Preparing for Big Black Friday results

(Source: Burst by Shopify)

Black Friday is one of the year’s most hotly-anticipated shopping events. From a day that began in the US as a post-holiday shopping opportunity to a global weekend-long omnichannel experience leading into the end-of-year holidays. 

Customers view Black Friday as a chance to engage with new brands and save big on products or services they have been considering. For businesses, it is an important revenue and growth-driving opportunity. It also provides an opportunity to get their products in front of a whole new set of shoppers.

As a savvy marketer, you know that Black Friday success is driven long before the shopping begins. Now is the time for strategic planning, smart segmenting, and a solid omnichannel marketing strategy that will position your brand for success.  

Here are a few key strategies to start working on today so you can hit the ground running during peak shopping time.

Test your discounts before the big day

Shoppers are looking for bargains on Black Friday. Marketers need to give them what they want without undercutting profits or devaluing your brand’s reputation. 

The key to this balancing act is to run pilot campaigns and collect customer feedback before Black Friday. Some questions to ask as you craft your testing plan are:

  • What behaviour do you want to drive? A one-time sale is not the goal but recurring sales. Some options include introducing an existing client to a new product line or getting them to act on an abandoned cart. 
  • Is this discount necessary? Not every customer is price sensitive, so be sure you’re offering a discount to drive behaviour, not just because discounts have worked before.

Fine-tune your automations 

If you’re looking to drive revenue during the holidays, lean on automation to do the heavy lifting. Manually deploying communications is needlessly burdensome. The more you can automate, the better you’ll deliver highly-personalised customer experiences at scale. Automation reduces the margin for human error and enables you to retrain your employees to focus on tasks that are likely to generate more revenue. 

Adding simple automations like “back in stock” notifications and price-drop alerts will save you and your team a ton of work while effortlessly driving purchases.

Holiday wishlists in action

Wishlists are easy to set up and open up an additional way to communicate with customers and prospects. Make wishlists intuitive and easy to navigate online. If you’ve got brick-and-mortar operations, work with in-store associates to encourage customers to add favourite items to their lists. After successful registration, send a confirmation email containing the items that were recently added to the list.

Creating an alert that informs customers when a wish list item has dropped in price – or informing them when a saved item is back in stock – encourages customers to complete purchases during the holidays and after they’re over.

Get started today

It is never too early to start planning for the biggest shopping event of the year. With a bit of preparation, you can put a plan in place that will increase revenue and introduce your discounts and offers to a host of new customers. 
To get more ideas on how to prepare for Black Friday, what to do to maximise your efforts on the big day, and how to follow up to nurture relationships with Black Friday buyers, download SAP Emarsys’ ebook, Power Up Your Black Friday: 10 Omnichannel Strategies to Beat Competitors and Make More $$$.