7 Black Friday Marketing Strategies to Boost your Sales!

Designing and planning your seasonal marketing strategy ahead is important. To organize and boost your sales on key dates, especially during the last quarter of the year, which begins with one of the most important dates for retailers: Black Friday.

Black Friday 2022 will be the most important so far for the eCommerce sector. With the pandemic, in these last 2 years the rules in all sectors have changed. Retailers will be forced this year, once again, to play differently than they did in 2021. Everything has returned to a semblance of normality and it may be that immense things will resume, or it may be that customers will prefer to stick with the tradition of the last two years, and shop online. 2022 is once again the year you need to put all your effort and attention into your website, as it is more than likely that all retailers will make another push into online shopping. 

There are various resources out there that will provide you with inspiration and ideas on how to rock this holiday season. In this post I chose seven strategies that should be in your list this Black Friday.

7 Black Friday Marketing Strategies

Timing

Black Friday Marketing is the alpha and omega for a successful seasonal holiday for retailers and remember that it starts long before Friday. As time passes by, buyers will be getting numb towards the Black Friday offers they see or receive. For that reason, you should plan ahead your strategy this year and start the communication of your offers early.

• Clever Tip: Organize a quarterly calendar with all the actions you plan to do for special dates: content, social media, sweepstakes, Google Ads campaigns… For this quarter, for example, organize Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas, among others, so you will have time for everything!

Create a Landing Page

Creating a dedicated landing page can add various benefits to your strategy. Creating a specific landing page, closely related to your Black Friday Google Ads campaigns, can significantly improve your quality score – AKA: your ads positions and decrease your cost. Leading the user directly to your page where you showcase your sales, offers, and the specific products will also improve your bounce rate. People don’t have the patience to navigate around websites. The easier you make it for them, the better.

• Clever Tip: Why use a landing page for one-time marketing actions? The hook you offer to get visitors to leave their data or perform the action you want can be of many kinds: a free ebook, a useful template for your target audience or a free consulting hour if you offer consulting services. That means that not only will you need a good theme design, but the texts, images and loading speed must be the best you can do.

Pre-create bundles & gift ideas

I’m the type of person who adores choosing gifts for friends, family, or colleagues. However, I can reassure you that I belong to a small minority group. Choosing gifts is a nightmare for most people out there. You can take advantage of this and do the work for them. Create gift categories on your website for different kinds of occasions. For example, “Best Black Friday Sale Products” “Best gifts for Secret Santa”, “Best gifts for family”, “Gifts under $20”…etc. Navigation will be made so much easier for your users once you gather together your products in specific gift categories.

• Clever Tip: Why organize your eCommerce in categories? The categories of an online store are the orientation a customer needs to locate the search for their perfect product. By ensuring a clear structure, customers will be able to conveniently scan the store’s offerings and enjoy a better shopping experience.

Launch a referral program

“The most credible form of advertising comes straight from the people we know and trust. Eighty-three percent of online respondents in 60 countries say they trust the recommendations of friends and family” Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report.

Initiating a referral program during Black Friday is a great technique for improving your brand loyalty and driving profitability. Find a smart way to reward your customers for bringing your friends and family to make a purchase from your website.

• Clever Data: BigCommerce reports that 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a vital factor in their purchasing decisions. In addition, 92% of consumers believe referrals from friends and family more than paid advertisements.

 

 

Personalized promotion emails

Consider setting up email marketing campaigns for your previous customers, taking into consideration the products they purchased in the past in order to include similar products or tailor made recommendations. The more personalized and less generic your Black Friday Marketing is, the more possibilities it has to be successful. Even though it’s an extra effort on your part, there is so much competition out there that if you want to stand out, you need to take that further step to catch potential customers’ attention.

• Clever Tip: when creating your personalized emailing campaign for Black Friday, we recommend several things: make it fully responsive (adapted to mobile devices), be careful not to be too mysterious with the content, create a sense of urgency, show your products to attract attention, and choose a catchy subject line, the first thing is that they open the email!

Get your mobile website ready

Even if the final purchase might not happen through a mobile phone, users will be using their phones to check the offers, checking their email, and visiting your website to look around. That being said, mobile experience must be optimal for your potential customers. You also want your website to be mobile friendly for not getting penalized from Google. Make sure you run a quick test and fix (if any) pending issues.

• Clever Tip: Remember these three key points when optimizing your website for mobile devices: 

1. Try to use libraries that allow you to do conditional page loading, avoiding loading unnecessary resources when people visit you from mobile. 
2. You have to be very careful when designing. It is recommended to design with the mobile-first pattern to avoid having adaptation problems with the screens and avoid overloading the page with useless elements.
3. Check the effects because some of the ones you use on the desktop web will not work on the responsive web. 

Optimize Google Ads

I could’ve dedicated this whole post only to techniques on how to optimize your Google Ads for Black Friday. As I decided to put some variety in the post and if iI had to highlight one tip regarding Google Ads, here you have it: “Increase your budget!”

It’s very important that your campaigns don’t go through the budget during the busiest time of the year. Make sure you update your ads headlines and texts to mention your Black Friday offers. Another good idea is to add your inventory details in order to provoke some sense of urgency. 

As previously mentioned, planning ahead is significantly important. Get creative and let your imagination come up with new, innovative, and original ideas to drive your customer’s attention. Competition is tough and if you don’t want your business to get lost among the various alternatives you will need to plan well your next steps for all the important seasonal holidays coming up.