucial to gaining new customers and competing against big retailers.
In this regard, We’ve developed nine top Black Friday marketing strategies to aid you.
1. Optimize Your Website Performance
For an eCommerce company, one of the most important aspects is the performance of your website.
In a time such as Black Friday, customers expect the websites to load speedily to allow them to locate the best deals and purchase quickly.
The ideal loading speed for eCommerce sites is between zero to four seconds since it is characterized by a 12% and 30% conversion rate. If it is longer than that, customers are more likely to stop buying, and their transactions will decrease by 1% every second.
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Additionally, many major brands, such as Macy’s and H&M, have been affected by site downtime due to substantial traffic surges. Optimizing the website’s performance can stop this from occurring.
One method in preparing an online retailer for a Black Friday campaign is to examine its hosting. If the site is close to its capacity limit, you should consider making the necessary changes.
A good plan will offer ample memory, bandwidth, storage and processing power to handle the number of products displayed, the volume of expected monthly traffic and a seamless shopping experience.
We also suggest using a speed test tool for websites to gauge the load time. This tool can help you decide on areas that need to be optimized for improved website performance. Black Friday Marketing Tips.
Although there are numerous speed testers available, We recommend beginning with GTMetrix. The tool will analyze the speed of loading your website at different server locations and display what happens when a web browser is opened.
They usually add an enormous amount of weight and could slow down the speed of your website.
2. Build an Email List
List building is an effective Black Friday marketing strategy to make a splash. It involves capturing emails of interested customers and informing them of upcoming Black Friday deals. Here’s an example provided by the fashion retailer thredUP
WordPress customers can use the WordPress plugin to send promotional emails with two different plugins. One is to allow email subscriptions, and another is to send newsletters.
The first one will produce pop-ups to get email addresses. The second one is designed to create the content of messages, customizing the template and automatizing the delivery process.
Offering incentives is among the best methods of marketing via email. People are more likely to join if they receive rewards for sharing their details. The most common rewards are discounts specific to the program or a gift card for free.
Personalization of emails can lead to an increase of six times in transaction rates and an average return of 122% on investment.
You could segment customers by their previous purchases with an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. After that, determine the kind of offer to send them an email.
Black Friday Marketing Tips.
For instance, first-time or potential buyers are generally more focused on finding the most attractive Black Friday bargains, so you could emphasize how much they will save when they purchase from the shop. They might also be interested in flash sales or other deals with a time limit.
If you have the most loyal customers, consider offering them discounts that make them more likely to return and give them a feeling of exclusivity.
Personalization is as easy as writing the recipient’s name within the subject line of your email. Subject lines for emails with personalization have a 22% greater open rate than the average.
To improve the odds, the subject line should immediately catch the subscriber’s attention. Use words that create a sense of curiosity or fear of being unable to access the content to make them want to access the article.
3. Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
Social media is a potent marketing tool that has the potential to influence the purchase choices of consumers by 71 per cent. For companies selling eCommerce, it’s one of the few online marketing platforms that permit direct customer interaction. Black Friday Marketing Tips.
Besides bringing awareness to Black Friday deals, use social media to understand customers’ demands and satisfy them during the holiday.
Here are some helpful tips and tricks to help you with Black Friday marketing on social media:
Optimize your social media profiles. Include a clear profile photo and a branded cover picture. Include relevant keywords in the business’s bio. Be sure that all hyperlinks are working.
Make use of the social shopping function. Merchants can integrate their online store into platforms like Instagram and Facebook and let customers purchase directly from their feeds. This helps to remove frictions that could hinder their shopping experience.
A case study of the integration of eCommerce and social media. Black Friday Marketing Tips.
The hashtags are a great way to highlight Black Friday hashtags. People will likely look them up to find additional Black Friday deals. This is a great idea when selling products that get a lot of searches on the internet, including electronics and clothing.
Encourage content from users. Ask customers to upload photos of their purchases or compose product testimonials. They can then repost the images on your feed to provide social evidence.
Plan your Black Friday promotion posts.
Post regularly to create anticipation for the big day.
Do not overload your followers with Black Friday content. Allow for other types of posts on social media not to be too promotional and annoy your fans.
Utilize Facebook ads. They are more specific than search ads and yield higher conversion rates. They have an average of 9.21 per cent. Ensure you redirect visitors to a properly optimized landing page when they click an advert.
Make contact with micro-influencers. Although their reach to followers is smaller, they have more engagement. This means they tend to be more influential than their followers.
Answer messages and comments. Customers may contact your social accounts to inquire about an item, ask for assistance, or even to make an issue.
