How to Run a Black Friday and Cyber Monday Promotion

Last year, 66 million US consumers shopped on Black Friday alone, spending a record $5 billion online in the space of 24 hours. And by the looks of it, we're not far behind. With 45% of respondents in Australia now signalling that they will be looking out for deals, Cyber Week (as it's known) is becoming a major retail event with Aussies. Consumers are actively spending more time online to search for Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.

If you're running an online business, it's important that you have the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion strategy ready now to boost your sales this holiday season.

When is Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

This year, Black Friday falls on the 27th of November and Cyber Monday falls on 30th of the same month.

Can't I just offer a site-wide discount?

With little over a month until the big day, you should be making sure any items, such as recent hot sellers, aren't lined up for a 60% reduction over Black Friday weekend. Retailers have been pulling back on discounting products due to the aggressive discounting brought on by COVID-19. You need to think of Black Friday as an opportunity to clear our older and slow-moving pieces ahead of the peak Christmas period. Avoid reducing products that have historically performed well. Some items that perform well when discounted are:

• Menswear
• Womenswear
• Electronics

As Patrick Cambell from Pricing Intelligently said:

"Blindly discounting is one of the worst things you can do, because you're conditioning your customer into de-valuing your product, and you're literally throwing money away by putting it back on the table from the initial and future sales of that customer."

Instead, you should focus on strategies to increase the average order value of each purchase.

Create Christmas gift bundles

This is your classic two birds with one stone deal.

You get to increase your average order value and reward your customers with a nice little freebie to keep them coming back for more. Product bundling can encourage customers to purchase the bundle instead of an individual item, increasing the order value by selling products that you may not have otherwise sold.

A great example of this is the five item bundle offer by AS Colour. They've created a special bundle of related products and offered a percentage off.

Take advantage of a landing page

Your job this Christmas is to facilitate gift giving this holiday season. Let's face it, no one likes to shop for gifts. Throw a hectic time like Christmas on top of this, and you've got yourself one puzzled customer. Put their mind at ease by creating a Christmas landing page with all your best sellers and discounts captured at a glance. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here, a good Black Friday landing page has the following:

• A clear message, don't overcrowd your landing page
• Create urgency with a countdown
• Make sure it's mobile optimised
• Make sure your call-to-action is clear. The most popular CTAs can be filling in a form to get a promotion code, get a newsletter about upcoming sales or direct them to a special offering.

Promote exclusivity

We've already established that running blanket discounts for all your customers probably isn't the best way to go, and if you've been following us, you'll know that we encourage our customers to start building their mailing list from the get-go. Try reaching out to your top customers and organise a private sale or event for them. This will encourage customer loyalty, and reactivate customers that may have dropped off. You can even use this mechanism for encouraging sales from your other customers.

Send a Black Friday email marketing blast

In order to get the most out of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign, you'll want to build excitement and then follow it up with a sense of urgency. This means you'll want to spread out your Black Friday email campaign over the span of several days. You can start with sending your first email on Tuesday and then sending a follow-up reminder on later that same week. This creates a sense of urgency that your customers won't be able to miss.

Partner up with others

Collaboration is a powerful tool for any business owner. Connect with other businesses with Black Friday or Cyber Monday promotions and see if you can help each other out. You might consider doing cross-promotions or sharing the costs to market your other offerings together. This is a great way to build business, boost awareness and break into new markets.

Create a sense of urgency

One of the best ways to make more conversions is to create a sense of urgency for the customer. This is especially true during a heavy sales period like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when deals and discounts are time-sensitive. The anxiety over missing a product or service, encourages people to take quick action and make a purchase. There are a few ways you can incorporate this into your online store:

• Set a deadline, and make sure it's visible on product pages and your home page (where applicable)
• Highlight the scarcity of your product to create the illusion that it is about to run out.
• Offer a bonus incentive when the first 10 customers purchase a product