To help you generate the most revenue you can, we’ve compiled a list of the top tactics DTC brands use to get Black Friday sales across the Ecommerce mix.
Discover how to get Black Friday customers and how to keep Black Friday customers buying from you in the future.
Everyone calls their campaign ‘Black Friday.’ Imagine the flood of similar emails coming into your consumer’s inbox on the big day. By calling your campaign something different from the standard, you can stand out and improve open rates like Pact Coffee did last year with their ‘Americano Friday’ campaign. Minor Figures also tried this with their satirical ‘Wack Friday’ campaign.
Most DTC brands won’t come up with something drastically different from the previous year, and we’ve found a hack to analyze the competition’s emails so you can step up. Milledlets you analyze the emails of brands and search terms and even allows you to search within a specific date range. We searched for Beauty Pie to bring you this example.
You’ll need the customer to have purchased from you previously to try this one, but trust us it’s worth it. 71.4% of carts are abandoned which means over 70 out of 100 customers never complete their purchase. Relo’s Magic Cart makes PDP mazes and unpersonalized landing pages a thing of the past. Magic Cart is an embedded shopping cart which lives inside your brand’s CRM. When customers click the CTA of your Black Friday email or SMS campaign, they’re taken to a personalized portal with their order pre-loaded and can checkout in 1-click. Brands like Dr Vegan report a 53% increase in conversion using Magic Cart.
Vegan make-up brush brand, Spectrum Collections used an interactive ‘spin the wheel’ promotion to generate interest in their Black Friday campaign last year. Consumers could click the spinning wheel of incremental discounts to receive their offer, and be taken to the website to use what they’d won.
Black Friday is the most congested email date in your consumer’s calendar. You need to capture the consumers attention and convert them in seconds. A large, clear headline, offer and creativity such as the example from War Paint for Men will set you apart from those who bury the CTA within paragraphs of copy.
The majority of Black Friday emails are sent out between 8am-9am flooding the inbox of consumers and causing an inbox traffic jam. This can lead to consumers being overwhelmed by the influx and avoiding your emails full stop. While you may believe that the earlier you start promoting Black Friday, the better it will be for your revenue numbers as sales come in all day, remember the full period lasts until the following Tuesday. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We recommend sending your campaign later, at lunchtime or late afternoon to stand out.
Jordan, Partnerships Manager at Klaviyo says “If you're planning to send at a specific time, make sure you take into consideration the time zones that your potentially diverse customer base resides in.
I would encourage brands to think about their consumers and what their routines are likely to be around the days of BFCM. E.g. if you're selling to office workers, they might be less receptive to impulse purchases during the working hours.
Jordan, Partnerships Manager
Klaviyo
Cutting through the noise and capturing the consumers attention is one of the hardest things to achieve on Black Friday. Creating a homepage countdown feature, site banner or dedicated evergreen landing page to climb in the search engines as Pact Coffee have done is a great tactic you can employ ahead of time.
A blanket site-wide discount isn’t as compelling as specializing in a few signature lines, and blanket discounts are usually an inventory nightmare. When you run deeper discounts, you’re able to create a stronger narrative around them, achieve higher margins and manage your stock better.
On-site quizzes enable you to capture first-party data about your customers and personalize your campaigns to their specific needs and interests, as in this example from Curlsmith. Why not create a dedicated Black Friday quiz ahead of time asking your customers specific questions around the shopping event? It’s likely that this would lead to themes and patterns among customers, enabling you to target your campaigns more effectively.
Growth Coach, Daphne Tideman who previously worked for Heights says:
Ad costs increase hugely around Black Friday so you want to be building your email list asap so that you can focus on your warmer audience. This doesn’t mean lead ads (often the quality is low) but rather ensuring a high percentage of your website traffic is converting to your email list through recent lead magnets and potentially a quiz.
