Black Friday is not limited to a single day, as many retailers extend promotions through the weekend and into Cyber Monday, another major online shopping event. Let’s review ideas and tactics to make your holiday marketing campaigns shine.
*Updated 10/27/2024
Successful Black Friday campaigns hinges on strategic planning, understanding customer behavior, and leveraging various marketing channels to maximize sales and brand visibility during this annual retail extravaganza.
How do you stand out from others and convert shoppers into customers?
Article Shortcuts:
- What is Black Friday Marketing?
- Black Friday Marketing Strategy Examples
- Three Key Tips for Increasing Black Friday Conversions
Black Friday marketing not only involves directing traffic to your website, it also ensures it meets customer needs and lives up to their expectations.
If your site doesn’t meet them, prospects will close the page and go to your competitors. Successful Black Friday marketing can increase your client base and bring you dozens of loyal customers. How?
You should consider everything from product page designs to customer support. Let’s look at the possible ways to boost conversions during Black Friday.
What is Black Friday Marketing?
Black Friday marketing is how businesses promote their biggest sales of the year during the Black Friday shopping period.
It's more than just offering discounts - it's a complete strategy that includes email campaigns, social media posts, text messages, and special promotions to attract holiday shoppers.
For small businesses, Black Friday marketing is your chance to capture holiday spending with targeted deals that compete with bigger retailers.
The key is starting early, choosing the right channels to reach your customers, and creating offers that make sense for your business size and type
Black Friday was primarily a U.S. tradition but has since spread to many other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and various European nations.
It is a prelude to the holiday shopping season, with consumers eagerly anticipating the steep discounts and special deals retailers offer.
From a marketing perspective, Black Friday presents a unique opportunity for businesses to boost sales, attract new customers, and strengthen brand loyalty.
It is a time when marketers employ various creative strategies and tactics to capture shoppers' attention and encourage them to purchase.
Black Friday Marketing Strategy Examples
- Early Bird Promotions: Retailers often start their Black Friday marketing campaigns early, sometimes days or weeks before the event. This can create a sense of urgency and anticipation among consumers.
- Doorbusters and Limited-Time Offers: Offer limited quantities of highly discounted products, known as "doorbusters," to draw crowds to physical stores and create a buzz online.
- Email Marketing: Send out a Black Friday marketing email to subscribers, showcasing exclusive deals, and creating a sense of exclusivity can be highly effective.
- Social Media Campaigns: Leverage social media platforms to share teaser posts, countdowns, and interactive content to engage a wide audience.
- Content Marketing: Create informative content like gift guides, product reviews, and comparison articles to attract consumers seeking guidance during the shopping frenzy.
- Remarketing and Retargeting: Use data from previous interactions to target potential customers with tailored ads and offers.
- Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website has a mobile-friendly user experience to accommodate more smartphone and tablet shoppers.
- In-Store Experiences: For physical retailers, enhance your in-store experience with festive decorations, entertainment, and exceptional customer service to set yourself apart.
- Influencer Marketing & Collaborations: Expand your reach and credibility with influencers or complementary brands.
- Sustainability Initiatives: Incorporating eco-friendly practices and promotions can appeal to environmentally conscious consumers.
Three Key Tips for Increasing Black Friday Conversions
1. Evaluate your website loading speed
According to data, one in four visitors abandon the website if it loads for four seconds or more. Poorly performing sites also increase the risk of losing clients forever.
The statistics show that 46% of visitors don’t return to the stores with unsatisfactory loading.
Potential customers expect the site to load as quickly as possible. As Black Friday is about the sudden influx of visitors, prepare your website to handle the traffic spikes.
I mean uninterrupted work, fast image opening, and responding to clicks immediately. Suppose users search for information on mobile devices during the festive season.
They won’t have time to wait for the content to appear as they can open another link on your competitor’s website and get the desired product.
You can check the loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It shows the weaknesses of your page and where to pay special attention.
It lets you compare the website speed for mobile and desktop versions and see the Core Web Vitals assessment.
Remember that the website should respond and load fast after clicking CTAs, icons, or a search button. You need to compress images, turn off the unnecessary plugins, or deal with the coding part and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
If you lack coding experience and don’t know how to speed up the store, you must seek help from a specialized agency, or you can use a Pre-built Bootstrap Admin Template to build PWA.
Furthermore, consider investing in building a progressive web application (PWA). PWAs are a popular and efficient solution to boost online retail websites’ performance and user experience.
2. Focus on customer experience
A recent CCW Digital study shows that 65% of enterprises value the customer experience (CX) more than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Why?
A positive experience encourages people to stay on the website, interact with the content, and return and share recommendations.
The website should be mobile-friendly, follow UX/UI best practices, and offer personalized products. Let’s look at these constituents.
