Black Friday is the day right after American Thanksgiving. This marks the start of the Christmas holiday shopping season for consumers, hence retailers often heavily promote their stores and mark down prices to entice shoppers to buy products both online and offline. But it’s important for them to make sure that they have everything planned and ready to launch before then.
Let’s quickly dive into a 3-step guide to planning and executing Black Friday promotions.
Step 1: Planning it all
The first thing you would want to do is to thoroughly review your business strategies and ensure that you’re not rushing into making any sort of a bad decision. Because if you do, you are certainly setting yourself ready for something to turn out badly. This is the reason it’s much better to plan out your sales in advance.
Keep a check
Check to make sure, if your store is in a good state to handle a surge incline in sales. Whether or not you have the inventory? Can the infrastructure handle an uptick in customer service inquiries? Will you be able to ship everything on time? If all the above things are a “yes”, how about we get this show on the road!
Focus on what you’re offering
Think about the discounts you want to offer. For instance, how much will it be? Will it apply to everything or specific collections or products? Are there other ways to reward your customers without killing your margin?
Slashing down sales can very likely eat up your margins and therefore isn’t feasible for small businesses. However, there are plenty other meaningful ways to have a win-win situation with your customers without hitting the bottom-line.
Here’s a list of several options, including:
- Unique coupon codes for specific customer groups
- Site-wide discounts with a universal coupon code
- Sale products or collections (no code required)
- Gift or gift card with minimum purchase
- Free shipping
How are you going to implement it?
Even if you have nothing unique or off-the-shelf to offer, your approach is what can still create some buzz. So make it as creative and interesting as possible. Here’s a list of several different types of marketing techniques that would help you inspire your own campaigns.
- Exclusive sale announcements: these sales events are for loyal customers, online only, mailing list only, Instagram only, etc.
- Time limit sale (24-hours only!)
- Offer gifts with purchases
- Run contests and giveaways
- Reminder sent before sale ends
- Sneak-peek or pre-sale of upcoming promotions
- Extend your sales
- Early bird discounts or limited-quantity promotions
Clearly state all the terms and conditions
Make sure you clearly state your terms and conditions to your customers to avoid any future disappointments.
A few handy tips:
- Mention clearly the start and end dates and times for each offer.
- If there is a minimum order value to be eligible for the discount deals mention them on the Discounts page.
- Are there any excluded products? Clearly identify these terms in your fine print.
- Is the offer exclusive to certain customers or regions? Targeted email communication is best for this type of deal.
- If you’re offering free shipping, are any countries excluded? This is also a good time to set up your shipping calendar with order-by dates to receive products in time for Christmas.
Step 2: Executing it
The next thing you should do is create and schedule all of your emails, blog posts, and social content upfront to free up your time to manage the influx of sales and customer service inquiries during the busiest shopping season of the year.
What assets do you need to create? Consider:
- Website: Go on by designing banners or collection headers or maybe simply adding graphics or pop-ups to your home page or landing page
PNC Logos is offering up to 50% off on some of their services and designed their website accordingly by adding banners:
- Email: Add catchy templates and banners
- Social: Try including network-specific posts
Set your store up
Then you need to set up your store accordingly. For instance, if you are offering free-shipping you can either add a free shipping rate or create a shipping discount code. Or if you are offering discounts on certain products you can set sale prices by adjusting the regular and “compare at prices” of those products. For the case of site-wide discounts, you can opt to create discount codes that the customers can apply at checkout.
You can also install a live chat app which will help alleviate the customer service crush, and respond to support issues in real-time.
Set up email marketing campaigns
Email marketing has the highest conversion rate during Black Friday weekend and it has proved to be a powerful tool in competing sales.
Email marketing has the highest conversion rate during Black Friday weekend and it has proved to be a powerful tool in competing sales.
It can get expensive to stand out in the noise of Black Friday sales. So why not focus instead on repeat business from a captive audience: your customers and subscribers? Use Black Friday as an opportunity to reward existing customers, strengthen relationships, and improve loyalty.
A few handy tips:
- Segment your list to send exclusive gifts to repeat/loyal customers or re-engagement deals to lapsed customers.
- Use “Black Friday” as a keyword to grab the attention of customers looking for deals in their inboxes.
Promote it on social media
Initially crack the discount offers over social media platforms as they are intensely populated and are an easy way to trigger the attention of buyers. So be sure to target your campaigns wisely to get the biggest bang for your buck.
You may use all sorts of channels and platforms available to give a synchronized look, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, with creative ad copies.
A few handy tips:
- Ask customers to share or tag friends.
- Schedule posts throughout the campaign.
Step 3: Reflect
Before setting your campaign live, be sure you completely look into methods on how you will track its success. It’s important to follow your progress for each sale and marketing campaign as the results will help inform you about future marketing efforts.
That’s it! You’re all set to put up your Black Friday sales promotions on the go!
