Best Marketing Practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

The world-famous shopping weekend – Black Friday and Cyber Monday – has always been an excellent opportunity for businesses to maximize profits. Along with boosting your revenue, it is also an opportunity to build brand awareness and visibility. 

However, it can be challenging to get noticed when you are practically competing against every other business out there. And this year, we only expect it to be busier. Online shopping is a preferred option for more and more buyers in the pandemic. 

A clear and thoughtful campaign with the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) strategies will ensure that your brand stands out this holiday season. But no matter how great deals you offer, buyers won’t know about them without a solid marketing strategy. 

To help you get ready for BFCM, we put together a few best practices for marketing your sale this year.

We always say that content is your biggest weapon to hold your audience’s attention. But with 116.5 million emails sent out on Black Friday, your email will likely get lost in the endless space of offers and promotions.  

To stand out against your competitors, you need to offer your buyers better deals. Consumers expect businesses to put out the best deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, you can get in the game earlier with “early access” Black Friday deals. Promoting deals a week early as an “exclusive offer” is a popular strategy to increase visibility. 

Some companies have already started promoting Black Friday deals along with Thanksgiving offers. Another clever tactic used by businesses like Levi’s is giving extra perks like “Free Shipping” if you subscribe to their emails.

Not only does it increase sales, but it also helps you grow your database of engaged customers. 

An engaged contact is someone who has interactions with your marketing emails. Interactions could be actions like opening the emails, checking out the offers on your websites, or purchasing. 

For example, only send multiple emails to contacts that previously opened your email but didn’t buy anything. The chances of these contacts making a purchase are higher than someone who never opened your email. 

Emailing only engaged contacts more often results in higher open-rate, click-through rate and increase in sales. Tools like Mailchimp lets you keep track of the engagement data of your marketing emails.

Even though email marketing is the highest-converting channel, social media is your best friend for faster visibility of your BFCM campaign. Promote your offers on every channel, including paid ads. 

Sometimes, just a social media post can create a huge impact. Take a look at how this simple Instagram picture posted by fashion brand ASOS to promote their Black Friday deal was well received by their audience.  

The key to boosting sales for the website is to have your promotion take all the attention instantly. One of the ways to do this is through pop-ups. Usually, businesses use pop-ups to garner more engaged contacts. Still, many users often find them to be intrusive to their experience. 

However, buyers don’t seem to mind when pop-ups include special offers. An important thing to remember is to set up the signup offer in the pop-up is the same as your most significant sale of the year, so your customers aren’t confused. 

One of the basics of email marketing is “don’t spam your contacts”. But as we mentioned earlier, customers get inundated with emails on high-volume days – Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

Your subscribers will most certainly miss it if you send only one email on these days. Send multiple emails to avoid getting buried in the inbox and make the most out of your email marketing campaign. 

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Ask yourself: “Is my products display compelling buyers to make a purchase?”

Check your product pages and categories, and make sure the images are attractive and the descriptions are accurate. Invest time in beautifying, simplifying or adding detail to product pages to make them more compelling and streamline the buying process.

Elevating the design and look of your page reflects the value and increases the conversion rate.

Bringing attention to your webpage is only half the battle. Your buyer journey is complete when the buyer purchases your products or services. 

You are responsible for providing a better user experience, especially when your buyer wants to cross the finish line. One of the areas to focus on is the checkout page, and making checkout faster and easier will lead to high conversion rates. 

One way to make checkout easier is enabling Google Address Auto-filler, and it makes the process seamless and eliminates unnecessary distractions. Making buying process easy for your customers will help them focus on completing their purchase faster.

With the holiday shopping experience extended into Cyber Monday, you must offer discounts consistently throughout the season. Sales continue to spike when businesses keep offering more compelling offers throughout the week. 

Let’s take a look at how Amazon does it. The company has created segments like “Deals of the Day”, further split into ‘Available’, ‘Upcoming’, ‘Missed’ and ‘Watching’. In doing so, it pushes a sense of urgency amongst buyers and attracts more customers.

The key is to give consistent offers shoppers can’t get enough of!

In conclusion, ready or not, Black Friday and Cyber Monday e-commerce is coming. There is no ‘one size fits all’ campaign for it. Look around, see what others are doing and figure out what works best for your marketing plan. We hope you found some strategies you can apply to your business this year. 

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