Black Friday is just a couple days away and every marketer is keen to implement the best marketing ideas for Black Friday possible. 

However, if you think you’re somehow not happy with the ideas you have implemented, you might not be alone. In the strange circumstances that we face today worldwide, there’s always a chance we missed something.

Given that your customers – or for that matter, all shoppers – will have multiple tabs open on their laptops, you’re in for a tough competition. And the recent pandemic has cast a gloom in a number of ways.

But that’s also why you’re likely to see less crowds in brick-and-mortar stores. As a direct result, online stores will see an increased demand.

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of last-minute marketing ideas for Black Friday. Most of these ideas are simple and relatively easy to implement – all you’ll need is strong intent.

Here you go:

1. Do a dry run

It takes tons of resources to bring potential customers to your online store, but it takes only moments to lose them. A snag here, a broken link there, a bug here, a missing delivery info there… you know the works.

So before you do anything else, go through your website like you’re a customer. 

Broadly speaking, categorize your experience under at least three heads. The first factor is safety. Does your site look trustworthy and secure? Are there some seals of trust you can add? What about the “https” in the URL? 

The second factor is friendliness. Does your site look warm and inviting? Is it easy to look for products? Are details like pricing and shopping clearly displayed? 

The last factor is the check-out experience. How many clicks does it take to actually make a purchase? Is it intuitive or have you loaded it with unnecessary steps? 

Fix each issue, no matter how small it appears.

2. Consider last-minute ads

Honestly, it’d have been better if you had planned your ads well ahead of the shopping festival, but better late than never.

Begin by defining clearly what is your objective behind the promotional ads. Next, partner with an experienced agency if you don’t have enough expertise on-board to tackle ads. Decide upon a budget and lay down reasonable expectations. Finally, zero in on what all products you want to advertise for and get your campaign up and running.

The CPC (Cost Per Click) for ads, especially during the Black Friday season, is going to be higher, but that shouldn’t stop you from advertising. After all, if you don’t advertise, you are less likely to get noticed by new customers, right?

3. Explore remarketing ads

Remarketing ads are a specialized form of online ads. Only people who have visited your site earlier will be shown your ads when they visit other sites in future.

Remarketing ads have a number of advantages. They focus on visitors of your site, which means these ads are shown to people who’ve exhibited some interest in buying whatever you sell. Also, they can work to recover visitors who decided to buy something from your site and changed their mind at the last moment.

4. Offer surprise deals

Who doesn’t love an occasional surprise or two?

Use the thrill of a pleasant surprise to please your Black Friday customers. Let your customers surprise themselves.

The idea is quite simple and open to a lot of experimentation. You can go with the idea of a mystery box – the way subscription based products do often. Your customer buys a mystery box of a certain value, say $ 65, but don’t know all the products that the mystery box will have. 

On your part, you assort the items that total up to the purchase value and send it to your customer. So when they open it, they’re in for a surprise!

Some businesses also use this idea a little differently: your customer chooses an item of a certain size (say, size-8 shoes) but leaves the color upto you. You ship them the pair of shoes and surprise them!

What better way to please customers and improve your Black Friday sales?

5. Improve landing pages

Your landing page can almost single-handedly decide the success of your promotional campaigns. That’s why you want to pay a lot of attention to your landing page and redesign it, keeping in mind Black Friday and the latest trends.

Here are 6 quick tips to build a powerful landing page:

1. Clear value. Tell your visitors exactly why they should be buying from you. Keep it very simple and clear.
2. A great headline. Your visitors will use the headline to decide how good your site is. Work hard to craft a short, yet effective headline.
3. Important details. Your headline can entice but can’t show all the details. Consider using bullet points to highlight what your key strengths are.
4. Trust factors. For first-time visitors, it’s a challenge to key in their credit card details or other personal information. Show all badges of trust you have.
5. Minimum distractions. Don’t have unnecessary links on your landing page or else you’ll give your visitors a reason to exit too early.
6. Intuitive design. Use the kind of layout and design visitors are accustomed to on other sides – don’t upset the apple cart. For instance, ecommerce sites typically have a shopping cart on the top-right corner. Don’t change that position; your visitors are too familiar with that location.

