If your business model is applicable to running a Black Friday Sale, then we’ve got a little tasty treat for you. As most are aware (and potentially scared) of the endless hoards to people bombarding brick-and-mortar stores to get that TV for 50% off, most people have recently resorted to doing their Black Friday shopping online. This is not only to save themselves from being trampled on, but also because of the convenience that online shopping provides.
This premise applies to business owners and retailers as well. For a business owner or retailer, online sales are much more organized, less chaotic, and less destructive than to deal with the endless stream of crazies who’ve overrun their physical storefront like a viking invasion.
Many businesses rely on Black Friday to boost sales and to dump inventory as the new year approaches. As we are certain your business has a plan for Black Friday by now, we are going to give you a few tips and tricks that can drive explosive sales for your business on Black Friday.
1. Extend Your Black Friday Sale Timeline
We’ve noticed an increase in the extension of Black Friday sale periods throughout the years, and believe us, it works. Extending your sale timeline can mean running a “Black Friday Week” sale, in which the sale will run from the Monday before Black Friday until the end of the following Cyber Monday. This will allow potential customers to have enough time to act throughout the week, as opposed to one individual day. With almost every retail company running Black Friday sales, you want to allow customers the ample time to sort through the barrage of Black Friday emails, ads, and texts to view your products and make a purchase. From our experience in the last few years, we have been able to hit our Black Friday sales goals BEFORE Black Friday even started.
2. Ensure Your Discount is Appropriate
The last thing you want to do on Black Friday Week is choose a random discount percentage for your products. When properly pricing your products, there is no exact formula. You’ll need to find a balance between three different pillars: your cost margins, competitor’s discounts, and industry discounts. If your retail business is the only one selling that product, then this is pretty easy. However, if you have competition in the marketplace, you’ll want to do some research to see what type of discounts they will be offering (or you can use historical data). On Black Friday week, customers are impulse buying through sheer discounts, and you want to make sure that your discount percentage is at least the same as your competitors (if possible).
3. Don’t Be Greedy
The whole point of Black Friday sales week is for consumers to mass-buy products at large discounts. Offering a discount or a deal that isn’t really a good deal or discount, will only push customers somewhere else. For example, offering a $10 discount on a $1,000 product is not a good deal for Black Friday. If you’re going to go that route, save your deal for a better time when the market isn’t so saturated with deals, discounts, and offerings to make yours stand out. Black Friday is a great way to drive new customers and to get rid of inventory before the new year. Don’t be greedy, and end up with a lump of coal for the holidays.
4. Create Simple Discounts & Offerings
We cannot stress this point enough. Create deals, discounts, and offerings that are simplistic and are easy to understand quickly. Too many times we see businesses creating deals that require a matrix chart to understand. For example, a simple deal is 25% off sitewide, or offering a 35% discount on select TV’s. A complicated discount example would be ‘if you buy 1 TV, and a TV Stand, then you’ll get 40% off of a lamp. Complicated sales will confuse customers and in return, you’ll lose sales. If you want to boost sales, create simplistic discounts and offerings.
5. Create Urgency When Things Are Urgent
When a matter is extremely urgent and you need a response, you’ll call, text, or email that person multiple times. The same applies for Black Friday week sales. You’ll be wanting to use emails, ads, website banners, popups, and social media posts to create a sense of urgency when urgency calls. For example, you’ll be wanting to initially BLAST that your Black Friday week sale has started, and you’ll also want to SUPER BLAST the remaining days and hours before the sale is about to end. Come Cyber Monday at 11:59PM, the sale ends and you as a customer are going to miss out on this HUGE savings. We typically hit people with messaging like “only 12 hours left”, and things of that nature to create an urgency to act or miss out. The same will apply for massive decreases in inventory. Should your main product start to get near selling out, start BLASTING that your products are about to sell out, so the customer should act now or miss out. Creating urgency is a key factor in getting over-the-top sales numbers during this week.
6. Run Google and Facebook Ads
Running Google and Facebook Ads is PARAMOUNT to driving large sales volumes during this time. If you only run ads on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, be prepared for slow ad launch times and skyrocketing costs because of competitors and other brands. Run Google and Facebook ads during the entire week, and watch your sales numbers take effect. Obviously, running Google and Facebook Ads optimally during this time is very technical, and we cannot explain this within the article. However, even if you aren’t an expert, you’ll still see a massive benefit by running ads during this time that you would not have gotten anywhere else (and you’ll probably end up thanking us afterwards).
7. Create Captivating Creatives for Ads, Banners, and Posts
There are going to be hundreds of thousands of retails bombarding the internet with their sales during Black Friday week. You need to ensure that yours stand out among the mess of ads, videos, and promos from other brands. By creating captivating videos, images and copy, you’ll see a major uptick in people clicking through on your social posts, digital ads, emails, and banner call outs.
8. Review Your Shipping Costs
If you’ve read the previous points above, you’ll see our notation regarding the purpose of Black Friday week sales, and how consumers are fueled by price. You’ll also want to remind yourself to check on your shipping costs to ensure that your shipping costs aren’t too high, which may put your overall product prices higher than a competitors. If you’re feeling froggy, you can also modify your shipping prices temporarily to push customers over the edge when deciding to make purchases. Some consumers despise shipping charges in general, and this may be something to address before Black Friday week commences.
9. Monitor and Adapt Your Strategy To The Current Situation
Okay, so you’ve got a plan for Black Friday week and everything is ready to go. Once the sale goes live, you notice after a few days that things start to slow down. This is when you need to find out why things are slowing down and adapt to the current situation. Maybe a competitor has dropped their prices more than yours, or maybe your competitors are offering free shipping and you aren’t. You’ll need to run some research, do some digging, and be able to adapt quickly. You can also use this strategy in an offensive light. If you want to steal customers from the competition, wait a few days after the sales launch, and then drop your prices below your competition’s temporarily to steal customers. By the time they figured out what is happening, you’ll have raked in a killing. Tactics like this are not illegal, immoral, or predatory…they are simply the dog-eat-dog nature of competing businesses.
The Takeaway
By following our tips and strategies above, you’ll be able to drive sales numbers unlike any years before. If you apply the above to your specific business models, you’ll be able to get results like these in standard sales that take place throughout the year as well. By understanding the reasoning behind the flurry of purchasing during Black Friday you’ll begin to see the elements that comprise a successful campaign. By seeing the world through the eyes of the consumer, you’ll be able to see how you can connect better with that consumer during this epic week. At the end of the day, business is about creating that connection, and when you give customers what they want instead of what you want, then you’ll start to see your sales numbers explode. Happy hunting!
