Black Friday and Cyber Monday are tremendous opportunities for marketers to maximize their sales during the last few weeks of the fiscal year. 

Whereas Black Friday offers a hype bracket to build awareness and create new audiences for your brand, virtually competing against every other brand and business out there can be challenging. 

To have a successful sales season the first step is to create a head strong strategy for your campaign. The sooner you can start, the better considering how much time you will need to plan your marketing strategy- product inventory, sale discounts, promotion material, content, banners etc.  

Another very important aspect that you need to consider is if your brand is equipped to handle the seasonal rush and heavy sales. You must be prepared to cater to the 100% audience that you’re reaching out to and more. 

Utilizing the best Black Friday marketing strategies with clear and thoughtful campaigns will ensure your brand stands out this holiday season; boosting your offline and online sales, and creating a new customer base. 

Here are 10 tips that will definitely help you plan a strong and systematic Black Friday campaign: 

1. Experiment with paid ads

Organic traffic is evergreen but if you’re running an E-commerce, you have to agree that leveraging paid ads can be absolutely invaluable for peak sale season. More than 70% of e-commerce businesses claim that Pay Per Click advertising has created a noticeable upward curve in sales. 

Black Friday season is a perfect time to curb the dilemma of leaning on organic audiences or creating new targets through paid advertising. Our creative team at Modifyed assists entrepreneurs that have no prior experience. We help assess the ability of your brand and set the targets, budgets, visuals in sync with your brand aesthetic to create a spot-on Black Friday campaign.

There are several other AI and automated ways to create campaigns and paid ads that might work for your business but again, human essence is a necessity if you really want to convince your customer to believe in your brand.

2. Schedule pop-ups

Retailers who know how to boost Black market sales bet that displaying relevant pop-ups on the right time is a highly effective way to encourage customers.

Whether you just want to introduce the audience to your amazing black friday deals or convert them into a long term loyal buyer, consciously targeted and pop-ups can definitely contribute in making or breaking the customer experience.  

Pop-ups are one of the most effective ways to remarket your brand to the audience essentially during peak sale season. Additionally, to create urgency in your pop-ups you can add a countdown that will help in pushing interested buyers to make immediate purchases.

3. Build Your Black Friday Email List

Before you even begin planning your black friday campaign make sure that you have a solid ecosystem of potential buyers, existing customers, people with similar interests and of course your own social circle. 

Make sure that your deals and offers are reaching out to the relevant set of groups way before you actually start the campaign. This not only helps in building curiosity but also silently influences the audience and creates a sense of desire. 

Again, your Emails should feel more personal than spammy to the people who are already engaging with your brand.

4. Catchy Subject lines will take you a long way!

BLACK FRIDAY IS CANCELLED!

Sounds abrupt but intriguing, doesn’t it?

For someone who’s looking to shop during black friday would definitely want to read further. 

Similarly, your subject lines and CTAs must be super catchy.  

Once you have a quality email list with scheduled pop-ups and high-quality CTAs, you need to grab the attention of people to actually open your emails. During the 2020 Black Friday season, email providers processed over 5.8 billion emails on Black Friday.

Records suggest that using minimal tricks like personalising the subject line by adding recipients name or adding urgency like “Time is running out” “Last few days left” can increase engagement at a perceptible rate.

5. More than just sales

Both Indian and International markets heavily strategize around Black Friday, especially the E-commerce industry. Black Friday is generally associated with heavy discounts and numerous offers. 

However, this time of the year is very fruitful to get your brand that exposure. You must go beyond discounts and provide additional benefits to new users and convert them into long-term customers.

6. Utilize user-generated content

Competing with every other brand, the E-commerce industry can be extremely challenging. There are chances that you might face a creative block, this is when user-generated content comes in handy. 

UGC doesn’t only give you an idea of how your brand is being received by the audience but also naturally builds credibility. Using UGC also acts like a testimonial and is definitely an incredible marketing tactic. 

Some of the big brands turn to influencer marketing which is again a type of UGC. These influencing personalities create make-believe content featuring your products or services which directly markets your brand to their thousands and millions of existing followers. 

If you’re running a small business, micro-influencers might also help you get a certain number of audience in exchange for products and/or a discount they can share with their followers.

7. Consider mobile-only deals

Studies show that people who shop online from their mobile phones are more likely to make purchase decisions quicker. This in fact is a great loophole to target mobile shoppers

Last year during Black Friday over 55% of sales were made on mobile phones, and these numbers are only anticipated to grow over the coming years. 

A few things that you still keep in mind is that your website must be optimized for mobile traffic. Check your mobile loading time, configuration, and image sizes to ensure mobile shoppers get the best possible experience and  to retain your viewers interest. 

8. Simplify the checkout experience

Reports suggest that over 56% of people abandon their carts due to additional charges presented during checkout, 25% because of complicated website navigation and 37% because they are just browsing. 

To curb all these issues and retain the viewer until they actually make the purchase you must keep the following things in mind: 

• Keep your website user and mobile friendly. 
• Keep the checkout formalities to the minimum, the buyer might lose interest in the time span. 
• Optimize the loading time of your website. 
• Have multiple payment options available. 
• Display additional offers/limited offers on the checkout window. For eg: Get 10% additional discount on this purchase or Add items worth $$ to get an additional 15% discount. 
• Keep multiple currency display options if you’re providing worldwide services or shipping. 

Over 50% of people who shop online indulge in impulse buying. To boost these purchases on Black Friday, reduce the on-site barriers to buy. 

One click buy CTAs such as “BUY NOW” “SHOP NOW” work really well. It doesn’t give the user any time to get distracted and lands directly on the checkout page. 

9. Provide gift guides

Black Friday tradition marks the beginning of the holiday season.This is a perfect time to buy gifts, make purchases you planned throughout the year and splurge!  

But the biggest challenge all of us have at least once faced is WHY TO BUY? They often search for ideas to find the perfect gifts for friends, family and colleagues.

Creating gift guides, Blogs on gifting ideas, and making gift hampers that can be purchased directly from your website can intrigue buyers interest. 

Here are some Ideas you can use to attract gift buyers this season: 

• 5 trending gift ideas to impress your partner
• Tick mark your Christmas List with these 10 gift ideas
• Best products to gift a traveller this season!
• 15 foolproof gift ideas for Christmas.

10. Tease Your Next Campaign

As I mentioned before, Black Friday starts long before Friday. But it doesn’t end on Friday either.

Black Friday starts long before the actual Friday and doesn’t really end on the next day. Since Black Friday is just the beginning of the festive season i.e Thanksgiving and Christmas, there is a lot of scope to experiment with your marketing strategy. 

Before you end your BF campaign,you can subtly introduce your next big move.Start leaning on Thanksgiving or any other new campaigns that you have planned while still lingering on Black Friday front. 

Make your audience believe that even when the sale season ends, there is a lot more to explore. 

Bonus Tip: Always keep in mind that your buyer is well informed and has knowledge of what they’re buying. Do not mislead them in the shadow of “Heavy Discount” and “Exciting offers” if you want them to keep coming back.