6 Black Friday Marketing Strategies

1. Boost your Black Friday email marketing strategy

Your email list is one of your most important marketing weapons. That’s why it’s essential you come up with a plan to build it before the sales season strikes.

To grow your list, create an email signup form weeks before Black Friday sales begin using a special promotion for those who enter (e.g. 10% off), and place it strategically as a popup on your homepage. This, combined with a compelling call to action, can turn new signups into lucrative conversions.

Once you’ve built your email list, set up an email marketing campaign and watch your return of investment (ROI) grow. As email marketing has the highest ROI of any other channel ($36 for each dollar spent), it’s a crucial component for your Black Friday marketing success.

2. Embrace SMS marketing

SMS marketing is another key strategy to up your Black Friday marketing game.

SMS messages have high open rates and quick opening times. In fact, 95% of texts are read and replied to within three minutes of being delivered.

Additionally, Americans check their phones once every 10 minutes or 96 times a day, meaning it’s highly probable your message will be noticed.

This sales season, we recommend you use SMS to prod customers about special Black Friday promos and to offer discount codes. Combine your targeted Black Friday SMS marketing with social media and email campaigns to have the most beneficial effect.

3. Enhance your retargeting strategy

Retargeting can greatly boost your brand awareness and sales, especially during Black Friday.

People are window shoppers by nature and this behaviour extends to online shopping. Consumers will peruse a website after clicking a social media link or an ad to first get a feel for your brand or product. If the consumer is in a ‘window shopping frame of mind’, they might simply look around and leave the page. 

That’s where retargeting comes into play. This method is an effective way to recapture interest by offering ‘reminder ads’ to consumers who have shown direct interest in your brand after visiting specific pages of your website. Retargeting is offered by all of the major platforms, including Google, Meta, and Linkedin, and is a crucial marketing technique year-round.

If you’re already implementing retargeting into your Black Friday marketing strategy, you can take it one step further with ‘Refine Audience’ retargeting campaigns. These campaigns allow you to single out consumers who spent X total seconds on your website. You also have the option to only retarget users who have already made X conversions or who’ve spent X amount. 

4. Offer free shipping and free returns

Go beyond the typical Black Friday deals by attracting customers with additional benefits like free shipping and free returns.

There are a couple of ways you can go about offering free shipping. You could offer it for a limited time only or advertise free shipping as a spending reward (e.g. free shipping for purchases over £50).

Additionally, as 47% of consumers would boycott an online retailer if they charged for online returns, offering free returns will be a useful option for retaining your customers.

5. Upsell and cross-sell your items

Upselling is the act of offering a customer an upgraded version of a product they’re about to buy, while cross-selling is encouraging a shopper to add more complementary items to their cart. Both strategies are extremely important for your Black Friday success.

The key to cracking these two strategies is to remain relevant and provide valuable upgrades or add-ons. Try to solve a prospective customer’s issues or offer additional benefits, rather than pushing random items on them that don’t match their initial purchase.

For Black Friday, try a ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ (BOGOF) offer to entice your shoppers to add onto their purchase. BOGOF is a proven powerful sales tactic that will surely lead to more conversions this sales season. 

To save time on creating special promos like BOGOF, use a template editor, such as ROI Hunter’s TEDI, for spectacular and automated creatives.

6. Promote your bestsellers

Black Friday is a great time for scaling campaigns, and the best items to use for scaling are your bestsellers.

The top 10% of products in your catalogue account for about 80% of your revenue, yet only 29% of retail marketers admit to knowing what their best-selling products are.

Your bestsellers are the items in your catalogue producing the most revenue across every channel. If you have a small catalogue you can likely find these items manually. For larger or more complex catalogues, we recommend using product-performance data to filter for these items. Product Performance Management (PPM) platforms such as ROI Hunter are a handy tool for accomplishing this.

Using a PPM platform, you can create a product set with built-in conditions to include only the items from your catalogue in the top 10% of revenue generation, and run your dynamic campaigns around this product set. 

This Black Friday, we suggest putting your ‘bestsellers’ foot forward by ensuring these top-performing products are the first ones your customers see.

A final word

It’ll be interesting to see how shopping trends evolve in a post-pandemic Black Friday season. As the sales season starts earlier every year, it’s crucial to cement your strategy now. By implementing the six marketing strategies mentioned above, you’ll be well on your way to success this year.

For more helpful tricks on improving your marketing game, take a look at The Retailer's Guide to Healthier E-commerce Marketing.