Black Friday is one of the biggest days for shopping in the year, and it is essential to make sure your Digital Marketing campaign has a key strategy to achieve as many targets as you possibly can.
On the face of it, this seems like a completely obvious fact. You are always going to want to market your campaign during the busiest and most popular times of the year. But instead of focusing the time of the sale itself, Retailers, both online and in person – are pushing their deals earlier and earlier. Black Friday is just over a month away from the day this is being written. This means Retailers will start their marketing campaign as early as the end of October. This is plain and simply the fact that Retailers now have the tools to take advantage of engaging consumers as soon as viable to build a buzz around the upcoming event.
Amazon, for instance, did this to promote their campaign in anticipation for their massive ‘pre-sale’ which commenced 12 days before Black Friday weekend. This led to Amazon dominating a whopping 36% of online Black Friday sales A distant second, Best Buy brought in 8.23% of total online revenue.
Examples of strategies proving effective this season range from:
Email Marketing
Email Marketing has proven one of the most effective tools for Black Friday. With 2016 statistics showing that an increase of 240% in revenue from browse and cart abandonment emails and a 17% increase in conversion rate on cart abandonment emails in this period, compared to the rest of the year. Why this is especially important this time of year is that with every site competing with each other even more aggressively, it’s easy for customers to hop between different sites and forget what they have been looking at with so many offers on display.
Abandoned cart emails give the excuse for retailers to promote their offers even further or even offer an incentive to come back with extra money off or a free item. Not only this, but these emails are not browser dependent. So for instance, if you happened to use Safari whilst using a mobile or tablet, you could then log on to Google Chrome on your desktop and you would still receive notification emails.
Mobile & Social
On top of Email Marketing, what has been noted is that Retailers are focusing on more Social and Mobile platforms. Statistics show that retailers who invested in mobile, email and social saw 30% more sales on average than those concentrating on just one or two channels.
Social media channels have a much higher engagement rate than email marketing – consumers are more likely to share social media content from brands than they are email content. The reason for this is the visual aspect of Social Media. With sites like Facebook and Twitter allowing users to share and connect with just a click of a button, the opportunity for Retailers to post their ads is unmissable.
They can advertise their brand, current offers and giveaways through these ads. This can allow them to reach new audiences, improve brand recognition and even encourage sharing across social platforms.
Mobile and tablets alone accounted for 35% of revenue during the Black Friday weekend in 2016 – the same as 2015. It goes to show that optimising your site for on-the-go users is vital in increasing your performance.
PPC
With technology being by in large the most bought items buyers like to snag on Black Friday, it’s easy to see why its partner in crime, Cyber Monday is so popular – since it is based all on tech buyers. Not only that, Cyber Monday is the last significant retail day before Christmas. This point, in particular, is essential to a PPC account. You can drive a sense of urgency to consumers which are unrivalled compared to the rest of the year. One way of doing this is to create unique Landing Pages. Whether these are advertised on your website or another, have your consumers arrive at a page where they know that the deals available won’t be there for long.
The increase in certain Adwords across these days can be quite insane, so it is paramount that you have your campaign laid out well in advance. If you’re a Technology Retailer and you’re going to have a huge sale on ‘50-inch Samsung TV’s’, having the appropriate AdWords campaign setup to make sure you’re the top of the search list can be unfathomable in the long run. It can not only provide a smooth shopping experience for them but also have them clambering for more, giving you a higher ROI.
Black Friday’s major influence over businesses is undeniable. More interestingly is how digital marketing channels can have the largest effect on the success of said businesses. If you’re looking to succeed over the season of sales then get in touch with DPOM today.
