Levelling up Black Fridays

It goes without saying that Black Friday is one of the biggest dates in every retailer’s calendar. Lucky for you, we’re here to help you get ahead of the game to avoid underutilising this ideal sales opportunity.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to target your audience. According to a Shopify analysis, email marketing has the highest average order conversion rate when compared to alternative channels such as Direct, Search and Social.

If you want your campaign to stand out among the noise, you should be looking at:

• Personalisation – Personalising emails based on your customer’s needs has been proven to lead to 6x higher transaction rates. Inserting customised subject lines and using the tools within your email database to segment customers based on their engagement history will allow you to tailor your campaigns to include offers that are going to entice them the most.
• Utilising subscriber browsing data – Through the use of cookies, you can gather user browsing data which will enable you to retarget customers via email about the products they were looking at as well as if they’ve abandoned their cart or if you want to use it as an opportunity to cross-sell products.
• Creative – Using dynamic content, compelling CTA’s and minimising marketing copy to ensure a visual impact free of distractions is essential. In short, be captivating, but get to the point!

Social media

With the power that Black Friday and Cyber Monday hold as a consumer holiday, making your brand’s social media campaigns thought-through and impactful is key to success.

Here’s a few things to consider when creating your campaign: 

• Start now – ‘Teasing’ is a good opportunity to provide your audience a sneak peek that gets people guessing, builds excitement around your deals and helps put you at the forefront of people’s minds.
• Deals and discounts – It’s important to not just have one deal up your sleeve. Limited-time deals will combat customer browsing whilst surprise deals will keep people engaged. Also, make sure to not forget your regulars by offering those long-term customers exclusive VIP offers. 
• Don’t just stick to organic social – Invest in paid social media to reach new audiences at a time when they are in buying mode..  
• Be creative – This peak season is the perfect time to have fun with your creative. Don’t be afraid to do something different.

Website Considerations

So, we’ve got customers to the site, now how do we keep them there and get those sales locked in?

It’s important to think about the following:

• Accessibility – Is your website accessible? Does your website open quickly, can the content be viewed correctly, is it visible on mobile?  
• Don’t forget mobile – Mobile shopping is increasingly becoming a shoppers preference with Shopify recording 70% of it’s sales occurring on smartphones during the 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, so ensuring your user experience on both mobile and desktop is crucial over the peak season.
• Optimisation – On-site optimisation needs to also include clear design features that ensure that as soon as your customers land on your site that they immediately see that you’re offering impressive deals for a limited time. A great way to do this is through banners, pop-ups and clear calls to actions.

Finally, It’s important to remember to track and gather data in order to measure success and better inform your future campaigns. You can do this by looking at the complete purchasing process and gathering data throughout each point of the sales funnel. By knowing this underlying data it then allows you to adjust your marketing decisions and maximise your results in the future. 

With the right planning and execution, you can use Black Friday to its full advantage and make it a success for you and your business. Good luck!