How We Made Record Sales on Black Friday’21?
Everything about campaign and sales management for SaaS products…
Hi, 👋
I love to write for Saas products and share my experience. In this article, I will tell you our Black Friday record sales story, which I think is important information for everyone.
Campaigns are very important for Saas products every year. Small or big campaigns are always held in every quarter of the year. This provides a user mobility for the products and facilitates targeting.
Black Friday has always been the month with the most sales. People in every field are very ready to pay and we wanted to use that.
Let’s start… 🤩
I think the most important part of the campaign process is planning and preparation. We started the planning and preparation process very early. Black Friday happens in November. However, we had established our strategy in the last week of October. So we had a very good organization.
The start and end date of the campaign was the first thing we decided on. Here our strategy began to take shape.
In general, a campaign was held on the week of November 25. We decided to do it differently.
We wanted to market the campaign longer. Because for a campaign to be held during the week of November 25, it is necessary to target this week for the whole month. But this method may mean losing the hot leads from the first 25 days. Someone who can make an immediate payment may not wait until the campaign week or their focus may change. People do not want to pay in advance when there is a discount.
That’s why we set our campaign dates as 14–30 November. However, our sales team enabled users who are ready to pay for the first 14 days to benefit from the discount. Thus, hot leads were converted into customers without waiting.
The campaign discount percentage should have been the biggest campaign of the year. We set a rate that we haven’t done before. Isn’t 40% a pretty good discount percentage? 40% discount The biggest discount campaign of the year for Mobiroller!
We have identified two methods for our users to pay. First, they will log in to the system with the coupon code and pay, or we will receive payment via a link using the second method, iyzilink. Then we will activate the package.
During the campaign preparation process, we created two different coupon codes and iyzilink for TR and EN users. We used different coupon codes and payment links depending on the language in our marketing efforts.
I would like to point out an important issue here: Our effort to display a direct discounted payment link screen with iyzilink during the campaign was less successful. However, our marketing with the coupon code was very successful. People want to see the discount decrease at the checkout step. I saw that it had a positive psychological effect. In Black Friday, only 14% of purchases were made with iyzilink.
We were going to do 2 studies to announce the campaign to people. Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing. In both studies, our aim is to enable users who are interested in the campaign to enter the Sales Funnel. (I will also write an article about Sales Funnel and its importance)
Our expectation from people who enter Sales Funnel is that they turn into customers with a high conversion rate. Some of the people who enter this funnel will complete the process with the documents themselves and will buy it themselves. Some of them will lead the sales team and the sales processes will begin. The remainder will leave the funnel.
We want to attract people’s attention with marketing activities to be done. We want to direct you to a place where anyone interested can get the right message. The best way to do this is “Landing Page”. The best starting point for Sales Funnel might be the right Landing Page. We have prepared a landing page that gives the right message and attracts attention. We directed people to this landing page in our advertisements, e-mail announcements and forum posts.
We also did it in lead-oriented ads. We also used advertisements that allowed the target audience to leave a demand for the lead form after attracting and arousing their curiosity, so we created a potential customer pool for the direct sales team without ever seeing a landing page. However, I don’t think it’s very efficient for this campaign.
In this part, I want to talk about an important issue. In general, people who know and use you in campaigns will convert quickly. Especially in SaaS products, people who signed up but did not buy are the biggest potential. The onborading process will be long for people who meet you for the first time for the campaign to get to know the product, believe in you and understand its benefits. So the key focus for the campaign should be your current users. Here, the number of non-customers of Mobiroller in the last year is about 268k people and this has created great potential for us. Also, for SaaS products, campaigns are a very good opportunity to direct users with monthly packages to annual packages.
Inbound Marketing 🎁
The work here is very important for the campaign. We will talk about the efforts to announce the campaign to existing members, users and customers. We will also announce this campaign to your website visitors whose purpose is to find you, and make them fall in love at first sight.
We used some tools to do these studies. The most important of these is Infoset, an omnichannel tool. With Infoset, chatbot, live chat trigger, pop up, announcement etc. can be added to our website and product management panel. we can create triggers and run them according to certain parameters.
Before the campaign started, we planned which triggers we would set up for TR and EN users and tried to direct the users to a point. The purpose here is to control the user flow.
