2021 Black Friday Marketing Strategies for E-Commerce to Maximize Sales
12 Nov , 2021
Black Friday 2021 is just around the corner!
Originated in the United States, Black Friday is referring to the busiest shopping and traffic Friday after Thanksgiving. It is also regarded as the beginning of US Christmas shopping season since 1900s when retailers would not be “in the red” (financial loss) but earn a year’s profit. Decades later, with the growth of economy and e-commerce, Black Friday has been introduced to the world by retailers outside US to keep up the competitiveness with the US-based retailers online.Since then, it is undeniable that the e-commerce competition has always been fierce on this day.
Last year, $9-billion online sales were gained over the Black Friday weekend and it is only going to get busier this year. Retail giants like Amazon and Walmart have already leaked their pre-Black Friday sales earlier than ever in October. While there is less than one month to go, to not be left behind, this is your last call to get prepared for the Black Friday marketing strategies. If you are e-commerce advertisers wanting to take advantage of this busiest shopping day of the year, you are in the right place to take away 5 proven but little-known 2021 Black Friday marketing strategies from this insight article. Make good use of them to amp up your sales over the shopping weekend and create value for future digital marketing use!
Redefine Your 2021 Black Friday Marketing Strategies
Leverage 2021 Black Friday Email Marketing Strategies
Create Sense of Urgency via Social Media Marketing
Increase Your 2021 Black Friday Paid Ad Budget
Boost Conversions on 2021 Black Friday with Programmatic Advertising
1. Redefine Your 2021 Black Friday Marketing Strategies
Let’s not lie to ourselves. Most brands promote their Black Friday sales in the same way every year— discount products, limited-time offers and final call with greater discount sometimes. You can drive sales from your loyal customers with the old way. But for the new customers who do not know much about your brand and are indecisive amongst a bunch of options in the market, you will need an outstanding 2021 Black Friday marketing strategy to differentiate from the competitors and win their votes.
With different missions and business models, each brand can have a unique purpose for the shopping day instead of executing it like all the other sales promotion marketing campaigns. So, ask yourself a question: what does Black Friday mean to your brand? By redefining your 2021 Black Friday marketing strategies to your potential customers with creativity and personality, it is expected to create more marketing value such as brand awareness and sales conversion.
Source: https://birdsong.london/pages/transparent-friday
Birdsong is a sustainable fashion brand in London which has the mission of fighting against the blind obsession in mainstream fashion trends and abuse of women labour in fashion production. By redefining Black Friday into “Transparent Friday”, the brand is still participating in the shopping day battle but with an ethical message to spread. It offers choices of discounts, full price and extra tips for its customers to choose and discloses the cost distribution. With the purpose of encouraging mindful and ethical shopping, Birdsong’s Black Friday Marketing Strategy successfully stands out from the crowd especially when the public is socially-concerned these days.
2. Leverage 2021 Black Friday Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing may be one of the oldest digital marketing strategies, but still works a charm for Black Friday marketing when it comes to getting attention of your most potential customers — the subscribers! If you are reading this digital marketing insight with a few weeks ahead of 2021 Black Friday, it is not too late to collect new leads.
People always love a little mystery. On your e-commerce site’s popup, you can keep part of the Black Friday deals in secret (save you little more time to prepare for the sales items!) and ask new visitors to sign up quickly with an email address for the “exclusive” Black Friday offer. Also, start advertising your 2021 Black Friday sales with the most enticing sales message TODAY. Redirect the audience from the ads to your e-commerce site to collect their emails and bring them in to check out your products. To be frank, amongst the numerous options, we would involuntarily relate Black Friday to big merchants and retailers such as Amazon, Fortress and Zalora. Therefore, the two tricks above are for more than growing your Black Friday email list. Creating anticipation for potential shoppers should be the result you aim to gain by maximizing exposure and strongly associating your e-commerce with 2021 Black Friday.
When you have the email list on hand, it is time to target those people and blast out the personalized 2021 Black Friday emails. We know you may be out of time to analyse the traffic data and personalize the on-sale items in each set of the emails. But here is still an easy personalized email marketing strategy to work on with promising traffic! As Black Friday gets nearer, everyone’s mailbox is going to be full of emails with similar subject lines like ”Black Friday Exclusives……” and “Black Friday Sales……”. Sounds overwhelming, isn’t it? With 319.6 billion total worldwide emails sent and received every day, it is not easy for consumers either to read all Black Friday emails and click into different stores.
Source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-new-rules/
Campaign Monitor, a global technology company, has shared that the emails with personalized subject lines received 26% higher open rates. So first of all, your 2021 Black Friday email definitely needs an intriguing subject line to get the receivers’ notice. Be aware that most people treat their email inbox as a very personal communication tool and it is a direct channel for advertisers to reach and connect with the potential shoppers. Think of something different for the Black Friday email’s subject line as if you are reminding a friend to shop on sale might be a good idea to trigger them to open the email. After this, promote your most popular products is the easiest email content you should include in the Black Friday email. Let your subscribers know that everyone else is buying these products and so should they!
3. Create Sense of Urgency via Social Media Marketing
We all have certain fear of missing some good opportunities. By smartly utilizing the fear of missing out (FOMO) in your digital marketing strategies, it is going to be effective in converting customers in a short period of time. Meanwhile, people check out several social media platforms for 145 minutes per day in 2020, contributing to the great impression and reach of social media marketing campaigns. Data also shows that 37.9% of the online consumers would make a purchase after receiving a social media ad. As one of the best digital advertising channels, most importantly, social media marketing is full of the latest trends led by KOLs and trusted by the users. MuseFind indicated that over 90% of consumers rely on influencers content more than traditional advertisement to make shopping decisions. So how could you apply the above insight to your 2021 Black Friday marketing strategies?
