Black Friday Marketing: 9 Great Ideas for Ecommerce and Mobile Apps

November is around the corner, and with it comes various Black Friday trends. While e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores prepare in anticipation, it’s no news that Black Friday is usually a very busy sales period for businesses across the globe.

However, you need an effective marketing strategy to launch one of the best Black Friday marketing campaigns. This article highlights some tested and tried Black Friday marketing ideas brands have used to boost sales and win big during this period. Read on!

Tip 1. Start Promoting Your Campaign Early

Your competitors are probably thinking the same as you. But starting on time could be your advantage to catch the early birds, subscribe them to your waitlist, and build the buying tension in advance.

These Black Friday marketing tips could help you kick off an early promotion for your campaign:

• Build anticipation on social media: Tell your email subscribers or followers what they may expect from you on Black Friday. Through various gamification strategies, you could hint them with mystery deals or tell them what it would be. Don't forget to leverage promotional video templates to create engaging teasers for your social media platforms and email campaigns.
• Advertising early: Now is also the best time to advertise your Black Friday deals online using paid social media, mobile push notifications, or Google Ads. You may as well run cross-channel promotions and experiment with your Black Friday marketing ideas using A/B testing.

Tip 2. Use Urgency Marketing Tactic

As people browse potential products to buy, they may have problems making instant decisions. Creating a sense of urgency for the product is an effective way to grab customer’s attention and influence them to purchase products faster. 

Over the years, urgency marketing has been one of the most used and tested Black Friday strategies. This is because customers feel they are taking advantage of the opportunity by buying it impulsively.

It’s also important to note that this technique works best if the product is on the customers’ radar but only needs a little more push to decide. Some urgent marketing tactics for your Black Friday marketing strategy include countdown timers, limited-time discount offers, and special offers for scarce products.

Tip 3. Reach Out to Your Email Subscribers

• Personalize your email campaigns and use email automation.
• Create an engaging copy, leveraging Black Friday trends or the urgency tactic mentioned earlier.
• Peg the email automation tool to your e-commerce website using the copy you’ve created.
• Then, start building your email list.

Occasionally, contact your email subscribers with discount offers for Black Friday. Try not to make it buggy, as they may unsubscribe at any slight inconvenience, which is bad for your Black Friday marketing.

Tip 4. Work With Influencers

Another tip for Black Friday marketing is advertising with influencers. Although influencers are more expensive to incorporate in marketing campaigns than other social media strategies, they share a special connection with their followers or fans, making them an effective advertising medium for your Black Friday marketing. 

However, before you pay an influencer to advertise for you, do background checks to ascertain if they align with your brand values and can communicate this effectively with their fans. Many influencers are copy-and-paste advertisers, which may not work out well with their fans because they don’t understand the brand or what it represents. One way to tackle this is by using an influencer content tracking tool to monitor the authenticity and effectiveness of their promotions. This tool allows you to assess how well the influencer's content resonates with their audience and whether it accurately reflects your brand's message.

Tip 5. Follow Up With Customers After Black Friday

After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll likely experience a drop in customers. A good strategy is to enlist these customers to your mail or mobile push list when they purchase your products on Black Friday. After the sales, don't hang your boots immediately; start an impressive follow-up campaign to turn these new clients into returning customers.

A follow-up strategy keeps your e-commerce store or app experience fresh in your customers’ memories and shows how much you appreciate their patronage. Through this, you can retain customers and reduce the churn rate on your website or app.

Tip 6. Use Referral and Promo Codes

Using referral codes makes it easier to track and manage. Plus, it’s a win-win for them and your business. On the other hand, coupons and promo codes can influence your customers to engage with your e-commerce platform. They’ll gladly use your promo codes and carry out tasks like referrals to get more benefits. Below, you can see how a promo code was used:

Tip 7. Give a Free Gift With a Purchase

Tip 8. Try Reducing Cart Abandonment

Nearly all e-commerce platforms face abandoned cart problems — a situation where potential customers shop and do not complete the transaction, thereby abandoning the cart, canceling the purchase, or never returning to the cart again.

This is a major challenge that needs to be addressed properly. You can proactively step in to reduce cart abandonment and improve user retention by sending reminders through push notifications, SMS, or email to the prospect or customer. 

If possible, try to know their challenges and why they may have abandoned the purchase. Even if they don’t eventually buy, the customer data gathered will help you know the right measures to prevent such an experience in the future. 

