Methods to increase your sales on Black Friday
Retailers all over the world are getting ready for the biggest shopping event of the year, Black Friday – this event was named “ Black Friday” because it is when retailers earn their biggest profits – and back in the day, black ink was used to record profits and red ink was used to record losses. Believe it or not, only about 50% of shoppers actually set foot inside a brick and mortar store – the rest of the shoppers make their purchases online. This is why small and large online retailers are fighting for a piece of the online pie. With such fierce competition, how can you increase your sales this Black Friday?
Preparation is the first step in the grand scheme of generating revenue on Black Friday – the sooner you start preparing, the better. You have to consider how much time it takes to plan out your marketing strategy, product inventory, sales discounts, and promotion material – website/social media banners, videos, blogs – setting up the ads, etc.
You need to ensure that your customer support and dispatch team is ready to handle that large amount of orders and traffic in a short time.
We have searched the web for the most effective marketing strategies and here’s what we’ve found:
Learn from last year’s events
If you still have your Google Analytics data from last year, it wouldn’t hurt having a look at the key metrics or other reports from last year’s business sales. Reviewing the information can help you have a better understanding of what to do this year – how can you better prepare your inventory? Which items will sell out? How do customers react to different promotional triggers? – someone once said that we can learn a lot of things from the mistakes that we make.
Advertise your Black Friday sale before it even happens – Create a hype
As with any other holiday season sale campaign, Black Friday is successful because retailers employ powerful psychological triggers such as urgency and scarcity to cause a spike in sales.
One way to maximize the effect of these triggers is to build anticipation around your sales before they even happen. You need to create teaser campaigns – banners, videos – or build on the notion of exclusivity, create content to fan curiosity around the products – but you need to keep yourself from divulging all the details of the sale until the day begins
Hourly sales
Also known as Flash Sales – they have an enormous potential to boost your Black Friday sales – If you are offering 40% off on Black Friday, consider increasing the discount to 45%-50% for an hour to drive even more sales. You can run several flash sales over the course of the day. In the case of flash sales, it is wise to use a countdown timer and popups to make website visitors aware of the limited time offer.
Use the power of social media
Social media marketing channels can play an important role in Black Friday sales promotions. The right channels can boost your sales and increase your revenue, the wrong channels can end up being a waste of money and effort.
Facebook is one of the best marketing platforms that you can use to attract customers – making it one of the most effective ways to increase your sales on Black Friday. It has over two billion active members worldwide – meaning that it has enormous potential when it comes to marketing your business. You can use Facebook to retarget existing customers and to find new customers as well – through stories, groups, messenger, etc.
To make the best out of Facebook marketing, you need to start building a community around your business – creating a follower base is not hard, keeping your followers interested in your product on the other hand is. That’s why you will have to engage with them as often as you can to keep them interested.
Facebook ads can increase the reach of your Black Friday sale but it will take extra time and resources to set them up.
Instagram is another social media platform that can be used to increase sales on Black Friday. Instagram’s organic reach can help you boost Black Friday sales if you use it properly – the media, hashtags, and CTAs you choose can help you engage more audiences. You need to take advantage of Instagram stories and IGTV and ads to increase your reach.
SEO
Want free traffic? – there’s no better way to get it than SEO – yes, you’ve heard me, you can get customers to visit your website through organic searches without any cost. If you already run a blog on your website, interlink your Black Friday content to your existing blog posts, especially to ones that get lots of traffic. SEO takes a bit of time, so be sure to create your Black Friday content early, so it can start ranking on the top of SERPs before the day of the sale.
Email marketing
Probably the best channel to use to retarget existing customers – Offer your subscribers discounts and promotions to get maximum results with email marketing. There is no doubt that social media is thriving but email marketing is a time-tested strategy to expand both your sales and customer base. Email inboxes are especially noisy over the holiday period, so try to come up with unique, interesting subject lines that will pop up in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Improve the mobile experience of the website
Nowadays online shoppers use their mobile devices to browse the internet, if your mobile site experience isn’t on par with your competitors, you’ll lose valuable customers during the holiday period. You can boost your likelihood of mobile shopping success by improving your site navigation, speed and you should offer one-click purchase to mobile-first customers. You also have to keep in mind that responsive design is not mobile optimization – you can read more about these to concepts here.
Black Friday is coming, whether you’re ready or not. If you still haven’t started planning out your strategy, now’s a better time than ever. Your Black Friday strategy has to take everything into consideration – from mobile speed optimizations to online and offline promotions to shipping and contingency plans for unexpected issues. We wish you a very successful Black Friday!
