EPISODE 84 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: ECOMMERCE: HOW TO PREPARE FOR BLACK FRIDAY SALES

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
If you are an e-commerce business, you are likely already thinking about Christmas, especially with Australia post cutoff times this year. In this episode, I'm going to talk about the two major events for online retailers you need to be prepared for prior to the Christmas shopping season, buckle up. I'm talking all about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Welcome to The Boom, your Biers podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre Reid. And each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate and power and inspire business owners and myself along the way.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
Hello everyone, or welcome back to another episode. This one is geared mainly towards e-commerce businesses. However, if you are a traditional retailer, you may need to think about brick and mortar opportunities as well. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have traditionally been geared toward the American market. In recent years though, they've also become a fixture in the Australian e-commerce calendar. And boy are we expecting this to be massive this year. Black Friday refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. It applies to both brick and mortar and online retailers over there. And it usually is the busiest shopping day of the entire year. Cyber Monday takes place just three days later and is traditionally restricted to online shopping only. And while Puritans will tell you that black Friday and Cyber Monday are 24 hour only events, in recent years we've seen retailers put on a whole long weekend of sales.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
And in the past two years, the Australian retailers who have participated in Black Friday sales have had phenomenal results. With all these Aussie's getting ready early for Christmas this year, and in anticipation of postal delays; the 2021 Black Friday weekend is to set, is set to break all kinds of records. Consumers spent $9 billion on Black Friday in 2020. And that number is set to increase in 2021, if you can believe it. And while it is a great way to build sales for your business, a good Black Friday sale doesn't happen by accident. Here's how we're preparing our clients for Black Friday. Step number one, make sure you do your math. It's pretty standard for e-commerce stores to offer discounts of anywhere up to 40% off store wide. But if that sort discounting will stretch your business a little thin, there are other ways you can participate [inaudible 00:02:49] having to cut into your profits too much.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
Can you do a buy one, get one half price, offer, a gift pack with purchase over a certain amount? The best promotion is one that will entice people to buy, offer great value and benefit your business, at the same time. You also need to be thinking about how you can increase that average order value when you get people to your online store. If you're going to run a sale, it needs to be pretty impressive in order to cut through that noise. Step number two. And I think this is the most important, is building your email list in the lead up to this. There's nothing worse than only receiving a call from a friend when they want something and to only receive an email from a business when they want you to buy feels a bit like that as well. There's a reason for building a list before Black Friday, and I'll go into that in step four.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
A sure fire away to build list is to run a giveaway, so that you not only capture email addresses, but you generate goodwill in the lead up to the event. Our clients get fantastic results with our giveaways and we see a decent percentage of those people who enter our client competitions going on to then become regular customers. Step number three is to hype it up. We're already seeing some major brands running ads and marketing emails to start generating buzz. And this is also really smart for smaller businesses too. If you start letting your followers and subscribers know that you're running a Black Friday sale now, they're far more likely to actually come and visit your store and purchase on the day because they will be flooded with emails in the lead up to Black Friday. Easy ways to build hype includes sending an email series out to your list, highlighting the products that [inaudible 00:04:29] to purchase on black Friday.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
-create stories counting down to the minute it ticks over into Black Friday. This is easy. You can just create a template in Canva and drag the counter countdown feature from stories in. Do some polls, ask your followers to tell you what they prefer, discount or bonus gift. Again, this is easy to do on Instagram stories, and do a walkthrough. If you're a brick and mortar store, take your followers through your space and show them the products you'll have on sale. And if your eCommerce only, screen record you scrolling through your website on your phone and highlight the product or pieces you want to sell. Most of on the day, step number four is really important. You need to have an ads plan, Google and Facebook ad prices spike significantly across Black Friday weekend due to their auction system. Basically the more people that you have bidding to get in front of eyeballs, the higher that cost is going to be.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
In order to keep your costs down, we recommend taking the actions above to grow your email list and prime your followers so that you don't have to spend a lot to retarget your ads to them. You want a good lead up to Black Friday so that Facebook can learn which ads work, which don't, and adjust the ads to your followers and look alike audiences accordingly. You're going to call us crazy, but the team at Lynchpin all say that starting your Black Friday, right at the beginning of November is the way to go. And I'll give you a little summarying of exactly what we're doing for our clients in November, so you can kind of get an idea of a strategy and how to implement it. Step five is getting your website right. There is nothing more heartbreaking than seeing a client do all the work to set up a sale and stumble at the final hurdle.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
-when their discount codes don't work or their sales prices don't render on the front of the website. Prior to Black Friday, you can add a banner or a countdown timer to your website to generate buzz. You could also add an email sign up so people can be notified when items go on sale and you want to make sure that on the day, your pricing is ready to go. We recommend that you add a sale price to your website or if you are using Shopify, rather than relying on discount codes. Now there are two reasons for this, number one, people can enter the wrong code or the code sometimes don't work. You can spend a lot of time fielding customer service calls when you should be watching your sales sky rock-rocket. Two, you want to make the buying process as straightforward as possible, the fewer barriers to purchase, the better.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
And actually there's a third reason for this as well. If you are running Google shopping ads, then Google Shopping will pull in the sale price into those ads automatically. However, if you are using a discount code on Shopify, what you're going to find is that discount doesn't show up until they reach the cart stage. So it's not as enticing for people. The potential for small businesses to make some serious sales is huge on Black Friday. So it's essential that you have your website ready to go when the clock strikes 12. All right. So as promised, in a nutshell, here's a strategy we'll be employing for our clients come November 1st. Yep. That's right. We're starting on November 1st. So we'll be launching a two week juicy competition for our clients to engage as many people as possible. And we're going to try and tie this in with actually building their email list as well as a condition of entry.

Sonya McIntyre- Reid:
So once that's over, we'll run a Black Friday/ Cyber Monday sale for two weeks until the end of November. So we've got a two week block of the competition running, and then we've got a two week block of the sale. This is a great opportunity to push any Christmas deals you have because Australia's post, as I mentioned just before our cutoff is super early this year. And even now talking to our clients, there are major delays happening up to weeks for people to receive their items. So there you have it running a Black Friday sale does take a lot of preparation and planning, but if you can pull it off, your sales could go through the roof.

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