eCommerce marketing strategies that captivate your customers during the busiest shopping season of the year can drive critical business impact. Check out our top Black Friday marketing tips and learn how Further can help eCommerce teams excel year-round.
eCommerce has routinely shown growth over the last decade, and with this trend further accelerated during the pandemic, consumers are shopping online now more than ever. Instead of shopping in classic brick and mortar stores and waiting in lines all night for deals, consumers have found it much more desirable to shop online right from their own couch.
According to the Nation Retail Federation, 88 million Americans shopped online on Black Friday. But how do you know how to reach the best potential Black Friday customers for your business? In this article, we’ll give you our top 10 favorite Black Friday eCommerce marketing strategies that will help you to target the right consumers for your business.
What is eCommerce marketing?
eCommerce marketing is the practice of using digital promotional tactics to drive consumers to your online store. This type of advertising consists of tactics used on and off your website using paid ads, search engine optimization, social media, email, and SMS.
While consumers have continued to start their holiday shopping earlier each year, over half of shoppers have stated they are planning to hold off purchases this year until items are on sale. These trends position this Black Friday and Cyber Monday to be vital to retailers.
Further helps clients with eCommerce-specific data strategy across digital marketing, optimization, data science, and analytics. Check out our post about sending eCommerce data to GA4.
Our top 10 Black Friday marketing tips and tricks
- Utilize Google shopping and social shopping features
- Website and mobile optimization
- Stand out on social media
- Create an Amazon seller account, if you haven’t already
- Perform A/B testing to find the most effective advertising
- Act early and late to create pre- and post-sale brand curiosity
- Make your sale memorable, and use good incentives to buy/come back
- Utilize email and SMS marketing
- Use a good subject line in your email promos to stand out and get clicks
- Create a loyalty program
1.Utilize Google shopping and social shopping features
Google Shopping, formerly known as Google Product Search, are images that appear after a product search query in Google. Google populates the most relevant products to what you’re searching for including the price, store, and rating. This carousel of product images is usually the first search result at the top of the page and are all paid advertisements.
Social media platforms like Instagram also have been releasing similar shopping platforms embedded right into their app. Or you can use paid advertisements on Instagram so that your featured product(s) appear right on the consumer’s feed like a normal post or in the shopping section of the app.
We highly recommend utilizing these paid search features for eCommerce marketing, because it’s an easy and effective way to get your products and brand name in front of quality consumers who are already looking for your product.
Further’s Paid Media team is ready to help get your product to your best audience. Contact us today!
2. Website and mobile optimization
Making sure your website is in good working order for the busiest shopping season of the year is a must. Testing things like site speed and user experience are important to optimize regularly but especially during busy seasons. Updating the content on your site and making sure you have an easy checkout process are all very important to your customer’s user experience on your site.
If your website isn’t visually appealing and easy to navigate, it decreases your credibility and reputation, and may make users less likely to buy.
Optimizing your mobile site is just as important. In 2021 Adobe Digital Insights reported that 42.4% of Black Friday sales were made from smartphones and tablets.
To do this, you should make sure your website has a responsive web design, meaning that no matter how large or small the screen you’re viewing it on is, your site will appropriately adapt the look and information on your site to fit the screen. You don’t want your site to scale up or down so much that it becomes impossible to read or interact with, because this causes poor user experience and makes it less likely for consumers to buy from your site. That is why it’s important to be sure your site is specifically optimized to navigate on a mobile device.
3. Stand out on social media
Making your social media presence known all year round is important, but especially when you’re trying to drive in new leads for Black Friday. Consistency is key with social media. Come up with interesting content and attention grabbing ads. Try using a design tool like Canva to make unique and personalized content, and utilize content planners to schedule out posts ahead of time.
Use historical holiday performance, combined with what you know about your consumers’ purchase path(s) to account for increases in your frequency and investment across social media.
Create engaging stories that followers and consumers will want to interact and play along with. You can easily create a “swipe up” feature on most stories that will take your customer right to your preferred landing page. If you’re not able to use a swipe up feature, it’s always a good idea to at least have your website in your bio for an easy and effective call to action.
