Black Friday isn’t new to the UK, it’s been around for about 10 years now. Customers expect to see some great deals for this time of year. If you’re not making the most out of your digital strategy for Black Friday, you can be missing out. So how can you make the most out of Black Friday for your eCommerce business? We’ll go through some important considerations for your Black Friday eCommerce strategy so that it doesn’t just give you happy customers on the day itself, but will help to gain you loyal customers for the long term too!
Honesty is Key
One thing we are seeing when it comes to how people respond to Black Friday offers, is customers becoming a lot more cynical when it comes to some of the more disingenuous deals out there. For example, The Which? Magazine, last year, ran this story on how to avoid fake Black Friday deals:
The Sun picked up this story as well, as did the likes of The Week magazine too:
Brands that tend to do well off Black Friday aren’t necessarily the brands able to create the best cost efficiencies for the deal that they’re pushing. It’s actually the brands who are able to calculate the benefit of other activity that comes through their Black Friday deals.
For example, if you’re able to calculate the benefit of an email sign-up on your Black Friday landing page to capture customer data, or, if you’re able to calculate the value of a link through a journal like this one:
Then you’ll be in a much better place to understand the value of driving a specific Black Friday deal for your prospects.
Have Your Black Friday Landing Page Ready
It sounds obvious, but one of the first considerations for optimising your eCommerce campaign around Black Friday and Cyber Monday is by having that landing environment live on your website in the first place. For example, we really like what ASOS has done here:
At the time of writing, we’re eight weeks ahead of the Black Friday event, and yet there’s a nicely wireframed Black Friday and Cyber Monday for 2022 landing page.
Another thing that’s really savvy on ASOS’ part is the fact that they’re already linking out to other price-sensitive categories on the website, namely the women’s outlet and the men’s outlet page.
Something ASOS is doing here, quite cleverly, is creating that topical relevance around what is quite a price-sensitive customer journey.
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the best deals and the best discounts often get the best attention. And so, by starting to link out to these other discounted pages, we are really getting ahead of the competition here and starting to create that topical relevance.
Check out our Tips for Creating a Black Friday Landing Page
What To Do With a Black Friday Landing Page Once the Event is Over
A question we get asked frequently is what you should do with your Black Friday landing page once the event concludes. There’s going to be 11 months before people start searching for Black Friday terms again, so what should you do with this page? Should you kill the page with a 404? Should you redirect your page to the homepage? Or redirect to an outlet page or a discount page in the meantime? Or should you keep the page live?
Our advice: always keep the page live.
You can pull back the Black Friday landing page from any sort of messaging in the customer journey, like the mega nav or any sort of homepage banners that you might have. But by keeping the page live, you’re showing search engines that the page is still going to play an important role in the customer journey at some point.
Obviously, it’s a very seasonal page. Just like you might have a Valentine’s Day page or a Mother’s Day page, you still want that relevance, and you still want search engines and users to see that you are relevant to that sort of search intent when the time comes around again. So keeping it live, just hidden from the customer journey allows you to keep this relevance.
For instance, look what Flannels have done here by keeping a live page in the interim:
It’s not yet optimised for Black Friday 2022 because we are still eight weeks away (at the time of writing), but there’s a really clear sign-up here so you can start talking to users ahead of time. Once you do start to get your offers out when we’re a bit closer to Black Friday, you’ve got a huge database of people who have shown interest in you. You can use this database to reach out to and pull these people back into that customer journey.
How To Utilise Digital PR & Paid Media in Your Black Friday Campaigns
Another consideration is what you’re doing with your other channels to drive your Black Friday strategy. For example, are you using digital PR to amplify the deals that you have for Black Friday by getting those stories into the niche publications within your sector where you know that your audience exists and create those positive brand stories?
On the paid media side of things, are you using your paid social, for example, to drive traffic through to these landing pages and create retargeting lists through the likes of Meta and YouTube for people that have already engaged with your Black Friday landing page that you can push those promotions out to again?
An opportunity that a lot of brands miss out on is the ability of a Black Friday campaign to re-target customers.
You can use your Black Friday landing environment to bring customers on and introduce your brand to a load of new people. Then track them back through social and retarget them with relevant messages based on the activity that they’ve taken on your website.
Making the Most of Your Black Friday Strategy
When it comes to making the most out of your Black Friday strategy for eCommerce, there are three main points to focus on:
- Honesty: Especially important with the current cost of living crisis, if you create bogus deals for Black Friday people will remember. Honest deals that actually let people save will let customers know that they can trust you.
- Landing Page: Have a landing page ready before your deals go live. You can use this for email sign-ups and encourage people to come back once your offers are up. Also, don’t 404 this page once the event is over, instead orphan it and have some holding text
- Drive Traffic: It’s no good having amazing offers if you don’t get traffic! Use paid social and digital PR to get your offers in front of your target audience.
If you keep these three points in mind, you have the basics of a good Black Friday eCommerce strategy!
Check out the video here: