3 marketing tips for a successful Black Friday

“Success is where preparation and opportunity meet”. Bobby Unser

Black Friday is coming and if you think your online store is immune from the retail madness think again. Last year internet sales went up a whopping 92% on Black Friday. Can you afford to not get in on the action? To take advantage of this great opportunity then you need to be prepared, and have a plan for promoting your shop on November 25th.

Cyber Monday follows Black Friday. Which means more business. This is the time to really grow your business and take every opportunity that comes from Black Friday.

With Amazon and eBay stores it’s likely that you will see more sales without any extra marketing efforts, but running your own e-commerce shop is a different ball game. We have put together a few marketing tips to help you maximize the upcoming opportunity.

Here are a few small things you can do that will hopefully have a big impact on your bottom line.

1.) Run a sale and tell your customers!

On Black Friday your customers will be hunting for the best deals. They won’t come to your store unless they know you have some great deals on. So send them a short but sweet email to let them know you will be offering discounts on Black Friday. Use a tool like Mailchimp to send out an email to previous customers, and see how many clicked through to your website. You can design great looking email in minutes using the pre-made templates or the drag and drop editor. Adding your customer details is also easier than you think, by using one of the MailChimp eCommerce integrations your customers can be imported from most ecommerce platforms in a few clicks.

2.) Promote your discounted items on Twitter and Facebook

Social media is an instant way to get in front of you customers. Schedule posts on all your social media platforms reminding people about the sale. Use persuasive copy (the text in the post) and get people to visit your website before the date, this will help build awareness of your products and create anticipation for the sale event.

For more about social media for online sellers, take a look at our tutorials covering Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

3.) Appear in front of your customers - Pay for advertising

You might think that this is expensive but paid advertising could be a cost-effective way of increasing sales of your product. Using paid advertising, whether it is Pay Per Click on Google, Facebook ads on people’s news feeds or Twitter ads. Each can be a cheap way to get in front of new customers and can be highly targeted to make sure you are reaching the right set of people. Try out different text and image combinations on each network and see which one brings more sales to your site.

These are just a few tips to help you make the most of Black Friday. Let us know if they helped you!