On Friday the 26th November 2021, we will see the return on Black Friday. While Black Friday has always been known as the biggest sales event day of the year, it has now turned into a whole sales weekend, with Cyber Monday following on the 29thDecember 2021. For the US with Thanksgiving just a few days before, it’s a whole sales week!
Cyber Monday took the lead in online sales last year with a total of $10.8 billion. This is a huge jump from 2 years ago when sales reached $7.9 billion in the US.
For the UK the total sales throughout Black Friday to Cyber Monday reached 7.5 billion British pounds in 2020. Cyber Monday has become one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Whether this is down to it being the last major shopping day of the year, the wealth of online deals, or the fact that it’s online- we are yet to figure out. But one thing is for sure, it is obvious from looking at growing trends that Cyber Monday is a growing popular retail day and one that you do not want to miss out on!
For many, this weekend is where the majority of their Christmas shopping will take place. Consumers purposely wait for this very moment to catch the best deals and shop to their heart's content with that one thing on their mind. – Deals, Deals, Deals!
That’s why it is so important for you to consider and carefully plan a whole marketing strategy around Black Friday weekend to make the most revenue you can.
Coming up in this post:
As you will probably guess from the fast-rising Cyber Monday stats, online shopping is now doing much better than in-store purchasing. This is even true for Black Friday, with 68% of Black Friday shoppers participating online rather than in-store.
The results speak for themselves. Over the last year, the offline footfall for Black Friday weekend was lower than the previous year. A survey taken by Salecycle.com found that 0% of Black Friday shoppers would ONLY complete their shopping in-store. Yes, we said that right, 0%!
Where most people from the survey said they would shop from desktop only. With desktop and mobile-only coming in at a close second.
So with these statistics in mind, let's sink our teeth into a revenue soaring Black Friday Marketing Strategy for 2021!
If you sell products or services, then gift cards and gift vouchers are your tickets to skyrocketing your revenue over Black Friday weekend.
Customers are searching more and more for a good experience over the cheapest price. This not only translates to the types of goods and services people are buying but also to the shopping experience. Having a seamless, trustable website to purchase from is a top priority to shoppers.
People are also preferring to spend their hard-earned money on experiences that create memories, rather than on goods and products. This is another reason why gift vouchers and gift cards are becoming more and more popular.
When it comes to Black Friday the results are in and it looks like it’s men who purchase the big-ticket items! Men are 10% more likely to spend over $1,200 on Black Friday than women and 6% more likely than women to spend over £1,200 on Cyber Monday.
What does this tell you when it comes to looking at gift vouchers?
Cater your Black Friday gift voucher experiences to men!
It’s not too late, if you act fast you can set up an online gift voucher store in minutes with Enjovia.com, see here for our system features.
It’s now more important than ever to be optimised for mobile.
To be mobile-ready not only do you need to have your website design configured and optimised for mobile and tablet screen sizes, but your load times need to be quick too!
To make the most of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday online mobile sales, you should send your customers BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) promotions with clear Call-to-actions directly to their smartphones. For more information on how you can be mobile-ready, check out our past post: 5 Reasons Why Mobile Optimisation Is The Key To Successful Ecommerce.
Now it is time to start deciding on what promotions you will run for Black Friday weekend.
You don’t need to offer crazy discounts that you can't afford. But do show that your buyers are getting a deal or discount if they buy during this period. Even 10-20% off can be enough to encourage people to buy.
Types of discounts you can include:
Things to make sure your promotions go smoothly:
People get very excited at the prospect of a flash sale. It also helps them make a decision faster than it would normally take them, as the prospect of saving extra money or getting an exclusive offer is too good to miss.
Running a flash sale the day before Black Friday saw a 51% growth in traffic, 50% rise in conversion rate and a whopping 236% increase in revenue.
This legitimate fear mainly among millennials is so prominent that FOMO was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.
That’s why maximising people’s FOMO is so successful for Black Friday year on year. Often logic is replaced with an emotional drive to make sure they are getting great deals that they wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to get.
So to maximise FOMO you can do the following:
Start Marketing Early
Plant the seeds into your potential buyer’s heads early, and give them time to sow.
You do this by showing gentle reminders of the up and coming sales that are soon to arrive from Black Friday weekend. You can do this on social media, physical marketing in-house and email marketing.
Set up a sign-up to get deals and promotions for Black Friday early list. This way your shoppers who are interested in receiving notice of your deals first will get exclusive emails with direct links to products when Black Friday arrives.
They will appreciate the reminder, and it is great for business too, as these people are more likely to purchase f they’ve had it in their mind for a while. You can then use this list for future deals and promotional email campaigns.
As part of planning your promotions, it’s a great idea to create exclusive deals and packages that are only available this Black Friday weekend. These can include:
Create bundle offerings that are exclusive to BFCM only. For example, if you are selling gift voucher experiences, you could offer an overnight stay with 3-course dinner, with a full spa day for £300 when usually these two items would cost £450. This incentivises people to spend more, as they feel they are getting a fantastic deal that would be just too great to miss out on. For the extra £100 they spend they get a £150 discount on an overnight stay package.
For gift voucher experiences especially add-ons are the way to boost revenue instantly. People love to have personalised and unique experiences, so having the option to add-on an item to your experience gives it that personal touch just for you (or more likely your loved one).
