Secrets for a Successful Black Friday Campaign
Black Friday is always approaching us rapidly. We all know that Black Friday weekend is one of the most popular times of the year when shoppers come out and splash the cash.
As competition grows and more and more retailers join in on Black Friday, creating a Black Friday campaign that stands out from the crowd becomes more important. If you want to find out our top 7 secrets on a successful Black Friday campaign, then keep reading!
1 - Get your audience pumped for the campaign
Timing is something that is essential to the success of a campaign. You need to ensure that your audience knows about it soon enough so that they can prepare for your deals, but not too soon where the buzz disappears – it’s all about finding that balance.
There are many different things you can do to create buzz around your Black Friday promotions. Whether you post some teasing social posts of what people should expect to see, run a competition that encourages people to like, tag and follow your business or even do something simple such as telling them to put the date into their diaries.
2 - Create a rocking marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy will play a huge part in how successful your Black Friday campaign will be. As there are going to be many competitors who are aiming to capture your audience’s attention, you need to ensure that your marketing strategy engages them and gives them a reason to shop with you. Here are several tasks and elements that when combined can deliver a great strategy:
Create a Landing Page for your Black Friday deals
If you’re wanting to start organically ranking for relevant keywords and attracting organic traffic, you want to be creating a landing page designed specifically for your Black Friday deals at least a month before the date of Black Friday. This will allow enough time for the Google bots to crawl through your website and rank it for relevant keywords.
Another tactic would be to have the landing page up all year round, and when it’s not Black Friday, you could add a section where your customers can sign up for your email newsletter in order to be alerted when it’s about to start. This will enable you to build a relevant audience who you know are interested in your deals and will be able to target them with future campaigns. Do not give in to temptation and change the page too much even if the page is receiving plenty of traffic after BF.
Have discount and promo codes for shopping both online and offline
Discount codes are one of the easiest ways for retailers to encourage people to spend in your store and can be a valuable resource in your marketing mix. Ensure that you have methods to review how successful the code was from the point of sale to track how your customers are interacting with your website.
Shout out about promotions on social media
Spread the word about your Black Friday deals on your social media accounts and forums.
By promoting your deals before, during and after the event, you’ll begin to create a buzz about your business and hopefully, the word about your deals will spread and attract a wider audience. You could run a competition during the run-up of the event and encourage people to like, share and follow your business to be in with the chance to win a ‘Black Friday’ prize.
Look at AO this year, they’ve created a top tips release for shoppers on Black Friday. Not only does this show that they’re planning on having plenty of deals, but they’re also here to create value for their customers.
And finally, remember to use hashtags. Union Metrics suggests that the most popular hashtags include:
#BlackFriday
#CyberMonday
#Deals
#Giveaway
#Sale
#Christmas
#Retail
And the most-mentioned brands include Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft.
Spread the word with email marketing
When announcing your Black Friday campaigns, email marketing is still one of the best ways to promote your deals as it’s a form of direct marketing which can often receive the highest ROI. If you want to have an email Black Friday campaign, our top tips are to:
Create catchy subject lines –
Bare in mind that your audience will be receiving masses of emails during this time. You have to be able to catch their attention from the beginning. Perhaps you could use name fields for them to be more personal.
Personalisation is key –
You must realise that everybody is different when it comes to tastes and what they want to see. To increase your conversion rate, consider segmenting your audience by demographic information and reviewing what they have bought in the past or possibly even products they’ve previously looked at. This will help to communicate directly with the customer so they don’t just feel like one of the many.
Don’t forget about time zones –
If you’re an international retailer wanting to target people in various different countries, ensure that you take the different time zones into consideration. Evaluate which times receive the highest open/click rate and then segment your audience according to countries.
Have attractive CTAs –
Your call-to-action buttons are hugely important to the success of an email campaign. Whether you’re using it to ‘save the date’ with your initial email announcing the sale, or to enable customers to go straight to certain categories or products to shop.
