Looking for the best Black Friday marketing strategies for 2023? You’ve come to the right place.
Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are the most important holidays in November. Hundreds of millions of Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, and the day following it marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
Businesses across the US work hard to capture an even higher market share during Thanksgiving week. If you’re one of those on the lookout for just the right marketing strategies to implement, stick with us: we’ve got something for you!
Your Black Friday marketing strategy for 2022 should rely heavily on the buying behavior of Americans. Last year, there was a 1.3% drop in the total spending of Americans on Black Friday. The reason was that many Americans actually started their Black Friday shopping much earlier.
During the last Black Friday, toys, video games, and electronics were the top-selling categories. One crucial and perhaps surprising thing to mention here is that discounts offered by brands were lower compared to Black Friday in 2020.
On average, the discounts offered on electronics were 12% (vs. 27% the previous year), apparel at 18% (vs. 20% the previous year), and appliances and sporting goods at 8% (vs. 20% the previous year).
Last year’s Black Friday sales give a clear overview of how big brands and small to medium-scale businesses should formulate their Black Friday promotions strategy.
To get you started with a profitable holiday shopping season, we’ve identified the top Black Friday marketing strategies to follow in order to capture a greater market share.
Without further ado, let's take a look!
Table of Contents
Top Black Friday Marketing Strategies for 2023
Let’s discuss the marketing strategies one by one.
1. Introduce Buy Now Pay Later
At the top of the list of novel Black Friday marketing strategies is a popular one for buyers.
Buy now pay later, also known as BNPL, is a convenience marketing strategy that can bring fortunes to a business. Since it’s coupled with a financial risk, though, it should be handled with care. Go for it only if you have a dedicated marketing team in-house along with some finance experts.
On Cyber Monday last year, the use of BNPL services saw a hike of 21% in revenue compared to the previous year.
It’s popular because buy now, pay later allows people to enjoy the festivities even if they don't have the financial strength at that moment.
You can partner with FinTech companies like Afterpay to implement the buy now pay later option.
2. Go Omni-channel
With more and more Americans working from home, smartphones are losing their potential as a prime shopping channel. Last Cyber Monday, the share of mobile phones in online shopping was only at about 40%.
These insights indicate that you, as a business, should focus on an Omni-channel marketing strategy for the coming Black Friday. When it comes to reaching your customers, serving them where they are is the name of the game!
How can you make that happen?
Start by exploring your current channels of sales. Assuming that you already have an online store, a brick-and-mortar store, a mobile app, and a seller account at online marketplaces like Amazon, the next step is to evaluate each channel’s strength for your business.
For example, if your brick-and-mortar store is bringing in more sales as compared to your mobile app and website, you need to work more on your online shopping channels to create a better omnichannel Black Friday marketing strategy.
Now let’s discuss how to optimize your website and mobile app for the coming holiday shopping season, as one of our useful marketing strategies.
3. Get Your Website and Mobile App Ready for Black Friday
Black Friday is likely to bring in a lot of traffic to both your mobile app and online store. Your job as a holiday marketer is to funnel that traffic to sales.
Not sure how to optimize your landing page?
Here are some tips:
- Upgrade your hosting subscription to handle large amounts of traffic
- Change the banner for your website and mobile app to incorporate Black Friday deals
- Use pop-ups on your website and mobile app
- Send notifications to mobile app users
- Offer more payment options upon checkout
- Enable delivery to remote areas, if possible
This is one of those marketing strategies that focus on the best-case scenario and helps you effectively manage a sudden boost in traffic and sales.
4. Start Early
One of the most important Black Friday marketing strategies on this list is starting early.
We’ve seen that the trend for the last two years is that more and more holiday shoppers start their Black Friday shopping at the beginning of November. Hence, your promotional offers shouldn’t just be waiting for the Black Friday weekend to come.
Be ready with your discount offers and your communication strategy by the end of October. Starting early will give you an edge over your competitors since not all brands do this, which gives you more room in your target customers’ minds.
5. Don’t Forget Paid Advertisements
Even if your website has a lot of organic visitors and your mobile app has tons of active users, do not underestimate the power of paid advertisement during the Black Friday sale.
Paid advertisements don’t only get you new customers. With the evolution of remarketing, they’ll help you convert your website visitors into customers. That’s why we’ve included it in our list of Black Friday marketing strategies.
Let’s say, for example, that people visit your website and then leave after exploring a few products. In that case, you can use remarketing to show your ads (for similar products) to that particular customer group only.
That’s why you start seeing ads for the products you’ve recently looked at on Amazon or other online stores.
The most popular and useful paid advertising options are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. If you don’t consider yourself to be a tech-savvy marketer, have a look at our recently published blog on performance marketing for instructions on how to get started.
Include paid advertising in your list of Black Friday marketing strategies this year and reap its benefits.
6. Build Your Customers’ Email List
No list of Black Friday marketing strategies is complete without email marketing and for that, you need an email list.
An email marketing strategy is effective not only in generating sales but also in feeding the brand name into the minds of your potential customers. However, doing email marketing right isn't always as simple as it seems. You need to build your email list and create an email marketing campaign specifically for your Black Friday sale.
The process of building an email list of potential customers has to start at least one month before the Black Friday sale.
