The term „Black Friday” was first used by the Philadelphia Police Department to describe the traffic jams that occur on the Friday following Thanksgiving Day (the fourth Thursday of November). This day marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season and is declared the busiest shopping day in the United States, featuring the most significant discounts.
In Romania, the phrase „Black Friday” was introduced in 2011 by the retailer eMag through the campaign „Black Friday eMAG.” Observing the popularity of the concept and the difficulty in delivering all orders on time, they advanced the campaign to allow couriers to deliver all orders by the mini-holiday on November 30th – December 1st.
Why start preparations early?
„Rushing spoils the work”! As cliché as it may sound, it’s true. Since you need a well-structured plan for a successful Black Friday campaign, it requires a considerable amount of preparation time. The more time you have to refine the plan, the closer it will come to perfection.
Planning, strategy, and recommendations
This is where the hard work begins, but don’t be scared. You have time for each step until Black Friday 2020, right?
The plan should start with organizing and setting sales and goals. Generate a report of the products and choose the discount strategy. These can vary by category, by product, or you can even put the same percentage discount on all products. Then, schedule the campaign start date and the sale/reduced price. Any e-commerce platform allows you to schedule a campaign in advance, so it starts automatically at a future date, either through built-in functions or by installing a plugin like „Woocommerce Sale Discount Scheduler.”
If you have a small business, it’s preferable for the discount strategy to be as straightforward as possible to avoid headaches with campaign management.
Analyze the performance of previous Black Friday campaigns to optimize this year’s ads better. See which message worked best or had a higher click-through rate. How did the presence of benefits/details about the products influence the ad quality? By what percentage did you increase the budget compared to the previous year?
Depending on the sales goals you’ve set, check the stock of the products. At the end of the campaign, you’ll want all customers to be satisfied with the product they ordered from you. Failing to deliver a product will undoubtedly bring negative reviews that will impact future sales.
Website Optimization Helps Achieve Goals and Campaign Performance
Stefan Rusu – SEO Specialist
Check the website in detail and fix all optimization issues on any device. During the sales period, traffic will increase, so you’ll need the server to handle as many users as possible, with loading speed being excellent. Make sure that the entire user purchasing process, from the first click to completing payment, is simple and provides a pleasant experience.
Even create a backup plan in case something doesn’t work correctly. What happens if your server crashes? What if you miscounted the stock or the discount on one of the products? What if the courier company is too busy to deliver all packages? Have a backup plan for any problem you think you might encounter.
Announce the Black Friday 2020 campaign early
Okay, not with 2-3 months in advance, but it’s good for potential customers to learn about the discount campaign at least two or three weeks before it starts. You can achieve this through newsletter campaigns to your existing customer base, banners on the website, various articles or posts on social media and the website’s blog, or even listing your store on deal aggregator websites.
Black Friday Strategy in Social Media
To detail the promotion on Social Media, I asked colleagues from the Lead Gen department – Social Media Specialists, to provide details on various strategies and tips and tricks that have worked in Black Friday campaigns they’ve managed so far.
What Will Black Friday Look Like During the Pandemic?
Madalina Badea – Social Media Specialist
Black Friday has undergone quite a few changes in recent years, especially regarding people’s tendency to buy more online. This year, due to the pandemic, I believe Black Friday 2020 could go in two directions, which I’ll briefly outline below. In recent months, businesses have tested and learned how to adapt to people’s needs, which have been a bit different than usual.
We say that people have changed their purchasing behavior by being more cautious and attentive to what they buy, and also because they’ve prioritized their desires.
This behavior may continue on Black Friday, and consumers may choose to invest in more practical products that they truly need. There might even be an increase in purchases for home-related items: food, cleaning products, consumables, etc.
Another direction Black Friday might take is predominantly online purchases. Even customers who were used to „wandering” the stores during the sales period may opt for online shopping more. Why? There are two reasons for this idea: some physical stores may be closed due to restrictions, or people feel safer ordering from home, without sharing aisles with other people.
This is precisely why brands need to consider that Black Friday 2020 is a special one that requires well-built and planned strategies.
A good tip for preparing super offer campaigns would be to adapt the promotions and discounts significantly according to customer preferences.
Claudia Dragulin – Social Media Specialist
Black Friday is undoubtedly the most anticipated period of the year for both shoppers and brands, as they see this event as an extraordinary opportunity to increase sales, awareness, and build a significant base of users who visit their website and consequently become customers.
Analyze Last Year’s Results
Therefore, a successful Black Friday strategy must be carefully thought out and implemented in advance. This involves analyzing last year’s results (channels used, budgets invested, cost/result, ROI, ROAS value of purchases), any issues encountered, and improving the promotion strategy. This can also translate into much more coherent communication on Social Media, with dedicated teasing posts, estimating the desired outcomes, and allocating an optimally realistic budget for each channel to realistically support your expectations (based on previous results), in a context where this period is extremely competitive in terms of promotion.
