One of the biggest shopping days of the year is coming. Are Black Friday marketing ideas ready?
Many sellers are looking for creative ways to connect with new and repeat customers this Black Friday—the ones who are likely to fight the Thanksgiving food coma for a good deal.
When it comes to finding the best Black Friday marketing ideas for the exciting, often frantic, multi-billion-dollar occasion, Amazon sellers and brick-and-mortar retailers can lean from each other.
Consider adopting some of these Black Friday marketing ideas to bring the holiday joy to your bargain-hunting customers.
1. Send an email blast to your customers.
This might not be the most overlooked, but in all reality customers are expecting to get some sort of Black Friday sales announcement. They’re hunting for them. So why not deliver, straight to their inbox?
Email marketing is a time-tested solution. It can have significant ROI, on par with the returns from social media marketing’s rise in recent years. More than 25% of all Black Friday sales originated from the email marketing channels in 2014.
Consider informing your customers of holiday savings through an email marketing campaign or a series of them.
TIP: Make sure you’ve segmented your email list into past and potential buyers.
TIP: Use snappy and overly enticing subject lines, color schemes, and visually pleasing content in the email.
What makes an email successful? Sending your campaigns to specific customer segments, targeted demographics, peak times for online activity, and localities. And, of course, make it personal with mail merges.
2. Give some love to your landing page.
Is your page ready for the deals that Black Friday will bring to shoppers?
You don’t have to customize it for the shopping holiday, BUT adding some elements that allow you to tweak it for Black Friday is a smart move. Why?
61% of all holiday shoppers search through the internet for Black Friday deals days, even weeks, before the Thanksgiving weekend. Capitalize on that!
TIP: Make your landing page evergreen, serving as a generalized catch-all that can be used for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and throughout the entire holiday season without any significant design changes.
TIP: Add an email subscription button and make the page visually pleasing on all devices would also help in SEO performance and create continuity.
A year-long Black Friday landing page also should have year-long functionality and interactive content for customers.
3. Boost your sales through social media channels.
You can’t dismiss how large an audience social media posts can reach.
In 2015, over 3.8 million social media posts were created mentioning Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and door busters. The number has naturally grown well past that calculation.
Social allows sellers to act swiftly to adjust, monitor, update, and correct your marketing strategy.
Given the flexibility of posting on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you can send out your best deals of the year to your followers, potential followers, and then some for near-instant interaction.
TIP: Schedule your posts for peak hours for online users. This allows you to interact with commenters, showing you care about their questions and concerns. Great customer service can make or break a sale.
TIP: Add a call to action to turn that impression into a link click. Use phrases like “find out more” or “exclusive deals on our site, click here” will give the users reason to follow through.
4. Set up a referral program for extra sales and traffic.
Shoppers are not just swayed by advertisement or the reputation of a specific brand.
Now more than ever, customers are going to be relying on the opinion of others to make a final decision when it comes purchasing a product, shopping your storefront, and trusting your brand.
How can you tap into that reality? By creating a recommendation or referral campaign that rewards brand loyalty and new customers.
TIP: Take to your email channels, your social media, and your other channels of communication to offer customers a reward for referring their friends and family. Do everything in your power to make your social media following turn your referral program into a viral sensation.
TIP: Some of the best referral program offers are exclusive coupons or promotions that provide very steep savings. For example, you can have a referral campaign that will guarantee a customer a certain percent off the already steep prices your storefront has in place.
5. Add a countdown timer on a product to close the deal.
How can you get a customer to take swift action in buying your products?
Remind them that the deal they’re getting is for a limited time. A countdown timer is an easy way to be transparent with the length of the deal while creating that sense of urgency.
TIP: Program your landing page, your promotional emails, and your social media posts to mention that a product will soon be out of stock due to high demand. Or, you can claim a certain sale will expire if no action is taken.
TIP: A countdown timer can also adapt to decreasing inventory, a date, and time expiration, and similar content that can be programmed explicitly for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
6. Add upsells so customers can bundle their buys.
It’s Black Friday. If you’re not upselling, you’re missing out.
When a customer decides to make a purchase, tap into that passionate moment by offering a supplemental item that will only enhance their satisfaction.
TIP: Show them you know what they want by curating specific product bundles of three or four separate products to offer the best selling experience possible. Packaging your products together to match others will drive revenue.
TIP: Produce promotional copy that gives every customer contemplating a promotional bundle a reason to buy without second-guessing themselves. This also brings actual value to your customers as you work to also cultivate a sense of urgency by utilizing elements like a countdown timer, expressing the scarcity of the products in the bundle, among other sales pitches.
7. Add a sense of scarcity with a flash sale.
Tying back to the countdown timer idea, a flash sale further adds to creating that sense of urgency for the buyer.
This is Black Friday, after all, so customers are expecting short-term deals that will run out fast. That’s what they’re hunting for.
In a case study for one flash sale, web traffic was boosted by 51%. Conversion rates increased by 50%. And, that same flash sale ended with a 236% boost in revenue.
TIP: Put your unobtainable or more expensive products in the spotlight. Plus, forcing the message that the sale is not just for a very limited time, but, the products in the sale are in limited quantity will also assist in landing some purchases from customers who were subdued by their sense of urgency.
These Black Friday marketing ideas have three things in common: they build hype, boost traffic, and convert buyers. What other ideas for Black Friday marketing do you suggest? Tell us in the comments below!
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