With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, brands are looking to get their sale campaigns live. However, there are some dos and don’ts for sales success.
Unlock Black Friday Success
Do Utilise Social Media
Whilst it may sound obvious, utilising all features of social media platforms can help to reach your audience and build excitement around your Black Friday campaigns. In addition to posting on platform feeds, make use of tools such as Instagram Stories, to create excitement and show the personality of your brand. Creating behind the scenes content, such as packing customers orders and doing team interviews, can add a human element to the brand which can in turn increase sales – people buy from people.
Do Create Gift Guides
Creating gift guides is a great way to inspire your audience and showcase the products that you have to offer. Not only do gift guides add value to your customers, but it helps to solve a common pain point – not knowing what to give their loved ones during the festive season. You can create generic gift guides, such as those for ‘him’ and ‘her’, or more specific guides such as ‘gifts for the nature lover’, ‘gifts for the person who has everything’ and ‘gifts for the stationery obsessed’.
Be sure to create these beforehand, so that it gives customers time to scroll through guides, think about their decisions, and be ready to purchase once your discounts are live.
Do Offer a Free Product
If you want to steer clear of discounts on your products, you could instead offer a free gift with each order. This is a great way to get one of your products into the hands of hundreds of people that may have otherwise not purchased, and they may return to repurchase at a later date. This is also a great idea if you’ve just launched a new product – offer a ‘mini’ version as a tester for free with orders, so customers can trial it and purchase at a later date.
You can also offer a free gift if a customer orders over a certain value or certain amount of products.
Do Leverage Partnerships
Take advantage of partnerships or relationships that you have with other brands. For example, if your website carries other brands, you can do joint marketing with them to promote each other’s content and reach a larger audience. Additionally, this supports your relationships with other brands, helping to strengthen these for future collaborations or campaigns.
Do Utilise User Generated Content (UGC)
User Generated Content (UGC) is original, brand-specific content created by people rather than brands, based on their experiences, opinions, feedback or ideas. By reposting your customers’ content on social media, you can increase trust with new customers, and also give customers the opportunity to visualise how they can use your product in their daily lives.
Do Optimise Your Website
In the run up to Black Friday, ensure that your website is optimised. Without a quick-loading, user-friendly website, your marketing efforts are ineffective. You should ensure that your website is mobile responsive, has a smooth shopping experience, and has easy navigation to allow customers to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Additionally, you need to ensure that your server can manage lots of people on your website at one time, so you may need to increase your server storage capacity or timeout limit.
Do Study Data and Analytics
Make use of preexisting data from both the last period and Black Friday 2023, to identify which products sold most to inform your marketing strategy. You can also use data to analyse basket abandonments to identify website improvements that may help minimise these on the day that your sales are live.
Black Friday Don’ts
Don’t Overcomplicate Discount Codes
Many customers want to checkout quickly on Black Friday – whether that’s due to them already knowing what they want to buy, or time sensitive discounts that create urgency. Therefore, keeping discount codes simple, or having an automatic discount at checkout, means customers can input codes to redeem savings for a quick checkout.
Don’t Spam Customers
Spamming customers with discounts and sales content is a quick way to put them off your brand for good. To avoid this, ensure your online content is variable, by including valuable and thought provoking content within sale content. Additionally, highlight benefits and values of your products, so that customers can make informed buying decisions, and understand the value that your product will have on their life if purchased.
Don’t Rely on On-The-Day Campaigns
Black Friday may only be one day, but your brand should make use of the weeks leading up to your sale or discount. Show sneak peaks, create excitement and promote a range of your products, so come discount day, your customers know exactly what they want to buy.
Don’t Forget Cyber Monday
Following on from this, don’t forget Cyber Monday – Monday 2nd December. Continue discounts on this day, or perhaps run a completely different campaign altogether, by offering free gifts, bundles, or never seen before products.
Overview
The key to success on Black Friday is preparation, keeping customer satisfaction as the sole focus, to make buying into your brand a natural decision.
