Maximize your sales with Black Friday
Maximize your sales with Black Friday
The "black friday season" is the most anticipated and at the same time also the most dreaded by e-commerce. November 26 is approaching, and if until now e-commerce companies have not thought about the strategy to put in place to promote their discounts, they will certainly have to think about it in this month of October.
Undoubtedly, black friday (BF) is a much-desired time for businesses and consumers alike, but it is also a time of great management and logistical stress. There are many actions to be taken for e-commerce, marketing and organizational, and one must arrive prepared.
In the past two years, interest in this holiday has increased by 14 percent, especially after the Pandemic, which forced a complete overhaul of consumers' shopping habits. Today, virtual shopping almost completely outclasses physical shopping, which increases the competitiveness of companies.
Competition these days becomes cutthroat, ADV costs rise sharply, and ecommerce businesses are facing cutthroat competition. You might say "May the best man win," but in this case it is not a question of who is the best, what matters is the marketing strategy you decide to adopt.
In a study by MailUp, it was found that in 2020, there were nearly 189 million black friday-themed emails examined in the period from the end of October to December. One trend that was particularly interesting was that at the correspondence of a decrease in emails sent -3.32%, the open rate the CTRs definitely improved. This phenomenon went hand in hand with the personalization of communication.
Important concepts these, which make it clear how important targeted and quality communication is to achieve great results from pre-black friday activities.
Black Friday and strategy, where to start
Working ahead is absolutely essential; you need to prepare to start maximizing your gains.
The discounting calendar needs to be ready as early as October, deadlines need to be set and the AOV (the average value per order month) needs to be analyzed.
One strategy that many e-commerce companies adopt is to sell off their products. This is actually a decision that does not lead to a good result, because if the consumer buys more than he needs, he will not buy from the online store for quite a while afterwards.
The consumer's need should always be created, it should be tempted, it should never be completely satisfied.
Black friday can be a great opportunity for e-commerce Let's see what are the 5 strategies to follow to increase sales
Preparation and strategy are the basis of any marketing activity.
Here are the steps to follow
- Create a business plan with discounts to be offered during the BF. The aim is to keep users active at all times, generating expectation and using the levers of urgency and scarcity. It is Important to create profiled promotions, avoiding reducing margin indiscriminately;
- Make a forecast of the items that will be most successful and invest the cash in stock products that will definitely sell. We can know this if we have conducted an analysis of the products sold in the last edition;
- Invest in marketing campaigns before the seasonal increase in CPM;
- Shift, where possible, paid traffic to unpaid channels;
- Create an editorial calendar for promotions. What can really make a difference for an e-commerce business is the creation of an efficient business plan. We explain this in the next section.
Create the business plan for your promotions in 5 moves
Arriving prepared for Black Friday means thinking mainly about your business plan and what you will need to do to manage the promotion strategically.
The business plan related to promotions can have different purposes:
- Acquiring new users with covert promos. In this case, the LTV of customers and especially the motivation for a potential consumer to purchase a particular product must be well assessed. An example may involve the sale of children's products related to hygiene. If my ecommerce sells baby sanitary products, including diapers for example, what I will need to do is to understand which size is sold the most during the year. I then need to supply my ecommerce with diapers of size "X" and upsell, to avoid the CLTV being too high later on;
- Reactivate dormant customers. We know that acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than reactivating an inactive customer. One strategy can be, therefore, to send special promos to customers who have not purchased for a long time for the purpose of getting them to come back and buy from our online store. In an Inbound Marketing strategy for example, email marketing automation works great to reactivate a dormant contact list. During BF usually about 70% of purchases come from existing customers, this proves that actually prioritizing previously active customers pays off big time;
- Sell inventory that has been idle for too long to obtain cash that can be reinvested in other products. A strategy that works well when the warehouse is full.
- Capture the spending power of customers who want to buy our products during Black Friday. One strategy that works well is to have customers who want to receive special discounts, reserved ONLY for them, sign up for a particular email list. 20-30% of these VIP customers buy several times during Black Friday.
Increase AOV by offering special discounts only when a certain purchase threshold is reached
Arriving prepared for Black Friday is a matter of reasoning
Indiscriminate discounts reduce margins, especially when you have consumable products that are purchased on a regular basis. Ergo, you should not panic the seller, but you need to design your own promotions, taking cues from the analysis of past product sales.
What were the best-selling products in previous editions? Based on this info, allocate cash to purchase more of those items. Never find yourself in the situation of not being able to satisfy the customer.
Supply and demand must always be balanced.
Invest in digital campaigns, in the months before on social when CPMs are still "low," anticipating, in effect, part of the budget you would invest in the following months.
In the BF period, for example, it may make sense to work more on retargeting and search/shopping campaigns.
Another functional strategy is to use paid campaigns to get users to sign up for your newsletter or "vip discount" list, using the leverage of urgency and the leverage of loss, closing the lists well before Black Friday.
You need to be prepared at least 2-3 weeks in advance, which implies:
- Prepare a ready calendar of promotions;
- Thinking of a list of products to sell based also on the analysis;
- Plan the duration of discounts.
The basis of everything is always automation; it is important that all these decisions are automated, so that everything else is more manageable.
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