6. Craft hourly deals

Why show all your cards at once?

Charm your visitors by having hourly Black Friday deals 2020 – one deal every hour.

That means every time they check, there’s something or the other that attracts them. The more often they come, the more chance they’ll buy something.

This will work particularly well if you carry a variety of products. 

7. Add exclusive Black Friday products

Maybe you sell only a certain range of products, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a great time to extend your product line. 

Let’s say you sell ready-to-cook food ingredients. Now’s a wonderful opportunity for you to introduce various gadgets, equipment, vessels, kitchenware… 

This extension will serve multiple purposes. First, you can reach out to a new audience or explore new channels to get the attention of the new audience. Second, you can add more value by giving more choices to your existing customers. 

Finally, Black Friday gives you a strong reason to design various combo offers and target Black Friday shoppers, both new and existing.

And don’t forget, your new suppliers will be keen to offer you great bargains, so that’s an added bonus!

8. Help affiliates sell more

When you help affiliates sell more, you’re essentially helping yourself, right? Well, here are some ways you can do that.

• Craft gift recommendations. Many visitors on your affiliates’ sites are undecided on what to buy. Helping them make up their mind is a strong way of helping your customers profitably.
• Record videos. Visitors not keen to read? No problem, record and share videos instead. Videos can add to the aesthetic value of whatever you sell.
• Create special product reviews. Your affiliates can straightaway copy paste them. A sensible product review is a smart way to convert visitors into buyers.
• Offer social proof. For products with great reviews, nothing works better than positive social proof from people who’ve bought the product earlier and are extremely happy with it. Get your affiliates showcase that too.
• Suggest bundling of products. Make your affiliate’s life easier by helping their visitors buy a product combo. Show which products will go best with what product. For instance, show which tee will look fabulous with a jean or which memory card is ideal for the new digital camera. Do it well and your customers will thank you for it.

9. Work with influencers

When we say influencers, you don’t have to rope in Stephen Curry or Emilia Clarke (though it will certainly help!) to push your products.

Instead, look around for small and mid-sized influencers in respective niches.

For instance someone who knows a thing or two about makeup and has a decent Instagram following can be a great choice for your skincare products. A baseball writer with a neat social media following can be quite effective in helping you sell more baseball gloves this season.

These influencers can help you reach your target audience faster. What’s more, their followers often turn to them for expert references and hence you automatically earn credibility when you partner with such influencers.

10. Engage with email marketing

Email marketing is popular for many reasons, but two reasons stand out: it’s inexpensive and it’s effective.

Send out emails to your mailing list. Be sure to have a short, crisp copy. If you sell items like dresses, shoes or something that has a high aesthetic value, also include great images.

While we are on email marketing, it’s important that you’ll get results only if you follow best practices. To begin with, your email list should be clean. Next, don’t forget to check how your email renders on different clients and devices before you actually send out all the emails.

Finally, keep track of the email marketing KPIs so that you can tweak your next emails for better results. 

Email is fast, easy, economical, effective and scalable. Make sure you use this channel well.

11. Partner with charities

Here’s a chance to not only improve your business but also do something you can be really proud of. 

Reach out to non-profits. Find one you can really identify with. Then find a way out so that the charity will benefit from your sales.

For instance, you could decide that of every $25 of sale, $1 will go to the charity. Or, for every $1,000 of clothes sold, you’ll donate X number of hoodies to the charity that they can distribute to the homeless.

Now you can highlight this on your website. That has at least two positive outcomes. One, your buyers will feel happy that by buying from you, they are indirectly contributing to something worthwhile. And two, it raises the image of your organization as a business with a conscience.

Be sure to request the charity to highlight this partnership on their website and social media handles as well.

12. Craft different offers for different days

On Black Friday, a visitor to your website sees you have an offer of flat 20% off. On Saturday, the visitor sees the same thing. Chances are they won’t return on Sunday because they know the offer.