4. Audit Product Pages
Customers spend the majority of their time browsing page for products, searching for the items they want and then purchasing. Thus, optimizing your product pages will result in a speedy and enjoyable shopping experience. Black Friday Marketing Tips. Black Friday Marketing Tips.
Make use of this checklist to enhance the quality of your work:
Customers spend most of their time browsing pages for products, searching for the items they want and then purchasing. Optimization of product pages ensures a fast and comfortable shopping experience.
Make use of this checklist to enhance the quality of your work:
Optimize product descriptions. Include SEO-friendly keywords. Include a FAQ area that will answer buyers’ most frequently asked queries.
Create gift guides for your customers. Twenty-seven per cent of Black Friday shoppers look for presents for the upcoming holiday season. The products are grouped based on the person who will receive them, such as “Gifts for Him”, or the reason for the gift, like “Home Decor Presents.”
The inventory is synchronized across every sales channel. Reduce time spent on the manual stock update and avoid inventory-related issues.
Create an interactive catalogue to be used on Black Friday to showcase all your items and sync this with the database to ensure customers can purchase directly from it.
Include between six and eight images. Display the product from various perspectives and scenarios for greater depth of understanding.
Review and display user ratings. Customers depend on them to decide the quality of a product before buying. Include both negative and positive remarks to make it appear less biased.
5. Create a Holiday Marketing Calendar
Get through the busy Christmas season with the calendar that outlines every aspect of your Black Friday marketing strategies.
What kind of calendar you choose and what should be included depends on what you plan to do on Black Friday. Separating calendars for various marketing channels to manage the timeframes could also be beneficial.
Here are some project timeline calendars to track brainstorming, text and design briefs, and Black Friday campaign launches.
6. Create the Urgency to Increase Black Friday Sales
Discounts aren’t enough to attract customers to purchase online from a retailer. To increase Black Friday sales, urge customers to visit the site. The entrepreneur Marcus Taylor implemented this marketing strategy and increased his sales by 332%.
There are many ways to generate urgency for Black Friday campaigns:
Create the flash sale. Flash sales are sales and offers that run for a limited period, usually lasting from a few hours to a full day. To encourage shoppers to purchase you, display the times the sale starts and closes and show a countdown timer on the site.
A countdown that shows the length of an online flash sale.
Show the level of stock if the amount is small. It creates the impression that the item will be gone shortly. Retailer H&M employs this tactic to sell their items that are on sale.
A low stock alert on H&M’s website store.
Use time-sensitive language. Keywords such as “now,” “today only,” “final sale,” or “last chance” are excellent examples. Think about including them in the subject lines of your marketing emails to increase the number of open rates and increase the open rate.
Bright red is an excellent illustration, but you could choose a colour that contrasts with the layout’s dominant colour.
Rewards the most efficient customers. For instance, you could offer no shipping charges or gifts to the first 100 customers.
Display how many people have bought the item from the page for the item. The goal is to create anxiety about not getting it and encourage visitors to join other shoppers and purchase the product. Here’s one example on J. Crew’s website.
7. Encourage Customers to Purchase More Items
This tactic is designed to convince customers to spend more by increasing the average order value of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Utilize the following Black Friday marketing ideas to boost the value of your order:
Offer free shipping when you reach an order minimum. This can motivate buyers to purchase more things from their shopping cart to get the discount. This is an illustration of the policy from Forever 21:
Free shipping from Forever21.
Sell related items on the product’s webpage or before purchasing. For instance, if a customer is buying a t-shirt and you suggest a pair of pants or other accessories to match the t-shirt. WooCommerce’s customers can use the extension to recommend products for this.
An excellent example of cross-selling an eCommerce store.
Offer bundle deals. One example is to make three items for the cost of two items or purchase one and get a 50% discount.
Give a gift card free when the client spends an amount. Be sure that the gift card’s value isn’t too high to avoid the possibility of a substantial loss.
If you offer discounts, show how much the buyer is saving with their purchase. It can help people feel they’ve found the best price and inspire them to purchase additional products.
8. Update Store Design for the Holiday Season
Create the website with Black Saturday colours and features to help customers get into the spirit of shopping. Ensure the layout is like the company’s branding to ensure the design doesn’t throw customers off.
In addition to paying attention to aesthetics, you should optimize your user’s experience and navigation. Customers must be able to quickly locate the product or information they’re searching for and then make a purchase.
If you need some guidance for your website, our eCommerce web design guide provides guidelines for the best guidelines to adhere to.