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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
Ensure the website meets mobile-friendly standards. And, of course, make Black Friday shopping even more fascinating with time-sensitive offers.
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.