Tip 9. Upsell and Cross-Sell Your Products

Our list of tips won’t be complete without this point. When you upsell, you try to persuade your prospects to buy an extra or more expensive product. In cross-selling, you try to convince the buyer to get an additional product that is different or complements the one they have purchased.

How to Adapt Your Marketing Strategy to Black Friday

Before Black Friday, it’s presumed you already have an existing marketing strategy for your e-commerce business and app. But you still must adapt your marketing strategy to fit the Black Friday season. Here are some steps you can take to do that:

1. Create a Black Friday Plan

Apparently, you’ll use different channels to promote your offers. Creating a plan is how you test other Black Friday marketing ideas.

Break down your campaign into three phases: 

• Before Black Friday (until Thanksgiving) — As you prepare for Black Friday, it is the time to do the dirty work, experiment with your ideas, conduct market analysis, launch MVPs, and carry out surveys to put you in the position of authority.
• During Black Friday — At this stage, your traffic is at its peak. However, you still need to tighten up marketing. You can create more urgent marketing tactics and strengthen your customer support system.
• Post-Black Friday (until Cyber Monday) — Chances are that your potential customer may still be undecided until the last minute. You can extend your discount offers over Black Friday to savor as many interested customers as possible. You can also reach out or follow up on abandoned carts at this stage.

2. Create A Black Friday Landing Page

Your landing page is integral to the success and conversion rate of your Black Friday marketing strategy. The landing page could be a page on your website that informs your existing and potential users of your Black Friday campaigns and what they stand to gain. 

The page can have one or more banners, links to the Black Friday deals, relevant call-to-actions (CTAs), etc. For best results, your copy should be simple, interactive, and able to communicate all the essential information needed to drive action. Knowing how to optimize a landing page by improving its design, mobile responsiveness, and loading speed is essential for increasing conversion rates and user engagement during high-traffic periods like Black Friday.

You can direct traffic to the landing page from a simple pop-up ad on your website or app, a pop-up notification, an email sign-up form, an email newsletter with exclusive deals, a social media Black Friday banner, a YouTube ad, a full dedicated sales page, etc. 

Alternatively, your customers may use any of these listed options to access the Black Friday offers and deals directly instead of going to a landing page first. You can get a fair click-through rate if your copy and visuals are engaging enough.

3. Optimize Your E-commerce and Mobile App 

During this preparatory stage, you should also enhance and modify your e-commerce website and app to scale and suit the occasion. You should monitor your site’s or app’s health, evaluate its speed in line with the estimated site traffic on Black Friday, and review your Black Friday copy to ensure it aligns with your goals.

Once these are done, you’re set to launch an effective Black Friday mobile marketing strategy with juicy in-app offers. 

4. Update Your Stocks and Inventory

You don’t want to run out of stock on Black Friday. After researching and estimating your potential sales, you can work on updating your inventory to fit your budget and estimates. If you’re short on some products, now is the time to restock and adjust your prices ahead of Black Friday. Doing so on that day could result in a disaster as the market will be occupied with busy stores.

5. Simplify Your Checkout Experience

Part of the cause of the high churn rate and increased cart abandonment is a complex or bad checkout experience. At this point, evaluate your checkout system, ensure it is easy to access and process, uses the latest technologies necessary, and can accommodate as many checkouts as possible. 

Launch Perfect Black Friday Marketing Campaigns with Reteno

Reteno is a mobile retention solution that provides all you need to create a successful Black Friday marketing campaign. From web and mobile pushes to personalized product recommendations for mobile users, Reteno offers the right services to help you streamline your e-commerce store and app experience and onboard more customers. 

Beyond these, we offer our users several opportunities to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. For instance, we understand the importance of personalized campaigns, storytelling, and automation for the success of your marketing campaigns and strive to provide you with a tool to set your app up properly. 

Hence, we built the Reteno platform to enable you to send personalized in-app messages and offers to your users seamlessly, thereby meeting your different customers at their points of need. To make the most of Reteno and our numerous features, visit our website now and enhance your competitive advantage ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Final Thoughts

Black Friday is usually a very busy sales day around the globe. You don’t have to wait until it is knocking on the door to begin marketing your product; the clock is already ticking. With these hacks, you can launch successful Black Friday marketing strategies and prepare your e-commerce store or app for Black Friday.