Black Friday is nearly here and we’re all, admittedly, gripped by Black Friday Fever, making a concerted effort to implement Black Friday strategies in the run-up to the big weekend.
We understand how important it is to be prepared for Black Friday, to be able to deliver the best for our clients, so, we thought we would give you a sneak peek into our Black Friday strategies to show you how much effort regularly goes into delivering a working end-product that brings success.
Our Black Friday strategy is split into 3 main phases:
- List Building (well in advance of BF)
- Warming (2 weeks before Black Friday)
- BFCM Weekend
LIST BUILDING
This starts early in the lead up to Black Friday, and although it is not focused on the Black Friday offer, it is crucial as a Black Friday strategy because it’s main goal is to grow the amount of leads and potential customers inside of a funnel.
For example, in the USA they have Labor Day and even Halloween, where you could potentially run a sale. You can then use Facebook and email to get interested people into those lists and run the sale to them over that date. And what else do you know? Well, that they’re interested in sales, and if you nurture them properly towards Black Friday you stand a high chance of converting them again.
Other ways you can do list building is to offer people free resources, such as lookbooks when you’re in the fashion industry, and send them to end of season clearance sales.
The goal of list building for Black Friday strategies is to start engaging people early, having them already becoming familiar with your brand and potentially becoming a customer. This will lead to a higher potential of them becoming a returning customer over Black Friday weekend.
WARMING
This is the most important part to being successful with your BFCM offers!
This starts 14 days before the offer goes live. Building hype and FOMO around the offer. The importance of implementing Black Friday strategies is that once people are signed up for the offer, we ‘tease’ people about the offer.
Once people are in this ‘warming’ funnel we want to show them relevant content about the offer. Show them more and more about what BF is going to be about and build up hype around it so they don’t think of any other offers anymore, but just about yours.
The strength of this warming strategy is that people will already be anticipating your BF offer and are focused, ready, and waiting for you to finally drop your Black Friday offer.
Warm lists or segments of people are the ones we mainly target over Black Friday due to their likelihood of buying. And there are a few special ways that you can create warm lists and keep those people engaged up until the Black Friday launch.
So, how do you do that?
You make them feel special by sending them save the dates, entering them into VIP lists with early access or additional discounts, giving them a free gift if they’re one of the first to purchase, or simply reminding them that the sale is coming up soon.
Warming Strategies & List Building
- Ads
- Lead Magnets/Ads – opt-ins on Early Access to Offers
- Email – Get ready for the offer (existing or VIP customers)
- SMS – List Building
- Messenger Bots – List Building
- Warming on Facebook/Instagram and social networks to get people ready for the event on organic platforms
BLACK FRIDAY LAUNCH
Launch day is where the fun begins and this is where we hopefully hit our goals and beyond, with record sales days (in an ideal world, of course).
Depending on your brand, you might want to launch a day early for your existing customers so they have early access to sizes/discounted products. This can also be an effective Black Friday strategy for email or SMS marketing.
The idea behind this is brands asking people to sign up before to be able to get early access. By doing this, you entice people with the offer, making them more likely to sign up, and have a list of highly engaged people ready to purchase when you send out your email or SMS blast to engaged people.
Some important things to consider on launch day is that you want to be focusing on your warm audiences, the ones you’ve put the most effort into, in the lead up to Black Friday. And, always anticipate more than less, meaning, set your budgets higher because it’s easier to scale down than up. Finally, it’s always good to have a backup plan if everything starts falling apart, because we all know how that can unexpectedly happen and you wouldn’t want to be caught out.
It’s an intense time, where all of your content strategies you’ve put in place over the year, using Facebook, email, SMS, Instagram and anything else you can draw revenue out of, come together to create something brilliant. And if you’re well-prepared, it can be extremely fun and, ultimately, rewarding.
Black Friday holds a lot of potential for all brands, with many possibilities, but the real winners will be those brands that are competing at a higher level due to their Black Friday strategies in the lead-up to the weekend.
