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Digital Horizons
Maximize Your Black Friday Profits: Proven Strategies for Unmatched Sales Success
Ready to make this Black Friday your most profitable one yet? We promise you'll gain insider tips and proven strategies to skyrocket your sales. Join us, James and Brian, as we walk you through the essential steps to build engaged audiences early, the power of shifting budget allocations towards reach and video view campaigns starting in September, and the benefits of offering flexible payment options like Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) to build trust and smoothen checkouts. You'll learn how understanding your margins when offering discounts through BNPL can be a game-changer for optimizing your sales.
Ever wondered how to create compelling offers that truly captivate your audience? We share actionable strategies for significant discounts, the effectiveness of micro-testing various discount formats, and the magic of aggressive, multi-touch email marketing campaigns. Discover the importance of planning content early by collaborating with content creators and influencers, ensuring you have top-notch promotional material ready to go. This episode is packed with insights and practical tips to help you maximize your Black Friday campaign's impact, turning your preparation into unprecedented success.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
Is your business prepared for Black Friday this year?
Speaker 2:We're currently preparing our clients for the biggest Black Fridays they've ever had, and in this video we're going to run through some tips and tactics that you can implement in your business right now to ensure that you're well ahead and prepared to have the biggest Black Friday you've ever had. I'm James.
Speaker 1:And I'm Brian. We both own our own agencies. We've been in the industry for over 20 years and we're here to share marketing tools, tips and ideas with you on what's working for our clients right now and into the future.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening. So let's get into our first tip, which is making sure you're building your audiences right now. So when we're talking about this and when we're talking to our clients, is we're making more of a shift away from those really conversion-focused campaigns and allocating more of our budget into reach and video view campaigns so we can start building up these audiences.
Speaker 1:Is that in the lead up, like weeks, or would you say months? I?
Speaker 2:would say months out, like we're talking, we're doing this in September right now. So I think, at minimum in September, you should start building these audiences, because then you're able to create audiences that you can then remarket. This is a really cost effective strategy. So, whilst you're going to be spending money now, you're building your brand awareness. You're going to be spending money now you're building your brand awareness. You're going to generate sales anyway out of this. But what you're going to be able to do is then, when it comes to that sale period where everybody is going to be spending advertising on the platforms, you're going to not be targeting by interest targeting. So you're not going and putting, all right, well, I sell shoes, I'm not targeting everybody who's interested in shoe sales. You're targeting people who have engaged with your list previously, and so your cost and your CPMs are going to be able to reach a more engaged audience and it's going to make your cost per conversion far lower.
Speaker 1:That's a really good point, because I think a lot of brands would consider saving up their funds or getting ready for the few days in the lead up to and then the days itself. This year it's the 29th of November, so that means starting September, october and building up that activity.
Speaker 2:I'm going to say a minimum of eight weeks. You want to be building up those audiences. Just think about the amount of people that you're going to be able to get to engage with your content. Run video view campaigns. Make sure that it's going to attract the right audience. So create your custom audiences based on that. So anyone who's watching, say, 25% of these videos, and so that way, when they're watching it, they're falling into your remarketing buckets of these videos and so that way, when they're watching it, they're falling into your remarketing buckets. Then you've got them saved into your campaigns, ready to go for when you're about to hit. But go on that sale.
Speaker 1:And, if you think about it, the product that you have to offer or the service that you're discounting, whatever it may be the chances of someone seeing it in the moment and making a impulse purchase on Black Friday is quite low, Whereas if you could build up that audience in advance, have people wanting the product and then when they see your offer, they're actually ready to convert.
Speaker 2:So it's a good way of extracting out as much value from Black Friday as possible and not paying over the odds for those audiences 100%, and you're also building brand awareness during the whole part of that as well, so it's not like it's just wasted dollars saving up for this one thing. You're building brand credibility. You can run as many different video view campaigns and reach campaigns to just continually have more touch points and educate people about your brand, so that way they're much more warmed up and ready to purchase.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true, don't think about it as just a wasted budget and then hopefully they all buy on Black Friday. Hopefully you're going to get some sales in the lead up as well. 100%.
Speaker 2:And I mean that's what everyone sort of in e-commerce knows is during the lead up to Black Friday, you're potentially going to see a lull in your sales because people are knowing they're trained to know now that they're going to get discounts when it comes through the Black Friday period or even earlier in November. So just making sure that you are aware that this period may be a little bit slower because people are trained to wait for sales.
Speaker 1:I've got one I'd like to cover off Ensuring your e-com platform has buy now, pay later or really flexible payment platforms to make it really seamless for your buyers when it is time to convert on Black Friday.
Speaker 1:You should have this anyway and it's also relevant for some products. Obviously, very low cost products probably don't need a buy now, pay later or multiple flexible payment platforms. But ensuring that the platform that the user trusts, or the one that they signed up for or the one that they've used before, is there as an option not just using PayPal, not just having one payment gateway option ensures that it's going to feel confidence inspiring for the user that if they are considering checking out with your brand for the first time, if they see those brands there of checkout platform providers or buy now, pay later providers, it's going to make it easier for them to make that commitment to buy if it is a larger ticket item. But it's also going to build trust so that when they do go to checkout they know that it's not a scam or a dodgy website or it's going to actually be processed and they're going to get their order. So that's just a little conversion optimization thing that you should ensure is set up in the lead up to Black Friday 100%.