Campanii de teasing cu 1-2 săptămâni înainte de Black Friday 2020
Perioada preliminară (1-2 săptămâni înainte de Black Friday) este foarte importantă. Atunci trebuie să începi campaniile de teasing. Userii încep să facă research cu mult timp înainte pentru a vedea ofertele existente, pentru a-și face o listă cu produsele pe care urmează să le achiziționeze.
Tocmai de aceea este important să te afișezi în procesul de research astfel încât oferta ta să se transforme într-o opțiune de luat în considerare. Iar notificări pe site prin care le ceri userilor să își creeze un wishlist sau să își facă un cont, pot fi foarte utile în campaniile de remarketing. Bineînțeles, aceste acțiuni trebuie expuse ca fiind în beneficiul lor, pentru simplificarea procesului de comandă.
Teaser Campaigns 1-2 Weeks Before Black Friday 2020
The preliminary period (1-2 weeks before Black Friday) is crucial. This is when you should start teaser campaigns. Users begin researching well in advance to see the available offers and make a list of the products they plan to purchase.
That’s why it’s important to appear in the research process so that your offer becomes a consideration. Notifications on your site asking users to create a wishlist or an account can be very useful for remarketing campaigns. Of course, these actions should be presented as beneficial to them, simplifying the ordering process.
Traffic Generation Campaigns
Beyond website appearances during the research process, it’s recommended to run traffic campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram to generate a large number of users (to populate your remarketing lists) that you can retarget with dedicated campaigns on Black Friday.
In both teaser campaigns and on your website, use dedicated banners announcing significant discounts on key products and encourage users to return on Black Friday to enjoy the biggest discounts of the year.
Apart from organic posts, use dedicated Stories on both Facebook and Instagram, include countdowns, and don’t forget to use dedicated hashtags in all teaser posts.
Black Friday Campaign Landing Page
Special attention must be given to the landing page used for Black Friday. It should be optimized for both desktop and mobile, easy to navigate and understand, and include dedicated banners. You can even implement Black Friday-specific overlays on product images, and the entire purchase process should be streamlined and simplified.
Creating and Optimizing Black Friday Campaigns
The success of campaigns depends not only on strategy but also on the visuals used. Include suggestive images and texts, a suitable Call To Action, and adapt them to the latest Facebook requirements (1080×1080 px for Facebook and Instagram feed, and 1080 x 1920 px for Stories).
Campaign implementation should be done in advance to allow for necessary checks on targeting, placements, texts, and products used. Automatic rules for starting/stopping, budget adjustments based on results, set notifications, and manual bidding give you much more control over delivery and cost optimization.
Of course, conversion campaigns and dynamic feed campaigns are the most recommended during this period. However, ideally, you shouldn’t run campaigns optimized only for purchases or adding to cart. Make sure you continue to generate site traffic by targeting both new users and those who have visited your site before, through traffic campaigns, which can generate much better results than they do during the rest of the year.
Returning to dynamic campaigns, use Up-sell and Cross-sell targeting. Users who have already interacted with your brand, browsed, and made purchases on the site are much more likely to convert. Similarly, you can use remarketing lists based on certain periods (1,3,7, 30, 60, 90, 180 days), based on the level of interaction with the site (top 10%, top 25% site traffic), or based on certain actions they have taken: viewed but didn’t add to cart, added to cart but didn’t purchase, purchased in the last x days, but excluding recent buyers.
Don’t forget that within dynamic campaigns, you have the option to use Black Friday-specific stickers, which can be overlaid on product images in the feed. This way, the visual impact will be much greater and more suggestive.
Test, Test, and Test Again!
As a final piece of advice, I recommend testing a variety of ads, from single banner ads to carousel ads, video (created using the Facebook Creation Kit), Canvas, or Collection ads. Use both category landing pages and landing pages with specific products (here you can include products that have had high demand throughout the year), monitor and analyze the results, and intervene when allocated budgets aren’t being spent. After all, every Black Friday is a learning experience for the next year.
Daniel Mereuță – Social Media Specialist
In addition to the promotion strategy and Black Friday discounts, the materials used play an essential role. They will determine whether users stop scrolling and pay attention to your ad. And during this period, the battle for display space is intense. For example, in 2019, out of 5 feed posts, 2 were ads. With such competition, banner blindness occurs. Without attractive visuals, your ad may go unnoticed.
How do you do that? Use colors to highlight your products. But don’t forget about harmony between them and the brand colors. Other important elements to include are the logo, a strong Call To Action button, and relevant text, e.g., maximum discount.
And if you have a collaboration with an influencer, their presence in banners will certainly help boost sales. Very important, the influencer must be relevant to your niche.
