It’s almost here: the biggest shopping day of the year.
On the 25th of November, millions of people all around the globe will queue up outside stores to spend billions on heavily discounted products.
This is the day many retailers become profitable (hence "black" Friday) as shoppers spend nearly $404 each on average.
Of course, you want your store to be a part of this mega shopping event. But with just a little over a week left to go, you need marketing ideas that bring in results quickly.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of 6 last-minute Black Friday marketing ideas that will bring customers to your store by the thousands.
Submit your deals to coupon websites
96% of consumers use coupons while shopping.
Traffic to coupon websites spikes around Black Friday as shoppers try to find the best possible deals.
For instance, the search interest for "coupons" sees a significant bump in the week before Black Friday:
Submitting your deals to coupon websites can be a great source of referral traffic. More importantly, people who are searching for coupons have a high purchase intent. This means that your traffic will be very high converting.
For example, RetailMeNot has a dedicated page for Black Friday deals:
Most coupon websites will have a section to help you submit your deals. For example, on RetailMeNot, scroll down to the footer and click on "Submitting a Coupon".
There are hundreds of coupon websites online but for the most part, you should focus on these:
SlickDeals
RetailMeNot
FatWallet
Woot
Groupon
PriceGrabber
Bargainist
BensBargains
Buxr
CouponCode
Coupons
CouponSherpa
FreeShipping
Deals2Buy
Offers.com
CouponMom
CouponAlbum
GivingAssistant
DealCatcher
Dealighted
DealSeekingMom
eBates
eCoupons
GottaDeal
DealsPlus
MySavings
Savings.com
WiseBread
Dealigg
BradsDeals
Once you submit your coupons to all these sites, you should see a decent bump in targeted referral traffic.
Use Buyable Links
You’re likely already sharing your products on social media. But on Black Friday, you don’t want your followers to waste time trying to find your posted products in your store.
There’s an easy workaround to this: Buyable Links.
"Buyable Links" is a new free Ecwid app for directing customers straight to the shopping cart with pre-selected products. Instead of promoting your entire store, you can use Buyable Links to promote a select few products in a pre-populated shopping cart.
This way the checkout process will be the shortest and the easiest possible, increasing conversions from your promotions.
The process takes three simple steps:
Select your products
Generate a link to the cart
Send it to a customer or promote it on social media.
Use exit-intent popups to keep shoppers from bouncing
As a retailer, one of your biggest challenges on Black Friday is to keep shoppers from bouncing off to a competitor’s website.
One way to solve this problem is by adding an exit-intent pop-up to your site.
These pop-ups use exit-intent technology to estimate when a user is about to leave your website. Just before the user is about to bounce off, she will see a pop-up with an incentive (such as free shipping or additional 10% off).
This incentive can get the user to stick around and actually finish the purchase.
According to one study, exit-intent offers can increase e-commerce conversions by up to 20%.
Even if you don’t land a conversion, you can add an email form to your exit-intent popups to collect emails from bouncing visitors.
When you’re competing against hundreds of other retailers on Black Friday, this 10-20% conversion rate boost can translate into thousands of dollars.
You can start using exit-intent popups on Ecwid using the Privy app.
Start a scavenger hunt
Scavenger hunts — a great staple of holiday retailing — don’t have to be limited to the offline world. With a few simple steps, you can turn your entire store into a big scavenger hunt, giving Black Friday shoppers a fun way to find deals.
Scavenger hunts tap into two often-ignored aspects of retailing:
Gamification: By turning the deal-finding process into a game (and giving away points, badges and awards), you make shopping more fun while also boosting customer loyalty.
Serendipity: Serendipity — stumbling upon the perfect gift or a surprising deal — is one area where online stores lag behind offline retailers. Scavenger hunts add serendipitous discovery to your shopping process, making it more engaging.
For example, Wayfair organized a scavenger hunt through Pinterest. It asked its followers to pin different items from the Wayfair product catalog, giving away $10 for every successful entry.
As a result of this scavenger hunt, Wayfair increased conversions from Pinterest by 107% and average order size by 48%.
This is an example of a very simple hunt that pushed customers to spend more time on your site and discover new products.
You can create a similar scavenger hunt on your site by hiding a button, coupon code or phrase on an inner page. Then update your social media and send out emails telling your followers about this hidden button.
The objective is to get people to dig through your product catalog and in the process, discover something new.
For example, Bonobos recently teamed up with Notcot to create a scavenger hunt. A pair of Bonobos pants were hidden on the Notcot website. Users who found the pants would get a $100 coupon.
If you want visitors to look through specific pages on your site (such as high-margin/high-converting products), you can drop hints directing them to these pages.
For instance, when Lomography ran a scavenger hunt, it told people where to start their search.
But if you want to really push people to take action, consider adding a time limit — say, 60 minutes — to find the reward. This works really well as a last-minute deal before Black Friday.
Create a "use it when you want it" savings pass
There is more to the holiday shopping season than just Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In fact, the National Retail Federation estimates that the 2016 holiday season will bring in $655.8B in sales. In contrast, Black Friday brought in just $10.4B in 2015 — less than 1.6% of the entire holiday spending.
Keep this in mind when planning your Black Friday promotions. While it’s important to capitalize on Friday and Monday, you should also give customers a reason to come back to your store before Christmas shopping.
One way to do that is to create a "use it when you want it" savings pass.
This coupon will give shoppers a deal that can be redeemed anytime after Black Friday. You can bundle it with a purchase to give customers an incentive to come back to your store.
JCPenney is particularly well known for using such "coupon giveaways" to get people into its stores.
This is essentially a way to buy customer loyalty for future holiday shopping. A customer is more likely to come back to your store if you give them an exclusive "loyalty" bonus or coupon for future shopping.
To create such a coupon in Ecwid, log into your control panel, then click on "Create a coupon" in the "Promotions" tab.
Set your discount (or offer free shipping) and set the valid from…to date after Black Friday.
Limit the coupon to "once per customer" under "Limits".
Announce the deal on your website, email and social media.
Get your deal on marketplaces
During holiday sales, shoppers rush to marketplaces such as Google Shopping, Shop.com marketplace, Shopzilla.co.uk, etc. to find new products. Getting featured on a prominent marketplace can land you thousands of visitors.
If you have an Ecwid Business plan, you can upload your products to most popular marketplaces. This will essentially create a storefront for you on the marketplace, giving you an additional sales channel.
Follow the links below to learn how to do so:
eBay
Google Shopping
PriceGrabber
Nextag
Shopzilla
Yandex.Market
eBay Commerce Network
Your next 3 steps
Black Friday is just around the corner and there is no time to waste. Focus on low-effort, high-reward marketing tactics that are ease to implement.
These should be your next three steps after reading this post:
Create Black Friday coupons and submit them to at least 20+ major deals sites
Update your social media with "buyable" links
Add exit-intent pop-ups to your product and cart pages