Are You Ready for The Next Black Friday 2022 ?
You may have missed your chance to get on this year’s Black Friday. Maybe it was because of logistical problems, funding, not starting the business and a myriad of different possibilities.
The good news is that Black Friday isn’t a one-time event; it happens every year with plenty of time to prepare for it. The name Black Friday was originally used to refer to economic crises and not shopping.
A Wall Street market crash in 1869 was the first time Black Friday was officially used. It was linked years later to shopping after Thanksgiving in the 80s.
Since then, it was the biggest shopping event in the USA that spread later to the rest of the world with almost all nations celebrating it in November.
The few months before the Black Friday are known to be a bit hectic as all stores and brands compete to provide groundbreaking sales that overshadow their competitors.
This doesn’t only help big brands to increase sales, it allows smaller businesses to join the game as sales become the defining trait of every business on Black Friday.
We believe that using Black Friday to your advantage can help boost your business tremendously so we’ve made a guide to help you prepare for the event.
Newsletter
It may sound old-fashioned when you compare it to the new and modern techniques of marketing but it does wonders. An email campaign has been and is still known to be one of the most effective marketing strategies for sales. The best thing about it is that it’s practically free with very low costs. Since people start preparing for Black Friday pretty early, up to 2 months, an email campaign has a lot of time to make an impact on not just your customers, but also a wider audience of potential customers.
The main obstacle faced when you’re organizing an effective email campaign is to make sure you don’t fall into the same pitfalls of spam newsletter practices while providing exciting offers at the same time. Personalization is the key as it will make your customers understand and feel that you care about what you’re sending to them.
You may find a lot of competitors following the same strategy so you have to make sure that your emails are well-crafted which will help you stand out and increase your brand awareness.
A commonly used strategy that is effective is sending to your top purchasers or customers exclusive emails to make them know that you appreciate their shopping experience. You can send early and exclusive offers that only they can benefit from.
This will greatly increase the probability of them purchasing and pursuing such offers. Making your top senders feel special is one of the key pillars of a newsletter email campaign.
Another strategy is offering customers who have been gone for a while offers to remind them that you haven’t forgotten about them. Special discounts for inactive shoppers can help you boost your sales during the Black Friday event.
Using Social Media
You’d be hard-pressed to find a business doing well without their active work on social media. A lot of eCommerce businesses are using social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to increase brand awareness amongst a huge audience. Black Friday is a great opportunity to create ads that can attract people to your deals.
You stand to gain not only a boost in sales on Black Friday but an active customer base that can become loyal to you in the future. You can use urgent Call-to-Action messages to give them a sense that these offers are limited and time is of the essence.
The best thing about social media is that you can customize your marketing campaign to reach the exact target audience you have in mind. Avoiding wasting the social media marketing budget on casting a big net and try to focus instead on reaching your target audience.
Website Optimization
Your website stands to benefit from advance SEO tactics whether they’re for Black Friday or not. But the sales season is one of the best opportunities to ensure that your website is ready for it.
There are a lot of businesses competing in the field of SEO which makes it very important that you know the ins and outs of SEO to truly stand out. The keywords you use on Black Friday are going to be a little different than usual as they’ll be more tailored towards Black Friday shoppers.
If you don’t have the technical knowledge required to improve your SEO, it’s totally worth it to use the services of professional agencies and marketeer to ensure that you get the most out of your website as Black Friday approaches.
Optimizing your website doesn’t mean handling the SEO exclusively. You will also need to ensure that your website is able to handle the extra traffic due to all the marketing campaigns you’ve been doing.
There is nothing more disappointing than potential customers abandoning your website because it’s not fast enough or because of bugs. Reports state that half visitors to websites will leave if the site doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Ensure that your website is operating flawlessly and ready to handle a lot of traffic when it needs to.
Mobile Shopping Optimization
This is a bit different than website optimization as it includes mobile shopping as well. Research shows that about 75% of all online orders will be made from mobiles. This means that your website doesn’t only have to be good enough for desktop users, but it will have to be fully functional for mobile users as well.
This means that the loading speed of your pages will need to maintained at the lowest possible while ensuring that your customers are able to navigate your website as easy as it is on a desktop. Since more and more stores are starting to build their own apps, it can be easily seen that apps are becoming essential to both consumers and businesses.
This new direction of m-commerce is enabling more and more consumers to buy products and complete transactions on their phones with complete ease and convenience.
It’s easy to forget a website’s address but when there is an app on your phone, it will always be the first go-to when your consumers think about you. The introduction of push notifications to eCommerce apps has significantly increased sales and interactions with the app.
Try your best to craft push notifications that aren’t intrusive yet able to excitingly urge your customers into checking the latest deals for Black Friday.
You don’t want to find yourself preparing for the biggest sale shopping event in the whole world in the last few days. Things would only get hectic if you don’t prepare your business and come up with a strategy to help you drive consumers to your business.
Since the technical livelihood of your website and app are vital to your business’s success, try to cement their infrastructure to handle increases in traffic.
Make sure that you play the long game and use Black Friday to increase your average customer base and not only your sales during the season.
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