Black Friday & Cyber Monday Retailer Top Tips

While it may seem like a long way away, it's crucial to plan for undoubtedly one of the busiest weekends in the retail calendar, Black Friday through to Cyber Monday, Friday 27th – Monday 30th November 2020.

Whether we like it or not this weekend is focussed on big discounts and sales and you will need a promotion to help you stand against a whole host of messages! Even if you don’t think it fits with your brand, this weekend will have some of the highest traffic and revenue days for both online and offline retailers, and potential customers will be browsing and comparing brands, so it’s good to be part of this, but only in a way that works for you.

Here are just a few areas to consider when planning your Black Friday / Cyber Monday activity: 

  1. Know your margins

We start with this point as it’s a key place to build your promotional activity from. We will discuss different opportunities in later points but while it can be tempting to compete with a high discount promotion, only do this if you can afford to. We promise, you can find a way to compete within your market without having to push huge discounts.

  1. Start Early

It’s going to be loud and busy over this particular weekend so make sure you start your brand promoting activity early. Use the weeks ahead of Black Friday to advertise your brand, during this time advertising costs are lower so it allows you to be seen by potential customers ahead of this weekend. You can then use retargeting campaigns to re-engage these users and get them back onto the site during Black Friday.

  1. Discounts & Promotions

There will be high % and £ discounts flying around during this time and while there is a definite opportunity to go down this route you may find yourself quickly becoming uncompetitive as discounts increase.

A key point here is to understand your audience, the competitor market you operate within and your brand values; then build your offering around this. For example, you could offer free delivery, free gift wrap & gift message, free personalisation & monogramming or free gifts all of which can drive your customers to convert. Anything which shows added value and is outside what you normally offer is likely to tempt your customer base to purchase.

  1. Emails 

Everyone’s inbox will be busy this weekend so you need to stand out from the crowd! A few points that may help:

  • Segment your users e.g. are they a new customer, first purchase customer, never purchased, VIP, retail or wholesale. Create content to reflect these different customer types.
  • Personalisation - only 30% of brands use personalisation in their emails, even though statistics show people are six times more likely to interact with personalised email content. You could use this in your subject lines or your email body copy to drive engagement.
  • AB Test - your subject line needs to stand out it's your first opportunity to engage your potential customer. We would advise you run an AB test on subject lines before sending the winning combination out to the remainder of your database.
  1. Loyalty

A loyalty programme is a brilliant way to not only drive activity over this weekend, but to also build into a customer retention programme. If discounting is difficult due to margins, you could utilise your loyalty programme to drive activity over this weekend such as bonus points across your full range or on slower selling products and collections. By doing this a customer receives an added value to their purchase but will only get the benefit of this on future orders with your company.

If you don't currently have a loyalty programme just get in touch and we can help set this up and create a loyalty programme that works specifically for you.

  1. Urgency 

In our experience, we have found that having time limited offers is the best way to generate the buzz around your activity. If you can’t afford to run a promotion for a full weekend, keep it to a few set hours.

Just make sure you promote this effectively and can support this with a strong website platform and operationally with customer service teams, live chat, dispatch etc.

  1. Time frames

If you sell products with longer lead times and your delivery cut off has gone pre-Black Friday, you could look to promote gift vouchers or other services. You could do a free £5 voucher for every £50 voucher purchased or free design consultations etc. 

If you do work in a long lead time industry make sure you push your Christmas cut off NOW! Especially if you operate within furniture and interiors where people are likely to want to receive this ahead of Christmas.

 

We hope all these few little points are helpful and if you need any help with your website or online marketing or just want to chat feel free to get in touch with us.

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