Wondering how to maximize the benefits of Black Friday for your online store? There is a lot that you can do. Here’s how online stores should prepare for Black Friday with 6 essential strategies.
1. Prepare your website
Your website or online store should reflect the promotions that you are offering in full swing. This means mentioning the Black Friday sale on your website banner and the website hero section (the first section on your landing page).
The content in these areas can have a simple call to action such as ‘Avail Exclusive Black Friday Offers’, ‘Chunky Black Friday Discounts’ or ‘Black Friday: Up to 60% Off’. This text should be linked to the offer page or a category page that contains all products listed under this promotion.
You can also launch a store-wide Black Friday offer whereby the customers can get a flat discount on any products using a coupon code or a preset discount.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is great for two things: bringing new traffic and spreading the word about your campaigns. It is an expensive way to build a customer base but when customers are searching for discounts in your business domain it can work wonders.
SEM can yield a specific-slightly warm traffic that is interested in leveraging Black Friday deals to purchase items for themselves.
3. Pop ups
If you have a lot of incoming traffic but not an equally impressive conversion ratio you can consider pop ups as a means to communicate with your audience. It is easy to place and cheap as well.
Pop ups can deliver your Black Friday message directly to the customer when they land on your page and also when they try to quit. This can help you rekindle some of the customers.
4. Social media ads
Social media advertising is a very competitive domain. Individuals on social media platforms witness a content tsunami that is competing for their attention all the time. Little or no attention is given to unattractive advertising. However, if you have faith in your offers it will work its way into the customer’s attention span.
In order to make this effective you should consider writing concise ad copy, use attractive images and show off your best offers. Together this should increase the efficacy of your Black Friday campaigns on social media.
5. Email newsletters
Email newsletters allow you to re-engage your (warm) customers periodically. A Black Friday reminder or email update can tempt them to visit your website once again. This is a great way to convert incomplete sales from the past.
You can choose to reveal some of the offers within the newsletter, or you can call the readers to the website for an in-depth shop surfing spree. For improved results you can also send your email list customized messages based on their previous interests on your website. Many CRM tools allow you to automate this process making your task easier and scalable.
6. Beyond Black Friday
Finally: Extend your sale beyond Black Friday with SMS retargeting. Recapture the attention of lost clients or shoppers who are on the fence with a final nudge. Many visitors will come to your website, add products to their cart and then just leave. This cart ghosting can be reduced.
You can send them a message saying ‘here’s the offer of the year: avail 40% off on your favorite product XYZ *and add the link to it*’. You can use name personalization on top of this to further capture the recipient’s attention.
CartFox offers free credit for the first 300 SMS you send to your clients.
ROI on your Black Friday marketing strategies
It is obvious that social media ads and SEM tend to be more expensive as compared to setting up direct message campaigns. These campaigns through SMS or Emails will have a greater ROI.
Another benefit is that you can set them once and the effort will be automated and replicated for the rest of the time to come. You can reuse previous campaigns with slight modifications and that gives you implementational ease as well as a lot of data to understand the recipient’s response.
If you are looking to re-engage past buyers, or complete incomplete sales then direct marketing is your go-to strategy. However, if you need fresh traffic then SEM, social media ads and website optimisation to reflect Black Friday offerings is a great way forward.