It’s also important to determine which social media platforms make the most sense for your brand. If you’re trying to target a younger demographic, platforms like Instagram and TikTok and maybe even Twitter may be a good place to start. If you’re looking to target an older demographic, consider Facebook.
4. Create an Amazon seller account, if you haven’t already
Amazon is one of the largest online businesses in the world and growing rapidly every year, so creating a seller account could help you increase your sales by exposing your product to a wider range of people. In 202, Amazon accounted for 17.7% of all Black Friday sales. This may not seem like much, but year-round, 46.7% of all product searches start on Amazon.
This can create more sales for your business and more awareness for your brand, so we recommend looking into an Amazon seller account and seeing if it’s right for your business.
5. Perform A/B testing to find the most effective advertising
It’s always a good idea to test out different types of marketing strategies and content. Using two different pieces of content and comparing likes and engagement on each can give you a better idea of what your target audience responds to more. When you have an idea of what ads are most responsive, you’ll know what to post more of and what will work better with consumers when it comes time to turn up ad spend for the season.
Testing different options like format, word copy, call to action, and colors can contribute to consumer engagement. Perform your experiments a couple of months in advance so that you can plan out a good strategy that you know will work well when it comes time to shine.
6. Act early AND late to create pre- and post-sale brand curiosity
Creating curiosity about your product or service before your Black Friday campaigns even start ensures consumers are aware of your sale and your brand for the months to come.
You can do this by posting on your socials about your Black Friday sale, or even having a pre-Black Friday sale. Send out an email about new products or your upcoming Black Friday deals to let existing customers know in advance what sales you’ll be running.
We all know by now that the deals don’t stop right after Black Friday. Cyber Monday can also pull some big sales numbers, so it’s important to your eCommerce marketing strategy to keep up ad spend and social posting until Cyber Monday sales have ended.
7. Make your sale memorable, and use good incentives to buy and come back
Everyone on earth is doing the “Free shipping! Act now, low inventory!” thing. Stand out and make Black Friday your own by offering memorable sales and discounts that will actually make potential customers want to act.
Research what sales will make your business the most profit, while keeping your consumers top of mind. Put yourself in your consumer’s shoes and think about if your sale is a good enough incentive to buy and keep coming back. Be sure you’re advertising your highest value offers during this time because you’re competing with everyone’s best deal of the season.
8. Utilize email and SMS marketing
As an eCommerce business, email marketing is a super important tool to convert leads into prospects. Utilize your existing email list and retain new prospects to ensure that you keep long-term retention all year round.
Once a consumer finds their way to your site and converts, you can set up an option to have customers opt-in to receive emails or text messages about new releases and sales. Give your consumers the option to connect with you in their preferred style. While email can deliver a richer experience, some users find text messages more personal and less spammy.
Make sure both of these channels are active prior to the holiday season, and that you have an understanding of the engagement rates and size of each consumer marketing list.
9. Use a good subject line in your email promos to stand out and get clicks
Using email subject lines as a form of marketing might sound a little outdated, but there’s nothing wrong with using what you know. With the crazy amount of spammy promotional emails in everyone’s inboxes, you need to find a way to make people click into your email.
Don’t use clickbait. Instead, be honest and intriguing enough to get people interested. Make your subject lines personalized to your brand and juicy enough to make consumers want to click into it to see what new products you might be dropping this Black Friday season.
10. Create a loyalty program
Loyalty programs are a good way to reward your best customers, encourage repeat purchases, and to increase customer lifetime value. When your customers or members join your loyalty program, they’re given special deals, discounts and rewards for regularly engaging with your brand and buying products.
Creating loyalty programs is a valuable tool for customer retention and can be a tie-breaker during this highly competitive holiday season. Loyalty programs can boost revenue, encourage word of mouth advertising, show customer appreciation, and improve customer retention.
How Further can help
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great time to drive growth in your eCommerce business. Kick-start your Black Friday marketing strategy with these 10 great tips and tricks. Further can help you act on any of these tips and improve your online conversions, revenue, and your brand awareness all year round.
