Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping events of the year and occurs on the last Friday of November, followed by Cyber Monday. This year Black Friday will take place on the 25th of November 2022, however, now is the best time to start planning your Black Friday strategy to boost sales and increase revenue.
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is one of the biggest sales events of the year in which businesses launch promotional offers and significant discounts to attract customers. Although Black Friday used to be a one day only event, many businesses now launch Black Friday deals from the beginning of November to entice early shoppers. This way, they can advertise lots of different offers in the lead-up to the main event.
Black Friday Marketing Strategies
As businesses of all sizes participate in this shopping event it’s important to create the right marketing strategy as competition is fierce, and businesses are competing to attract customers with the best deals. Here are a couple of the best Black Friday marketing strategies you can implement to boost sales.
Optimise Your Website Performance
Website performance is one of the most important factors for an eCommerce business, as customers expect online stores to load quickly to find the best deals. In previous years we have seen big brands such as H&M, Gymshark and eBay suffer huge website outages due to large traffic spikes, causing their marketing strategies to fall through. However, Gymshark has learnt from this issue and now has a queuing system to enter the website during periods of high traffic such as sales, reducing the chances of downtime on their website.
Therefore, it’s important to ensure that your website is correctly optimised to lower the chances of this happening. The ideal loading time for websites is less than 4 seconds as it has a 12 – 30% conversion rate. Any longer users will start to abandon their purchases, with transactions decreasing by 1% per second.
Along with page speed, it’s vital to ensure your website has enough memory, storage, processing power, and bandwidth to deal with the number of visitors expected to your website.
Build an Email List
This is one of the best times of the year to build your email list and generate interest. In order to encourage users to sign up to your email list, you will want to offer them an incentive such as “Sign up to be the first to find out about our amazing Black Friday deals, with offers up to 50% off” or “Free delivery on your first order”.
Once you have built an email list you can send out emails in the lead-up to Black Friday teasing the deals that will be on offer, free shipping, and featuring flash deals. Ensure that your emails have an eye-catching subject line and connect with your customers.
Encourage Users to Purchase More
The following marketing strategies can be used throughout the year to increase the average order value, but are most impactful during high sale periods such as Black Friday.
- Highlight a minimum order threshold for free shipping in the shopping basket. This encourages users to add more items before checking out so they can qualify for the promotion.
- Show how much has been saved from the discounts. Customers feeling like they’ve had a great deal can make them purchase more products.
- Bundle deals. Examples include buy one, get one 50% off, and three for the price of two.
Offer Early Access to Loyal Customers
There are many benefits to offering early access to loyal customers, from making them feel appreciated, to being able to manage stock accordingly.
Offering early access also means that you are one step ahead of the competition, as customers will use this opportunity to purchase products before the big rush and before stocks run out.
You could even offer special offers such as free delivery which is one of the biggest Black Friday go-to incentives, encouraging consumers to make a purchase.
Create a Sense of Urgency
You don’t want to just offer deals as sometimes it’s not enticing enough, however, creating a sense of urgency makes consumers feel more compelled towards the deals and gives them the feeling of not wanting to miss out.
There are several ways you can do this:
- Display stock level when quantity is low. This creates the feeling that the product will soon sell out.
- Highlight the offer with a colour. Bright red is always a good choice for sale items, however, any shade that contrasts with your website colours work well.
- Launch a flash sale. To encourage users to make a purchase display a countdown timer to when the flash sale ends.
- Display how many people have purchased a particular item.
- Time-sensitive language. A few examples include “last chance”, “today only”, and “now” to create urgency.
These Black Friday marketing strategies are best used in conjunction with each other to have the biggest impact. Do you want help creating the optimal digital marketing strategy this Black Friday? Get in touch with us at GA Agency, our international team offer digital marketing services including Amazon Marketing, SEO Consulting, and PPC digital advertising.
