Whiteboard Wednesday #7: Tactical tips for Black Friday | Clearhaus Learning

You are probably planning on running a campaigns or two on Black Friday - but what kind of promotions work?

In this video, Allan Jørgensen from Web2Media will talk a bit about what tactical things you can do, and give some examples of good discounts to offer on Black Friday.

Watch it here.

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Welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Allan Jorgensen from Web2Media. Today, I’m gonna be talking to you about Black Friday and giving you some insights on the tactical aspects of getting the most out of Black Friday.

First off, I like to start in the Danish market saying we were late adapters compared to what they do in the States but now it’s booming at best and the consumers are ready to get the full benefits of Black Friday.

That’s something you should take in consideration when you prepare your own Black Friday deals or setup, because what we’ve seen in particular last year, where we tested a lot of different setups, was that we don’t need to provide 50% deals to the customers we could instead give them something that is a perceived value in the same level. Get ourself a better earning on our selling but still get the same amount of orders coming in.

So, one food for thought for you guys is that look at your current offering. Do you really need to remove all the margin? You can actually maybe do 25%, free shipping, or XYZ on top of the deal and people feel still that they have the best solution with you guys. You can also do price match, whatever, added communication to that.

So, look at your margin, don’t destroy it all - you can actually get away with offering something else than half price or what we’ve seen in the market so far.

Secondly, I’m going to be focusing about the tactical parts of what is Black Friday good for. So, would you sell a lot of stuff at a zero margin? What’s really in it to be inside Black Friday? If you instead focus on doing two things one is that obviously sell. Utilise Black Friday to get rid of a lot of your inventory, get a lot of new customers.

Secondly, focus on getting permissions meaning if you can get permissions up towards Black Friday, you can advertise cheaper when it’s at a high rate just around Black Friday but you can also start communicating with the customers afterwards, and that’s a potential business booster if you do that right. One example could be that you can start communicating a month before Black Friday’s coming up: “You can enlist in our VIP section or our membership section, hand over a permission for us to send you emails and we can send you the right information.”

You could also go in and say :“a week before we open up for all our VIP club members”, and then they’ll feel both special treatment but also you can start utilising the fact that if you do relevant communication you might get them to buy more than once.

So, we’ve seen a lot of good cases where you do that a week in advance, but on the day you do hourly offers, for instance. So you prepared your customers, perhaps they already bought something from you, and then on the day you’re going to be sending them hourly offers on email. Don’t fear that they’re gonna churn. We’ve seen a minority do that cause the fear of missing out is intense, especially on that day. So even though they receive maybe 15 emails in the awake hours of day, they might go in and act on two or three of them.

So, then you could in the morning end up with saying “you bought this from us yesterday. Add this to your basket and you get free shipping,” and then you can actually get them to use even greater share of wallet on that day in your webshop. So, that was one key insight you can take away from here.

We also talked about digital marketing. You can also start thinking about if you have such a strong offer to your customers, you can send them a direct email, also a direct mail, the physical part of it, if you have their address and their permission you can actually stand out with this VIP offer a week before, so you don’t mass communicate it, but only communicate it to the people that you actually want to treat as VIP but also with a higher intent of buying more from you guys.

So that was two tactical things you can do for Black Friday. My name is Allan Jorgensen and subscribe here for more videos.