Black Friday and Cyber Monday – How to Improve Your Sales

Black Friday: Let the holiday shopping season begin!
This year Black Friday lands on November 25, 2016. Black Friday is always the day following Thanksgiving Day which is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.

In the United States – Black Friday has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season since 1932. Whereas in the rest of the world, Black Friday is quite a new trend. However, stores use this event to attract customers with discounts and promotions on various items. Pointless to say, this event truly comes to life with ecommerce shopping. On e-commerce sites, special sales don’t just stop on Friday, but continue over the weekend till Cyber Monday, a day typically devoted to discounts on electronics and technology.

Last year – according to a survey by Comscore – internet users spent about 11 billion dollars online, showing an increase of around 15% year on year.

In Denmark and especially Danish stores – both online stores as well as physical stores – the Black Friday phenomenon has over the last years won massive popularity. In 2015 Black Friday was a huge commercial success. 27 November 2015 (Black Friday) stands out – as there was set a new Danish record for most transactions on Danish credit cards including the popular Dankort. The Dankort alone had a turnover of nearly 2 billion Danish kroner. According to Nets (In Denmark Nets connect banks, businesses, the public sector, merchants and consumers via an international network facilitating digital payment), at the busiest periods there was recorded 300 transactions every second on all Danish credit cards.

How to set a Black Friday strategy
This means that every retailer must prepare strategies to apply to their business. Here’s how to stay afloat of the shopping fever and get the most advantage from it.

1. Sign new subscribers from social networks
Use social media to prepare dedicated posts, e.g. on Twitter or Facebook. Use dedicated hashtags (#blackfriday or #cybermonday). This way you can release news about limited-time offers, and invite new contacts to subscribe to your newsletter, so they can receive these offers directly to their inbox.

2. Integrate e-commerce and emails
During the promotion, set up automatic triggers in your marketing automation platform and integrate them to your e-commerce or website. For example, you can report when a product is running low: notify users that stock is short to create a sense of urgency and trigger impulse buying.

3. Build up the suspense
Announce new discounts to those who’ve already registered. Use both email and SMS a few days before the start of the sales, so that users can review their wish list or fill their shopping carts while waiting for the discount code or offer to go live.

Send a simple email with essential information and a clearly visible call to action. Try to be creative and fun, maybe even using animated GIFs.

4. Make sure your emails are mobile responsive
Between January and June 2016, mobile transactions reached the threshold of 30% of all transactions for the first time in history. What’s more, the number of sales made by smartphone exceeded those by tablet (Smartphones: 17% vs Tablets: 13%).

The percentage of people who read your emails with their smartphones is shooting up rapidly. Ignoring these facts means losing the opportunity to communicate with a large part of your target market.

5. Launch the offer: start the countdown
It’s finally time to launch the emails or SMSs to kick off your promotional offers.
In your emails, you can enter a countdown so that users realise it is a limited-time offer, thereby stimulating impulse buying.

If you opt for SMS, enter some details about the sales or a discount code within the text. Don’t forget to use landing pages. If, for example, you use different discount ranges (i.e. 5% for purchases below kr. 250, 10% for purchases between kr. 250-500, etc.), it is worth diversifying the content and graphics of the landing pages to give your message more impact.

6. Follow-up activities
If everything goes as planned, you should find yourself with plenty of purchase orders and new contacts in your database – due to your activities. It is very important to analyse the results to understand how effective the campaigns were and structure targeted follow-up activities.

For example, this could be a new discount coupon to encourage a second purchase, or a triggered email with related products dynamically selected based on the purchases made.

Happy Thanksgiving!