Black Friday & Cyber Monday Marketing Strategies

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping holidays of the year. For businesses, that means two things: a lot of potential sales and a lot of competition. If you’re not prepared, you could miss out. Here are some Black Friday & Cyber Monday marketing strategies that will help you drive sales and get the most out of these two important shopping days.

Fun Facts

• Black Friday originated in the 1950s to describe the chaos that ensued the day after Thanksgiving in Philadelphia. Suburban shoppers and tourists would flood the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game. Taking advantage of local sales. Shoplifters took this as a prime moment to steal.
• Many merchants tried to change the term to Big Friday to remove the negative connotations. The term did not catch on.
• Late 1980s retailers reinvented Black Friday to what we now know as “red to black” in reference to their revenue.
• Cyber Monday caught on in 2005 when a trend of shoppers would go online the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend.
• 2010 American Express created Small Business Saturday to promote local shops and restaurants.
• Black Friday is the busiest day of the year for plumbers.
• Clothing and accessories are the most purchased items over the weekend.

Statistics

• 196.7M Thanksgiving weekend Shoppers
• $229.21 is the average Thanksgiving weekend spending on holiday-related purchases
• 70% of consumers’ holiday purchases over the weekend were for gifts

Marketing Strategies

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest shopping days of the year—which means they’re also two of the best opportunities for businesses to increase sales and drive revenue. By planning ahead, using promotions, advertising, email marketing, and utilizing social media you’ll be able to attract new/old customers and keep them coming back for more.

Sales

Everyone’s going to be offering discounts on their products and services. What makes your business different? What can you offer that nobody else can? If you can find a way to stand out from the crowd, you’ll be much more likely to catch consumers’ attention—and drive sales.

Conduct some market research by surveying your previous customers with a Black Friday/Cyber Monday discount incentive. Learn what they liked and disliked, and what will get them back. This will help reactivate some customers but most importantly provide insight into future marketing efforts. If you are looking to reactive customers,  Ideas for Reactivating Customers on Black Friday & Cyber Monday is a recommended read with more sale strategies.

One way to entice people to shop with you on Cyber Monday is to offer free shipping on all orders. This is a great incentive for people who are looking for deals because they know they won’t have to pay any extra fees on top of the sale price. If you don’t normally offer free shipping, this is a great time of year to start doing so. Some other great ideas are doing “freebies” and early access sales to get people buzzing about your offering.

Advertising

The most important thing you can do for Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing is to plan your promotions in advance. By planning ahead, you’ll be able to make sure your promotions are aligned with your overall marketing strategy and that they’re properly executed. Plus, you can get a jump on the competition.

Run prospecting campaigns between now and November so that you can retarget them again during Black Friday & Cyber Monday. If they don’t purchase at least you are increasing your brand awareness ahead of the retail holidays. If they do purchase, this will create an audience more likely to purchase again, rather than trying to find first-time buyers. Before you go live, make sure your tracking pixels are setup correctly.

Create a great CTA Pop-up now on your website to begin collecting names and email addresses for future marketing endeavors. Utilizing a website pop-up is a great inexpensive tool that when executed correctly can provide an endless number of leads. Encourage customers to provide their email with an enticing deal, for example, “15% Off your next order”. The pop-up can feature the sales you came up with from above and provide you with the leads to retarget.

Social Media

Social media should be a key part of any marketing campaign, but it’s especially important during high-traffic shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Create social media posts featuring your promotions and make sure to use hashtags like #BlackFridayDeals or #CyberMondaySales to reach a larger audience. Make sure to post regularly leading up to the big days.

If given a budget, you can also run social media ads targeting specific demographics (e.g., people who have engaged with your brand in the past) to boost reach even further. Just be mindful that CPMs will be going up due to supply and demand on ad units, so you might want to increase your daily budgets or expect to reach less of your audience than normal.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to reach your target audience with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. You can send out special coupons and discounts to your email list in the weeks leading up to these two shopping holidays. Make sure to use strong subject lines and call-to-actions to get people to open and click through your emails.

Be sure to target your active or engaged contacts only to stand out and . PPC and other advertising avenues will have a significant price increase due to demand, but Email marketing remains a fixed price.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is not just important to be found on google but it is important to have a user-friendly experience for a strictly Online holiday, like Cyber Monday. If making changes to your website, do so far in advance to work out any bugs to have everything working smoothly for the big day. Check out these tips:

• Site Speed is super important, especially when you expect hundreds if not thousands to be viewing your website at one time. Remove any unneeded plugins or code that may slow down your website.
• Review your checkout process. Be sure to have a smooth customer experience that is self-explanatory. You do not want to have someone leave your site with a cart full just because they got frustrated at checkout.
• Make your website enticing. Audit your website to find improvements in look and style. Make sure all product descriptions are correct and align with your CTAs. It is important that the website looks professional as customers will stray away from messy or DIY-looking websites. Not just because of their preferences but because there is a large spike in scam websites created to hurt the consumer’s identity and wallet.

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