Are you ready for the Black Friday?
Black Friday is coming soon, and together with Cyber Monday it represents one of the best moments of the year for e-commerce websites and for all those who sell anything online. 
Altough you have to offer a significant discount in order to appeal your customers, the increase in sales will be huge, and you’ll end up making more profit. In 2017, 1.4 billion pounds were spent online on Black Friday all across the UK, with a 11.7% increase in sales compared to 2016, and this year economists expect this record will be broken. Now, if you want to be part of all this, you need some Black Friday marketing ideas.
The biggest mistake you can make, in fact, is assuming you have to do nothing but discounting a few products and your sales will automatically increase. While this might still happen, you won’t maximise your average spend per user, which last year was around 200 pounds, with Londoners reaching the peak of 300 pounds.
So, here is the question: what are the best Black Friday marketing techniques to maximise the income of a business online? Here are a few advices based on our experience.
Plan ahead
There are still two weeks to go, but it is never too early when it comes to generate revenues online. Black Friday is a good chance, and you want to make sure everything goes right, so the best thing you can do is planning a good strategy and design a landing page with all those psychology tricks designed to make your offer irresistible and a great e-mail form to gather contact information of potential customers, create a compelling copy for your marketing e-mails, and creating some hype through your social media channels.
Obviously, this is just an example, because there are a lot of alternatives, and that’s another reason why you need to plan everything. I am sure you don’t want to find yourself in a rush two days before the X date without a clue of what to do.
25% of Black Friday sales come from e-mail marketing, so if you implement a campaign in your strategy, you will surely benefit from it. Take these few tips to make it work best:
- Write a captivating subject, because it can decide the success or failure of your campaign even before users open your message;
- Include a script that allows users to add the event to their calendar, so they will receive an alert when your promotion starts;
- Choose the right time for your follow-up series: study your audience’s habits and figure out what time they are more likely to open your e-mails, and if you have foreign customers, make sure you schedule your e-mails according to their time zone;
- Read the next paragraph.
Segment your target
Discounts attract everyone, but only when they are for products your target really needs. There are so many tools that allow you to monitor their preferences and propose them personalised deals. The Facebook Pixel, for example, is one of them. Remember that you can potentially reach thousands of people, and no two would be the same, so the best course is to define more than one buyer persona and then create a different campaign for each one of them.
For example, the first separation that comes to my mind is between regular customers and new ones, two groups that might need a different strategy. You could:
- Propose a loyalty program with freebies as a reward or give special conditions, like free shipping for regular customers;
- Create urgency with limited time deals for new customers, usually a countdown on every product works (Amazon does it).
Mobile first
The majority of the traffic comes from mobile devices, so it is critical that all your e-mails and your website are responsive. Make sure you give usability the importance it deserves, as it may influence the success of your Black Friday marketing campaign. The purchase process should be smooth, the page loading fast, and the layout impeccable.
However, it’s not just about technical aspects: accessing from mobile also means your target takes the smartphone at certain times during the day, like the lunch break at work or in the evening before bedtime for a last check, but don’t take my words for granted, always check your target’s behaviour.
Promote a referral program
Why should you include a referral program in your Black Friday marketing strategy?
Because word of mouth is still the most poweful kind of advertising, and because when you offer a good deal to someone, they never refuse.
Instead of offering such a huge discount that makes your wallet bleed, you can negotiate for a little discount, but offer another discount on next purchase both to your customer and the person they will take to your website to register and make a purchase of their own.
Actually, there are a lot of ways to incentivise your customers to refer a friend, just make them an offer they can’t refuse, perhaps with a limited time to take action, because when you create a sense of urgency on your referral program, rest assured your users will stress their friends so much that they can’t say no.
If you create a landing page for the program, make sure you implement social media share buttons, so it has a chance to become viral.
Don’t stop after Black Friday
Yeah, sales don’t stop! There is still Small Business Saturday, Sofa Sunday, and Cyber Monday.
Imagine your user is snuggling on a sofa, looking for Cyber Monday deals on their smartphone (yes, that’s what people do on Sofa Sunday, and that’s the reason of its name) and they receive an e-mail from you with some anticipations on next day’s offers.
Yeah, another e-mail, still with a captivating subject, personalised deals, and the button to add the event on the calendar. And obviously an amazing copy.
Here we go! With such a simple operation, you just increased your chances to make more money even after Black Friday.
Now, it is your turn to talk: what is your Black Friday marketing strategy?
Tags: ecommerce, sales