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Ensure a mobile-friendly experience
Mobile-friendliness has become vital to providing an excellent customer experience. To prove this point, let’s take a look at the statistics on mobile site optimization:
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- A mobile-optimized website has a 74% higher chance of returning visitors.
- 67% of mobile users state the importance of website mobile-friendliness for influencing the purchase decision.
- 61% of consumers rank companies with a positive mobile experience higher than others.
- A poor mobile experience may divert 52% of buyers from purchasing the company’s products.
That’s why the content should be adapted for mobile devices. Then, it will be convenient for the user to view it. The main features of mobile content are as follows:
- Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences);
- Text enrichment with photos, graphics, and videos;
- Implementation of interactive elements.
Smartphone screens are smaller than computers and laptops, so you should ensure the text will be readable on any display size when developing a mobile version.
See the screenshot from the Overstock site as an example of integrating interactive elements in the mobile version.
You can easily control the display of photos with one hand: move them by dragging, zoom in with two fingers, and zoom out with a tap.
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Take UX/UI design into consideration
ECommerce UX/UI design entails the organization of the website pages and elements. These may be navigation, site search, the homepage, product page, shopping cart, wish list, checkout, etc.
Well-thought-out UX/UI design ensures visitors seamlessly transfer from one page to another, find the desired goods, and complete a purchase.
There are numerous rules to comply with, but some of the most crucial ones are:
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- Homepage: It’s the gates to your store. People land on the page and need to understand the business purpose. Your task is to make your brand memorable to encourage people to continue their journey. Place the most important elements above the fold for users to see everything without scrolling down the page.
- Navigation: People should be able to find the needed section. Organize the navigation menu, group items into more prominent categories, and show breadcrumbs to display the path to the product.
- Site search: This functionality helps prospects find the product on the website faster. Employ autocompletion to save users time inputting the request. A case in point is the Chopard store. You insert the phrase and see which products the store sells. Look at the screenshot below to check how auto-completion works on this website.
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- Product page: Show as many product photos as you can. Provide reviews, trust signals, customers’ photos (user-generated content), and personalized blocks. You may include a product video or AR/VR capabilities to demonstrate the product from all angles or let users try them before purchasing. The product description should also be comprehensive enough to eliminate purchasers’ doubts.
- Shopping cart and checkout: That’s where potential customers are closest to completing an order, so nothing should distract them from it. Remove unnecessary fields, display the total cost, and allow for saving items for later. For example, a wish list functionality is an appropriate place to keep products for some time.
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Provide a personalized touch
Another crucial factor for improving customer experience is personalization. How can you personalize interactions?
First, you need to gather clients’ data. Organizations should engage customers through their most-used channels and leverage data on their preferences, objectives, and communication history.
Then, this information can provide insights into the type of content to show users. Here is an example of intelligent recommendations from Anne Klein’s online store based on previous views, orders, and other buyers’ information.
You can add these suggestions in emails, push notifications, etc.
3. No time like the present
Black Friday is a hectic time when products at a reduced price appeal to numerous customers at once.
A sense of scarcity and urgency boosts sales due to the fear of missing a discount. Why not specify this fact to speed up decision-making?
You may show the number of items left in stock, the countdown timer, or the number of current visitors watching the page.
Don’t overuse this trick or show irrelevant information; the deceit may cost you more. It may encourage prospects to add the product to the cart before it’s too late—one crucial note.
There are several tools to integrate a countdown timer into the website. The free POWR Countdown Timer lets you customize the functionality to engage customers, reduce bounce rates, and boost conversions.
Below is a screenshot from Old Navy. The store includes words like “Hot Deal” in the product description.
You can also see a popup on the left side offering an extra 30% off on a first purchase with an Old Navy credit card. POWR also offers a free Popup that you can use in a similar way.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday is when a yearly goals can be met or missed. Online retail stores and e-commerce websites must be in full gear to prepare for higher traffic and increased orders.
The most important step to take is improving your website performance. Interruptions and delays lower your marketing conversion rate, especially when tons of lucrative deals are everywhere.
Make saving the customer's time your central focus. Reduce your website loading speed. Remove all obstacles on the customer's purchase journey, such as:
- confusing navigation;
- improperly working site search;
- excessive checkout fields.
Ensure the website meets mobile-friendly standards. And, of course, make Black Friday shopping even more fascinating with time-sensitive offers.
Author Bio
Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab, a full-service eCommerce agency focused on Magento.
Kate has worked on diverse marketing strategies and activities for over eight years. In her pursuit to bring up top-notch marketing solutions, Kate is constantly exploring the topics of SEO, branding, SMM, PPC, and Magento PWA development.
