The Black Friday promotion is fast approaching and, if you’re a savvy eCommerce brand, your planning is well and truly underway.
With all the upheavals the eCommerce landscape has seen recently, not to mention the rapid changes across all digital marketing platforms, it’s important to play the BFCM game like chess, not checkers: methodical, thorough, and well-planned-out.
Right now, our eCommerce strategists are working side-by-side with their clients, making sure that not only are they prepared with the data they need to execute a killer Black Friday campaign, but that their business will be prepared for the rapid growth that occurs as a result.
If you’re looking for tips on how to further optimise your BFCM planning strategy, here are 8 key strategies every eCommerce brand must focus on to hit the jackpot with their Black Friday promotion!
1. Focus on the three pillars of a successful Black Friday promotion
There’s 3 areas you should focus on: list-building, teasing, and the actual launch. Those pillars, they pretty much outline how you should think about your strategy.
a) Capture attention with list-building
It’s essentially just purposefully capturing customer data either from a purchase, or from a lead capture for the intent of remarketing to them. That’s the whole point of list-building.
The bigger the list, the bigger the profit. List-building is what makes the biggest difference.
b) Stay top-of-mind by teasing your list
You need to stay top of mind with your audience. A really great way to do that is by inviting your list to opt-in to what we call the VIP list. This is the list that gets notified first when you go on sale. This helps with building hype and FOMO (fear of missing out), meaning you specifically tell them that the sale is coming and you start reserving special details about it before anyone else.
Once they’re in that list, you release more. Tease them with more sneak peeks, more updates, more surprises, delights. What it does is it keeps them focused on and excited about you and not all the competition. Because when they’re on your list, you keep showing up with new information, new offers – that hype and excitement helps to keep them focused on you and nothing else.
c) Launch with intention
Where people go wrong is they send one email, or SMS link, or one social post, and that’s it, that’s all they do for the day. That’s the wrong thing to do. This is the one time of the year you should be 3-4 times more frequently than normal with your emails and content.
How do you know it’s too much? When you stop making money, that’s when it’s too much. But if you’re still making money from it, keep pushing and sending.
2. Test as much as you can before the main event
We recommend running multiple micro-tests from now until Q4. If you know what your plan is for Q4, do micro-tests on your offers and messaging angles to give you the confidence of how it’s going to perform.
That way, when the day actually comes, you’re looking at the ad spend and total sales goals and using that as your true north star for scaling. We have confidence in how it’s going to work, then we can then focus on the scalability and sales volume.
3. Focus on your product
A key thing to keep in mind here is, it’s the value of your product the people are buying. Don’t make the process complicated or set unrealistic expectations. And don’t be generic with your marketing.
Selling the value is a combination of the right offer, the right messaging, and an intuitive, enjoyable user experience on your website. When you get this combination right, you’ll increase your conversion rate, your average order values, your repeat purchase rate and therefore your overall sales volumes.
4. Make customers invest in the long run, not just during your Black Friday promotion
There are multiple peak sales moments during Q4 (October to December), and statistics show that many customers will buy more than one time during this period.
We know this is how the big brands win. They know that they can get themselves in a position where they have strong repeat purchase rates, they have a really strong retention game using email, SMS, loyalty programs and referral programs.
So, in the lead up to Black Friday, brands can focus more aggressively on first time customer acquisition, knowing they’ll increase their net profits through repeat purchases.
5. Give your VIP list an extra special treat on BFCM
A big reason why I like to use the VIP list is because, if you know how many people are in your VIP list and you know how well that list generally converts (you can get that data from Klaviyo), it gives you a lot of confidence of what your potential sales revenue will be.
My recommendation is to launch your Black Friday promotion to the VIP list early (mid-November) and to incentivise them by offering an extra gift with purchase.
6. The hype is real – keep it up
November and December are very VERY busy in the online space. Brands all over the world are vying for the attention of their customers, so everyone’s seeing a lot of marketing on their social media newsfeed and in their email inbox. It can be much harder to achieve any kind of cut-through and be seen amongst the crowd…
So you need to keep changing things up with fresh content across all channels so that you can keep the hype going throughout the promotion.
7. Sustain the launch
Between the early VIP access to Black Friday, through the Black Friday promotional period itself, and then into the Christmas promos…That’s about 5 weeks of promotion, which is a LONG time to sustain…
To keep customers coming back to take a look (and buy) again and again, change up the window dressing (messaging and graphic design), add new limited time offers, and possibly even launch new products during the promotion, so that you can prevent sales from declining over the promotional period.
8. Prioritise value for customers
Your database of customers and subscribers is one of THE most valuable assets your business owns, so you want to love on this as much as possible.
Always prioritise your existing audience with first access to new products and promotions. Make things as easy for them as possible in the way you merchandise your promotions – for example, a landing page that curates all the promo deals in one place and makes it easy for customers to make a decision.
Even giving them an extra gift voucher to spend during a peak promotional period can make them feel loved and appreciated and also works really well to increase sales.
Want some expert help to maximise results?
If you really want to make your Black Friday promotion (and Q4 generally) your biggest, most profitable and most successful to date, schedule a call with our friendly Brand Growth Advisor to learn more about how we can help you hit jackpot this year!
