When to Prepare for Black Friday - Part 5

Welcome back to the last in the series of our continuing week-by-week glance at preparing for a Black Friday promotion.

We've been through picking your promo, targeting your audience, dividing your 'herd' and teasing your promo. Now we'll get the word out to your list.

November 8 to November 29: The Home Stretch - Schedule and send your promotional communications series

Now, it’s time to launch! Woot Woot!

Your herd should start seeing your Black Friday deals every day starting November 8th.

Then, from U.S. Thanksgiving (for us non-Americans that’s November 19th) to Cyber Monday (November 29th), send DAILY your series of increasingly urgent emails, with subject lines like:

Email No. 1: Black Friday sale for three days only!

Email No. 2: Get [offer] now before it’s gone!

Email No. 3: Today is the last day for [promotion]!

Can you do all this manually? Sure. But between the business, family time, and maybe even doing a little shopping yourself, don’t you have better things to do?

With Keap, you can have your marketing automation software schedule the emails to be sent on specific days and times—and automatically remove customers who purchased your offer so you don’t annoy them with subsequent emails.

(You can have other automation do this too but I’m biased to Keap ‘cuz it just works!)

And after the dust settles… Follow up with another offer!

Remember, after Black Friday, the holiday shopping season is just beginning.

First of all, there’s Cyber Monday—the biggest online spending day of the year, with $2 billion in desktop sales in 2018, according to comScore.

Keep your herd shopping with YOU by making yet another offer to those who took you up on your promotion. Ideally, this should be a related upsell or a thank-you discount to be used on the next purchase.

Again, use a little “out of the box” thinking here.

What if my Black Friday promotion was a dud?

Sometimes a promotion doesn’t produce the results you hoped for. It happens (even to me).

Fortunately, there are always procrastinators who might jump for gift cards or some other last-minute deal.

And that might be all you need because as of Dec. 15 last year, about 90 percent of consumers told the National Retail Federation that their holiday shopping lists still weren’t finished.

The key is to keep trying different offers, measure your results, try something else and compare which did better.

Take what worked from each test, combine them, and try again.

If you do this, a winner is eventually guaranteed.

Need brainstorming ideas? Get a complimentary 15-minute strategy session with Richard Bueckert HERE