With the holiday season underway, the marketing world is focusing on our buying motivations. The first high of ceaseless promotion and endless special offers comes during Black Friday. Last year, American shoppers spent an estimated $5 billion in just 24 hours – growing by almost 17% since the year before.
Black Friday is an increasingly popular global phenomenon that pays off well for businesses. When seen from that perspective, it’s no wonder that the sales are likely here to stay. But how can a business owner who doesn’t have an insane marketing budget make the Black Friday sales worthwhile?
Here are 4 best Black Friday promotion tips for your business to help improve your bottom line:
Optimize Your Website
If you’re doing any e-commerce sales through your website, you need to ensure optimal performance. A website crash during the Black Friday rush could end up costing your business too much. Ideally, optimizing your website should take place at least a month ahead of a significant event. The goal is to give yourself enough time to implement all the necessary changes and test the performance of the website. However, if you don’t have the time to look into optimization in-depth, there are still things you can work on to ensure everything runs smoothly:
- Ensure it loads fast — site speed can be essential for retaining customers, and even one second can make a significant difference in the total number of page views;
- Focus on mobile-first optimization — with 63.5% of total e-commerce sales coming from mobile, the times when you could neglect how your website performs on mobile are long gone;
- Keep your checkout process slick — the easier for the consumer to purchase what you offer, the better.
Now that you’ve prepared for a surge of traffic on your website, there’s only a matter of bringing people there. How are you going to do that? Through careful promotional tactics that fit the needs of your business.
Promote through Email
Email promotions through newsletters is a debatable practice amongst marketers. Even though many of them are turning to social media promotion, there’s no denying that email marketing is still active. On Black Friday, your existing subscribers may prove invaluable in driving your income up. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be growing your email list in the days leading up to Black Friday. Here’s how:
- Create a new campaign — there’s no better way to build your email list than to create a campaign that will target people who haven’t purchased from you before;
- Test the subject lines — make sure you know which subject lines have performed with the best open rates
- Provide a sense of urgency — time-sensitive offers effectively tap into human psychology, driving purchases and making the campaign more successful;
- Emphasize your Black Friday discounts — your landing pages with newsletter sign-up forms are an ideal place to promote the upcoming discounts, so consumers will know what to expect.
Invest Pay Per Click (PPC)
If you have some budget to spare, you can invest in making your business more visible online. Companies often use Pay Per Click ads to boost their sales and visibility. However, the rules change slightly during the Black Friday craze, which is when you’ll want to be smart with your PPC ads. Let’s have a look at a few tips that will help you with that:
- Focus on a few of your bestsellers — whichever product you’re creating ads for, make sure it’s among those that are already selling well and upsell or cross-sell potential;
- Slightly change your keywords — if you’re already running PPC ads, don’t change your keywords much, add “black friday” to them instead;
- Increase your budget — as the volume of searches goes up, your budget will need to follow that growth.
Pay Per Click ads yield quick results, but if you’re inexperienced with using them, social media promotion might be your best bet.
Build Buzz on Social Media
Building anticipation about the Black Friday sales organically might be one of the most painless ways to do marketing. The best part about social media marketing is the ability to interact with customers and gauge their reaction to what you’re doing. There are a few ways to build hype on social media and foster engagement of the followers at the same time:
- Contests and giveaways — when freebies are offered, consumer excitement grows. With giveaways that require them to share your promotional posts, they will be spreading the word throughout their social media while boosting your engagement;
- Emotional connection — social media posts can help foster an emotional connection with the consumers by using inspiring imagery with a positive message, which makes consumers more engaged;
- Communication — consumers like responsive businesses and social media takes the cake when it comes to instantaneous responsiveness. When consumers feel like they’re heard, they will be more likely to spread the word of your business and the fantastic value you want to offer them.
However, social media management can be a handful, especially for accounts across multiple social networks. Sometimes there’s a need for a helping hand, a tool that would take away inconveniences of promoting through social media.
eClincher and Social Media Promotion
With tools like eClincher, managing various social media accounts for your business becomes much more streamlined. With support for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other prominent social networks, you’re entirely covered.
One of the nifty features of eClincher is providing you with a centralized place for all your social media feeds. Similarly to that, there’s also the Social Inbox feature which lets you engage your audience from multiple accounts. It can come in especially handy during the hectic Black Friday sales where you’ll need to stay on top of inquiries from customers.
Black Friday is an excellent opportunity to take your business up a notch and make profits with the right marketing. It will take some time to prepare and plan, but with helpful tools and online guides, the process won’t be too difficult to carry out. By ramping up; you will benefit by following the same procedures for other holiday events.