Put a banner or a pop-up for the Black Friday sale on your website and mobile app and ask your website visitors to subscribe to your exclusive Black Friday deals.
As soon as they do so, you’ll have their email which you can then use to communicate your Black Friday promotion offers to them. Don't forget to provide them with exclusive deals. Since they’ve already shown interest in your brand and products, it’s a smart move to make them feel extra cared for!
7. Write Catchy Headlines for Your Email Marketing Strategy
The next on our list of Black Friday marketing strategies is writing catchy subject lines for emails.
As many of your competitors will also be sending promotional emails to the same customer group, it’s important for you to stand out from the rest.
Your email subject line is the first point of contact for the customers and it decides whether they open your email or just ignore it. Considering that you only have about 40 characters to impress the reader, crafting awesome headlines that they’ll open is a tricky task.
Following are some tips for writing catchy headlines for your Black Friday email marketing strategy:
- Use emoji in the subject line
- Talk in the language of your target demographic
- Create a sense of urgency in the subject line
- Clearly indicate the promotional offer
Still struggling with the headlines? Here are a few email headline examples for inspiration:
- Don’t break the bank this Black Friday
- Free in-store goodies for the first 100 shoppers
- Can you keep a secret, [customer’s first name]? VIP access to Black Friday sales!
- Tick Tok… Your Cart is going out of stock…
- Psst… Black Friday is tomorrow, use these secret discount codes!
- Exclusive deals for loyal customers only
- Struggling with the bank balance? Shop with BNPL
- Get a flat $100 off. Only 4 hours left!
- *Don't Open This Email*
- Can you afford these?
You get the gist. Now it's up to you to come up with a winning email headline for your Black Friday marketing strategy.
8. Partner with Influencers
In this hyper-social world, influencer marketing is among the best Black Friday marketing strategies for 2023.
Influencers tend to have a strong connection with their audiences and can help brands get new customers with a lower cost of acquisition.
Influencer marketing strategies aren't just for big brands. With acknowledgments from nano and micro-influencers, even small to mid-scale businesses can benefit from collaborating with influencers to grow their audiences for their marketing communication.
For your own Black Friday marketing strategies, creating an influencer marketing strategy will expose your business to a large audience.
9. Encourage User-Generated Content and Hashtags for Social Media Marketing Strategies
Image via Instagram
If you’re running low on content ideas for your social media marketing strategy, user-generated content (UGC) is the best way forward.
You can encourage your buyers to tag your brand’s social handle in their posts (in which they’re using your product or service) in exchange for special discounts on future purchases.
Another way of encouraging user-generated content is to host contests. Ask people on social media platforms to post pictures related to Thanksgiving using a particular hashtag and tagging your brand’s social profile, for example. Announce the winner after the contest period ends and reward them with a prize (maybe your new product for which you want to create hype).
Such social activities will increase your brand’s presence, customer awareness, social media followers, website visitors, and of course, your sales figures!
Overall, it is one of the best and most cost-effective Black Friday marketing strategies that you should definitely use.
FAQs
Q1. What are the top Black Friday marketing strategies for 2023?
A. Taking our cue from previous Black Friday trends, here are the top 9 Black Friday marketing strategies that will surely drive more sales your way:
- Introduce Buy Now Pay Later
- Go Omni-channel
- Get your website and mobile app ready for Black Friday
- Start offering discounts early in November
- Utilize paid advertisement
- Build your customer email list
- Write catchy headlines for email marketing
- Partner with influencers
- Encourage user-generated content
Q2. When is Black Friday in 2023?
A. In 2023, Black Friday is on the 24th of November.
Q3. What Are the Top Email Subject Lines for Black Friday in 2023?
A. Craft or repurpose the following awesome Black Friday marketing ideas for email headlines for your brand strategy:
- Don’t break the bank this Black Friday
- Free in-store goodies for the first 100 shoppers
- Can you keep a secret, [customer’s first name]? VIP access to Black Friday sales!
- Tick..Tok… Your Cart is going out of stock…
- Psst… Black Friday is tomorrow, use these secret discount codes!
- Exclusive deals for loyal customers only
- Struggling with the bank balance? Shop with BNPL.
- Get flat $100 off. Only 4 hours left.
- *Don't Open This Email*
- Can you afford these?
Q4. Is Black Friday the biggest sale of the year in the USA?
A. Yes, Black Friday is considered to be the biggest sale all year. So, use the right marketing strategies and boost your holiday sales drastically.
Q5. What does Black Friday mean?
A. In the term Black Friday, black means “marked by misfortune or disaster.”
The Friday after Thanksgiving was first referred to as Black Friday by factory managers in the 1950s when workers would call in sick in order to extend their holiday weekend.
10 years later, in the 1960s, the term Black Friday was used again, this time by traffic cops in Philadelphia. That’s because they were required to work 12-hour shifts in terrible traffic on the day after Thanksgiving.
Later in the 1980s when the terms in the black and in the red were coined in the business world, we started calling the busiest shopping day of the year – the day after Thanksgiving – Black Friday.
Time to Get Started!
All 9 Black Friday marketing strategies we’ve discussed so far in this article will help you get the most out of the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving.
If you’ve already decided which Black Friday marketing strategies you’re going to implement for your Black Friday marketing campaigns, help our community by sharing your thoughts in the comment box.
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