October 14, 2024
Black Friday: The ultimate guide for ecommerce businesses
Black Friday is well-known for being a great time to grab a bargain, whether you’re looking for a new air fryer, want to upgrade your tech or get ahead with festive shopping.
It will start on Friday 29th November and run for four days. However, a survey from last year showed that “a third of consumers (32%) took advantage of early deals available in the days and weeks leading up to Black Friday.”
This is the last big promotion before we get into Christmas (yes, we said the C word!) and it’s important for your business to really get the most out of the opportunity.
FUN FACT
Shoppers spent an impressive £1.04 billion during Black Friday 2023 – which was up 4.1% from 2022!
Set clear goals – what do you want to achieve?
- Is revenue the biggest KPI for your business?
- Are you focusing more on engagement?
- Do you have stats from last year that you can use to improve this year’s performance?
Drum up interest in your products
Get people thinking about your products before Black Friday even starts! By starting marketing activity a few weeks before the promotion, customers will still have your brand front of mind.
Leverage cross‑channel marketing
Use cross-channel marketing to engage with customers throughout every stage of the buying journey. You could:
- Run a social media competition to get email signups
- Use email to drive more traffic to your website
- Offer additional discount across paid ads including Google, Amazon & Facebook
Is your product feed up to date?
It’s essential to make sure your product feed is up to date. This includes checking stock levels, optimisation and resolving any feed issues. You will need to reprocess your feed more regularly over Black Friday weekend rather than the standard daily scheduled fetch.Top tip – don’t make last minute changes to your product feed the night before! These changes can take a few days to update so wouldn’t be live in time.
Use a targeting & segmentation strategy
Make your Black Friday campaigns more of a success by showing the right products to the right people at the right time.
- Send email offers to a specific audience based on what they have previously purchased, demographics and interests.
- Don’t let them get away! Have an abandoned cart automation set up which convinces people to purchase.
- Use Custom Intent Audiences on Google to capture people that are actively looking for your products and services.
Need help with targeting & segmentation? Contact our experts here.
Adjust your budgets
Black Friday 2023 saw record average cost per clicks on Google. Specifically, with CPCs up 22% YOY and up 63% from 5 years ago. Make sure you closely monitor your spend, bids, ROAS and budget to get the very best results without wasting money!
Offer Buy Now Pay Later
The rise in cost of living costs is driving more and more consumers to use Buy Now Pay Later options like Klarna and Clearpay. UK shoppers using this type of payment spent £101m on Black Friday last year.According to data from Adobe, “more than £1 in every £7 spent online uses Buy Now, Pay Later” which shows just how important it is to offer flexible payments on your website not just for BFCM but all-year-round.
Calling all FBA Sellers
Did you know that Amazon’s deadline is the 19th October for getting FBA products to one of its fulfilment centres? This is slightly earlier than last year – meaning you need to get organised if you want to ‘guarantee its Prime badge-ready by Black Friday’.