Banner Formats:
- For Facebook and Instagram Feed, use banners with dimensions of 10801080 pixels
- For Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Stories, use banners with dimensions of 10801920 pixels
- Videos can be used especially in teaser campaigns. For Social Media, it’s recommended they last approximately 15 seconds and be adapted to the same dimensions as the banners. And the brand and flagship products you want to highlight should appear in the first 5-8 seconds.
And good news: Now banners are no longer restricted by the maximum 20% text rule in the image. More space to communicate Black Friday offers!
Black Friday Strategy on Google
We’ve now reached Google in its various forms (Search Ads, Display, YouTube), and I’ve consulted with my colleagues from the e-Commerce department – Google Ads Specialists, to provide some ideas for promotion campaigns for Black Friday and beyond.
Adapt Your Bidding Methods
Alexandru Curtașu – Google Ads Specialist
It’s no secret that during the period before and during Black Friday, user behavior is entirely different from usual. Before Black Friday, most people conduct research, study offers, and decide which stores to check when the big discounts begin. You need to ensure that even if you have campaigns using smart bidding methods focused on sales, they will have „more freedom” in the pre-Black Friday period to deliver a larger number of users to your site. These users will be very valuable to you and can be retargeted with your best offers later.
Once the clock strikes 12 and the discounts begin, you must ensure that you have campaigns ready to deliver as many impressions as possible and cover search volume as efficiently as possible. In other words, your regular campaigns running on Smart Bidding won’t be prepared for such a high flow and dynamics in both searches and auctions, and most likely won’t adapt fast enough to deliver ads at maximum capacity.
We recommend that a few days before Black Friday, gradually increase your budgets, and once the promotion begins, expand your target user range. Keep in mind that conversions in the Google Ads platform aren’t attributed in real-time, and Google’s algorithms will likely be a bit „alarmed” when they start spending an unusually large budget in a single day without being able to see in real-time what the return is, and your ads won’t target all potential users.
RLSA (Remarketing List for Search Ads)
During Black Friday, 80% of orders are placed by recurring users for most websites. Taking this into account, we recommend starting an RLSA (Remarketing List for Search Ads) campaign during Black Friday to target users who know you, even for more general keywords than you usually do. This way, you’ll be sure that you’re always there for people who already know you and present the highest potential to buy from you.
Use Promotion Extensions
In Google Ads search campaigns, you can use the promotion extension to highlight discounts, both the percentage of the discount offered and the validity period of the discount. Also, you can replace sitelink extensions with pages of specific products you want to boost sales for.
Titles of ads should contain the term „Black Friday”
Don’t forget to adapt the titles and descriptions of your ads to include the offered discounts and the term „Black Friday.” Invest time in creating quality copy; it can influence your click-through rate and conversion rate more than you might think. Write the ads a few days before so you have time to edit them in case they are disapproved.
If you use Ad Customizers in your ads, they will be modified in real-time without the need for manual intervention. For example, you can use a Countdown Customizer to highlight the time remaining until the offer expires or an Inventory Customizer that will show the number of products left in stock.
Don’t forget to use labels to differentiate last year’s Black Friday ads from this year’s in your Google Ads account so you don’t accidentally activate last year’s campaigns. To not miss the start of the Black Friday period, you can use automated rules to activate and deactivate campaigns in your account.
Preparing a Shopping Ads Campaign
Matei Stoinea – Google Ads Specialist
Implementing a Shopping Ads campaign for e-commerce websites has become a necessity in the past year, so during Black Friday, it’s recommended to update the product feed with the new prices and promotions specific to the period, along with checking the campaign’s functionality under normal parameters.
For many online stores, the Smart Shopping campaign (Shopping Ads) is the most profitable campaign of all. This is due to the ability to interact with the ads and illustrate the data that the user has the highest focus on (product image, price, and product seller). Another advantage of such a campaign is the lower cost-per-click compared to a Search campaign, allowing us to obtain cheaper traffic during a quite busy period.
After Black Friday
You’ve successfully navigated Black Friday and are satisfied with the results? Don’t forget that the days immediately following are just as suitable for discounts. The next three days are known as Black Week and Cyber Monday.
This period is just as eagerly awaited by potential buyers. You can maintain the same discount campaign or create a new discount strategy so that those who didn’t manage to reach your site for various reasons can still enjoy their favorite products.
Has the discount campaign ended?
Perhaps it has ended, but your work isn’t over!
Check the status of all orders. There’s a chance that some orders may not have been approved due to various errors, or perhaps they weren’t picked up by couriers. Make sure that all orders are delivered because satisfied customers will only bring benefits to your business.
Analyze all campaign data to understand what you can improve in the future, what strengths and weaknesses you have. You can also take a look at the strategies used by competitors; they will surely offer you new promotional ideas for the next campaign.
Last but not least, remember that you have new users who have visited your site and made purchases. Keep them engaged and close. You can even send them a thank-you newsletter and ask for feedback on their purchasing process or the benefits of the products they bought.