Black Friday for shoppers and for companies

Black Friday works in favour of shoppers and of shops and businesses alike. The "holiday" generates free publicity for itself, which widens the opportunities for business. Shoppers, in turn, organise themselves around it to take advantage of the best offers it brings. 

The event began in physical shops — you have probably seen the videos that went viral, of shoppers pouring in and causing chaos the moment the doors opened. Today, with the digital market expanding all the time, the possibilities are far broader. Your website may well see its traffic climb, which can mean more sales and more revenue. Buying online also makes it easier for a retailer to convert an audience that is already hunting for deals at this time of year.

That opens the door to strategies built around flash sales, for instance: a pop-up on your site can tell visitors that the price of a product or service has just dropped. On top of that, with scheduling made simple and reporting that is ever more concise and real-time, you can watch your business closely and understand within hours how people are behaving on the site. If the plan was to sell 100 mice in three hours and only ten went in the first hour, the technology lets you change the strategy and steer customers towards that product as quickly as possible. 

Those are not the only advantages, though. Black Friday can also be a strong ally in making your business better known, thanks to the extra traffic the event itself generates.

Tips for sellers and companies

Just as shoppers need to stay alert on Black Friday — mostly over fake discounts, scams and fraud — sellers and companies need to prepare as well.  

As noted above, the date can bring more traffic and more customers into a physical shop. None of that is worth much if your business is not ready for it, so it pays to focus on creating an excellent experience for the customer. If you sell a service, work on improving your customer support. It is worth saying that this should be an exercise for every marketer, since one of the stages of the sales funnel is delight. The effort you and your team put in should be aimed at making more and more sales, and at feeding the process back into itself. One of the main factors at this point is the whole buying experience as the customer perceives it — which is why a successful first contact can turn into a consistent long-term relationship.

In physical shops, personalisation areas and activations can drive sales, as can kits, gifts, giftable packaging and limited editions. 

Five tips for getting ready for Black Friday

Your sales can rise a great deal, but for that to happen your business has to be ready to receive so many people. So that everyone gets served properly, here are a few tips on how to prepare:  

Make sure your site holds up under the traffic

A physical shop has limits of space, and even of safety, on how many customers can come in at once. The digital world is no different, immaterial though it is. Your online platform has to be ready for a large, simultaneous volume of users, so that it does not go down or slow to a crawl.

Work upselling and cross-selling into the plan

The name may not be widely known, but the upsell tactic certainly is. It amounts to recommending or suggesting an upgrade on a product during the buying experience — like the fast-food cashier offering you a larger portion of chips for a small addition to the bill. 

Then there is cross-selling, where the logic is the same. Say you are on a site buying trainers, and below them you see other trainers suggested, or perhaps a pair of socks — after all, whoever buys trainers needs socks. That is how you lift your average order value during Black Friday, which in turn grows the number of sales across several sectors, even the ones not running especially deep promotions.

Optimise the checkout page

One of the stages of an online sale is the checkout, where the customer looks at the basket and completes the purchase. It has to be clear and transparent, and it has to feel safe. It is worth offering different ways to pay — credit card, debit card, bank slip, instant transfer and so on. 

That is not the only optimisation available to you. With a testing tool you can create versions of your sales pages and give customers experiences that are close to one another but not identical, which shows you which version sells more or draws more attention at the moment of conversion. Your site's design can be refreshed too, with a look made specifically for Black Friday, or simply with banners and pop-ups pointing people to the deals. 

Work with logistics partners

An audience that grows from one moment to the next calls for better planning — the size of your stock, for instance, or which delivery and logistics partners you hire for that likely surge in demand. 

When demand rises, delivery times tend to slip unless logistics are ready for everything that has to happen. Expectations need to be aligned with that partner, and your own team needs training so it can handle the public on such a competitive date.

Run ads made for the date

Advertising is already a very important part of business. In digital business it matters more still, and never more than on Black Friday — because your competitors are pointing their ads at this same event, which raises the question of how you will stand out from them. 

Start by looking at which media are most "crowded" with the audiences you want. Depending on the size of the company, there are plenty of radio and TV ads tied to Black Friday. Paid ads on social media, through platforms such as Google Ads and Meta Ads, keep growing too, especially for e-commerce. It matters a great deal to run ads made for the date, built around the urgency of the offers. And run A/B tests to understand which ad performs better and brings more traffic and the right lead to your site.

What Manáry Digital brings to your growth

Telling whether your Black Friday went as well as you hoped means looking at a series of metrics. If you have a physical shop, track a few numbers — how many customers reached the shop thanks to the internet, whether through paid or organic traffic. In the digital world, a whole set of metrics can help you and bring valuable insight. Those results are useful not only for next year's edition of the date, but also as something to fold into your standard sales strategy. 

The Manáry Digital team can help you a great deal here. Thanks to our Growth Hacking method, we care about which strategies actually work, and we test until we find them. We focus on making sure the right people learn about your business — the ones most likely to become loyal customers — which is why we lean so heavily on data. EVERYTHING has to be measured, calculated and tracked: conversions, users, new users and so on. 

We also specialise in Google Ads and Meta Ads aimed at converting and attracting customers through a digital strategy. 

Want to know more? Get in touch with our team, or fill in the form below and we will contact you!