Black Friday, is one of the largest single days of consumer spending throughout the entire year. Over the last few years, it has morphed into a month or so long stream of offers, special deals, pricing across many industries.
Shoppers spent on average over $300 between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and nearly $12 billion in total online sales in 2019. The national retail federation also recorded over 189 million shoppers going to stores between Thanksgiving day and cyber Monday !
2020 numbers are predicted to be even higher, albeit mostly online !
Your business without a doubt needs to take advantage of consumers demand during this time.
Here are some of our top tips for creating a successful black Friday sales event for your business!
Put together your Email List – Email everyone!
One of your first steps towards getting your business ready for Black Friday is putting together a very comprehensive email list of every contact you have. Past customers, current customers, newsletter signs ups, potential customers – all of them! You absolutely want to get your new offers in front of as many people as possible!
Work with your advertising partners to craft good email subject lines and layout your email campaigns effectively. It is going to be a major time saver and a much more effective process to use software like mailchimp to coordinate your email lists and send campaigns. Really, you should already be using some sort of lead tracking software in addition to email providers. Some are even free, but most cost very little for the time they save you.
Your email should waste little time showing the best offers you have for your black Friday event. This could be something as simple as “up to 50% off all products” or get more complicated offering specific offers on certain featured items. Many larger companies will actually do a mix and send multiple black Friday related emails to spread their content over.
Increase Average Customer Purchase
One of the most common ways to increase your revenue from a major sales event is to increase the average revenue per customer that is buying. A popular way to do this is to tie discounts to sales numbers. For example “ get $30 off your order of $150 or more”. There are near limitless variations of this, but it creates a compelling reason and generally works well.
You can quickly drastically increase your sales event revenue promoting a mix of offers like this to your email marketing list. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.
Figure out Your Offers
The actual offers you market and tease to customers’ needs to be good and make people want to buy. That’s not to say that you need to lose money, but just make sure that the offers you work so hard to get in front of potential customers are actually offers that will generate action.
We’ve seen a lot of brands that offers nearly the same deals as they have for the rest of year, and many times running offers like this will generate disappointing sales results.
Is your Inventory ready?
2020 has been a challenging year for firms and their supply chain managers. Many brands both small and large have experienced inventory shortages due to factory and transportation shortages from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Your marketing and supply chain teams MUST work together to plan what products will be in high demand through the greater holiday season and Black Friday sales events. Many firms are trying to build inventory levels higher than on average to hedge against any possible supplier delays throughout the rest of 2020.
Email Everyone well ahead time!
Don’t wait until the last minute to reveal your offers and start your email campaign. Start creating the buzz for your black Friday sales in mid October or even a little earlier. You want people to be excited about your sales, so tease your offers little by little in a buildup to the actual sale.
You want to stay in front of your audience through all your marketing channels. Social Media is an incredible important tool for promoting limited time offer deals both through paid and non-paid social media marketing.
Expand the time of the sale
“Black Friday All Month” is starting to permeate the entire retail industry, which many brands in 2020 offering deep discounts in mid October in a sort of “ pre black Friday “ event. Since most consumers will be wanting to shop online this year, extend the time of your sale to give more of your audience the chance to buy. As the sales approaches its end consider running offers such as “ only two more days left of our black Friday event” or “ only 1 week remaining to get ….. offers”. Constant communication and the ever-present time limit of the sale are important aspects of a successful sales strategy.
Free shipping
Amazon has no doubt changed everyone’s expectations for shipping. While many firms can’t offer free shipping, consider for your black Friday sales event offering some sort of free shipping. A common strategy is to offer free shipping on orders greater than a certain dollar amount. This is a great solution to also encourage consumers to spend a greater amount on their order.
Shipping can be tough for smaller retailers, but keep in mind that you can negotiate with parcel carriers. When it comes to rate increases and added accessorials, you can leverage your volume to negotiate a lesser rate increase or even elimination of certain added fees.
Make a written out and documented Black Friday game plan
Get all your employees on board and make sure everyone knows what the black Friday plan is ! Too often there are disconnects between different teams within a company, where the shipping team might not know exactly what products to expect large sales volumes of, or your marketing team doesn’t have good communication internally on what products are running low on inventory.
You should strive for a cohesive and well planned sales event that can at least mostly follow a written and documented plan. This is also important to ensure that if someone is out due to illness etc, that your marketing plan is still carried out at the same levels. Make a clear list of all offers that will be used, with inventory numbers beside them, a list of all social media posts with content. For broadcast or paid advertising, you need to coordinate with your media channels and advertising vendors well ahead of time to ensure no delays and again maintain a level of cohesiveness.
Data and Analytics are Key to maximizing profitability!
Take a deep dive into your discounts, shipping costs, costs of advertising, how much traffic you need to hit certain milestones etc. All of this should occur several months before the event takes place. This is the key to making sure that your sale will generate profitable revenue and that you will maximize conversions. Keep all of this well documented as a way to compare projected vs actual results, so as to provide a game plan that can be tweaked in the coming years or even other sales events!
If you need help marketing your clinic, practice or healthcare-related business, give us a shout! We have worked with numerous healthcare industry clients both small and large to create a range of content and marketing plans. Volan Media is a top Knoxville Tennesse marketing and video production firm.
