8 Black Friday eCommerce Strategies to Spike Up Sales

Thomas Mercy
Marketing Innovation & Growth Hacking
7 min readNov 2, 2020

Black Friday, Black Friday, Black Friday… 🙌

That day of the year where both customers and brands experience an urgency to buy and sell like no other. Black Friday is one of those periods that your marketing plan should not be left until the last minute. It’s an ideal opportunity to strategize, particularly as customers all around the world are searching for the finest offers on the net.

In the past years, brands did their utmost best to drive customers to their physical stores for the one-day shopping mania. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic whose spread is heightened with crowds, brands are changing their course of action this year.

As is the current drift, most brands are staying away from urgent, doorbuster deals — the kind of deals customers have squashed one another for in years past.

They are doing their best to pull in shoppers by highlighting their online options. Using invigorating and captivating Black Friday marketing strategies and sales to exhibit surprising deals that are made with the intent to blow away customers’ minds and fill them with thrilling excitement. And they’re doing it NOW.

But as every company comes out with a vast advertising blitz, making your website stand out can be quite hard. And if at all you do entice shoppers during Black Friday, what is the guarantee they’ll stay and become loyal customers?

For retailers, Black Friday is a huge day — and the outcome is mostly unpredictable

However, this is what you should know going into the season:

🔥Start your planning in advance:

Each and every marketer right now — competitor or not — is contending for your selected shoppers' attention. That said, you’ll want to start planning and building anticipation by preparing your site, developing your game plan and assets, and ensuring you have a full-proof strategy in place to maximize the potential that Black Friday has to offer your business.

🔥Prepare to spend more on paid budgets:

Black Friday is a great sales opportunity that draws competition from different sectors across all platforms. Be prepared to increase your marketing budget across your paid channels to capitalize on the potential of Black Friday for your business.

Since we’ve covered the essentials, let’s consider some of the Black Friday campaigns I put together to help build up customer engagement and increase conversion rate.

1. Engage Your Audience with Live Videos

With shopping online being the new norm, it is imperative now more than ever to stay fun and relevant. You can launch a live video channel to take viewers through ‘guided shopping experiences in the hours leading up to Thanksgiving just before the Black Friday chaos takes its toll. This creates an amazing opportunity for you to increase your brand awareness, drive product discovery, and in the long run generate sales through the push on either Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or another social platform. It’s an engaging way to connect with your shoppers in a way that resonates with them whilst providing a little entertainment.

But be sure, to stand out from all the other businesses that are using the same approach by keeping your content simple and human.

2. Utilize Retargeting Ad Campaigns

Black Friday shoppers are known to have a short attention span and tend to compare deals across multiple vendors. And retargeting Individuals who have visited a particular web page is always an excellent idea. This can be done using Facebook. Doing this will enable you to reach individuals who may have disregarded your store and wouldn’t have gone over your deal in any case.

Retargeting customers that have purchased from your store is also a good idea.

Existing clients are normally easier to reach and advertise to as against new customers. So these customers you’ve sold to before should be responsive to your brand new Black Friday deals.

To maximize the potential of this marketing method, it is advisable you create custom ads for each category of product. Endeavor to refer to the holiday sale, the imminent end of the sale, and how long they have left until it’s back to full price, as you want the ad to remind the shopper of precisely what they’re missing out on.

3. Increase Social Media Marketing to Gain Awareness and Attract Customer

Another great E-commerce marketing strategy you can use to influence more customers is Social media. As we know, there is a steady increase in the number of online purchasers influenced by social media.

And studies show that the leading shoppers in Black Friday sales are millennials. This single fact indicates the importance of taking advantage of social media platforms to create awareness for your brand and exhibit its products.

You can also use hashtags # to increase your reach on social media. Studies show that posts with at least one hashtag get 70% more likes and 392% more comments than those without hashtags.

4. Offer Tempting Discounts & Coupons

Refer a friend and get a 50% discount, ‘’Buy 1 and get 1 free’’

How attractive does this statement sound?

I am guessing ‘VERY ATTRACTIVE’!!! Anybody would want to mention to their loved ones a business they had an exceptional experience with and one who is even rewarding them for referring people.

You can capture new shoppers this Black Friday by offering them massive deductions and tempting offers as it is a successful e-commerce marketing strategy that motivates and amplifies your number of loyal customers.

What you need to do is input a feeling of fear of missing out (FOMO) 😋 in your audience. You could do this by designing an attractive benefit system alongside an expiry date to summon a feeling of urgency that trips them to make a buy.

5. Update Your Website with Your Black Friday Deals

Create a landing page on your website to reflect your Black Friday deals, so it will engage your customers at first view.

Your landing page should have a theme that is pleasant, conversational, and instinctive. Display your latest deals to catch your customers’ curiosity and accept any visitors you might have on your online store for purchasing your products.

When it comes to organizing a PPC ad on your Black Friday deals, selected and defined landing pages convert easier than the general home page.

6. Utilize Email Marketing.

Email marketing is known to be the highest converting channel. But with 116.5 million emails sent on Black Friday as reported by campaignmonitor.com, not even witty subject lines will help you stand out against your competitors.

It is thus important to put in the effort and thought into constructing an appealing email. Assemble your campaign in a reasonable way so it does not disturb your customers. Put links and give call-to-actions in your email campaigns so that once people click, they are directed to your page.

You can also consider personalized in-mail videos tactic too.

7. Extend Black Friday Sales to Cyber Monday

There’s a ton of competition to make sales on Black Friday, so wouldn’t it be lovely if you give your customers extra time to put their savings to use?🙃

An approach you can adopt would be to proffer deals on some of your products on Black Friday and follow these up on the days leading to Cyber Monday with offers on your most popular deals.

When you extend your sale, drawing in more customers and conversion rate will be a breeze.

8. Sell Bundled Products

Another great Black Friday marketing idea for E-commerce is to bundle products instead of selling them individually.

Gift packs are a great way to upsell customers to a slightly higher price point as well as make great presents😊. You could also offer a price deduction if shoppers decide to buy any three related products.

Now it’s Your Turn

This probably feels like common knowledge. And no matter what marketers do, Black Friday is going to be considerably different this year due to the Covid pandemic. But with the influx of ads by competitors, shoppers have a variety of options to choose from and finally make a buy. So what steps are you taking to stand out from the crowd?

Growth Channel ensures that you’re targeting the right shoppers at the right time with the right promotions.

What Black Friday promotion are you running this year for your business? Share with us in the comments section 👇

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