It’s that time of year again! Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) week is creeping up on us and we want to make sure you take all the necessary steps to maximize your success in the busiest sales season of the year.
Whether you’re in the e-commerce space or the service industry, you are able to capitalize on this time and help increase revenue for your business.
What is Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM)?
Black Friday falls on the Friday after American Thanksgiving, which commences the chaos of the Christmas shopping season. Hundreds of people will flood the doors of big box stores every year, but as the e-commerce industry has risen, the scope of what businesses can do with Black Friday has grown exponentially. So much so that the holiday itself has extended to what we now call Cyber Monday, a push to encourage people to shop online and avoid the mass crowds.
Together they now make the largest in-store & online sales period of the year. But this sales period should not be limited solely to businesses with physical products. There is a huge opportunity for service-based companies to take advantage of this period and help draw new clientele in as well.
What steps can I take to prepare?
Do your research!
There are tons of BFCM webinars and success stories from years prior that will help you get in the mindset of what this sale will mean to you. Use these tools if you need direction on where to begin your BFCM sale. If you have run sales in the past, use your data to figure out what has worked and use this as a guide to enhance this year’s BFCM sale.
Come up with a plan from beginning to end
This begins with a brainstorming session that outlines what the sale will look like for your business, including the duration you expect the sale to go on. Every year BFCM sales begin earlier and earlier, so don’t drop the ball and wait until the last minute.
Tease your clientele!
Build up the anticipation of your upcoming sale. Tease it on social media, through email marketing, or even have a countdown on your website. But not too soon. Letting the sale buildup will slow down your sales once you announce it, so keep that in mind. You don’t want to disrupt your sales funnel too much, but you also want to give people enough notice to prepare.
Have your assets ready ahead of time
To help with the success of your BFCM sales period, you want to do a good job promoting it. Paid efforts aside, sales are easily promoted through other means of marketing, like on social media and through email marketing. If you don’t have either of these, you should begin starting them now.
Social media marketing will involve image creative that should be prepared ahead of time. That way you aren’t scrambling to create assets the week of. Through the use of free tools like Canva, create posts that will go out every day during the sale. You can load these posts into a post scheduler like Hootsuite or Buffer. That way the stress of keeping a consistent posting schedule is minimized, as it can all be prepared ahead of time.
Email marketing is a strong way of reaching customers directly. You should already have a good list of emails obtained over time through online sales, form submissions, or even newsletter sign-ups. Now is the time to effectively remarket to those individuals. Klaviyo and Mailchimp are great tools to help you create and schedule your BFCM sale emails.
The more you put in, the more you get out
I could go on and on about the different marketing tools and strategies at your disposal, but it all boils down to how much you are willing to put in. BFCM is a huge sales period, everyone is doing it, so you need to put in the effort in order to stand out.
How do I know what the correct promotion for my business is?
There is no standardized, “correct”, be-all-end-all promotion that will generate the most conversions for every business. How you will know what works best for you is by testing different sales to hone in on what works.
Get creative with it
Everyone is used to a percentage discount by now, it’s what most people expect when they see a sale. So get creative with it.
For example, you could offer a discount combined with a free mystery gift for purchases above $100. Something like this will help increase your average order value. If you want to be able to cover shipping, you could offer a discount combined with free shipping over $50. This will entice people to spend over the threshold.
One of my favourites recently has been the increased discount, as the order gets larger. A sale like this pushes people to spend more in order to get the higher discount.
You could even create bundles of your products or services. Offering two or more items at a discount that still increases your revenue is a great way to help sell your inventory/services, by also increasing your average sale.
Will it generate positive revenue?
At the end of the day, you want this sale period to result in a net positive. So you need to take the time, crunch the numbers, and figure out what discount for you is creative and enticing enough to stand out, while also resulting in a positive ROI.
What about service-based discounts?
The scope of what a service-based company could do with BFCM varies from business to business. But generally speaking, you could offer a discount on their first session, waive a certain fee usually applied to your service, you could even offer a BOGO (buy one get one) discount on a single service, or combine services you want to help promote.
Thats why I say BFCM isn’t just for e-commerce, you just need to have an open mind, figure out what discounts will still generate you revenue, and exercise your creativity.
Should I be investing in paid advertising during Black Friday/Cyber Monday?
All biases aside, paid advertising is the solution to gaining exposure you wouldn’t otherwise have through organically promoting your sale. With thousands of businesses preparing for BFCM, you need to invest money into paid advertising to help you make the most out of this sales period.
Anyone can put together a campaign on a search or social paid platform, but there are strategists and specialists that are trained experts in this field. So if you’re going to throw money into a campaign to help promote your sale, I strongly advise you to also put money into someone that can help you put your best foot forward.
Did you happen to know?
seoplus+ is introducing a premium Black Friday/Cyber Monday Campaign package! Take your campaigns to the next level with a dedicated Black Friday plan including a brainstorming meeting, sale-specific ad creative, post-launch monitoring/optimization, and reporting.
Reach out to us today if you are interested in learning more about how we can elevate your paid ads presence for the most important time of the year.
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