Black Friday Marketing Tips to Boost Your Sales in 2019

Kamila Łuksza
Nov 8 · 8 min read

A Philadelphia tradition, which began in the early 20th century, has now evolved into one of the busiest days of the year for advertisers all over the world. The shopping craze between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday is YOUR golden moment.

I can already hear the blessed clingy sound of $12 billion coming right at us. Yes, you heard right. Black Weekend’s online spending for this year is set to smash that $12 Billion dollar ceiling.

Play your cards right during these days and you’ll be sipping Pina coladas for the rest of the year. If you mess up, however, prepare to see your Black Friday profits walk right out of the door, straight into your competitors’ arms.

How to follow the first scenario? You have two options. You can either read the Ultimate Guide to Dominating Black Friday 2019 — a massive step-by-step HowTo available on Voluum Blog and based on that prepare your campaigns OR you can just go with the basics I put together in this article.

If you feel like the clock is ticking and you don’t have much time to put a lot of effort into your Black Friday Strategy, just focus on the tips I shared below.

What You Need to Do Before the Black Friday Weekend

  1. Research your competitors and analyze their Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaigns
  • Start with Google search. You may already know some of the top affiliates in your niche. If not, simply type in “best Black Friday deals in [your niche]” to see who is ranking high. What kind of offers are in the top results? What are the angles top affiliates use to get people to click on them
  • Create a list of Black Weekend keywords your competitors are ranking for. To do so, you can use tools like SEMrush. Investigate their backlinks. What pages are they linking to & from? See if you can get similar or better links.
  • Subscribe to your competitors’ email lists. Analyze how they are promoting their affiliate products during special days. Is there something that could be useful for you? Maybe you can spot what they are doing wrong and fix it?
  • Remember, your competitors are doing the same things. They are also spying on you. If you want to make it a little bit harder for them (and you should), use Voluum’s Lander Protection Script to hide your PHP landing pages from your competitor’s eyes.

2. Give your audience a reason to click on YOUR links

  • To capitalize on the shopping craze you need to grab the attention of your audience, offer them value. Write in-depth product reviews and prepare holiday packages. During this time, people are looking for deals and themed gifts. Write gift recommendations and cheat sheets as a lot of people can feel overwhelmed by the number of deals they see. Add your links to the cheatsheet to make sure that it will be used in the purchase process (learn more about choosing the right Black Friday angle).
  • To increase your conversions, find a HOOK and create a sense of urgency in your Black Friday ads with temporary sales and shopping codes by offering free gifts and time-limited deals. Launch an offer that will expire at midnight without stating it’s a one-day deal. Leave it open for a day or two. Once it comes to an end, use Voluum to direct people to a different landing page with a different one-day deal. Consider adding a Countdown for when your offers expire.

Optimize your landing pages

  • Prepare your Black Friday landing pages in advance. Aim at updating your old pages instead of creating new special pages every year. Google loves original content refreshed with new data. Plus, you get to leverage your old rankings for that page each year without having to build new backlinks etc.
  • Make sure your landing page resonates with your audience. Use Voluum data about specific carriers, browser versions, device models etc. to direct users to different landing pages according to the rules you’ve set up.
  • Your landing page needs to be able to handle the additional traffic that’s bound to come your way. Performance tests are the best way to know whether your system will or will not be able to support your expected load. You can run tests using different tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom or Dareboost.
  • As Black Friday and Cyber, Monday shoppers are picky, you need to make your checkout process as smooth as possible. The best way is to go through the purchasing funnel yourself (Learn more about the perfect checkout process).
  • Once you have your landing pages in place, you need to determine which ones resonate best with your audience. You can use Voluum to automatically A/B test different flows and paths. This way you will save yourself lots of manual work. Testing is crucial so, don’t be afraid to work on different approaches, following the 80/20 rule.

Make sure your links are working and you’ve set everything up correctly

Check each of the affiliate links on your website manually to make sure they’re working as expected. Pay special attention to these:

  • Typos in one of the URLs.
  • A blank space inside a tracking token.
  • A wrong domain name in a click URL.
  • A postback not passing a click ID value back.
  • A landing page not displaying correctly on mobile devices.
  • HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS that will be seen as a threat by browsers

To prevent your Black Friday marketing campaigns from these silly mistakes, you can set up your personalized notifications in Voluum. Create the first custom alert to be launched when the number of conversions exceeds 1. Once you get the first notification you can rest easy knowing that your setup works fine.

