Can’t wait to share my Holiday and Black Friday Marketing Strategies that I personally used to increase my revenue by 200% for the last holiday season.
Have you started your Holiday strategy yet? Some of us plan months in advance and some of us plan at the last minute. Here are some easy changes you can make that make a huge difference in your marketing and sales for the holiday season.
1.Website Changes
Give your website a holiday facelift.
(See image below as an example)
This can be as simple as adding a holiday themed banner/hero image to make it more festive. During November-December, people want to shop. They are buying gifts for themselves, their partners, their dogs and their friends and family, so make it easy for them to do that.
Make it easy for people to buy gifts
this could be a standalone gift guide page, a banner at the top of your website that tells people you have gifts, adding a graphic banner within your home page that tells people to check out your gifts.
2. Black Friday
Create a Great Offer and Promote it BEFORE Black Friday
Create a great offer for Black Friday but offer teasers and sneak peeks the week before to get your customers, subscribers excited. A lot of people plan ahead for what Black Friday deals they want to buy so letting your customers and followers know ahead of time makes it easier for them, and more likely they will be to buy from you.
This is a great example by Love Goodly, an email teaser they sent before Black Friday.
3. Email Marketing
Email has one of the strongest ROI marketing channels, delivering a return on investment of $39 for every $1 spent.
Create an epic Black Friday email
Tips:
- Spend $$ and have a graphic designer make a graphic for you promoting the sale. See below as an example. An amazing email is created using many creative graphics that an email marketing platform cannot do on its own.
- If you don’t have a designer, you can easily find a freelancer on websites like Upwork or 99Designs.
- To maximize exposure create two emails, send one out the day before Black Friday and send the second email on Black Friday. Heres one we love from Barkshop.
Make sure to ALSO have the following in place:
- Welcome email with a behavior-triggered multistage series.
- Abandoned cart email(s). Over half of brands fail to send abandoned cart emails, leaving easy money on the table!
- After-sales emails including order confirmation, shipping updates, and review requests. Ensure to include clever cross-sell or up-sell recommendations. Over half of brands fail to send an after-sales review email, missing an opportunity for valuable user generated content.
4. Boost Your List Building Activities
You want to get as many email addresses as possible before Black Friday so you can aggressively market to those subscribers when your sale hits.
Some ideas:
- Create a campaign that gives “ early access” to your Black Friday deals and promote this weeks before Black Friday. Use the campaign on social media, ads, etc. here’s a great example that Wishpond put together for a client.
- Bolster potential to reach your ideal customer using Facebook ads and instagram ads. Give google ads a try too!
- Use an enticing popup on your website to get email addresses. If you typically use one offer, make it even better as a way to boost your conversion rate and get more emails.
4. Holiday Collection page
Create an actual collection page with your holiday products
You always want your shoppers to easily identify the holiday products and gift giving items. You have 3-4 seconds to grab their attention before they click out of your website so make it crystal clear for them. Here is a great example from Zippy Paws.
They have a dedicated page to only Christmas items, so they can easily drive all traffic to this page instead of sending traffic to a homepage and then a customer has to struggle t figure out where to go. Drive your traffic to the specific page you want them to take action on.
5. SEO
People are looking to spend their money and if you optimize properly, you can grab their attention and lead them to your site.
Keywords
Add Keywords to optimize your website and landing pages. Everyone in the planet will be using “Christmas gifts” so you need to be a little creative. Use keywords that your ideal customer uses to find your product. For example if you are a dog toy company, you could add to your Title Pages and Meta descriptions on your website-“2019 Christmas gifts for dogs”
Content:
Up your blogging game. You could build content around gift guides for your ideal customer. For example, “10 Christmas 2019 Gift Ideas for Dogs” Or “10 Black Friday 2019 Gift Ideas for Dog People”
Link-building
Try to get your product featured on other people’s blogs and gift guides.
Find your niche and start googling for bloggers who have gift guides that serve your niche. If you have a dog toy company, find pet bloggers and ask them if they can include your product in their gift guides in exchange for free product.
Be creative but getting your products added to other peoples blogs helps you twofold. It boosts your SEO and it gets your product in front of potential customers.
6. Influencers and Ambassadors
Utilize social media to get in front of your ideal customers
Instagram is an incredible place to acquire customers and try out new holiday and black friday marketing strategies. Find a few lifestyle accounts that serve your niche or ideal customer. Reach out to those accounts and ask if they will do a promotional post for you in exchange for free product.
If they can post on Black Friday that is the best case scenario but any post around Black Friday late November or early December works fine.
- Create a discount code for them and have them use the discount code when they post.
- If they have 10,000 followers make sure to also negotiate a swipe up as part of your agreement. This allows customers to swipe up on instagram story and be directed to your website. Only accounts with more than 10,000 followers have this feature.
This is an example of a great Black Friday promotional post from a Dapper Dog Box brand ambassador. We gave the ambassadors the copy to use for the captions and had them all include a special Black Friday discount code that was created for them and a call to action.
Ready to learn more? Let’s Slay your Holiday Sales!
Click to learn more about crushing your black Friday sales with my SLEIGH Your Holiday Sales Workshop.
