Black Friday and Cyber Monday are synonymous with some of the most significant sales days of the year. Marketers start planning for the doorbuster deals in advance to capitalize on the holiday season and end their financial year successfully. Once just considered a B2C trend, it’s now slowly making its way into the B2B environment. Although B2B dynamics are pretty different from B2C, that doesn’t mean they cannot benefit from this particular season.
The countdown to the two biggest shopping days has begun. Here’s how you can ensure you are prepared for the upcoming shopping extravaganza.
Table of Contents
The Preparation Stage
It’s easier to get excited about the new campaigns and jump right into your black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing campaigns, but proper preparation will increase the chances of your success.
1. Prep your list
If you plan to launch Black Friday and Cyber Monday special email campaigns, then adding more contacts to your list is very important to make your message reach a larger audience. Encourage website visitors, social media followers, and your clients to subscribe to your mailing list. Offer them incentives, make it enjoyable and easy for them to sign-up.
2. Create a landing page
It becomes easier for people to join your mailing list with a stand-alone web page. When you have a landing page dedicated to these special days, you will be able to collect critical contact information. Besides names and addresses, you will be able to know about visitors’ product or service preferences, which will enable you to create targeted messaging. It takes just 50 milliseconds for the visitors to form an opinion of a company based on their website’s appearance. So, make sure to give a professional and attractive look to your landing page.
3. Segment your contacts
Customer-centric market is crucial to tap into the full potential of your marketing initiatives. Market segmentation is the answer to achieving this goal. Using this technique, the contacts are divided into subgroups based on shared characteristics, actions, traits, etc. It allows marketers to create effective and more targeted communication strategies.
4. Implement the right marketing techniques
The days of mass messaging are over. Customers prefer personalized communications these days. Segmentation is the first step to achieving that. Once you have grouped your customers based on different characteristics, you can target them by sending tailor-made messages.
5. Plan your marketing calendar
Prepare a calendar for when your business will send different types of messages to generate traffic. You have to send a series of emails or posts on social media to stay on top of your client’s mind. Consider the right time to send to different segments to ensure they view your message at the right time. Statistics suggest that the highest email opens are between 10 AM to 12 PM, but that’s not set in stone. You can experiment with different send schedules to see what works the best for you.
Source: optinmonster
Additional tip
It’s good to prepare well but don’t be forever stuck in the preparation stage. The more you wait to launch your campaigns, the better chances other brands will get in touch with customers and convince them to buy from them. So, start your campaigns much before the buying frenzy begins.
The Big Launch
Now that you have gained enough confidence by preparing well, you can start your Black Friday and Cyber Monday special campaigns. The below strategies will ensure you have the most significant impact using your marketing tactics.
1. Create email marketing offers that leave a lasting impact
Make customers feel special by sending them exclusive offers, discounts, and privileges. Your offers don’t have to be very high or expensive. Even small yet valuable things like a free consultation, a free workshop, or a free whitepaper can provide excellent value to your customers and be a real lead generator for your company. You can also invite your customers to be a part of your BFCM special events. Below are some examples of how other companies offer discounts to attract customers.
Source: digitalcommerce360
Make sure to notify your customers well in advance when your sale begins and ends, so they can mentally allocate their budget to you.
Some other ways you can leverage email marketing are:
- To introduce your latest offerings.
- To highlight your best selling products
- Create urgency due to limited quantities
- To convince customers to stock up on their favorite products.
2. Leverage content marketing to drive sales
To benefit from the holiday season, you can publish organic posts about the latest trends, how your products can help different customer segments, how your products helped other customers since the last BFCM sale. You can publish anything related to your product but in a way that your audiences find it exciting and share-worthy.
3. Using retargeting efficiently
While some customers won’t buy from you while visiting your website, you can certainly convince them to purchase from you by leveraging retargeting. You can use retargeting ads for advertising to them as they browse other sites. Using attractive retargeting ads with reminders about different products they viewed can drive sales and increase revenue.
4. Reward your customers for additional benefits
You can encourage additional purchases throughout the BFCM season by rewarding your loyal customers for making purchases.
- Ship purchases for free.
- Offer gated content for free.
- Offer a future promo code for referring another customer.
5. Last but not least – Make sure your website is working smoothly
Before launching your BFCM campaigns, check the health of your website and make sure it’s working optimally in all areas. A non-functioning and unresponsive site will cause all your efforts to go down the drain: Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark highly competitive shopping days of the year. You wouldn’t want to lose your customers to competitors by offering them a bad shopping experience.
Conclusion
With the big shopping days just around the corner, it’s good to start planning and strategizing well in advance. A well-chalked-out plan coupled with well-thought-out strategies will ensure good sales this shopping season and unlock several new opportunities for you.