Daphne Tideman, Growth Coach
Rather than heavily discounting which isn't sustainable we opt for rewarding our existing customers - e.g last year we rewarded customers with extra loyalty points for shopping over the weekend but also extended it beyond Black Friday weekend so that customers knew they didn't have to spend there and then if they didn't actually need the food - so we avoided unnecessary waste. I would add to this that recruiting customers in advance of Black Friday so they really see the added value is also a big part of our strategy.
Katie Walker, Marketing Manager
Mamamade
Yes, Black Friday is a money maker. However, if your DTC brand is about quality, not quantity then mass-consumerism may not be on the agenda. In this case, going against the grain and using Black Friday as a vehicle to spotlight your attention to high-quality and planet-conscious goods could help you rise in the brand awareness ranks and secure you a high AOV sale.
In a recent Ometria study of consumer attitudes to Black Friday, 72% of customers said they’d prefer to hear of Black Friday offers via email compared to social ads (22%), direct mail (30%) and text message (16%).
In a recent Black Friday newsletter, Nik Sharma recommends creating two emails for new and existing customers. He says, “In addition to announcing your promos to existing and new customers (2 variations), you should have emails for reminders (last call for XXXX) or segmented audiences (openers but non-clickers or clickers but non-purchasers), depending on list size.”
As we communicated in the last tactic, email is the preferred channel that consumers prefer to be addressed with Black Friday offers. So, growing your list and ensuring you have a thorough database of people to reach out to on the day is imperative.
Parker Mayes, Head of Partnerships at Amped says, “Amped helps you capture 2-3x more emails and SMS through its no-code popup builder. Start with a proven fully-designed template, customize it to your brand in minutes, and optimize your popup’s performance over time with easy A/B testing. You can capture preferences, run a quiz or survey, or make an announcement on your site.” For more ways to grow your email list before Black Friday, we recommend this dedicated blog from Direct to Consumer newsletter.
We have to thank Nik Sharma (again!) for this one. The idea is that a new customer without any previous experience of your brand should be spoken to differently to someone who has a base level understanding of your products and services.
Nik says, “If you're not running landing pages for all your big November sales, you're doing this whole thing wrong. Each promotion should have 2 landing pages — one for new customers and one for existing customers. These two audiences should be spoken to differently, and the page, in general, should be optimized for understanding the promotion, getting in, and checking out.”
Cyber Monday is now arguably bigger than Black Friday. In 2020 alone, Cyber Monday sales hit $10.8. This may be in part due to the fact that Black Friday happens in brick and mortar stores and online, whereas Cyber Monday literally relates to Ecommerce. With this in mind, consider placing more emphasis on Cyber Monday than Black Friday.
Jordan Bourchier-Lee
Partnerships Manager, Klaviyo
Expressing gratitude towards your customer for their support is an easy way to keep them in your mind’s eye and drive brand awareness. If your brand has a social or ethical purpose, you could use this opportunity to tell them how much good their order has done for the planet. If you can, try to squeeze in a non-discount incentive such as ‘Refer a friend to get free shipping next time’ or ‘Order in 30 days for a free tote.’
It goes without saying, but the best way to ensure a second order is to provide an amazing customer experience. From comms to customer aftercare, ensure every stage of the experience is seamless. Take a look at the video above to see how Glossier makes its unboxing experience glorious for customers.
Customers are never more engaged with your brand than when they’ve just placed an order. Your initial emails such as order confirmation, shipping notification and delivery notification will receive the highest open rates - so be sure to optimize them for success by weaving in your brand mission and values. This order confirmation email from Pooch & Mutt has been spun into a personal letter with the brand mission statement spotlighted at the top.
Black Friday is a chance to focus on your big ticket items - the ones that can be harder to shift because they’re more of an investment purchase. As long as you can still generate a high margin, don’t be afraid to offer a high discount.
In his Black Friday newsletter Nik Sharma offers the following advice, “On Black Friday, I like to go high AOV, high discount, and high margin. High AOV bundles that are 2-3x your normal AOV. 30-50% discount, justified by the high AOV + high margin.”
