Black Friday is knocking on your door and your online store needs to be ready to welcome the overwhelming crowd of customers hunting for discounts.
So how do you prepare? And when do you know if you’re ready?
This post will emphasise 5 Black Friday marketing tips to boost your traffic and increase your sales.
So let’s dive in.
What exactly is Black Friday?
Black Friday comes right after the American Thanksgiving and it’s not just a day, but more like the start of a long-awaited holiday season. That’s why entrepreneurs prepare in advance by providing record discounts to their most popular products. Black Friday ends with Cyber Monday which is essentially the same type of event designed for online shopping only.
Now that you have a rough idea of what’s Black Friday and its origin, it’s time to outline the first crucial step you need to take to make sure you start your Black Friday campaign with the right foot.
Evaluate Last Year’s Results
Since you’re the one who knows best how well your eCommerce business performed in 2018, there’s a list of questions you need to ask yourself to see what direction to take for your Black Friday campaign.
What were your best performing ads? Try to see what messages performed better and why others didn’t. Maybe what made the difference were the benefits they provided, the writing style, or the type of audience.
What was your bidding strategy? Was the investment worth the effort? If not then you should assess your campaign for 2018 again and calculate how you can invest without risking too much and how to provide the right discounts to make sure you don’t go overboard.
Now, moving on to the product categories. What items were easiest to advertise? Which brought the highest profit? By doing this, you will automatically exclude those which did not perform very well and see whether there’s not much demand for those products or if something else went wrong with the advertising.
Last but not least, evaluate what happened in the first week after Black Friday. Which products sold better and which didn’t? By assessing your overall performance from last year, you will be able to better plan your 2019 Black Friday campaign.
Optimize Your Ads for Black Friday
Apart from making your ads benefit-oriented, you want to make sure you know what tone of voice does your audience relate to the most. As a rule of thumb, the more personal, the better.
But how do you optimize your ads specifically for Black Friday?
It might seem obvious but the first thing you want to do is to add Black Friday references to your text. However, although a no-brainer, due to the limited number of characters at disposal, some entrepreneurs avoid to include these references in their ads.
Next, you want to extend the promotion. When you extend a flash sale for a few more hours, there are higher chances that people who are on the fence will make up their minds and click.
While the extension gives shoppers a second chance, adding a countdown creates a sense of urgency. The fear of missing out on something great is a more powerful motivator than any discount.
In other words, if customers know that the offer expires soon, they’ll know that they may never benefit from that discount again. Another great way to optimize your ads is to make your links more specific, so link your ads to discounted products instead of a general webpage.
Give Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse
What I mean is to offer an incredible discount to a popular product or one that is very easy to sell. Your target here is not to generate immediate revenue with that product but to provide traction for the rest of your Black Friday product catalog.
After customers purchase that product, it’s a high chance they’ll continue browsing through your online store and buy other items. That’s where you’ll start making some solid Black Friday revenue.
Now, you need to ask yourself what kind of irresistible offer will attract people to your online store. The rest of the other sales will make up for the massive discount on your flagship product.
Optimize Your PPC
To optimize your PPC, you have to stay updated throughout the whole Black Friday period. That means you need to keep track of your campaign in real-time.
One thing you want to avoid is importing your transactions into Google Ads from Google Analytics. This will create a delay in displaying your conversion data, which means you’ll be one day behind when monitoring your data.
A better strategy would be to monitor your account performance directly in Google Analytics, instead of the Google Ads interface. In this case, the delay will be no longer than an hour.
Don’t Lose Sight of the Competition
That means you have to analyze your competitors Black Friday strategy not just for this year but for the last year as well. This way you can identify what they are doing better and see how you can improve your own Black Friday campaign to stay on top of the game. Sometimes, great ideas come from the competition, but make sure you don’t go overboard.
What’s Next After Black Friday?
After the Black Friday craze is over, you’ll have to do some tweaks to get your online store back in normal mode. First, you need to restore the bids you were using before Black Friday.
Then, you want to stop the Black Friday ads until next year and reactivate your best ads for the periods outside the holiday seasons. Last, evaluate your Black Friday performance and prepare for what’s coming next.
Time to Boost Your Sales on Black Friday
In this article, you learned about 5 tips to prepare and launch a better Black Friday campaign. Now it’s time to make sure your online store is ready for an increase in sales.
What other Black Friday tips would you like to share? Let us know in the comments section.
And to help you better prepare for Black Friday, we’ll host a webinar where a member of our team from Retargeting.biz will tell you to share with you some invaluable insights about Black Friday and excellent marketing tips to boost your sales.
All you need to do is register on the link below to save your spot for the webinar and we’ll contact you later with the hour of the event and other details.