As mention above, let KOLs create the urgency for your Black Friday sales. KOL marketing has been the popular digital marketing strategy in recent years that somehow consumers tend to trust KOLs more than celebrities. It is not exaggerating that the products promoted by the KOLs, either micro- or mega-KOLs, are always sold out. Your brand can collaborate with KOLs in formats of “early Black Friday” unboxing or try-on videos and product reviews with special discount codes offered to their followers. Their loyal followers will naturally be tempted to purchase the items same with what the KOLs have shared.
For example, the New-York-based KOL, Yuyan, is well known in the fashion-related digital creation and holds public accounts on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. In her sponsored video by Princess Polly, she mixes and matches Princess Polly’s items and shares her fashion concept in the YouTube video. Besides giving a sneak peek of how the real products look like to the audience, the promotion code and shopping links included in the description box have also driven sales for Princess Polly. With the right and high-quality KOLs of your niche, it does not even require over-addressing the urge to shop or hard selling to promote your 2021 Black Friday sales.
Some other social media marketing strategies can trigger hesitant shoppers with an urgent nudge as well. For instance, make use of Instagram’s countdown stickers in Stories for flash Black Friday offers or expose the low stock level message on your Black Friday posts. By reminding the audience of the product scarcity, people would tend to prevent themselves from missing and regretting big sales. Your potential customers need a little push by you on the hectic 2021 Black Friday!
4. Increase Your 2021 Black Friday Ad Budget
There is rumour that some small to medium e-commerces refuse to invest in Black Friday marketing campaigns as they feel like they are not competitive enough with the big merchants anyway. It may look reasonable but don’t go with this short-sighted flow!
Last year’s Black Friday, despite the rising click price year by year caused by the high competitiveness of digital advertisement, the overall ad spending in e-commerce channels has increased by 60% compared to 2019. Meanwhile, the ad spending in paid search for Black Friday has increased not much by 7%, but the total clicks have increased by 24%. Why? It is because the pandemic has not restrained people from shopping. From the latest data in 2021, more consumers are found online than ever with 2.14 billion digital buyers in total.
Perceiving this tremendous audience group, instead of getting scared away by the expense, we highly suggest e-commerces to join the 2021 Black Friday bidding competition and look for a long-term result. No matter what size your e-commerce is, 2021 Black Friday is your chance of the year to make the biggest sale and profits with the suitable digital marketing strategies. Even though visitors may leave your online store without any shopping done, they have shown their interest in your products and these are the valuable footprint and data that you should collect and analyse! Same for the email list you receive from Black Friday, retarget these potential customers to boost conversions in your future digital marketing plans. All in all, we mean, when your e-commerce can get the most out of one annual shopping festival, why not ramp up your ad budget for optimum benefits?
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5. Boost Conversions on 2021 Black Friday with Programmatic Advertising
According to Criteo’s report for Black Friday, 45% of consumers begin their online shopping journey from search engine, followed by direct visit to retail websites with 31%. With people’s high activeness in searching for the best deals on 2021 Black Friday, you need a smart targeting strategy — Programmatic advertising — to maximize your ROI and spur your ecommerce sales.
First, be greedy in performing programmatic advertising on 2021 Black Friday. There are two common types of customers on Black Friday: hesitant and impulse customers. Most hesitant consumers need to see the product for around three times to know that it is what they want and go have further research. The latter see the great deal and is ready to pay the next second.
By distributing digital ads via mobile, video, display, native and social channels, these two types of audience will all be covered comprehensively by programmatic advertisements.As it allows advertisers to target on the pre-built audience segments based mainly on interest, location and habits all offered by the demand-side platforms, the targeting accuracy is quite promising. When programmatic advertising provides such a golden opportunity for you to capture the high-quality audience, it is worth constructing an omni-channel programmatic campaign for this coming Black Friday.
Second, dive deep in understanding your best customers. Yes, programmatic advertising is smart but it is not enough without your input of the customer profile. We assume you know your customers the best. The more detail you have regarding your target audience behaviour, the more accurate targeting results programmatic advertising can get for you. On 2021 Black Friday such a competitive shopping festival, people are flooded with different sales promotion information. If you overburden consumers with irrelevant ads, not only is your ad spend wasted meaninglessly, your brand may make a poor impression in their head. On the contrary, the relevant ads will trigger the right shopper to click and convert. Therefore, put some time in figuring out an effective customer profile and narrow down the targeting segment for the best Black Friday programmatic advertising results in 2021.
Summary
Black Friday marketing strategies is actually full of possibilities and depend on your creativity. Some brands changed Black Friday into “Treat Yourself Day” while some even “postpone” the shopping festival and launch their “Black Friday in July”. It really does not matter how your e-commerce is going to design and run your own Black Friday, as long as you offer the best deals and promote with the best Black Friday marketing strategies! So don’t hesitate to participate the day with some new bold ideas! Click here to find our digital experts to discuss how your e-commerce can maximize sales in 2021 Black Friday.
About AsiaPac Net Media
With an extensive digital marketing experience of serving more than 2,500 clients across Asia in sectors such as ecommerce, finance, gaming, travel, retail, beauty, FMCG, education, health products, AsiaPac’s expert team is highly recognized for the excellence in providing performance-driven services to businesses across Asia, and global corporates targeting Asia markets. If you’d like to learn more about AsiaPac and the work we’ve done, visit our Case page. For more information on AsiaPac/ AdTech and our services, please contact us at info@asiapac.com.hk /info@adtechinno.com.
