Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. If you are in e-commerce, you better prepare early because your competitors will. From the beginning of November or even the end of October, we begin to see advertising campaigns intensively on television, websites, social media, billboards, and bus stops.
Being prepared for this period, carrying out targeted promotional activities and organizing remarkable campaigns can significantly increase your sales. Ready for Black Friday online sales?
When is Black Friday 2022?
This year Black Friday sales will start on Friday, November 25th.
Why Is It Called Black Friday?
Black Friday historically defines the first Friday after Thanksgiving. This day marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping period, a tradition in American culture since the 1930s.
The definition of Black Friday was first used in 1961. That year, people going shopping in Philadelphia, United States, after Thanksgiving, caused massive pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The term emerged when the city’s security forces defined the confusion created by this intensity as Black Friday.
This term, which describes a negative event in the first place, gains the meaning we know today over time, as many retail companies embraced this situation and turned it into a campaign form.
How do Stores Prepare for Black Friday?
Black Friday is the most lucrative time of the year for anybody in e-commerce.
Black Friday Tips 1: Prospecting early
One of the first things you want to do when you’re preparing for the Black Friday and the holiday season is a ton of prospecting. When you’re running your clients campaigns, you should start prospecting somewhere around September. This is essentially you’re growing your buckets of data that you have or retargeting.
During Black Friday, you make most of your clients revenue off of retargeting people that are somewhere in the funnel. There’s a much higher percentage of your clients budgets being spent on retargeting whether it’s middle of funnel or bottom of funnel during the Black Friday season.
So, you should spend the first two months trying to build up those lists of data essentially. That looks like collecting emails, filling up ad retargeting buckets with website visitors, link clicks, engagements, their video views, purchases, and adding to carts any sort of data. That’s because when Black Friday rolls around CMPS and just the general cost to advertise goes up and is a lot more expensive during the holiday season.
Months and weeks leading up to Black Friday, do your best to build these retargeting buckets as much as you possibly can. So, that you have as many people in there. As retargeting users is going to be a lot cheaper than paying for cold traffic on the day of Black Friday.
Black Friday Tips 2: Plan for the entire holiday season
A quick side note as well is when you’re planning for Black Friday, don’t just plan for Black Friday weekend and that kind of like the week leading up to it. Plan for the entire holiday season and the back end of Q4 because one of the biggest mistakes that e-Commerce brands are new to Black Friday make is they’ll plan everything out for Black Friday.
They’ll have a great Black Friday, shopping sale and then December 1st rolls around and they don’t have anything else planned for the rest of the year. However, you still have all of December and most of January as well where people are spending a lot and receptive to deals and offers that your brand might be running.
Black Friday Tips 3: Create specific landing pages
The next thing that you’re going to want to do is create specific landing pages that highlight all of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers.
Make sure that your messaging matches across your entire funnel so anything that you’re promising or talking about in your ads needs to be included on your website for consistency and congruence.
Use bold headlines that showcase your products, your deals and the deadlines on your deals. For an e-commerce store running holiday campaigns, your product pages are going to be primary content.
Lots of people treat their product pages as landing pages and they send ad traffic straight to product pages. If you’re doing that you want to make sure that you update all of your product pages, descriptions, banners, anything on those product pages.
Again making sure that your deals and the information on your product pages are congruent with what you’re running in your email marketing, SMS marketing, paid marketing, and organic marketing.
Black Friday Tips 4: Order fulfillment
Another key tip for Black Friday that is often very overlooked is order fulfillment. If you’re selling multiple products for your brand, then you want to organize and highlight the inventory you want to sell the most of. Make sure that you have plenty of inventory for your hottest and most popular sellers.
If you’re planning on pushing or prioritizing a specific product, potentially centralize that or highlight that on your website and even make the offer more attractive so offer more of a discount or throw in more bonus products to incentivize that order.
Also, prepare all your gift cards, gift baskets, and bundles that you might want to offer. Make sure that your order fulfillment process is dialed in for the holiday rush.
If you’re doing your own order fulfillment make sure that you’re staffed and ready to ship. If you’ve struggled with this in previous years consider just hiring an extra couple of people to help you for your expected surgeon sales.
In the age of two day free shipping you cannot afford delays with your shipping especially during holiday season.
Black Friday Tips 5: Include last day available
Another bonus tip is to include the last date available for Christmas shipping. Lots of people are ordering gifts for Christmas and they want to make sure that they arrive on time ideally before Christmas Eve. So, if your product genuinely takes seven, eight or ten plus days to ship, make sure that you’re not pushing sales or pushing orders to people that are ordering for Christmas anytime past December 15th or December 21st whatever your order date cut off is.
Black Friday Marketing Campaigns
Creating a detailed advertising plan
It’s good to plan all of your advertising campaigns in advance for October and November. So, make a plan! For example; this week you’re doing these advertisements, this week you’re doing those advertisements.
Create all of your creatives in advance and be sure that you have a variety of them to use for any advertising campaign that you planned. Create a campaign calendar and all of the creatives that you have in mind. Then when the time comes you will be able to test all of it and find out what works better for you.
When the time comes and you actually have to advertise which is around now, it’s good to have a variety of campaigns that you can do because if you will try to create them kind of in a moment, you will not have enough time to execute and design all of your ideas.
Just make sure that you have a very definitive plan and that you have all of the creatives prepared for you.
Diversification in marketing
Most of the time a lot of e-Commerce store owners do the same thing, you advertise only through Facebook Ads. Diversification is one of the most important things for your marketing. You have to have a couple of channels that attract leads and customers to your products.
Make sure that your system is diversified. For example, you can also use Google Ads. They have much better CPMS during the Black Friday times. You can use Taboola for native ads. You can use such channels as Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube and all other platforms.
There are so many platforms to use paid ads at. Don’t keep all eggs in one basket.
Partnership marketing
You can also look into partnership marketing. Partnership marketing is kind of the marketing of the future or not so future anymore it’s the reality these days. It means that you can advertise your product with the use of advertising partners. Some of the ideas for partnership marketing is:
- Affiliate program
- Referral marketing and
- Influencer marketing
You probably heard all of these names but if you don’t use any of those channels yet, we recommend looking into them. Actually the previous blog on our website goes into details about “How To Create A Sales Strategy That Works For Your Online Store”. Check out this last blog post if you want to know how you can create a sales strategy that will work for your online store.
Conclusion
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With Shopiroller, your products can be published on your Opencart, WooCommerce or Shopify eCom site with a few clicks.
- We offer easy-to-use marketplace integration solutions.
- You can list your products on all platforms within minutes.
- Manage your orders faster thanks to e-invoice and cargo integration.
The biggest mistake that online retailers make during the holiday season is not being prepared and not preparing early enough. If you’re looking for more info on how to run a successful e-Commerce business during the holidays, you can book a call with our team. Otherwise enjoy your holiday season!
