Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday are some of the most popular shopping dates in the calendar, offering huge discounts and shopping incentives. Of recent years, many businesses have chosen to use this as an opportunity to maximise their website sales, with some choosing to run a promotional period of up to two weeks.
Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday are some of the most popular shopping dates in the calendar, offering huge discounts and shopping incentives. Of recent years, many businesses have chosen to use this as an opportunity to maximise their website sales, with some choosing to run a promotional period of up to two weeks.
When should you start planning?
This year Black Friday is taking place on Friday 25th November, so you’ve got a little bit of time to get things in order, but let’s be honest, there’s no better time than now. Like with any successful marketing campaign, you’ll need to ensure that you have prepared a strong strategy, decided on your offers, your messaging, your copy, and the products/ services that you’re going to be advertising.
Here we’ve put together some key action points your online business can take, in preparation for a successful Black Friday 2022.
How is your website performing?
It’s likely that you’re going to be directing your customers to your website to complete their purchase, therefore, it’s crucial that your customers can access, browse, and make that all important purchase without any hiccups.
Website Speed – How long is it taking customers to access a page on your website? People expect to get instant results and if your website is operating at anything less than this, you could risk losing out to a competitor.
Increased Traffic – Website traffic is normally a lot higher during this promotional period as many users are actively searching for deals and special offers. Combined with any marketing campaigns that you have active, could mean that your website sees an influx of traffic that it’s not used to. It’s a good time to check into your hosting, server speed, scripts, plugins, and site designs.
Checkout Process – Imagine doing all the hard work getting your customer to your website, even getting them to add their desired item to their basket and then losing the sale because they’re unable to complete the check out. Our advice would be to put through multiple test purchases and make sure you test this process on different devices and browsers. Don’t forget, a large percentage of shoppers will be shopping from their mobile devices, so make sure your checkout works seamlessly on your mobile devices too!
If you need support to assess the current health of your website, please reach out to our experienced team at Carrick Creative, we’ll be happy to run some tests and offer suggestions for improvement, so that your business stands the best chance at securing those all-important website sales.
Top Tip – If you aren’t already doing so, why not add an email subscription offer to your website? Invite people to subscribe and let them know that they’ll be the first to hear about your special offers. By building your email list now, you’ll have a bigger audience to market to when it’s time to do the Black Friday push.
It’s also worth noting that some people will even hold off buying items now, because they believe they’ll be much cheaper to purchase on Black Friday, so it’s important to think about customer behaviour when planning your campaigns.
Create a clear marketing strategy
Firstly, you’ll need to decide what products and services are going to be on offer:
Will you be applying a sitewide discount?
Perhaps a certain collection will be the focus of your attention?
Or maybe there’s some other benefit to shopping with you during this period, e.g. Freebies added in?
Of course, your typical marketing methods can be successful at raising awareness of your special offers and driving traffic to your website. So, make sure you create some great copy and creatives to stand out, capture the attention of your ideal customer and really position your business as the go to business for the product/ service you are selling.
Some businesses might choose to run paid campaigns in the lead up to Black Friday on Google and Facebook to further increase the special offer exposure.
Now that you’ve done the hard work of getting the traffic to your website, you’ll want to make sure that when the time is right these discounts are correctly applied to the products on the website. Communicate this clearly and showcase the discount so people can see that they’re getting a good deal. Some people will opt to display a strike through of the original price and the new price, others will showcase a percentage discount.
It’s always good to show your customers that you appreciate their business, so it’s a good time to check in with your Thank You for Your Purchase message.
What to do after Black Friday?
Even if those visitors to your website don’t convert on Black Friday, all is not lost, especially if you have a sophisticated marketing strategy that incorporates an element of retargeting. Here’s two retargeting campaigns that help recover sales.
Abandoned Cart Email – Often sent within 48 hours of a product being added to basket. You might choose to remind consumers that their basket is still waiting for them. Some businesses will offer a further incentive at this stage to help seal the deal! (Just make sure the numbers work for you, you don’t want to be selling at a loss.)
Social Media Retargeting Campaign – You’ll need to ensure that you have a Facebook Pixel set up on your website, so that the social media platforms know what users have visited your website and taken specific actions such as viewed products or added to baskets. You can then set up marketing campaigns with tailored messaging to remind them of the interaction with your business and encourage them to make that purchase.
If you need any additional support getting your business ready for Black Friday, whether that be ensuring your website and technical elements are working correctly, or creating a marketing strategy specifically for a Black Friday campaign, the team at Carrick Creative are on hand to help.