The biggest shopping day of the year brings the most opportunity and the most competition. For some retailers and outlets, Black Friday is literally the day the business goes into the black. Without it, many retailers would be stuck in the slow season, treading water behind inventory and trying to catch up with accounts payable.
In order to take advantage of increased web traffic on Black Friday, a company must be prepared. Here are some best practices to make sure that you stand out from the digital crowd this Black Friday.
Create a Theme Around Black Friday
In order to capitalize off of holidays such as Black Friday, you must first show your audience that you fully recognize the importance of the event. You need to do this consistently from your landing page all the way to your sales page. Most companies accomplish this through a Black Friday loss leader sale, but you do not have to necessarily have a sale in order to make this work.
Simply acknowledge Black Friday and put forth products that you believe are most likely to sell to attract attention. You may be able to determine these items more easily through a quantitative presentation of your inventory.
Loss Leaders
That being said, do not discount the idea of having a sale for the Black Friday holiday. However, make the sale work for you. Your loss leaders should be products that have many add-ons or complementary products that go along with them. Once your audience becomes enticed by the original item, they will naturally want the upgrades as well.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Although you want to invest in a seasonal upgrade with loss leaders, you do not want to make your site overly complicated. If people get confused, then they will leave. This is true of any holiday, but it is especially true of Black Friday. People know that they have more choices on this holiday, so they will be less patient with every website, including yours. They are going to respond best to the sites that are displayed well and convenient to use.
Investing in a Remarketing Campaign
You want to be able to keep up with the people who visit your website but leave without making a purchase. This is done through a remarketing campaign. Remarketing is a great investment for Black Friday through to Cyber Monday. It keeps up with all of your non-buying visitors in an automated algorithm, “stalking” them around the web to make them convert into customers.
Properly implemented, the end-user will not even realize that he or she has been targeted with a marketing campaign. Remarketing simply places your products in the ad positions on other websites they are visiting. Not only that, but you can specify which products you want to go with those ads, increasing the chance of a conversion.
Connecting Black Friday to Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is officially a “thing,” not a fad. Millennials stretch the Black Friday holiday over into Cyber Monday, and they spend incredible amounts of money. The Washington Post reports that people between the ages of 24 and 35 spend around $420 per person during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday “holiday weekend.”
Make it clear that any sales you have will extend throughout the entire weekend and into Monday. You may also want to use the Black Friday leadoff to create email lists that are specific to the weekend. This is the one time during the year that hard-sell direct email campaigns may work out well for you.
Social Media Advertising
The increasing number of digital natives that will be coming into the retail space on Black Friday means that you have an unprecedented chance for sales through social media advertising. You can gain even more traction by putting your sales on websites like Twitter and Facebook.
Coordinate your social media posts with actions on your website so that your theme and latest activity is always synchronized. Invest in services that automate your flow so that real-time updates can be accomplished at scale with no hiccups. This will keep your audience engaged, and they will wonder what you have next. You may even be able to get repeat visits from the same customers, resulting in loyalty sales over the long weekend.
Banner Ads & IP Targeting
You can actually begin this part of your campaign before Black Friday. If you have an idea of the type of prospect that will come to your website during the long weekend, you can target them early with a banner ad campaign.
Once this campaign has been started, it can flow directly into your remarketing campaign so that you can keep the pressure on your prospects and converts to come back to your website. You can even begin multiple visual campaigns at once, directing each of them to a personalized landing page depending on the previous behavior of that particular prospect.
Multiple Touch Campaigns
Regardless of the campaign channels that you choose, having a multiple touch campaign is definitely in your best interest. You do not want to lengthen the sales funnel during Black Friday, but you can definitely increase your chance at a good conversion rate by making sure that your customers engage with your products on multiple occasions.
It is usually best to combine some of the above techniques into a single campaign. If your prospects are getting your offers through email, social media, and IP targeted banner ads, then they cannot help but consider your sale more seriously. Do not think so much of oversaturation during the short weekend – this is the time when people are looking for direction on what to buy for the entire holiday season after.
On-Page vs. Off-Page
At the same time that you are saturating your potential customers with off-page advertisements, you must keep your on-page stuff simple. Previously mentioned under the heading “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify,” this point is worth repeating from the perspective that your landing page is actually the end of the sales funnel rather than the beginning.
Most people will find your products through outlets like social media and advertisements from other websites. Unless you are a big time distributor or retailer, people will probably not find your landing page directly from a Google search. You will need to rely on the off-page techniques to bring your prospects in. However, once they are in, they should be given a beeline to the products that they are most interested in. Carve away the on-page fluff for best results on Black Friday.
Follow the best practices above to ensure that you stand out without being overbearing. As more people flock to the online space for day-to-day retail, the efforts that you put in today will be rewarded even more down the line.
Read Also
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Digital Products + Black Friday Deals 2018 from TemplateMonster
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Short Tips on How to Make Your Website Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday