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If you didn’t know what Black Friday was 10 years ago, you would probably be forgiven.
A phenomenon imported from the USA in recent years, the shopping holiday is now celebrated across the world. The FOMO is real and we’ve seen brands of all shapes and sizes get involved online and offline.
Whilst we might not be holding Thanksgiving parades, you can bet your bottom dollar that we do love a good sale.
For many e-commerce brands, Q4 and in particular Black Friday represents a huge opportunity. Many brands actually make most of their money during this period, adding even more pressure to get it right.
The average total spend on Black Friday in the UK over the last 3 years is just over £5bn!
That's a great big opportunity for you to get a slice of the pie right?
In the blog, we’ll set out some key steps you need to take to ensure you have a successful Black Friday 2022 👇
First and foremost, you must ensure that you have enough products to sell through the Black Friday period. Whilst it is officially just one day, Black Friday sales usually start from the week before and run over the weekend until Cyber Monday.
The last thing you want to find is that you’re all sold out before the big day!
Your operations will also need planning and preparation. From picking and packing to scheduling collections with couriers, everything will be much higher than what you are used to.
A great example of a massive company not quite getting this right is THG. During Black Friday 2018, the company saw huge successes across its e-commerce channels. But, their warehouse operations could not manage the unprecedented demand. This meant that their marketers, sales teams and even the CEO had to get their high-vis jackets on and help pack boxes for their millions of orders.
A fun adventure for some, it’s not something you want to be doing during such a busy period.
You will be sitting on lots of beneficial data as a business. This is data about your business, sales, customers, previous Black Friday period and more.
The key to success in planning for a successful Black Friday is understanding your data and extracting those golden nuggets that are going to give you a competitive advantage.
It could be data around AOV for your customers, or their favourite products. You could compare this with your stock levels to make sure your best-sellers always have plenty of units.
The data can also give you a great insight into how a successful Black Friday 2022 might set you up for 2023 and the opportunities it could bring with new customers and increased brand awareness.
Now you’ve got your data and inventory in check, it’s time t start building up some hype for your Black Friday sale.
The crucial element in building up hype is to not give away any details for free. Even when you do give away details, keep them short and tight.
Building an email waitlist is a great way to gather data, nurture customers before the big event and also offer nuggets of details about the potential discounts and offers to an exclusive group of people. FOMO will set in and everybody will want to be on that waitlist.
You can also use social media organically and through advertising to boost brand awareness in the run-up to and during Black Friday. This will help get the word out to already hyper-engaged audiences for this shopping period.
Don’t forget to get your website in order before Black Friday too. It is possible that you will see a lot more website traffic and engagement than at a normal weekend. Brands like Gymshark have fallen foul of this before and had their website crash with too much activity on Black Friday.
Without your website, you won’t be able to make any sales! So do all of your checks on speed and coverage, make sure that every link is clickable and goes to the right place and make sure you push through some test orders to get a better idea of the customer journey.
If we haven’t convinced you that Black Friday provides a huge opportunity for your business then we will go and crawl into a hole and try again next year. But our bet is that you’re excited about the prospect of kicking some serious butt this Q4.
The opportunity is there to be taken and can be taken with just a few extra steps to make sure you’re steady. Focus on getting your pricing and discounts right, plan for more orders and customers on your website and make sure your warehouse can manage the volume of orders.
If you’re looking for help and support to make the most out of your marketing this Q4, get in touch with one of our specialists today 🙌
