Black Friday: tips and strategies

 

Most retailers see Black Friday and Cyber Monday as a great opportunity to get rid of leftover goods in stock, create engagement with their clients and increase their sales.

However, risks and the chances for colossal flops increases dramatically during this period. You may find yourself, for instance, swamped with orders that you cannot fulfil. Or you may not be able to provide adequate customer service compared to the flow of requests you are used to receiving normally. And finally, the biggest risk: being clearly outperformed by your competitors.

For all these reasons, it is essential to prepare for Black Friday and the upcoming shopping period well in advance, allowing you to maximise conversions, sales and the average order value, all while providing a value proposition that surpasses that of your competitors.

In this post, we will provide you with several practical tips and outline a number of useful strategies to make the most of Black Friday and the earning opportunity that it is.

 

Tips for e-commerce

Before we begin with our tips for ecommerce platforms, we think it is important to clarify three points regarding Black Friday:

1. Browsing will mainly take place on mobile
2. Shopping will mainly take place from desktop
3. Shopping is divided equally between genders and demographics

 

Having said these statistics, let us now turn to the tips that form the basis of any Black Friday campaign and are essential to be prepared:

• Site speed: Low site speed kills conversions. Site speed, both mobile and desktop, must be up to the Black Friday period.
• High traffic: Can your servers handle potential traffic peaks? Make sure you have the necessary bandwidth.
• Segment your mailing list: Segment your mailing lists well in advance, thus ensuring that the best offers end up with the right people. §
• Organise email campaigns: In addition to having a segmented customer base, your email marketing content should also be ready well in advance. 
• Make mobile a priority: As already mentioned, most of your visitors will arrive at your site via a mobile device. Mobile optimisation and marketing should be at the top of your to-do list.
• Start early: Start informing customers about your upcoming offers well in advance of the actual days so they are ready to buy when the time comes.

 

Black Friday strategies

Now let us turn to strategies. There are really a lot of them, and we have selected ten that we think are absolutely worth applying:

1. Advertise Black Friday offers both on the homepage and on special landing pages. On both the homepage and landing pages, messages related to Black Friday should be clear and obvious.
2. Display Black Friday discounts clearly on product, shopping cart and category pages. Many visitors land directly on the product pages, but it is important to make it clear that the discount applies to the whole site and not just to the individual product.
3. Guarantee a fixed discount that applies to each item. Try to offer a fixed tariff that applies to all products.
4. Increase scarcity with insufficient stock warnings and countdown timers. Evoking a sense of scarcity is one of the most powerful things you can do. Customers who see that a product is in high demand will be more motivated to buy.
5. Exploiting mobile ads. Contenuti studiati ad hoc e forniti tramite app mobili creeranno interesse per il Black Friday e durante il Black Friday. 
6. Extend the discounts to the whole weekend. A practice that is becoming increasingly popular and can boost sales is the Black Weekend.
7. Contacting people via Messenger on social media. Even if you have hundreds of customers, with Messenger bots you can now interact directly with them and send personalised offers and suggestions.
8. Organising a pre-sale event. A great way to create excitement in the period leading up to Black Friday is to offer customers a taster, a mini black friday. 
9. Prepare your retargeting strategy. Thanks to retargeting, you can even offer discounts to customers at the end of the official sale.
10. If a code is needed, put it in plain sight. Make sure that the discount code is clearly visible everywhere: in advertisements, emails, landing pages and product pages.

 

In conclusion, we can say that the key to success for your Black Friday campaign is called preparation. Preparing in advance will give you two big advantages. First, by considering all aspects to be coordinated, you can be sure that everything is organised in the best possible way. Second, you will have time to test the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, as well as promotions. There may be unexpected events with Black Friday, but with advance organisation you will be able to cope with them in the best possible way. You just have to put our tips and strategies we have shared with you into motion!

If, on the other hand, you need someone with the necessary skills to carry out good online and offline digital marketing for your Black Friday campaigns, do not hesitate to contact us: we will work out the best solutions together with you.