Customers don’t want to have to jump through hoops to repurchase the goods they love. A simple hack like adding a repurchase QR code to the packaging is a frictionless way to enable them to buy the product again. Bird Blend Tea used Penny Black to improve their unboxing experience in the example above.
Don’t make the mistake of sending all your shiny new customers the same comms. If you were able to implement a sign-up quiz as we discussed in part 1, you should be able to segment your audience based on their answers and purchase history. For instance, if a customer bought pod coffee on Black Friday and said they like a fruity, floral taste, you can send them relevant content in your next flow. In the example from Fiid, the recipient had been sent this recipe based on what he’d purchased.
Part of the problem that brands face when getting customers to buy again is timing their comms at the optimal moment. This results in everyone receiving the same repurchase prompt at the same time. At Relo, we take all your jumbled up Shopify data and analyze the average order gap across customers, purchased products and all-time orders, so you can make the best predictions. Best of all? There’s no need to build out complex email and SMS flows as we sync with Klaviyo allowing you to easily target customers at the right moment.
64% of marketers believe that word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to drive sales. You’re more likely to trust your sister or friend’s recommendation than a static image testimonial you see on Instagram. Therefore, it makes sense to leverage the power of referrals and offer a ‘give discount, get discount’ system. The most important thing here is to keep it simple. Nothing repels a customer more than a confusing process. Take a look at how Beer52 drive referrals using a simple landing page.
You know your customer loves to feel like a savvy shopper as they bought from you during the Black Friday sale, so enter them into a tiered rewards system or make them a VIP with ‘early access’, rewards and strong incentives to buy again.
The brands that nail retention have found a way to feed on their customers wants, needs and desires. There needs to be a reason why the customer would buy again beyond the bargain bin. In this great example from Heights, they remind the customer of all the ways taking Omega 3 can reduce ailments and improve performance.
The best brands find a way to implant themselves in their customers memory with interesting content that deviates from the standard ‘buy this again’. In this example from Who Gives a Crap? The customer is persuaded to use their time on the loo to perform a bathroom scavenger hunt. They still include a CTA to shop, but the ‘selly’ part is very minimal.
Matt Clegg at Shipbob says, “With the current economic situation, customers will be extra choosy this holiday season. However, it need not be a battle based purely on the biggest discounts. Think beyond the BFCM period, focus on acquiring and keeping customers for the long term.Become the trusted shopping destination – charging for either returns or shipping are conversion killers. Consistently hit your delivery promises and keep your shoppers informed at every step of the journey. Secondly, focus on creating an unboxing experience they’ll remember. Why be just another brown box? Your parcel is the only marketing channel you have with a 100% open rate.”
This tactic only applies if you offer subscriptions, but it’s well worth considering if you do. Some DTC brands use Black Friday as a hook to get consumers to subscribe. However, the average subscriber will cancel after 4 orders and too much product is the number one reason. Currently, subscription management is clunky and takes the subscriber into a maze of admin hassle.
Relo solves this with a 1-click Subscription Manager you can embed into your CRM. Authenticated by email / SMS, the user only has to click the CTA in your email or SMS message to skip, delay or add products, without logging in.
Are you B Corp Certified? On the road to it? Sitting on thousands of positive Trustpilot reviews? Social proof is important for the first sale as most won’t purchase unless they can see some signs that you’re trustworthy, but after this it helps to remind the consumer of your higher value and keeps your brand in their minds eye.
As much as you can optimize your email flows, follow your customers around the internet and create engaging websites to hook them in, sometimes a good old fashioned mail drop like this example from All Plants hits the mark. Your customer is likely to spend more time looking through something tactile like a flyer or letter than they are an email. According to Market Reach, 87% of customers of all ages trust in direct mail.
Katie Walker
Growth Marketing Manager, Mamamade Food
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Tom Mckechnie
Founder, Snackfully
Pheobe Barber
Puresport
Oliver Dickinson
Pore Favor
