Black Friday is the day to be making that cash money. Black Friday is the day after thanks giving were everyone wakes up at like 4 am and starts their Christmas shopping off with countless sales going on at mostly all the stores in the US. Black Friday is one of my favorite days of the year. I don’t give a shit about the sales going on, I care about making them sales that day.
So do online shoppers act the same way as offline shoppers on black Friday? Absolutely! I’m not sure about the waking up at 4 am part to make there orders on the internet, but the customers spending masses amount of money on Black Friday online is a fact.
Below are my top 3 tips for other e-commerce store webmasters. To help increase sales and leads.
Tip #1 - Discounts
I have always know that people love sales, but when I made my discount script for Developer Hut, Inc. I didn’t realize how much of an impact discounts make to profits. People get stuff on sale because it is cheaper and they only have a certain amount of time to choose if they want to purchase the item or not. In my personal option its the short time frame that make people want to buy something more then the discounted price. Since most sales are for a limited time, people think that they can only get that product for that price during that certain amount of time. Now since you are giving the user only a certain amount of time to make there decision, and add that to the fact that the product is a little bit cheaper, that makes them want to purchase the product more then they would if the sale wasn’t going on.
I’ve tested this. Put one of your products on sale for 2-3 days and advertise it. Then wait 2 or 3 weeks. Then put the same product on sale for 2 to 3 weeks and watch what your customers do. My customers would buy the product a lot the first few days, then with the traffic staying the same the discount sales go down and down. Since the users see that the item has been on sale for a while, they don’t feel the rush to get the item.
Discounts are a great way to get new buyers. If you have a product you sell for $29 and you sell an average of 5 a day, and each transaction you make $15 (you would make $75 a day) . Would it be better to sell that product for $23 and 10 sell that day (you would make $80 that day)? Sure that is only a $5 increase, BUT now you have a higher probability to have your customers buy other products on your website. So you can turn that $80 profit into $125 profit if only 3 of those 10 customers purchase another product that sells for 15$ profit.
Math: $80 initial purchases + ($15 profit x 3 products) = $125 profit
You would have normally made $75 that day. Thats a 60% increase in sales. Good job! Now just imagine this on one of the biggest shopping day of the year, if not the biggest (I’m too lazy to look this little useless fact up, forgive me)
Tip #2 - Step Up Your Marketing
With all of those potential sales don’t you think that pumping up your marketing during that week will help increase your sales? Well you are correct hehe. While most people will be relaxing on thanks giving night, I will be marketing my e-com sites. I am sitting here looking at a list I have to do on Thursday night that will take me about 5-6 hours to get done, the list is my normal marketing to-do list which I usually do throughout the week. However this time I will cramming that whole to-do list into 1 day, plus adding a few more techniques that will increase my sales.
My suggestion is to do everything you normally do to get your sales, this time step it up. Your hard work will pay off on Thursday 
Tip #3 - Mailing Lists
If you have an e-commerce website then you should be collecting emails. If you aren’t then I highly suggest you do it. You don’t have to use an costly program like aweber to capture your emails, just make a simple script and keep the emails in a database until you can use them.
Mailing lists are great because it keeps your customer up to date about your products, increases your sales, and help with your branding. I highly suggest writing up a nice little newsletter and sending it out on Thursday night. List all of your specials going on and also tell them why and how they can use them. Well, what I meant to say was, convince them that they need your product.
With these 3 tips you should increase your sales on Black Friday. If you discount your products, increase your marketing during the week, and send out them newsletter then you should be able to pull in some decent numbers that day. Good luck
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Great post as always Jon, in terms of SEO, campaigns should be planned a longtime in advance - Christmas sales uploaded in August, Valentines offers in December and so on. Most SEO’s are far to reactive and often get left behind.
What exactly do you mean in terms of SEO? Such as ranking for certain seasonal terms? If so then most definably. Terms like “mothers day flowers” will bring in thousands and thousands of dollars on that day. Only prob is its only for a certain time of year.
I have personally never targeted a seasonal seo term. Never had the need to, maybe I should look more into that haha.
I do a lot of work with hotels and I found this year especially I began targetting Christmas breaks in August and by the time every other SEO had got around to even thinking about it most of the hotels I was working with had cornered the market.
Great post as always Jon, in terms of SEO, campaigns should be planned a longtime in advance - Christmas sales uploaded in August, Valentines offers in December and so on
I used a evil black hat strategy this year for black friday. Well, it’s not black hat, but I somewhat “mentioned” my sites on a lot of top forums and websites that were revolving around Black Friday. This gave a big boost in traffic and about 100+ member sign ups in 2 days
-Mike
Awesome tips, thanks for that. Indeed I found out too, that discounts can have a very effective role in online marketing.
at least there’s no danger of being trampled online
Day position, of black Friday is good as it is just celebrated after thanks giving day and people all over America have huge shopping. Well both online and offline marketing are good and depends on many things. I agree that discount should materialize in increase in profits of shops. Three tips beneficial not only on Friday but also other time as well.
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