In 2023, Black Friday will occur on Friday the 24th November with ‘Cyber Monday’ taking place on Monday 27th November. Online stores will change their visuals, brick and mortar shops will launch sales, and email inboxes will be flooded with messages. It’s no secret that for many brands, Black Friday isn’t exactly the same as it used to be. Stores who previously offered huge sales, now offer minimal discounts off select items to be a part of the event. But none of this means that Black Friday is not a pivotal time for your business. From organic search to email marketing, there are plenty of best digital marketing practices to adopt to give yourself the best chance at a successful Black Friday.

1. Use The Same URL

From an organic standpoint, Google prefers you using the same URL every year for Black Friday. While it may seem to make sense on the surface to have black-friday-2020, black-friday-2021, and black-friday-2022, it means Google has to recrawl a new page every year. For example, with Shopify’s standard clear URL structure, you can set up a page in the back end with pages/black-friday-sale as the handle that you can use every year that will hold a lot of domain authority and SEO ‘juice’ from the previous year. Regardless of what platform you are on, create a handle that you can use year after year.

2. Plan Your Emails Ahead of Time

Thousands of brands will utilise email marketing around Black Friday - which means that the chances of your Black Friday email being at the top of a customer’s inbox drops. Scheduling emails at the right time and keeping customers informed in good time could be the difference between them shopping with you and your competitors.

Do you know when your sale starts?

Alert customers in good time so they know when they can start checking out on your website.

Are you giving certain customers early access?

Set up an email segment for VIP customers and target them with their own deals and messaging exclusive to them.

Have some specific new products that you want to push?

Highlight them in your Black Friday campaigns.

How Can You Help Future Customers?

Set up a product or service reviews flow set up to get more information that will help future customers?

3. Review Your Customer Journey

You’re running a 60% off sale - brilliant! But if your customer journey isn’t on point, people can’t check out and actually make those savings. You want to make your customers’ online journey as simple as possible at all times - especially around Black Friday. Make sure that adding products and variants to the cart is seamless so customers can check out in minutes (or even seconds if they know what they want!)

If customers can check-out quickly, they may even come back for round 2 before your sale ends due to how easy the process was, and how much money they could save buying now instead of after Black Friday.

4. Utilise Advertising

Google, TikTok, Facebook & Instagram are all full of customers looking for great products to buy. While online shopping may not be the main intent of someone scrolling through social media, seeing your Black Friday deals and products could be enough to get them to visit your site. Showcase your sale properly with high converting Google Ads copy, great imagery, eye-catching videos and other forms of engaging content.

5. Follow Up With New Customers

Black Friday is over! Your job is done, right? Wrong. You’ve just added potentially hundreds of brand new customers to your business and they might want to hear more from you. Send these customers a welcome email automation to tell them more about your products and services? Did they buy a certain type of product that you can then send them more information on? Gaining customers is one thing, but retaining these customers is another.

That doesn’t mean throwing every marketing strategy possible at them and hoping one sticks. There’s always a psychological element that when people sign up for Black Friday sales, they could then be bombarded with marketing efforts from every brand they bought from. It’s probably best to not be one of these companies. Provide them with useful, helpful, and valuable content and help persuade them to engage with your business again.

What Can Mucky Puddle Do For You?

With years of experience running Black Friday campaigns across all of our digital marketing and e-commerce platforms, we have identified the perfect principles to adhere to when marketing your Black Friday sale. No matter what industry you are in or services that you offer, our team of digital marketing and Shopify experts can help you both obtain and retain new customers.