If you haven’t heard, Australians are ready to spend big during Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales. With 31% of Aussie shoppers ready to open up their wallets during the four-day sale event, retailer brands should be pulling out all the stops to make their promotions known!
If you’re planning on running your own Black Friday promotions but are a bit stuck on ideas, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve outlined top-proven ideas to help boost the success of your BFCM sales.
Consumers expect promotions
When it comes to Black Friday, people expect to see promotional offers.
According to Deloitte, 81% of shoppers expect that promotions will influence them during the holiday season.
Incentivisation can appear in a variety of ways, but some perform better than others. In fact, consumers tend to have a preference for which kind of offers they want to see:
| Price discounts | 74% |
| Free shipping | 72% |
| Buy One Get One Free | 39% |
| Cash Back | 29% |
Depending on your situation you may want to run one or a combination of offers to entice your audience. Let’s explore what BFCM ideas you can implement during the sale event.
Black Friday promotional ideas
Create a sneak peek/teaser
Giving your audience a hint of what’s to come can create intrigue/curiosity. Creating a sneak peek or a teaser in the lead-up to your BFCM event can be a great way to generate awareness and prime your audience that you’ll be participating in the annual sales event.
You don’t need to give away your offers straight away. From an e-Commerce perspective, your teaser campaigns can be as simple as showcasing a few of your leading products that will be on sale ahead of time. Alternatively, you can simply state that your brand will be having a BFCM offer and keep an eye out for further updates.
Most importantly, whatever you choose to communicate, make sure to keep it in the context of BFCM.
Ways to promote your sneak peek/teaser:
- Send it out as an email campaign
- Schedule an SMS campaign
- Update your automations to mention offers
- Create a series of social media posts
- Develop pop-up messaging on your website
- Create Search and Display ads
Offer VIP/Early Bird access
Leverage your subscribers/followers and encourage them to sign up for early/VIP access to your promotions. A great way to hook them is to offer better incentives (e.g. greater discount) than your ordinary BFCM offering. This creates a sense of exclusivity and amplifies the likelihood of engagement.
Start by mailing out your email audience and drive them to a landing page to “opt-in” to an early bird mailing list so that you can quickly identify those that are keen to shop with your brand. – this also makes for a great opportunity to capture their mobile numbers if they haven’t provided them already.
Once it comes time to launch your early bird access, use a combination of email and SMS to notify them of the special offers and watch your offer take up explode!
Free gift with purchase
Offering a free “gift with purchase” (GWP) can be an effective way to generate sales conversions.
Depending on the offering, a GWP can be perceived as a more attractive option than a straight monetary discount. Additionally, GWP offers can be more cost-effective for a brand considering the cost of an item is typically less than the consumer’s perceived value of a product.
Additionally, when a brand offers a GWP that is of a higher value to the individual product in question, they enhance the overall perceived worth of the brand. This is in direct contrast to discounting strategies which can impede the perceived worth of a brand and potentially be more costly to run. On top of perceived value, there is evidence that GWPs can attract repeat patronage. According to a study by the Harris Institute, nearly 90% of free gift receivers said they were “somewhat likely” to buy more frequently from an online retailer after receiving a free gift. That’s a win for post-BFCM engagement!
Run your promotions early
If you’ve been keeping eye on your competition or just the eCommerce/retail landscape in general, you’ll probably have noticed a trend in recent years where “Black Friday” promotions seem to start earlier and earlier each year.
This is for good reason.
According to a recent Think With Google report, 37% of shoppers who shopped last holiday season wished they had started earlier, with 50% of shoppers saying they’ll start shopping earlier to avoid an item being out of stock.
With consumers only having so much money to spend, it makes sense to get in early with your promotions before your potential customers have bought everything they need.
Price discounts
Discounting your pricing is the tried and true strategy during Black Friday.
Not only does discounting work, but it’s also expected. In a recent study commissioned by ING, 69% of BFCM shoppers expect larger than usual discounts offered by brands. On average, consumers are expecting a 37% discount in sales, with one-in-five shoppers expecting discounts as large as 50% off.
