It’s OFFICIALLY that time of year – time for holiday sales!
Your customers are searching for the perfect gifts for their friends and family – and don’t forget that they’re looking for sales for their own selves too.
If you’re joining the Black Friday Fray, you only have a few days to get all of your ducks in a row and get ready for the holiday sales.
AND because it’s 2020, the competition for your digital marketing plan is higher this year than ever before. If you took our advice and started making your plan earlier – that’s awesome!
If you haven’t already, this week you should be focused on finishing up your holiday plan. It’s almost go-time so it’s time to check in with every piece of your plan and make sure your holiday sale is functioning perfectly.
QA Your Black Friday Plan Right Now!
If you’re creating things like landing pages, email automations, early bird sales, social media posts, and emails, you should be doing the quality assurance check for your whole structure this week.
The smallest logistical issue can cause your sale to be less effective. Here’s a quick list of things to double and triple check:
- Make sure that your add to cart buttons work on landing pages.
- Check every link in all of your emails, on your pages, and in your social posts.
- Make sure everything is scheduled for the correct days times.
- Test all of your coupon codes.
- Read all of your pages and campaigns over again and make sure all the information is correct and you’re not giving mixed messages.
- Test your automations to ensure they’re triggered correctly.
4 Holiday Sales You Still Have Time For
If you haven’t been working on your holiday sales, you still have a (very) little bit of time to set up the holiday season for your brand.
1 – Put a Banner on Your Website
Add any coupon codes or deals that you have should go on a banner on the top of your pages. A lot of WordPress and Shopify themes have this as a standard option, if yours doesn’t it’s VERY easy to find a free app that you can do this.
This is especially effective if you get organic traffic or you have a loyal audience that would check your website for sales around this time.
If you’re doing this, it’s worth making at least one social media post directing people to your website.
2 – Send Emails Later
Every brand and their brother are raging email holiday sales for Black Friday. Brands with mature email programs are probably sending 1-3 emails PER DAY Friday through Monday.
There are absolutely customers that will search through their emails searching for the best sales, so it’s worth sending an email or two over the weekend, but more often, emails like these days go unopened.
That being said, people are doing massive holiday shopping for the next two-three weeks. Very few people finish their sales on this first weekend, so it’s 100% worth offsetting or extending your sale for a week or more.
If you decide to send an email on Black Friday, consider sending a follow up on Monday along with a resend on Wednesday and/or the following Friday.
3 – Other December 2020 Holiday Sales
I’ll repeat this here – very few people finish their sales on this first weekend. If you’re skipping this big sales weekend, it’s worth setting up a holiday sale in December.
Keep in mind that shipping times are a bit longer this year, and so our suggestion is to make sure to let people know when the last day that they can purchase to receive their products before Christmas Day.
Running something like a last chance shipping sale in the first 10-12 days of the month, or a sale on gift certificates after about the 14th can pull in a good chunk of change for your brand.
4 – Consider a “Reverse Sale”
I’m including this to get you thinking creatively about your sale. Something we see a lot from sustainable brands is that your margins don’t really let you compete when it comes to having the deepest discounts on your products compared with your competitors.
Consider raising your prices and rather than running a sale, run a “last chance to get it at this price” special.
For this, you can send an email and make a social post saying that your products are going to increase on a specific date – 1 week in the future is usually enough time.
Then send another reminder 24hours ahead of the time that you’re increasing your price!
These types of “reverse sales” do really well, don’t cut into your margins, and they give you a higher price point for your products moving forward.
What is your holiday sale plan this year? Are you trying something new? Drop it in the comments!
