Officially marking the start of the holiday season, Black Friday is the name given to the day after Thanksgiving. The popularity of the event has now become almost a cultural phenomenon. Naturally the biggest shopping event of the year, from online retailers and small businesses everyone loves Black Friday since it is bound to get them those extra sales and a considerable spike in the revenues.
This year, Black Friday is falling on November 26th, however, most businesses try to get on their discounts by mid-November at least, so that they can be ahead of the competition. If you are an eCommerce business, you get a window period which is even bigger than usual, giving your existing and potential customers ample time to explore your products. This means that right up from Thanksgiving until the upcoming Monday that has been monikered as Cyber Monday (29th November), you can now really garner some good revenue for yourself.
So, to help you really boost up your sales, we have you a host of ideas for promotions that you could utilise and capitalise on this event window:
Boost up your sales with host of ideas for promotions
- Hourly Deals: For stores that deal with high traffic, having hourly deals can help you in covering a lot of bases in one go. Keeping in an element of surprise, by frequently changing your deals, you not only encourage your customer to spend but also keep them coming back for more. It is really beneficial to keep hourly deals along with other Black Friday deals you’ve been planning on. In fact, you can even turn it up a notch by offering the hourly deals at lets’ say 10% higher discount than your regular deals.
- Gifting Guides: For first-time customers, and this holds especially true for people who are looking for holiday gifts online. Creating a gifting guide will help you in being able to highlight a different kind of products you have and the deals you are offering. You could create gifting guide is based on various kinds of interest apart from the genetic ‘Gifts for Him’ or ‘Gifts for Her’, for example, you could create a gifting guide for someone who loves fitness and CrossFit and have a guide called ‘Gift for CrossFit Lovers’.
The entire point of making a gifting guide is to lure in shoppers, with the promise of making shopping so much easier for them – which to be frank is a win-win situation for both of you.
- Free Gifts: Let’s face it everyone loves a freebie – so why don’t you capitalise on that and give away a free gift to every customer who orders between the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. It is also a good practice to set up a minus purchase value limit for these. For example, you could have a limit of minimum $50 being spent in order to get a free gift. It is a marketing tactic that is quite effective and does intrigue a customer enough to shop more.
- Extended Sales: Even though this post is about Black Friday sales, a good practice is to gently extend your sales from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. With the kind of growth that eCommerce has seen in the recent years Cyber Monday has also resulted in being as popular as Black Friday. Thus, capitalising on both these events in order to get bumper sales is a great practice as you will be able to draw many more customers and much more sales.
- Utilise Mailing List: Email marketing has for long been a great way of promoting your brand. Studies say that for every $1 that you spend on email marketing you will have the potential to earn at least $30 in return. When you are talking about Black Friday sales, there are two ways to go about it – first you can contact your existing customers and offer them a special discount code that they can use while shopping that will give them an additional discount. Second would be to send an email to potential customers, and enumerating for them all the various deals that are going to be available for a particular day. However, make sure that the subject line of your mail doesn’t sound too click-bait-y otherwise it will end up in your subscriber’s spam folder.
- New Product Additions: Everyone loves new products, whether it is someone who has shopped from you just once or a repeat customer. Adding new products from time to time makes shoppers keep coming back for more, as it piques the curiosity regarding what are the new products that you are offering. Hence when you talk about your Black Friday sales, keep on adding new items every day and market them so that customers will visit your site every day of the sale to see if there are any products that they would like to buy.
- Increasing Ad Spend: Increasing your reach by increasing your ad spend, is a great way to make sure that your leads are converting into sales at a higher rate. Especially owing to the pandemic most people are preferring to shop online, this means that the higher the number of people you can reach out to, the higher chances you have of getting sales. When you look at the ROI, even if you are going a little above your normal budget for your ad spend, you end up getting a lot more in return if you can convert those leads into sales. Hence do not be afraid of increasing your budget for a couple of days.
Now that you have taken a look at the marketing strategies that you can capitalise on for Black Friday, it is time to implement them to make sure that your store is ready, be it online or offline. One of the biggest retail weekends of the year, you can utilise whichever tactics suit your business best so that you can get the best returns possible. Have any more tips that have worked for your business – write them to us, we would love to hear them!