Through our gift voucher sales, add-ons create 5% more revenue- and that's throughout the year-imagine how this figure skyrockets for Black Friday.
Up-sell your items by creating a suggestion on cheaper products to upgrade for only “a discounted amount” or however you want to present your more expensive items. Put larger discounts on the more expensive items to encourage people to spend more. They will feel like they are getting a better deal, and you make more money. Win=win!
Show customers before the checkout stage of complementary items that go well with what they are purchasing. You can encourage sales with this by saying, “buy 3 or more items to receive 20%”.
Shouting loud and proud about your offerings is what you need to do to attract people to your website. If they don’t know what you’re offering, they won’t know to buy from you.
#BlackFriday, #CyberMonday, #BlackFriday2019, #BFCM, love it or hate it, Black Friday trends on social media every year. So why not jump into the hype and produce content that can be shared and talked about.
Get social and current with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Use the relevant hashtags in all your posts to increase awareness and engagement. Now let’s look at some of the ways you can use social media to get trending this Black Friday weekend.
People love to see pictures, so when advertising your Black Friday sales on social media, use high-quality images. Be sure to include a link to your Black Friday sales with every social post.
Create posts up until the weekend and over the course of the weekend.
You can use great scheduling websites such as Buffer and Hootsuite to plan and schedule your social media content ahead of time. The best part? Both these sites are free! The best thing about these scheduling platforms is that you can use different social media platforms. Plus, they have a catalogue of images that you can use for free if you want to add some variety to your posts in between your own images.
With new features on many platforms such as the opinion polls, or Q&A with Instagram stories, businesses have so many opportunities to reach out and engage with their audience. Black Friday weekend is a perfect time to do just that.
Use Questions and Answers or polls option to find out what people are buying. People love to share their great deals, so you could give them an opportunity to brag about their best buys. In between engagement, use this as an opportunity to plug sales from your website for Black Friday.
Keep content relevant, consistent and fun! Black Friday is a great time to show a humorous side of your brand if it’s applicable.
And don’t forget to use those hashtags!
You may even get questions, complaints and compliments from people on social media. If this occurs, reply to them in a swift and timely manner, while being polite and professional. It’s amazing how responding to negative reviews online can drastically change someone’s bad perception of your brand into a positive one. We talk about this in our post on Marketing strategies and promotions.
On Cyber Monday alone referral traffic from social media goes up 240%!
There’s nothing that holds more value than a trusted friends option. That’s why recommendations through friends and family are the most trusted form of advertising.
For example, when it comes to gift vouchers, 60% of consumers have been introduced to a new brand by receiving a gift voucher, and 17.7% have become a loyal customer as a result.
Create hype and a sense of urgency for people to share loud and proud about your Black Friday sales.
With every Black Friday sale, you can enter buyers into your free social media giveaway prize draw and send them a link to enter. Make the requirements of the competition entry to tag 2 or more friends into the post. This way word will spread exponentially of your Black Friday competition and of course your official Black Friday Sale on your website. Make sure to announce the winner before the end of the Black Friday weekend sale. You could even host a separate competition for Cyber Monday too.
Also be sure to send the winners of the prize your free item, with the request that they share their win on social media.
This type of promotional strategy gets people on social media sharing and recognising your brand immediately. You’ll gain a truckload of new followers quickly and instant brand recognition.
“A huge 60% of customers actually want to receive promo emails from companies they love.”
That’s why it’s important to make sure you send a Black Friday weekend email campaign to your customers, it can increase revenue by a huge 330%!
Things to consider in your email campaigns:
Creating a bespoke Black Friday gift guide is a great way to help indecisive shoppers make a decision on what gifts to buy people for Christmas.
You can create your gift guides on specific landing pages, through email campaigns, on social media and through a blog post if you have a blog.
Here are some gift ideas you can write about:
Create a specific landing page for your BFCM that lasts all year long. Long-standing landing pages of a year or more have a backlog of previous search positions which Google will recognise and prioritise over a fresh Black Friday page with a new and clean SEO.
So re-use your Black Friday landing page year after year to be more likely listed top of the search engine results. Just be sure to optimise it for all devices.
You need to communicate to website visitors that you’re participating in Black Friday. And where could be more important than on your website homepage? Create a link within this header image that takes shoppers straight to your Black Friday Sales page.
Remember we spoke about FOMO and flash sales earlier? Well, this is another tactic that gets decisions made and persuaded fast.
Adding a countdown timer to your website for certain products makes it less likely that consumers will ‘shop around’ competitors websites and decide to buy there and then with you on the spot.
It’s so important to follow up with abandoned carts. So many times I’ve put items into a basket only to decide whether or not to buy later when I’ve received a reminder email that has convinced me to go and check out the order right away. (Usually, this is when companies have sent me a 10% off code to persuade me). And it works!
Sending an email to customers who abandoned their carts with a reminder, or discount will convert at least some of them back to your store and make that final checkout. It worth doing. It costs you nothing, in return for recaptured lost sales!
You want to be persuading your previous customers to come back to your website. This is easier than chasing new visitors. Creating funnels are an easy way to do just that. It’s even more important on Black Friday weekend!
With just around a month until the big day, it’s time to get prepared and make the most revenue you can this year. Good luck with your Black Friday marketing strategy!
For more information on how you increase revenue with experiences check out our post on how experiences are changing the buying economy.