Add the pressure –
Countdowns are a great tool to use if you want to reiterate the fact that something is only up for a limited amount of time and can help you boost click-through rates and the number of conversions. One of our favourite free countdown tools to use as they offer a basic countdown which is personalisable and easy to include in your emails.
Reward your loyal customers
Celebrate your loyal customers on Black Friday weekend as they’ve helped you grow and succeed as a business. Whether you’re offering them an extra discount, or a way to unlock some ‘hidden’ offers, it’s a great opportunity to say ‘thank you’ for the loyalty.
Retarget those abandoned baskets
Being prepped and ready to retarget those abandoned baskets can help you increase your conversion rate even after the customer has left your site.
Whether you create a pop-up reminding your customers that there are items in their basket, or drop them an email to remind them, it all helps to resurface your brand name which is exactly what you want during Black Friday.
Offer easy-to-access support
Automation is starting to truly take off this year with more and more retailers looking to streamline processes and optimise customer journeys. By offering live chat features, your customers can have an amazing on-site experience offering you more chances to be able to turn visitors into converting customers.
Ensure your live-chat bot pops up after a certain amount of time and ask them whether they were looking for anything in particular or whether they had any questions or needed any help.
Though this may seem like a large investment for one day, it is something that you can use all year round as it offers your customers greater support and enables you to feel confident that customers will be getting great service.
3 - Push cross-selling and add-ons
If your eCommerce website doesn’t have a cross-selling/upselling feature, try to implement one before Black Friday. This will enable you to truly perfect the items you recommend and tailor them to how you would like.
With the Remarkable Commerce Manager, we use artificial intelligence technology to cross-sell to your customer. If there’s a common trend of your customers buying particular items in a set or bundle, it will recognise these and suggest them to relevant, future customers.
4 - Ensure your technology can handle it
There’s nothing worse for customers than a page that is struggling to load due to an overload of traffic and the servers not being able to handle it. If you’re going to be pushing a lot of traffic to your website and are expecting a rise in sales, have a chat with your IT department in order to best prepare for Black Friday weekend to ensure that your customers remain unaffected and you maintain a great user experience.
Our recommendation for assessing how much capacity you need is to look at the previous year’s peak points of traffic and analyse how many concurrent users you had on the site. Adding on additional architecture with more servers and more efficient load-balancing will allow for growth.
5 - Plan, Plan, Plan
You can’t prepare too much for any event, and by giving yourself plenty of time, you are ensuring that you’re thoroughly prepping for Black Friday to enable your business to get the best possible return from it.
Our suggested checklist of actions includes:
Double-check your product data to ensure it’s as enriched as possible. If it makes you want to buy the product, then you’re on your way there
Test any discount codes & promotions you’re running for Black Friday
Schedule any content changes (such as homepage banners) ahead of time to ensure that everything is set out well before the day
Keep all teams in your business in the loop with your plan and make sure everybody is prepped and ready to go
Inform all external agencies/3rd parties of website changes as communication is key for a smooth campaign
Make a plan for how you are going to internally communicate and measure the performance of your Black Friday campaign
6 - Don’t just stop at Black Friday
Black Friday itself is not enough. Perhaps consider doing an early sale for Black Friday or even extending it another week or so to enable your business to stand out from the crowd of business sales.
This year, though the Argos Black Friday deals are yet to land, they’ve created a 10-week ‘Crazy Codes’ sale ahead of Black Friday. Starting on 16th October and finishing on Christmas Eve, they’re definitely going the extra mile this year to give their customers a great deal in the run-up to Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
7 - Make it worth it
Shoppers are especially savvy for Black Friday as they’re all on the hunt for one thing – a bargain. Review your products, and see what people want to see in the Black Friday sales, don’t just try and discount products that aren’t selling very well to reduce your stock. Using a product pricing-monitoring tool will allow for your competitor's prices to be tracked and give you insight into how competitive you are in your market.
We hope that these secrets will help you to kick off your holiday shopping season the right way and with the right preparations and planning, Black Friday can really prove to be a valuable day to your business with increased conversions, average order value and a chance to reach new customers.
