Every year, shoppers from all over the world look forward to taking advantage of big sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Because let’s be honest, who does not love sales! With Black Friday moving up the calendar it is extremely important for businesses to be well-prepared for such a mega sales-event. Therefore, this article will provide you with some useful strategies that will smoothen the preparation for Black Friday weekend. However, feel free to use these tips with any other big-sales events! 

First things first: what can you do now already?

Big sale events such as Black Friday can be very hectic for businesses. As a result, good preparation is super important. But with these tips, you’ll be more than well prepared!

It all starts with the technical basics. At this moment,  you should already investigate whether the website is user-friendly. First, make sure that your website load times are acceptable. In general, we advise our clients to ensure a load time below 3 seconds per page. Second, you should provide a mobile-friendly website since many customers are shopping on their mobile devices nowadays. A third crucial factor related to the user-friendliness of your website is the check-out process. Test before Black Friday weekend if everything works properly and if not, make sure to make the necessary adjustments. Moreover, this check-out process should be easy to follow for the customer. In addition, you should add enough relevant payment methods. Think about the latest methods such as Klarna, Google/ Apple Pay, Bancontact app. However, be sure to also include the preferred methods of your customers. Finally, it can be a good idea to include a ‘favorites’ feature on your website that works as a wishlist. This way, customers are able to save their favorite products on the website, instead of having to search the products when visiting the website again. 

Despite the fact that SEO is always super important for businesses to appear on a top-level page, it can also help boost sales during Black Friday. Therefore, we recommend making sure that your SEO is up to date. At this moment you can already start writing blogposts whilst keeping the choice of keywords in mind. 

Next it’s really important to have a good balance between your owned and paid media. Therefore we make the division here so you have a clear overview of what to do. To know what to do when we also made the distinction about three different periods: teasing period, the day itself and after Black Friday weekend.

Owned media

          1. Teasing period

Around one week before Black Friday, you’ll start informing people about the actual sale event. You have to convince people to consider a purchase therefore you can implement elements in your visuals that can drive up the engagement with your audience. Here are some ideas: 

• Use a countdown: to tease your audience that something ‘big’ is coming.
  
  

• Leave a blank space so people can tag friends: as you can see in the example below there is some blank space (see pink square). So when people share the visual they can personalise it and tag other people. For example if you are a food store that sells different types of pasta you can implement the following sentence: [blank space] is the pasta I love the most. Don’t forget to implement your brand logo on the visual so it’s clear for non followers that the visual is from your brand.
  
  

• Use video or GIF’s 

• Make use of polling stickers so your audience is engaged 

          2. Black Friday it self

The day you’ve been waiting for is finally here! On this day, we only want to focus on conversions. We’re not trying any longer to convince anyone. However, we want our customers to be reminded of our sales event. In other words, we have to make sure that they are heading over to our website. Therefore, we suggest sending out a newsletter that includes all of the relevant information to subscribers. 

Despite the efforts you took before the big-sale event (making a clear FAQ page), it is probable that you’ll receive some questions. Therefore, we advise our clients to remain pro-active. If you are able to provide your client with a quick and clear answer through your socials, the customer will be more likely to make a purchase. 

The usage of branded content can also be interesting on this day. Think about a collaboration with an influencer who promotes the event. However, you could also choose to set this collaboration up in an earlier phase if you want to tease your customers before the start of the sale. 

Finally, try to turn the customer into a newsletter subscriber when they convert. Tease them by saying that they will be the first to know about other promotions and that they have a significant advantage compared to non-subscribers. 

          3. Post Black Friday

Last but not least, there is the period after a mega sale event. First thing to do is to make sure that everything that is related to Black Friday on your website is gone. For example if you installed a banner with a discount code make sure to delete this. Besides that it’s important to keep on introducing new products in order to keep people interested. We still want them to be down the funnel. This way you can keep on selling your products during the whole year. 

This is also the perfect time to use your new, bigger client list (that you got during the teasing period) to send out emails about your products. We do know that it can be a struggle to start again after a big sale event. For example, after Black Friday, Holiday season starts immediately. Therefore start making a plan before the start of Black Friday about what you are going to do after. This way you know what your focus is after the busy period and you are well prepared. 

Paid media

      1. Teasing period

The teasing period is the perfect time to make your audience bigger. This can be done by collecting leads in a leadgen campaign. In this campaign you are going to tease people to subscribe to get an early access code. This way your customer list gets bigger and the bigger the list, the more people you can target on the day itself – for free! You don’t only benefit from this in the short term but it’s also interesting to have all this information in the long term. You can expand your current customer list and target the new customers also after Black Friday.

During the teasing period it’s important to have clear visuals that make people consider a purchase on the day itself. Here are some best practices on what to include in your visuals. 

1. Feature your brand voice: as you can see on the HAY ads, they use their brand name on every visual. This way people can connect the ad to the brand.
2. Highlight the product: here again the HAY ads are the perfect example. It’s clear about what type of product they are talking about. 
3. Include a call to action: shop now’, ‘get early access now’, ‘discover more’
   
   

          2. Black Friday itself

When it comes to the visuals used in the ads on the day itself, we suggest making sure that your visuals call for a sense of urgency that drives consumers to check out your products immediately. 

When using product visuals make sure that the products that are shown are the ones that are in discount.

      3. Post Black Friday

Here again make sure that all your ads about Black Friday aren’t running anymore. After Black Friday comes the holiday season so here again make sure you have your new visuals ready so your new campaign can be up and running as fast as possible. Take this in account when preparing yourself for this big period. 

Now you are totally ready to rock the coming period which is full of big events!