6 Black Friday Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Sales

To add it to your store, all you need to do is create relevant product collections and assign their URLs to the buttons on the popup. If you happen to be on Shopify, read a more detailed guide to creating product filters.

3. VIP sale

Black Friday is the embodiment of mass consumption, a day where everybody can enjoy the benefits of discounts.

Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t offer even better discounts to your VIP customers. The truth is, consumers like being rewarded; they want to feel special.

That's why loyalty programs exist — to nurture a bond between a brand and its customers.

The more loyal customers are to a brand, the more profitable they become.

Bain & Company’s research found that companies with strong loyalty programs grow revenues 2.5 times faster than their competitors and generate 100-400% higher returns.

However, when we talk about VIP customers, we're not talking about developing and promoting a loyalty program (although it would be ideal if your business had one). The goal is to send special offers to your existing customers.

There are different ways you can reward your VIP customers, including:

• Giving away steeper discounts: If your average Black Friday discount is 20%, give your VIPs a special 30% discount code.
• Discount special products: Offer discounts for products that aren’t discounted in the site-wide Black Friday campaign.
• Bundle products: Pack a group of products together and discount them.

💡 Getting access to secret sales or bigger discounts is a great incentive for people to join your email newsletter. Make sure to add this tactic to your list of Black Friday marketing ideas.

4. Leverage partnerships

Whether you realize it or not, your business has partners. These can be influencers, affiliates, suppliers, and other brands in your niche who aren’t direct competitors.

These partners have audiences of their own you can tap into to extend your marketing reach. The price you pay to access your partner’s audience is to let them access yours (assuming both have similar audiences).

Ecommerce businesses leverage partnerships all the time, you just may not realize it. For example, back in 2017, Walmart and Tasty, a food publication owned by Buzzfeed, developed a partnership in which the latter would create shoppable videos that would redirect to the former’s site.

With a partnership, you develop a “win-win” situation: both parties benefit equally from the extended reach. You need to be creative and find potential partners in your existing network, such as:

• Your suppliers
• Your retailers (if you sell wholesale)
• Your followers (particularly, those with substantial followings)
• Your affiliates
• Other businesses in your industry or niche who aren't direct competitors

It doesn't take more than two or three partners to see the benefits of this tactic. Once you find those partners, you can use any of the following Black Friday marketing ideas before or during the big sale:

• Joint marketing: Share media contacts, promotional campaigns, and content to promote each other's businesses.
• Social media cross-promotion: Share each other’s content on social media.
• Email cross-promotions: Mention your partner and/or promote their discounts in your email newsletters.
• Giveaways: You can set up giveaways with your partner’s products, and vice-versa.

5. Adjust your website design

During Black Friday, time is your enemy. You need to get people to take action fast; they are only a click away from a competitor. If your store design confuses them, you may end up losing them.

How do you get them to visit your discounted product pages quickly?

By using popups

If you have already visited Getsitecontrol before, you know we love popups. They are a great way to gather customer feedback, generate leads, and so much more.

But guess what? You can also use popups to direct people to any page of your store, including your product pages, and share your Black Friday discount codes.

Another option is to use floating bars, which work exactly like popups, except that instead of interrupting the visitor’s experience, they appear at the top or bottom of the page 👇

Similarly, you can create a category page specifically made for Black Friday and feature the best deals, so customers can find the right offers for their needs. You can also add site-wide banners to bring non-Black Friday shoppers to your discount pages, like John Lewis did last year.

Besides popups and floating bars, you can add fullscreen banners to your homepage that take visitors to your Black Friday sale page. There are plenty of options to advertise your BF deals on the website — at the end of the day, it all comes down to the design of your store and your marketing resources.

6. Launch a cart abandonment email campaign

No matter how steep your Black Friday discounts are, you will get some people to abandon their carts. There are many reasons why your store visitors will do so. According to the Baymard research, some of the most common being shipping, tax, unexpected fees, slow delivery, and complicated checkout.

There are many ways to lower your cart abandonment rate, but one that we have found to be particularly effective is to set up a cart abandonment email campaign.

A study by SalesCycle found that:

• Abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of 43%
• 2.9% of cart abandonment emails generate purchases
• The best time to send a cart abandonment email is within 1-2 hours

So yes, setting up a cart abandonment campaign to prepare for Black Friday is clearly worth the effort!

To get started, connect your ecommerce platform with your email marketing tool. Then, you need to figure out the right timing and messaging, which you can do by surveying abandoning customers to see what causes them to leave.

With that information, you may figure out that, for example, your audience doesn't like your shipping costs.

Consequently, your email could be sent two days after they abandon the cart with a coupon that discounts the shipping costs. You can send up to three emails as more will annoy them.

Your email should be simple: it should tell them what product they left in the cart, what's the price, and, if possible, it should include an incentive (e.g., a coupon)

An abandoned cart recovery campaign will help you get some lost customers back. As a matter of fact, many of them will be thrilled to see they can still get an item they want for a discounted price! It’s a handy marketing tactic for a Black Friday email strategy, but you should consider including it in your main email marketing strategy as well.

Wrap Up

When done right, Black Friday can be the biggest day of the year for your ecommerce store. You will increase your sales, attract new customers, and, if you use some of our Black Friday marketing ideas, foster a deeper sense of loyalty with your existing ones.

The question is, will you make the most sales, or will your store cruise along? Start your Black Friday campaign early using social media — but don’t forget all the other channels available if you can. Target gift shoppers too, who are often ignored and represent a big portion of the Black Friday crowd.

Finally, leverage partnerships that extend your campaign’s reach. Once you get people to visit your store, lead them to your offers so they can take action fast. And whenever someone leaves a product in their cart, bring them back using a cart abandonment email campaign.