Black Friday is just 3 weeks away (November 24 😉 ).
Black Friday is the most important day in e-commerce in terms of visits and conversions. With inflation so high these days, consumers are particularly price-conscious and on the lookout for the best deals.
Some e-tailers (including you, perhaps) choose not to take part in this event (usually for reasons of marketing positioning). For the others, we take a look at the important stages of preparation and the best practices to follow.
Let's start with a look at the Black Friday calendar
Black Friday takes place on the last Friday of November, this year on the 24th. It is followed the following Monday by Cyber Monday, which focuses on tech and digital and brings this intense period to a close.
Most e-retailers will start offering right at the start of Black Friday week (Monday 20th), or even during the week before for the most relentless (cuckoo Amazon).
What does this mean?
1️⃣ It's the same dates for everyone, so agencies and consultants are swamped. Think ahead and avoid the last minute to prepare serenely because processing times are higher than normal for everyone in this period;
2️⃣ Most of your competitors will be taking part and offering (often quite aggressive) promotions. Promotions are all very well, but remember to stand out from the crowd and diversify your offers, rather than just offering low prices (free shipping, BOGO, etc... I'll focus on this point in a minute);
3️⃣ The price of clicks in pure acquisition is skyrocketing in this period (because everyone's outbidding everyone else at the same time), so I'll give you a few tips below, but once again, it's best to plan ahead.
4️⃣ The amount of ads and emails to which customers are exposed during this period is stratospheric (during Black Friday week, on average, a consumer receives 3x as many marketing emails and sees 2x as many ads as in normal times), so stand out, get out your best creatives because overexposure also means higher marketing fatigue.
5️⃣ Website traffic is significantly higher than normal (3x higher on average than on a normal October day), so make sure your server is ready and your site is optimized for performance.
A few ideas for diversification
Here are some ideas of what always works well during Black Friday:
🏷️ Classic "slash price" discounts, of course (just because they're classic doesn't mean you should ignore them).
📦 Offer shipping costs (one of the main disincentives to purchase)
🎁 A "Buy One Get One" (BOGO) system, i.e. offering one product for the purchase of another.
💳 Payment in installments (free of charge ideally to maximize the conversion rate given that customers generally place large orders during Black Friday).
⏱️ Very limited-time offers
Note that offers generally crescendo to a maximum on Black Friday.
Don't hesitate to ask us for ideas, you can simply reply to this email, it's my address 😉
How to optimize budgets and campaigns during Black Friday
As far as the budget is concerned, in principle we're going to have to increase it to take advantage of this opportunity for a massive increase in traffic. However, you shouldn't suddenly increase your budget (AIs don't like this and will go back into learning mode if you do - something you want to avoid at all costs in this kind of situation). I therefore advise you to define clear (and realistic) traffic objectives for the period, and adjust budgets accordingly, progressively (in increments of 15 to 20% at a time), until you reach your target budget for D-Day.
Then, as I told you above, during the week of Black Friday, the cost of clicks soars in acquisition during this period. But we can anticipate to manage this intelligently 🤓
On Meta Ads
During the Black Friday period, CPMs (costs per thousand ad displays) are prohibitively expensive. As a result, a technique that works well is to allocate the budget differently, with a higher allocation to remarketing versus acquisition. Generally the right Meta account structure is; we usually spend 75% on acquisition and 50% on remarketing, over this period we'll be targeting more 50% - 50%.
To remarket, you need an audience that has already been marketed to. If you want to increase your remarketing share AND your total traffic volume is higher, you need a massively larger remarketing audience. Which means filling those remarketing audiences now (where the cost is lower).
This happens as follows:
🛍️ We specifically push products that will be on special offer within our traditional acquisition campaigns. Objective: Remarket "no purchase product views" during the BF period.
📹 We set up "video views" campaigns for those who have videos highlighting products that will be on special offer. Objective: Remarket "video views without purchase" during the BF period.
📩 We set up a lead generation campaign to create a special Black Friday waiting list Objective: Remarket "no-purchase leads" during the BF period + Mail campaign.
These campaigns should be launched as soon as possible. They play an important role in your BF's performance.
On Google Ads
We're following an identical strategy, namely to increase the share of remarketing during the Black Friday period, as the price of CPCs is also rising on Google. So here too, we want to fill these audiences right away.
This happens as follows:
🛍️ We specifically push products that will be on special offer within our traditional acquisition campaigns. Objective: Remarket "no purchase product views" during the BF period.
📩 We set up a lead generation campaign to create a special Black Friday waiting list Objective: Remarket "no-purchase leads" during the BF period + Mail campaign.
Optimize your creatives
The graphic charter of your visuals must stand out from your classic campaigns. In the pre-Black Friday period, dark, saturated colors are used most of the time (black, red, gold).
Cyber Monday visuals also need to stand out, this time generally in lighter colors (light blue, white, gray) to make the transition to the Christmas period.
I'm sure some (probably most) of you have a well-established graphic charter, but it's okay to bend the rule a little this time of year.
Plan more different creatives than normal (remember that budgets are higher so we want to test many creatives) and as usual differentiate your formats (I'm preparing a newsletter on this) to avoid the platforms generating them automatically (we see too many customers who give us videos in landscape format only or just image visuals, which are then automatically converted by Google and Facebook into 9:16 portrait video for ads in Story, YouTube Shorts etc., and most of the time the automatic conversion is ugly).
Optimize shopping flow
Make sure that all references are published and associated with your campaigns. Google Ads Performance Max or Shopping Classique to avoid realizing halfway through that you're not broadcasting on strategic refs.
Promote your promotions appropriately by using the Google feed labels 'Promotional Price' and 'Base Price' so that Google Shopping displays your crossed-out price and not just the discounted price without the base price.
Clean up your product titles + descriptions
Make sure you have good stock-flow synchronization to avoid bidding on orders you'll have to pay off.