Or they will keep postponing their purchase.

Instead, consider crafting Black Friday deals for every day. That means you offer 20% off on Friday,  buy-two-get-one-free on Saturday, express shipping with gift coupons on Sunday and so on.

This does two things. 

One, your customer keeps coming back to your site every day hunting for the offer they think is the best. 

Secondly, because the offer is going to expire on the same day, it can infuse a sense of urgency in the minds of your customers – I’d better buy now or this item will be taken off the sales list.

13. Improve post-purchase experience

One of most frequently forgotten but highly effective Black Friday marketing ideas is the post-purchase experience.

If your customer buys on Black Friday and then turns their back and never returns, you don’t get the most out of the customer. Why not have them shop with you frequently?

Since they’ve already bought from you once, they’ve shown trust in you. And it’s only natural that you leverage this trust and get them to return again.

You can set up a series of post-purchase emails to not only improve your customer’s experience but also to gradually improve brand loyalty. This will help you get repeat purchase and make cross-selling easier and more effective.

Keep your customers coming back to you, don’t make this purchase a one-off experience. 

14. Send cart abandonment emails

As a marketer chasing Black Friday customers, you want to always increase the buyer-visitor ratio.

Sure it’s important to chase new customers, but what about those who already visited your site, added a few things to their shopping cart and suddenly left without making a purchase?

Cart abandonment recovery emails aim to bring back these visitors and convince them to make a purchase. 

And why not? These visitors have already invested some efforts into choosing products and passing through one or more stages of your checkout. So they are what salespeople call highly qualified leads.

When sending out cart recovery emails be sure to include:

• The products they left behind
• A great copy 
• (and probably) What they missed by not buying, by using social proof
• (and maybe) A discount

Whenever appropriate, you can also create a sense of urgency with something like “Only 3 pieces left! Hurry, we’ve 1 saved for you…. But not for long!”

15. Offer printable gift coupons

Why should your customers have to wait for you to hand them a gift coupon? Why not let them do it themselves?

An estimated 93% of US consumers purchase or receive a gift every year. When you don’t offer your customers a chance to print their own coupons, you’re ignoring huge opportunity.

Design beautiful Black Friday gift coupon templates that your customers can use to print as gifts. That will help your customers easily personalize their gift – and they will thank you for that.

16. Leverage Quora and Reddit

There’s no reason to keep spending money in promotions. You can use platforms like Quora and Reddit to introduce new products, announce great offers or simply show your expertise in the kind of problems you solve.

For instance, you are a SaaS offering specialized insights into site performance. Use Quora to answer questions related to growth hacking. Use Reddit to show what small tweaks can achieve and improve your ranking.

On the sidelines, you can mention what your solution is capable of. There, you have a fan following. And a few customers too.

17. Work on the finer points

And before we sign off, here’s a list of small but not insignificant actions you need to take. 

• Use chatbots: That helps you automate sales and scale quickly.
• Extend terms: Offer extended warranties or longer return periods.
• Offer faster shipping: Let your customers enjoy the product sooner.
• Add visible banners: Be sure to have Black Friday banners all along your website.
• Optimize your site: See to it that your site is optimized for all devices. 
• Fix the links: Check to see that all links are working fine.

Summary

The period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday is one of the biggest marketing events of the year. That’s why you’ll want to enter into the event with all the preparations so that you can serve more customers profitably.

The last minute Black Friday marketing ideas listed above are sure to help you generate more business. 

From running dry runs to check if everything’s in order to building paid ads and tying up with influencers to leveraging platforms like Quora and crafting smart post-purchase emails, there’s a lot of work you can do. 

Of course, there’s some groundwork you’ll want to do to ensure that all your efforts bear fruit.

For instance, you’ll be collecting email addresses of new customers who are making a purchase for the first time. At this point, a real-time email checker will help you ensure that customers don’t key in a wrong email address by mistake or otherwise.

Don’t forget to let us know what ideas have worked best for you!