Top 5 tips to smash your Black Friday sales targets

Black Friday is still the key time of year for ecommerce - the US import is a crucial period for UK & Ireland ecommerce stores. UK consumers spent £9.42 billion over the course of the Black Friday weekend in 2021, over 61% of that spend was online purchases.  

Smash your Black Friday sales targets with our 5 top tips. 

1. It's not just Black Friday weekend, it's all month
   

   With so many of the big brands spending huge amounts on digital ads across the Black Friday weekend, cost per click (CPC) is driven up during the bidding war. We have our guide to the best Black Friday Google ads campaigns but there is one easy win to avoid the sky-high CPCs. 

   Ecommerce stores need to make the most of the month by running flash sales during November on high-margin items and offering an early discount to existing customers (more on that later). Spreading your budget across multiple campaigns and channels earlier in the month will drive low-cost, high-intent traffic which you can remarket to later. 

2. Make sure your offer stands out from the noise
   

   Customers are flooded with ads and messaging letting them about the best offers and discounts available, similar to Christmas, it's a saturated time of year for advertising so your advertising must have a hook which draws a click. 

   There is the tried and tested high street sales tactic where your shop window says that the sale is 50% off, but the slightly smaller print says "up to", this can be leveraged by Google Display ads and Facebook ads in the same way by driving traffic to your online store but only discount a set amount of high margin items by 50%.  

   We also recommend repurposing your best-performing creative throughout the year, for example, if a specific Facebook ad creative and visual has performed well in the summer repurpose it with a Black Friday offer.  

3. Get your message out there  
   

   Although CPCs are higher than average at this time of year. There are still cost-effective channels, Google Display is still incredibly cheap for impressions as are Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) if your targeting is accurate. We recommend running a full funnel strategy which starts with top of the funnel (TOF) brand awareness campaigns to get as many eyeballs as possible on your campaign.

   And it's not just about digital ads, ecommerce stores should grow their email subscribers list all year round, so now is the time to make use of this channel to communicate to a warm audience. Creating a Black Friday email campaign - especially via platforms such as Klaviyo - will generate additional sales at a very low-cost point. Don't forget about your landing pages, create specific pages optimised for Black Friday, then reuse these pages year after year. Learn more in our blog 6 Powerful Black Friday SEO Tips.
   

4. Remarketing, remarketing, remarketing 
   

   We can't emphasise this enough - as an ecommerce marketer - all year round you've worked hard on your content, built warm audiences with paid-for traffic and created a loyal customer base, so make sure that you remarket all these opportunities. The big three channels we achieve the most success for our clients are: 

   • Google - remarketing ads are an excellent way to bring back users to your website, often overlooked is the importance of creating similar audiences, where Google uses behavioural characteristics find new potential customers who are similar ato people who have already purchased on your store. 
   • Meta - Facebook and Instagram retargeting ads are another paid channel to bring back users to your site to make that conversion. Similar to Google ads, you can create a “lookalike” audience to grow you’re a customer base with existing customers online habits.  
   • Klaviyo email automations – having spent money on PPC campaigns, it’s heart-breaking to see potential customers drop off at the checkout page when they have a basket full of products! We ensure that all our ecommerce clients are setup with abandoned cart email automations so there is another bite at the cherry to convert that sale. During Black Friday this can be the difference between hitting targets or just missing them.  
    
5. Mobile experience for ecommerce 
   As digital marketers, whilst we're working on our desktops it's easy to overlook our ecommerce store's mobile experience. This could be causing a huge impact on sales as 72% of retail site visits in the United Kingdom and was used to make 66% of online shopping orders.
   
   It's important to check your ecommerce store's mobile experience for any bugs or poor mobile experience, especially during a key sales period such as Black Friday. The checkout experience can also be a conversion rate killer if users are struggling to input their delivery and card details on mobile, you can learn more from our Top 10 ecommerce Website Success Factors blog.

Read our Black Friday series to learn channel-specific tactics.

Black Friday Email Tips: 8 Ways To Boost Sales

Increase Your Black Friday Ppc Sales With Our 6 Powerful Tips

6 Powerful Black Friday SEO Tips

If you need some help in the lead-up to Black Friday, get in touch with our expert digital marketing team by calling 028 9073 1190 or email us info@thewebbureau.com