If you’re operating purely online, you’re in luck. 68% of Aussie shoppers will be hunting for deals exclusively online, with 61% looking to support local brands.
When it comes to discounts, there are plenty of different strategies. This includes:-
- Flat discount
- Varied discounting on select products
- Tiered discounting (e.g. increased rewards based on spend)
- Buy-one-get-one-[free / xx% off]
- Daily deals (different promotions during the sale event)
Whatever discounting strategy you’re looking to implement, make sure you let your audience know. Use all your channels available, including social, paid search, email, and SMS. Make it clear what you’re offering and what people can save and watch the shoppers flock to your store!
Increased loyalty rewards/points
If your brand runs a loyalty program, you may want to consider offering increased loyalty points or rewards to encourage purchases during the BCFM sale period.
Advertising your loyalty program and offering increased benefits is a great way to get your loyal customers coming back, as well as attract new members to sign up for your program.
If you don’t run a loyalty program, the lead-up to BFCM could be a good time to start. Brands that offer a loyalty program can increase their average order quantity by 319%. Additionally, 15% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand if they are part of a loyalty program.
Regardless of whether you’re looking to establish a new loyalty program or run increased rewards, it’s important to communicate this during your BFCM campaign at every opportunity.
Gamified offers using popups
Popups are a great way to help grow your email and SMS database, but they are notoriously loathed by users and when executed poorly, can do more harm than good.
The average popup converts at around 3.09%, with good messaging and incentivisation potentially pushing that number higher.
Another way to boost engagement and popup conversions is by gamifying your popup. Research has shown that adding a gaming element to your popup can result in a whopping 13.23% average conversion rate!
A typical example of a gamified popup is adding a “spin to win” element to your offering. Particularly during Black Friday when you’ll want to direct a lot of traffic to your site, a gamified popup can add an extra element of interactivity while boosting your database building numbers simultaneously.
Create product bundles
Black Friday has historically been a popular time to purchase big-ticket items that would normally not be bought throughout the year (e.g. computers, TVs, furniture).
However, brands with lower average or values (AOV) can take advantage of the penchant to spend big during BFCM by bundling up cheaper products into an “all-in-one”, “getting started” kit, or “complete the look” package.
The upside of creating product bundles include:-
- Increasing your AOV
- Creating the perception of greater savings
- An opportunity to introduce customers to new products/categories
When it comes to product bundling, there are plenty of options, including:-
- Mixing low-selling items with fast-moving ones
- Combining complementary products together (e.g. complete skincare regime)
- Introducing bundle options at checkout
Creating scarcity and FOMO
Scarcity marketing can be an effective technique to help drive sales. Particularly when supply/availability is one of the top three considerations for shopping online, creating a sense of urgency through limited supply can be enough to convince consumers to pull the trigger.
Scarcity marketing plays on consumers’ desire, creating a sense of demand through the mystique and fear of missing out. Particularly during Black Friday, when people are often shopping for gifts, the fear of missing out on the perfect present may influence some shoppers to take immediate action.
There are plenty of ways to generate scarcity during BFCM, including creating limited quantities of a product, through to time-sensitive offers – bonus points for applying these two techniques together!
Free Shipping
Finally, there’s free shipping. It might not be particularly glamorous, but with 75% of shopping carts being left uncompleted, shipping costs account for 60% of all abandoned cart transactions.
Offering free shipping or even upgraded express shipping during the holiday period can be the difference between a placed order or a lost sales opportunity.
If you’re offering free shipping, make it clear to your audience. This includes on your homepage, through to any abandoned cart email triggers you might have activated.
Conclusion
When it comes to BFCM, Australian shoppers are prepared to spend big.
It’s the once-a-year sale event that has the potential to make a fifth of your overall yearly sales. Therefore, it is important to ensure your promotional strategy is on point.
As competition gets more intense each year, it’s essential that your brand is prepared to make a compelling offer to attract customers. With these top inspirational marketing ideas in your possession, you can supercharge your Black Friday/Cyber Monday offering and generate more hype and interest in your audience.
