Great Black Friday Marketing Ideas For eCommerce

Friday the 26th of November, arguably the biggest shopping day of the year, is steadily creeping around the corner and if you’ve landed on this blog, you’re most likely looking for a few last minute Black Friday campaign ideas for your ecommerce store.

What is Black Friday exactly? For those that aren’t too familiar with it, Black Friday has become notoriously known as the one day of the year where brands give away great discounts on their products and services. Interestingly enough, Black Friday falls a day after the American holiday, Thanksgiving, and began as a way for brands to mark the start of the festive holiday season. Today, it’s grown into a widely known date that people across the globe anticipate year after year.

For online ecommerce stores, it’s an opportunity to give the website visitors who haven’t purchased yet, a good enough deal that will convert them into customers. In fact, shoppers who have had their eye on a product for a while, but haven’t yet purchased, usually take this Black Friday “opportunity” to do so. For online ecommerce stores, both Black Friday and Cyber Monday are essential days to increase your sales for the year.

To give you a little bit of Black Friday marketing inspiration for e-commerce stores, we’re sharing what tactics worked best for Black Friday marketing campaigns in the past.

A few quick wins for your Black Friday marketing campaigns

But first, since time isn’t on your side, here are a few quick wins before you get started.

1. Black Friday 2018 was the first time that Apple sold more iPads than MacBooks during Black Friday weekend—the first time ever! With over half of online shoppers using their smartphones for shopping purposes each month, it's crucial that your website looks good on smaller screens as well as large ones (using responsive design).
2. 90 % of Black Friday shoppers will compare deals and discounts online so make sure your offers are better than your competitors.
3. The day is often frantic for a Black Friday shopper who is trying to find what they’re looking for (and fast) before it gets sold out. Use a tool like Shopbox to quickly show your website visitors exactly what they are looking for. Shoppers are already researching the deals they want, so install an AI plugin that will help make their search easier.
4. Men are spending roughly 50% more than women on Black Friday deals, so consider your Black Friday messaging, designs and audience carefully when creating campaigns.

Top 10 Black Friday Marketing Ideas For eCommerce in 2022

Some of the most successful Black Friday campaigns have a few things in common – they create a sense of urgency and have exciting visuals, but most importantly, they know exactly what their audience wants to see. Below are a few Black Friday ideas that are designed to drive more traffic and sales.

1. Give your audience a sneak peek of your Black Friday deals

Since your audience is already researching what products they want to purchase and which brands are offering the best deal, it’s important for you to create anticipation and hype around your upcoming deals. When you do so, you’ll have customers in line, waiting to purchase your products the hour Black Friday opens. You can share the message through Black Friday social media campaigns, email campaigns and so much more.

2. Offer your loyal customers a further discount or early access

If you know who your loyal, repeat customers are, Black Friday is a great time to reward them for supporting your business. Offer them an exclusive discount on top of your Black Friday offers, or give them the opportunity to be the first to shop the deals before Black Friday begins. This will further encourage them to continue being loyal customers of your brand and usually works well in the form of an email campaign that has segmented this audience apart from other shoppers. You can even remind them of last year’s deals and share how this year will be even better!

3. One deal every hour

For larger e-commerce stores with high traffic volumes, Black Friday can cause sleepless nights worrying about whether the website can handle this year’s website traffic and click-throughs. By only releasing a deal every hour, the website will be able to handle traffic much better and complete purchases smoother. Plus, it creates even more hype as customers eagerly wait for their product to come on sale. You can segment it per department, product, or percentage off – it’s completely up to you and what works best for your store.

4. Personalise deals

Did you know you can use AI to automatically integrate promotions with the rest of your catalogue? This makes it much easier for customers to find deals by personalising the products in real time, based on what they are looking at. You can do this with a tool like Shopbox which understands what a customer is looking for and even finds good substitutes if there are any with promotions. An added bonus is that this also gets rid of the frustration when a customer sees “not available in your size” – tech like Shopbox remembers a shoppers size and pushes deals which actually fit them.

5. Create a gifting guide

Black Friday is often a day for shoppers to purchase their upcoming Christmas gifts. By creating a gifting guide, you can give your audience ideas about what gifts they could buy friends and family. What’s exciting about this is that you can get really specific with niche items in your store, create an advert targeting that niche and sponsor it to the right people before Black Friday. For example, you could create a guide for ‘Gifts Every Dad Loves’ or ‘Christmas Gifts For Gym Lovers’ – and the list could go on. Hit the niche on the head and sales are bound to roll in.

6. Upsell other products and increase your average order value

Use a tool like Shopbox to suggest similar products that your audience might find interesting. This is especially useful in the weeks leading up to Black Friday when shoppers are researching which products they like best. Shopbox shares personalised product recommendations that will help visitors compare products easily. What’s more is that Shopbox recommends products based on their unique shopping journey to give them ideas that will help them discover more products in your e-commerce store. Think similar products, bundled together to increase your average order value!

7. Extend Black Friday all weekend long until Cyber Monday

Some of the best Black Friday advertising campaigns utilise the whole weekend long and create a separate event for Cyber Monday too. Instead of only boosting sales for one day, your store is now open for four whole days, giving you a much larger opportunity to make sales. What’s more is that you have a better opportunity to gain repeat customers too when you extend the sale for a longer period of time.

8. Create abandoned carts flows and retargeting plans

It’s likely that many store visitors might add products to their cart and then leave your store before checking out. Make sure your abandoned cart email flows and retargeting ads are running quicker than usual for the weekend of Black Friday – this will ensure your products are top of mind! If you want to take it a step further, you can even offer an additional discount to help them make their final decision sooner. Download our retail playbook to learn best practices and insights to boost sales in 2022 & beyond.

9. Use Social Media to promote to create a buzz around black friday deals

Social media is a great place to promote your deals. You can create some buzz around your Black Friday promotions by posting on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

If you’re using social media to engage with customers, you should also use it to answer their questions and offer support during the busy shopping period. When it comes to promoting yourself as an e-commerce brand, social media provides an opportunity for companies to show off their personality by sharing engaging content that helps build trust with customers (for example: funny videos).

10. Replace the hefty black friday marketing banner with a curated homepage

Replace or reduce the size of your black friday sales banner and add Shopbox’s curated homepage that showcases your best deals and the breadth of your products curated to each shopper that lands on your site.

Use these ideas to make the most of Black Friday sales

So there you have it, a few of the best Black Friday marketing ideas to ensure campaign success. Remember that Black Friday is also an exciting time to increase your followers, leads and repeat purchases for future purchases, not only a temporary increase in sales. Now is a great time to test creative Black Friday campaigns and eye-grabbing email subject lines. Don’t forget to share your campaign ideas across all your social media channels, emails, paid advertising and every other medium to ensure consistency.

If you would like to further increase your sales before Black Friday, book a short demo with us today and we’ll show you Shopbox live in action in your store. The best part? We can have you up and running before Black Friday and the rush before Christmas.