Black Friday is almost upon us and we all know what usually comes with it, a mix of panic and excitement from both the consumer and the business owner! We take a look at this crazy, once a year opportunity and identify some of the ways you can use this day to your business’ advantage.
Black Friday is a great time to get your business out there and use the opportunity to make the most of the day by boosting brand awareness and hopefully sales, particularly if you’re in the business of e-commerce.
The best and most effective way to inspire some excitement in your consumers is to begin early on by engaging in a bit of marketing at the start of November. The idea is to inspire and encourage potential consumers to start looking forward to as well as plan for Black Friday. The most successful Black Friday marketing campaigns usually involve go BIG or go home strategies, and there is a reason for this. Consumers are not interested in small, pathetic discounts, the whole reason they plan for this day is to purchase great products at great prices, in other words, awesome deals! This online marketing approach involves taking risks that will ultimately result in some reward. It’s the one time of the year where you can lower your prices without feeling like you are losing brand integrity.
But this does not mean you should offer discounts on everything. Offering category-specific sales is a tested and proven effective strategy. The simple reason for this approach is that it allows your business to generate incremental sales with higher margins, engages email subscribers and visitors for longer and helps you better manage your inventory, ordering, and future promotions.
If you happen to have VIP customers, do not be afraid to offer even bigger discounts to your best consumers. VIP consumers are likely to spend up to three times more as opposed to regular consumers, it’s a win-win.
Choose to pace your promotions carefully throughout the month of November, as many businesses are embracing the new trend which is referred to as “Black November.” Some of the most important dates to focus on are, of course, Black Friday which falls on 29 November and Cyber Monday which is on 2 December. Those key dates should be critical to your online marketing strategy!
Your plan of action should look something like this. Your campaign should have the following basic elements, send out emails that notify people of the event, do some online advertising and come up with an exceptional a social media Black Friday strategy. Black Friday is the star of the show, after all, so be sure to include a countdown to create some hype and urgency on the day and feature great deals and specials that people will go crazy for. All of this combined will help to boost sales on the day.
For Cyber Monday, it’s a good idea to extend sale offers and emphasise that there is limited stock available for those last-minute consumers.
Also, make sure to prepare your website for large numbers of incoming traffic as site crashes are the last thing you need on Black Friday. Be sure to optimise your site as much as possible because a slow loading site can be quite vexing for consumers whose goal is to purchase deals urgently before they run out. Every second counts! Having a slow e-commerce site is not ideal and will probably result in losing Black Friday business to a faster competitor’s site so make sure to prepare your website for heavy traffic beforehand.
If you are not sure how your website stacks up compared to other sites, you can try out Google’s Test My Site tool to calculate your website’s site speeds and see how you can increase your mobile conversion rates, as mobile users of e-commerce websites are quite impatient and rank slow loading pages as their number one annoyance.
