The most awaited season of the year for consumers and businesses is here. It’s when the e-commerce players gear up to achieve the remaining revenue targets. And they offer enough in return to the buyers – never-seen-before discounts, lucrative offers, and insane deals. Over 80% of consumers intend to shop during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and 65% want to shop online this season.
As an online retailer or e-commerce business owner, it’s an unmatched opportunity for you to boost your sales exponentially. Not to forget – with e-commerce traffic being highest during the year (100 million in the U.S. alone), you can establish a prolific brand presence in no time.
However, you’re not alone in this race – thousands of businesses prepare for Black Friday in advance, launch attractive offers and promote their businesses aggressively to get maximum attention and conversions.
So how do you stand out among the crowd? What makes you shine bright, and more importantly – what persuades the users to shop from your platform? In this blog, we’ll uncover all of these and more to help you ace your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales goals.
When it comes to promoting your Black Friday offers, conventional marketing tactics don’t work anymore. Modern consumers are intrigued by unique and trending approaches. So it’s vital to indulge in innovative marketing and engagement campaigns along with compelling offers or discounts.
And if you’re wondering – promoting your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns is a direct function of your marketing budget, we have good news for you. In this Black Friday guide for e-commerce, you will find economical and even free strategies that are easy to implement.
Want your business to make the best out of this crazy shopping season? Stick around for an insightful discussion.
Ecommerce During BFCM: What to Expect?
Black Friday online shopping increased by 22% year-on-year in 2020, up to $9 billion globally. In 2021, despite the pandemic hitting the world’s economy severely – sales hit $8.9 billion which significantly surpassed expectations.
On the other hand, e-commerce grew 3x faster as consumers transformed their shopping habits during the pandemic.
While we were doing our research with consumers and established e-commerce players, we found out that a majority of them were eagerly waiting for the Friday and the Monday after Thanksgiving.
If you run an e-commerce business and are wondering why you should proactively prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday Campaign, these insights will help you set up the expectations right:
- Black Friday online sales increased by 3.5x in just 5 years – from $2.7 bn in 2015 to $9 bn in 2020. The growth is expected to continue this year and in the future.
- 60% of online buyers plan to spend more than last year during the Thanksgiving weekend.
- The top 3 priorities while Black Friday shopping for consumers are free shipping, fast delivery, and store pick-up option. To your surprise, discounts are not among the top ones. Now you know how to plan for your holiday sales.
- Social commerce which refers to online sales powered by social media, has grown by 29% since 2020 and makes up 4.4% of total e-commerce sales in the US.
- With an average shopping budget of $818, 43% of consumers plan to buy gifts for friends and family on BFCM sales, followed by 25% of consumers planning to upgrade their technology gadgets or other electronic appliances.
- As per a Salesforce survey, the average Black Friday Cyber Monday discount was 24% in 2021.
- The cart abandonment rate – a critical metric for e-commerce business owners stood at 78% globally.
- 88% of consumers actively compare deals before buying, spending hours of time during BFCM.
Despite a recession-like market landscape, record-high inflation rates, and geopolitical and economical challenges around the globe, e-commerce businesses are expected to weather the storm during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
No matter how much you’ve struggled in the three quarters of 2022, here’s a season to grab with both hands. Not only can this Black Friday help you surpass the Q4 conversion goals, but also win enough customers to get closer to yearly revenue targets.
Top 11 Black Friday Marketing Plans for Accelerating Your E-commerce Sales
Here are the most prolific Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion strategies for your e-commerce brand in 2022.
- Use Scarcity to Persuade Customers
Even before you try to convert your customers, your primary objective is to create a sense of urgency. The most optimal way to achieve that is by using scarcity marketing. Remember the websites highlighting the following?
- Only 5 units left
- Offer ends in 2 hours
- Discount valid only for today
- Now or Never
- Limited edition
- Invitation only
Numerous other enticing calls for visitors are used to make them feel like buying on that very moment.
As GenZ like to call it - ‘FOMO is real’, The same principle when applied to your business, can deliver exceptional results.
Create Never-Seen-Before Offers
Every other e-commerce platform will be offering big discounts. What are you doing to stand out?
In addition to Discounts, shopping can be made more exciting with Rewards, Giveaways, Free Gifts, Product Combos, and more. Here are 3 intriguing ways you can create attractive offers that force them to say - “Take my card already”.
- Offer unique discount rates to different customers and visitors. For example - 40% off for first-time buyers, 30% off if you buy 3 pairs of dresses and more.
- Host giveaways on your website. Every 100th, 500th, or 1000th customer wins exciting gifts
- Don’t just offer discounts or gifts on individual products, recommend closely relevant combos and offer significant discounts on them. For example - If a person buys a baseball bat, they are most likely to buy shoes and socks too. Find out such combinations and give them a good enough reason to buy.
Double Down on Influencer Marketing
As per Facebook’s survey, 87% of users took action after seeing a product on Instagram. There cannot be a better platform to promote your e-commerce business today. You might be working with influencers the entire year, but it’s now the time to get maximum ROI out of your collaborations. Follow these tips to boost the traffic coming from influencers’ accounts:
- Identify niched influencers as well as celebrity influencers who keep using similar products. Make sure you’re targeting both micro and macro influencers because the audiences mostly vary.
