Is Black Friday profitable for retailers?
Black Friday can be profitable for retailers. A winning Black Friday campaign with offers can lure shoppers to your site and sell more products — hence increasing profits, despite lowered prices. The key is reaching your customers before the big event and keeping them engaged with your brand.
Benefits of Black Friday for retailers
Aside from the expected sales increase, there are multiple benefits to participating in Black Friday for retailers.
- Increased traffic and sales due to Black Friday campaigns.
- Gaining new consumers through offers, social media buzz, giveaways and more.
- Incremental sales via promotions, discounts, etc.
- Reduce seasonal inventory, since early shoppers are looking for a great deal. This means they are likely to purchase products from past seasons at a discounted price — the perfect chance for you to move your older inventory items without compromising your brand.
How do retailers prepare for Black Friday?
- 2021 will bring the oddest Black Friday of our lives. Retailers need to take additional actions in multiple dimensions so as to inspire consumers to trust them this odd year. You can read more on how to prepare for Black Friday 2021 here
- Start marketing your brand early to reap more sales and engage customers with emails, blog posts and in-store specials (if brick and mortar).
- Integrate and personalize your Black Friday Marketing campaign to tailor to your targeted audiences. For example, for returning customers, suggest products that are on sale or bundles that other customers with similar interests have bought.
- Set a countdown clock to create urgency for sales that are both starting (to create anticipation and excitement) and for sales that will soon be ending (such as an early bird sale, etc) which creates a sense of FOMO.
- Use an omnichannel approach. Despite proven benefits, the majority of retailers today have not adopted omnichannel marketing and selling. This means missing out on sales. Read on to learn more about why omnichannel marketing is a must for your brand.
1. Run an omnichannel Black Friday campaign
Many consumers prefer to conduct their research online and purchase in-store, or vice versa. A smooth transition between online and physical stores, desktop or mobile, is a must to avoid customer frustration and lost sales.
An example of a brand with a stellar omnichannel holiday campaign is Disney. First, vacationers start out on Disney’s mobile-friendly website, where visitors can design their custom-made dream holiday plan within the My Disney Experience account. When visitors arrive at the Disney destination, they can link the My Disney Experience account to a smart wristband called the ‘MagicBand’. It contains a touchpoint sensor and grants visitors directions and access to theme parks, hotels, and attractions that visitors have planned within the trip.
How: Running an effective omnichannel marketing campaign to work requires a robust CRM capability. One that tracks your customers across various stages of their purchase lifecycle, which provides you insight on when to best engage with each customer. A marketing automation platform, such as ContactPigeon, centralizes all customer interactions (e.g., web behaviors, campaign interactions, eCommerce transactions, etc) in a single repository. The customer data is captured within the platform in order to run segmentation and trigger marketing messages automatically.
2. Create mixed product bundles to increase profit margin
Product bundling works because it gives shoppers a sense of getting a great deal. Furthermore, bundled pricing allows retailers to bundle high-margin products along with ones that are low-margin to increase profitability. A win-win for both sides.
How: Consider which products go well together from your product offerings and create the bundle based on products that are complementary to each other (e.g., matching top and bottom, products frequently bought together, etc).
3. Contact your subscribers on a daily basis during the Black Friday week
During the days leading up to Black Friday, shoppers are flooded with offers discounts, giveaways and more. To stay relevant, it’s important for your brand to keep up the frequency of the touchpoints and be more creative in your messaging.
Communicate valuable information about your sales offer early on with clever content to convince consumers to shop from your brand.
How: Use an automated marketing platform to send personalized emails. You can include countdown clocks for sales beginning and ending, or special early bird deals such as gifts with purchase or additional discounts, etc.
4. Create special BF themed exit intent pop up
Set up an Exit-Intent Popup and catch customers before they leave! While exit intent works primarily on desktop browsers, don’t forget that desktop accounts for ~40% of sales.
How: Use Black Friday graphics to lure shoppers into staying on your site with great deals. Try something like: “Save 20% off your order NOW!” to see an increase in conversions.
5. Create a Smart Product Recommendation workflow based on products seen
This workflow will help you re-engage the vast majority of Black Friday traffic that viewed a product but didn’t convert, with monthly/weekly personalized product recommendations.
How: Tackle Browse abandonment by using an automated marketing platform. This way, you can suggest personalized product recommendations to shoppers via cross-selling or up-selling based on the products they have viewed but not purchased. The workflow can start from the Black Friday period but can continue into the holiday season or even beyond.
6. Create a Repurchase reminder automation workflow for each participating product
This workflow will help you re-engage with the customers a few weeks/months later with a relevant message, thereby extracting more value from your Black Friday marketing investments.
How: For products bought over Black Friday, create reminders via pop-ups and emails using an automated marketing platform. This works great with products that have a short to medium lifetime cycle.
7. Write 3 blog posts featuring 3 awesome upcoming BF deals
Drive potential shoppers to become enticed and more engaged with your brand and, ultimately, to shop your brand on Black Friday!
How: Provide subscribers with relevant and valuable information about your Black Friday sales. This will make them feel as though they are getting the inside scoop on the upcoming sales — a token of gratitude for their loyalty to your brand!
Wrapping up
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