Put Your Black Friday CPC Campaigns in Place

  • Review Last Year’s Performance — What did you learn from the Black Friday ads you ran? Did ads describing the product features bring you more than priced ads, shipping, and other specific info? Dig into your campaigns from last year to do better this time.
  • Come up with a clear strategy and set a budget based on your campaign goals.
  • Set target goals for the important metrics to help your business reach its goals, like Revenue, ROAS, CPA, and conversion rate.
  • Set up your product catalog so you can run dynamic product ads for multiple products
  • Make sure your supplier can keep up with the demand. In case you decide to offer popular sales like a sitewide discount anywhere from 10–20% off.
  • Create a special high-ticket offer to help you increase your average order value. This can include your most popular items or a massive bundle of all your digital products.
  • Come up with a bidding strategy — If you run any type of automated bidding, you’ll have to run bids manually for at least 1–2 weeks after Black Friday due to the influx of data.
  • Start building your retargeting audiences at least 2 weeks ahead of time — Start a Black Friday campaign that targets your cold traffic ahead of time. This will allow you to take advantage of lower ad costs.
  • Set up at least 1 backup ad account in case your main account goes down.
  • Have your ads ready for review a few days before your campaign goes live so that they are approved in time.

And Once Black Friday 2019 Comes… Your Work Is Not Done. Yet. What you need to do during Black Weekend 2019

  1. Heavily Promote Your Deals
  • Be an active curator. There are literally thousands of new deals added to Amazon and other merchants during the sales season. This is why you should dedicate 2–3 hours each day updating your posts with the latest deals.
  • Use your email list to drive more attention to your landing page, create exclusive Black Friday and Cyber Monday newsletters and email blasts.
  • Post to Facebook groups, forums & online communities. Be social, make some buzz, stay engaged with your audience.

2. Keep track of your progress with the right tools

  • Measurement is the first step to improvement. If you want to succeed you need to track every parameter of your campaign: offers, creatives, referrer links, carriers, browser versions, device models and so on. Set up tracking in Voluum to keep your eye on everything that is going on with your Black Friday campaigns.
  • During Black Friday, time literally is money. If you run multiple campaigns, you cannot afford to waste time on slow reporting speeds when pulling data out of the system. Decisions based on real-time data can significantly reduce the risk of low performance and high costs. Access your real-time reports in Voluum regularly to be able to react instantly when something unexpected happens.
  • Stay up to date with the performance of your ads, offers, and landing pages constantly. If you see that something is working significantly well, don’t think — scale. You can use Voluum Automatic A/B Testing tool to drive traffic to specific destinations according to specific rules and conditions.

And When the Cyber Monday 2019 Ends… You still have a chance! What You Need to Do Right After Black Week

  • Extend your promotions for a few days to maximize your conversions. There will be a big chunk of latecomers, who missed out on the biggest promotions and will be looking for gifts and presents at the last moment. Use the “afterparty” angle and go for them.
  • God’s sake, don’t forget the abandoned carts. These people already clarified which products they’re interested in, you know how to reach out to them so make sure you will target them with your future campaigns.

Like everything else in life, the holiday sales season doesn’t last forever. When all the best Black Friday deals for 2019 end, you can chill.

You’ll see a drop in traffic and clicks after November 31. But don’t worry. As December approaches, it’s time to put on “Last Christmas”, wear your dandy reindeer sweater, and just give yourself a break before the sales pick up again before Christmas.

To prepare your campaigns for the Black Friday 2019 read the full article on Voluum Blog

Voluum

Performance marketing is our thing! We create Ad Tech Software to manage, optimize, and monetize online campaigns.

Kamila Łuksza

Written by

I’m a writer, editor and project manager, fascinated by the buzzing art of digital marketing. At my core, a social girl and a music freak.

Voluum

Voluum

Performance marketing is our thing! We create Ad Tech Software to manage, optimize, and monetize online campaigns.

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