We made campaign announcements with chat triggers for everyone who came to the system, and directed them to the landing page for detailed information. Thus, we aimed for everyone to visit the Landing Page and enter the sales funnel for the first time. In addition, we have worked on redirecting users with pop-ups. We also used these triggers in the mobile application management panel. We have grouped users in different parameters and used special triggers, not only visitor-oriented, but also according to the page the user is visiting or the type of package he uses.
Another tool we use in this process is Announcekit. With Announcekit, we can create a fixed banner on our web page and make announcements easily. From here, we redirected users to the Landing Page.
We also used the advanced pop-up management platform, Popupsmart, a lot in the system. We drew attention with quality pop-ups.
In my opinion, the most important work we do is announcement and campaign mails. Before the campaign started, it was clear on which days we would send e-mails and on which subjects we would send these e-mails. In line with this planning, mail kits were prepared. We tried to trigger the campaign by sending e-mails to users on different topics.
Note: I wrote a detailed article about our mail sending standard before. I definitely recommend checking it out here.
We have a very strong mail audience and this has made our job much easier. We aimed to convert leads to sales team during the first 14 days of the campaign. For this reason, we directed users to Lead Forms. Users learn about the campaign and its start date. People who want to use fast become leads. Before the campaign starts, the sales team can convert these people into customers at a discount. I think this is a good strategy to warm up users for the campaign.
After the campaign started, we sent e-mails directing users to purchase. We aimed to increase self-purchases.
Our aim here was to announce the campaign to everyone in the system. But we tried to show this message at the right time and on the right page. I think this is the important issue. For this, it is necessary to segment the users correctly. We have some shortcomings in this regard, but I think we have produced a very good solution.
Outbound Marketing 🥁
During the Black Friday period, people are psychologically very ready to pay in every sense. In order to evaluate this process very well, we wanted to find our target audience and give the right message. We wanted to tell you how we solved his problem and to attract his attention. So he will visit us and start preparing for the sales funnel. The only downside is that this process takes longer than existing users.
In order to start this process, a campaign slogan and campaign message were determined and decisions were made with A/B tests.
Facebook Ads and Google Ads were the tools we used the most. Our advertising kits were prepared in different variations and decided by A/B tests. Different strategies were used in advertisements. Ads that attract visitors were used on the campaign landing page, where users were expected to be activated with the message of the page. It was also used in advertisements that lead to lead-oriented forms. A large number of leads were collected for the sales team in lead-oriented advertisements. The conversion rate of leads, whose problems we were able to solve, to sales was much higher in Lead Ads.
We can interpret this in 2 different ways; first, the Landing Page may not be of sufficient quality for the campaign. Therefore, visitors may leave without entering the system because they do not understand the process. Therefore, the rate of conversion to sales is much faster with the contact of the sales team. Or the system may have UI/UX problems. Thus, you can request leads before users enter the system.
Apart from advertisements, we applied to some forum and community lists before the campaign started. We have been featured in “Black Friday Deal” groups, forums and articles. Here, we have reached the people whose aim is to discover the campaign in the shortest way and without any cost.
Here we made some attempts to work with influencers and youtubers. We contacted people who we thought were the right audience for our product. We did mail work. However, since we are not very experienced in this field, we could not progress much. The budgets required were high to experiment. That’s why we haven’t tried it in this campaign, but we have it on our list and we will experience it as soon as possible.
Campaign Process ⏰
I think the most enjoyable part of the whole process is the start of the campaign. Isn’t it exciting to see the results of all the planning and work done? I find it very enjoyable to see the result of the user flow control strategies that we initially imagined.
We did everything we planned here. We had planned all the processes in advance and it was very easy for us to manage the process as our documents, announcement contents, and mail kits were ready before the campaign started.
During the campaign, we followed the people who bought it on their own. During the process, we responded to users’ requests for technical support very quickly and immediately evaluated the feedback given by the users. Thus, we made users trust us quickly. We have ensured that the after-sales communication is very strong. Thus, users were activated quickly. I think this is very important for Recurrigs.
The campaign started after the first e-mail we sent as TR and EN over the system. We didn’t expect a purchase after the first email. However, about 1 hour after the first e-mail, the first annual package sale came. This increased the motivation of the team. We created a different strategy for each email and I think we had a great Black Friday campaign.
What was the result?
We sold 94 annual packages during the Black Friday campaign alone. If we also add recurring and new monthly sales, this means a record income for Mobiroller!
THANK YOU!
ARİF ÇAĞLAR
You can contact me for detailed questions. I would love to hear and discuss your comments.