- Focus equally on byte-sized videos – Instagram Reels, Tiktok videos, and stories for promoting your products.
- Use countdowns, host giveaways, and exclusive discounts for their audiences.
Run Personalized Email Campaigns
The world is filled with all types of shoppers. Proactive ones will surely check out your website for top Black Friday deals. However, users who are often busy often miss out on visiting websites even during holidays. But a good number of overall consumers open their emails on a daily basis.
As an e-commerce business, you can create targeted campaigns with personalized email content, product recommendations, and offers. For your frequent customers, you can offer VIP discounts. Similarly, for first-time buyers – you should highlight the discounts as once-in-a-lifetime deals.
Underrated tip - Email campaigns are all about subject lines. Make it interesting enough so that your emails get opened in the first place.
Go All-in on Social Shopping
Use specific hashtags for targeting Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Focus on content redistribution more than you do on creation. Pick up hashtags relevant to the product, industry, holiday, and region. Create fun, engaging, and incredibly relatable content as per the trends. Remember to instill a sense of urgency in your campaigns, but don’t overdo it at the same time.
Another major factor that drives conversions for e-commerce businesses is the ease of buying offered to customers. Regardless of whether you’re running social media campaigns, ads, or influencer collaborations – the audience should be able to buy from you in one to two steps.
Persuade with UGC Videos
Your audience trusts other consumers more than brands and celebrities. Video marketing has got all the hype, especially after byte-sized videos popularity and became the biggest social media trend. User-generated content when put as video can quickly and effectively build trust for your audience.
Once you persuade people using UGC videos on social media – not only the sales curve will rise, but it will also boost your brand value and credibility.
UGC content can be completely flexible – from ‘Why do I use this’ type of videos to lifestyle vlogs and more, all you need to do is to promote your product/brand subtly.
Install a Chatbot for User Assistance
As your website receives higher traffic than ever during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ensure you cater to customer support requests and inquiries effectively. Having a chatbot installed on your website can be particularly helpful in streamlining and automating your customer services.
Additionally, you can also provide product recommendations using chatbots. It’s a great way to enhance user experience as you help customers save a lot of time and find desired products effortlessly.
Note: Having a chatbot doesn’t mean you won’t need a customer support team. The basic FAQs around any query can be handled by the chatbot and the request must be forwarded to the Customer Support executive if required.
Host Social Media Contests
In e-commerce marketing, engaging with your audience plays a crucial role in business success. During holiday sales like Black Friday, you can host unique and attractive contests to amplify your campaign’s reach. These activities also help you in gaining loyal followers who actively engage with brands.
A lot of brands practice social media posting contests where people (who are not influencers) getting maximum reactions and engagement on contest posts, win a reward. You can either offer gifts or exclusive discounts for the contest winners, depending on your audience and competitors’ activities.
Follow-Up With Customers After the Holiday Week
One of the most underrated marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses is indulging in proactive follow-ups. With a huge abandoned cart rate, it’s becoming all the more critical for organizations to follow up with customers for improving conversion rates.
Once Black Friday and Cyber Monday are done, you can begin follow-up campaigns through emails, push notifications, SMS, and other channels. Another tried and tested strategy is to offer users with abandoned carts targeted discounts and reward coupons.
Customer Loyalty Programs
Your customers like to be identified and love to be rewarded for loyalty. The best way to nurture your brand’s relationship with customers is by offering loyalty discounts and rewards. Black Friday is a perfect opportunity for you to identify long-time customers and acknowledge them.
A crucial marketing practice for both customer lifetime value and retention is – loyalty programs drive repeat purchases with minimum effort. Especially for early-stage e-commerce entities, sustainable growth can only be achieved when customers shop from you even without Black Friday sales. Loyalty points followed by exciting rewards encourage customers to keep buying from you.
Chance to Play & Win
Push notifications and nudges are not as effective now as they used to be for user engagement. To engage users proactively and drive them down the marketing funnel - gamification has emerged as the most innovative approach.
Adding gamification experiences as part of the Black Friday marketing strategy for your e-commerce business will help you double down on user engagement, conversions, and retention. How?
Gamified activities like Spin the Wheel, Quizzes, Streaks, and Shopping Points – associated with leaderboards can trigger user motivation to engage and buy. Gamification is the most optimal low-effort and high-reward marketing strategy you can use to supercharge your sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Also Read: Ultimate Guide to Implement In-App gamification
Want to Pull Customers with Engaging Gamified Experiences?
There’s nothing as intriguing and engaging as games, and when you add such purpose-driven experiences for users, they are bound to spend more time on your platform. E-commerce businesses can make the best out of gamified activities for customers and significantly boost their conversions and customer retention.
If you’re worried about the technical efforts behind adding such experiences to your e-commerce platform, we’ve got your back. CustomerGlu is a no-code gamification platform that enables product owners to build intriguing experiences with an easy drag-and-drop builder.
If you wish to stand out among the crowd of e-commerce businesses with your marketing and promotional efforts, get started now with gamification using CustomerGlu!