Speaker 2:And I guess, on the back of that, is understanding and because if you are getting a lot of sales through these BNPL options, understanding what your margins are, because when you're looking at Oracle, you need to look at what your discount offers are and the next we'll talk about how we approach that but you need to understand well what is your actual margins going to be, because you need to factor into your discounting or whatever it is that you're bundling and how much you're actually going to make, looking at what your profit margins are, but then take into account these other things. You're probably going to be offering free shipping. You're probably going to be offering afterpay or some of these other payment gateways, which is then going to take, you know, 6 to 12% of whatever your sale price is as well. No-transcript want to just be making a whole ton of sales and making no money out of it, especially when you're taking factoring in ad costs and everything else that you're using to generate those sales throughout that period.
Speaker 1:That leads us nicely into the offer. You have to have one. I think that's a really good tip about structuring it so it is still feasible for the business to make a profit off those sales. But what are some tips around generating an offer and defining an offer? I often see clients go not far enough in some cases. So it isn't a Black Friday or Cyber Monday quality deal, so you want to go as big as you can because it's what's going to get attention right.
Speaker 2:So you want to go as big as you can because it's what's going to get attention right.
Speaker 2:So you're looking through all these ads in your feed, you're looking through your inbox and you've got a hundred emails in there promoting offers on.
Speaker 2:You need to go as hard as you can. So, even if you've just got one product that you know that you're going to lead in with, all right, we'll throw on 70% off, 60% off on this, and then the rest of your store might be at a little bit less of a discount, but you need to promote something that is going to be able to allow you to say, up to X. You also want to be testing all right. Well, maybe my customers don't really engage as much with a percentage off. They want to see a dollar value off, and so you, maybe you want to. When you're thinking about and planning out your ads, thinking about all right, we want to be testing percentage off versus dollar off, or starting from, or having a look at the wording and the way that you're structuring and presenting your offers to your audience, to see how it's going to resonate with them, because some people are going to react differently to the way that you're presenting that in their ad copy.
Speaker 1:So testing that throughout the Black Friday sale and being ready to revert to the best performing version of your offer.
Speaker 2:Yes, but before this, though, we want to be doing micro tests, so this is something that a lot of businesses don't do, and they're going to get a lot of value out of this. So, if you're thinking about, all right, it's September right now, it depends on when you're watching this but you might think, all right, cool, well, I'm thinking about doing a 50% offer. I wonder how that's going to compare to doing a 40% offer. What we can do is start running little micro tests. That way, you can test it, and you might see all right, well, testing this versus this it had a significant increase in performance versus the other offer, because you don't want to go and throw all your eggs in one basket and go all right, cool, we're coming up to Black Friday. We are going to guess that this is going to be the optimal offer for this period. Put your huge budget into it, and then it potentially not hit with your audience.
Speaker 1:Maybe you need to start thinking about all right well, how do we test these offers actually with your audience, and so running micro tests is a really effective way to do that. We're starting to see a plan forming in the lead up to Black Friday. Now We've got a few things that advertisers and brands can start to employ now and start trialing now. Some require more setup than others.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've got two more to go. So next one is running lead forms. So your email list again is a really powerful tool for you to have and to activate over the Black Friday period. It doesn't cost you anything once you've got those emails on your list and you can smash it as many times as you want. Like some people, I think go way too light on email marketing.
Speaker 2:Yes, I know myself my inbox is completely full. So if you sent me one email throughout the day, there's a good chance. I'm not bunch of emails, all different subject lines and having rules and clavio or whatever email marketing platform. You got to say if this person hasn't opened, send out another one, keep adding them in that list and keep hitting them throughout the day to try and get people's attention, to get them to take action during the period, to build that email list again right now. So action you can take.
Speaker 2:Start running lead forms with a hey, we've got sales coming up. Get on the list, be the first to know, get early access. Whatever it is to start building up that email list, you'll get extremely cheap cost per signups using lead forms. You don't even need to take people off the Facebook ad platform or Instagram and then capture their email address, add them into your Klaviyo list or email marketing list. That way you get them ready. Make sure you're sending emails leading up to Black Friday, but that's again it's going to be something you can do right now. Start running lead form ads and start building your email list.
Speaker 1:I think the power of email marketing, if done well and not being so restrained and thinking I'll only send one a month, can really leverage the value of those emails you'll build up through those lead forms. I also agree doing those lead forms in a way where it's easy for the person to convert means it'll be really quite cheap. So really good tips there. Is that the last two. Was there anything else?
Speaker 2:Final one, Last one, and this is one again I don't think business to think about. So I want you to start thinking about this, but start talking to content creators, engaging content creators, get them your products in their hands and start getting them to create the content that you want promoted for Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Nothing worse than getting to the week before Black Friday and going, oh shit, we probably would be great to have an unboxing video or have something like that, and that's too late. So start thinking about your content plan and start engaging, working with if you work with influencers, if you just work with content creators to create stuff. But start thinking about that now. Start building that catalog of content, because the more content you've got throughout the period, the better results you're going to get. So that's, I'd say, the final tip they want to go through. Today is just being prepared. So I guess, as overview, build your remarketing list, build your email list, test your offers, start creating ad content and then make sure you make it as easy as possible for people to convert on your platform by using BNPL and you've got all the payment gateway offers there available. And micro tests Micro tests Don't forget the micro-tests.
Speaker 1:That's great. I think there's some really good tips that you can use and start getting ready now for the 29th of November this year, or the 4th Friday of November every year, if you're watching this next year. That's Digital Horizons for this week. Thanks, james.