As of October 16, there are only 38 days left until Black Friday. That may sound like a lot of time, but in marketing, 38 days might as well be one week. It’s important to begin planning for your BFCM sale as soon as possible. If your new to BFCM, this post will give you a general guideline to help begin planning for the holiday season.
Choose Your Sale
Selecting your BFCM sale can be difficult, but it’s important to stick with one or two sales. One of the most common mistakes retailers make is overwhelming their customers with too many sales going on.
Try keeping it simple.
Percentage discounts and BOGO sales are very popular and easy to communicate to customers.
Here are some questions to keep in mind when choosing a sale:
What are your marketing and sales goals?
Which key performance indicators will you use to measure progress?
Which tactics and channels will help you best reach your audience?
Once a sale is chosen, schedule it in your Shopify admin. Also, make the coupon code easy to remember. “BLACKFRIDAY” is an example of an easy to remember coupon for customers.
Plan Your Marketing
Creating marketing collateral is essential for a successful BFCM campaign. Whether it’s a photoshoot or video productions, let your creativity take control to create unique campaigns.Email campaigns are great for generating BFCM purchases as well.
At a minimum, schedule 3 separate emails scheduled to send throughout your sale. each email should cover the following:
Email 1: Send the first email on the Monday before your BFCM sale. This will be an introductory email to get customers excited about your sales.
Email 2: Send a second email the morning of Black Friday. This email should highlight your BFCM sales and let customers know how long your sale will last.
Email 3: Urgency is of the utmost importance in this email. Reiterate your BFCM sale and create a sense of urgency by letting customers know time is running out for your BFCM sale. This email will go out on Cyber Monday.
Schedule Your Paid Advertising
The holiday season is the most expensive time for paid advertising. We recommend focusing purely on targeting warm and hot leads. This is accomplished through retargeting campaigns. Use mailing lists, site visitors, and social media engagement audiences to segment the delivery of your paid advertising.
With your Facebook pixel set up properly, you can segment your audience based on when they last visited your site, the actions they took on your site, and their purchase history.
It’s important to note that during the holiday season, many online shoppers are actively looking for products to buy, thus potentially increasing your ROI while decreasing your CPA.
Experts are predicting the biggest BFCM ever in 2018. Now’s the time to claim your share of the holiday sales.
Happy selling!