Black Friday has a long and storied history as the year’s most hotly anticipated shopping event. What began as a single day of post-Thanksgiving, store-level sales promotions has grown to a massive, weekend-long omnichannel experience. 

Customers view Black Friday as a chance to engage with new brands and save big bucks on desired products or services. Businesses view the event as a critical revenue- and growth-driving opportunity, plus a chance to get their offerings in front of a whole new set of shoppers.

As a savvy marketer, you know that most Black Friday results are driven long before the shopping begins. Strategic planning, smart segmenting, and a solid omnichannel marketing strategy will position your brand for success. Whether you’ve been planning all year, or you’re just getting started, there’s still time to create a smart, effective plan that gets results. 

Here are a few key strategies to start working on today so you can hit the ground running during peak shopping time.

Testing Your Discounts Before Black Friday

It’s no secret that shoppers are looking for bargains on Black Friday. Your goal as a marketer is to give them what they want without undercutting profits or devaluing your brand’s reputation. The key to this balancing act is to run pilot campaigns and collect customer feedback before Black Friday. Questions to ask yourself as you devise your testing plan:

  • Does this customer need a discount? Not every customer is price sensitive, so be sure you’re offering a discount to drive behavior, not just because it’s what’s done well before.
  • What behavior do you want to drive? A one-time sale should not be the goal. Can you introduce an existing client to a new product line? Get them to purchase items in an abandoned cart? Have them share contact information for SMS? What’s your goal at each touch point? 

Fine-tune Your Automations Now for Smooth Black Friday Conversions Later

If you’re looking to drive customer growth and revenue during the holidays, lean on automations to do the heavy lifting. Using automation in the sales cycle enables you to deliver highly-personalized customer experiences at scale while removing the mundane burden of manually deploying communications. Automation drastically reduces the margin for human error and enables you to retrain your employees to focus on tasks that are likely to generate more revenue. 

Adding simple automations like “back in stock” notifications and price-drop alerts will save you and your team a ton of work while effortlessly driving purchases. Essential automations include savvy abandoned cart messages and SMS campaigns.

Remind Customers to Treat Themselves with Holiday Wishlists

Although the majority of holiday shoppers are making purchases for friends, families, or significant others, there is one other person they need to consider for their holiday purchases — themselves.

In the course of shopping for everyone on their list, customers are sure to come across items they’d like for themselves. Whether they choose to treat themselves for the holiday or save ideas for later, adding holiday wishlists is a great way to capture your customers’ wants in real time.

Holiday Wishlists in Action

Wishlists are easy to set up and open up an additional avenue of communication with customers and prospects. Besides making wish lists intuitive and easy to navigate online, you can also work with in-store associates to encourage customers to add to their lists. 

When customers visit your brick-and-mortar stores and a product they are looking for is unavailable, store staff can add that item to the customer’s wish list. After successful registration, you can send a confirmation email containing the items that were recently added to the list.

When customers place an item on a wish list, it allows you to communicate with them about products they’ve identified as ones they want. Creating an alert that informs customers when a wish list item has dropped in price – or informing them when a saved item is back in stock – encourages customers to complete purchases during the holidays and after they’re over.

Get Started Today

It’s never too early to start planning for the biggest shopping event of the year. With a bit of preparation, you can put a plan in place that will increase revenue and introduce your discounts and offers to a host of new customers.