That’s it folks, we’re officially one month away from the SuperBowl of eCommerce…
As the year begins to wind down and all of us mere mortals start thinking about Christmas holidays, a break away from work and time with our families and love ones; online retailers turn things up a gear and look forward towards what can be the BIGGEST sales event of the year.
BUT as you know, fortune favours the brave… And by brave, I mean prepared.
If you run an online store, you know that to truly CRUSH Black Friday / Cyber Monday you need to be prepared and have your wheels in motion NOW because as cold audience costs begin to climb heading into Q4, it gets harder and harder to win the battle for those hard to get eyeballs on your ads…
So what do you do if you’re want to win at Black Friday but you haven’t started thinking about your sale yet?
Never fear because at Dash Activate Online – we live and breathe eCommerce and we’re here to share some useful tips and strategies to dominate your marketing this Black Friday, so let’s get into it.
STEP ONE: Your Offer
Before you do anything, you need to work out your offer. This can be tricky because your offer needs to stand out, but you also need to protect your margins. To help you here we’ve included some of our favorite hooks/offers that we’ve tested over the years to get customers excited to buy from YOUR store… This isn’t a finite list and there’s more to add, but this will get you started with locking down your Black Friday deals.
- 50% off Sitewide
- BF/CM bundles (helps avoid discounting)
- BOGOF / Buy 3 Get 2 Free etc
- Spend $200 get a $25 gift card
- Spend over $100 and get FREE shipping
- Free gift with purchase
- 2 for 1 pricing
- Exclusive BF/CM products
- Mobile only offers
- Social Media Only offers
- Email Only Offers
- Up Sells
- FREE shipping limited time / # of buyers
- Exclusive limited supply item
- Reward first x number of buyers
- Increase price after x number of sales
- Today only deals
- Sale on sale items
- Pop-ups for limited time promos
STEP 2: Your Audiences
Once you’ve locked your offer down, you need to segment your audiences. If you’ve been running ads and posting high quality content all year, then this will be easy. If you haven’t, now is the time to partner with an audience expert to build your warm audiences and pixel data as fast as possible.
Some of our favourite data based audiences for these types of sales are:
- Time on site (top 5%) – 180 days
- Purchase 180 days
- Video views 50% 180 days
- Facebook Engagement 90 days
- Instagram Engagement 90 days
- Lead magnet thankyou page 180 days
- Giveaway thankyou page 90 days
- All website visitors 90 days
The beauty about setting up these data based audiences is that you can also use them to create Look A Like audiences instead of competing on specific cold interests. When using these as your seed audiences remember that they’re also dynamic, meaning as more users visit your store and fire these events your LLAs become even more accurate delivering you more and more highly relevant users!
STEP 3: Nurture Plan
As you build your audiences you need to remember that with brand new users, it’s rare for people to purchase off their first touch with your brand. In recent studies it’s been noted that people need to experience your brand up to 7 times before they’ll take the next action.
This means nurturing those cold audiences is KEY. This could be an entirely separate article but a quick hack for this is to take your best performing posts, blogs or long form video content and retarget users who have engaged with your top of funnel ads to quickly build brand familiarity.
STEP 4: Sales Time
SHOW TIME… As Black Friday approaches, you’ll want to go all guns blazing with your offers to your warm audiences. You’ve spent all this time nurturing them and building brand trust, so now is the time to make them an offer they can’t refuse.
If you have time, you can even run pre-sales events to test offers, build trust and excitement with your audience and to pre-warm them for the big event at the end of November.
We like to reach customers from multiple angles. This could be through a Chatbot, Email Sequence and Retargeting Facebook/Instagram Ads all pushing a consistent and cohesive sales message.
That’s it, you now have a plan to go out and WIN this Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
