How to do Black Friday the right way

Unsure what your take on it all should be? Aftab Saleem (Chief Trading Officer) and Mat Williams (Head of Paid Media) talk about doing it your way and getting the basics right.

AFTAB: “I’ve traded and promoted Black Friday loads of different ways over my 15 years.?What I find the most interesting is that you don’t need tons and tons of offers and promotions.?You need to build up excitement by doing something different.

Yes, you need to offer a saving. Yes, you need to offer free delivery. Yes, you need to have an easy checkout journey. Yes, you need to offer a clear returns and refund policy. Yes, you should push discount lines as well as full price new lines. But do it in a way that’s in line with your brand and excites your current customers and intrigues your prospects.”

MAT: “Patagonia shut down their website for Black Friday a few years back. I think that was the catalyst for a lot of businesses to explore similar Anti-Black Friday campaigns – trying to find their angle. Obviously?Anti-Black Friday isn’t right for everyone, but it’s crucial to find your own take. At Cotswold Outdoor we combined Black Friday with a tree-planting initiative with the National Trust. At Ruroc we made?this film?where we framed our discounts around an underground hack or stock crash which was kind-of subversive and perfect for our audience. It worked a treat. It’s about what fits.”

AFTAB: ?But before you get carried away with exciting your customers, remember to do the basics right - like remembering what’s at the top of your site. The first screen people see on mobile, that’s key. Can they get straight to the offers? Have you got clearly signposted, simple payment methods. Are your promo codes prominent throughout the sites, especially on PDPs? And do things like countdown clocks. They’re simple, but they work.”

MAT: “Paid Media is the same. There are basics you’ve just got to do, like starting to advertise and prospect across social channels in October. CPMs get increasingly expensive in November. If you start advertising early by teasing a promotion, you can also build remarketing pools and target those people again through remarketing ads. If you want to do this, get your Paid Media team aligned with your CRM and data teams, like now.”

AFTAB: “And don’t forget to test! Test and schedule ads ahead of go live times to avoid major stresses on the day. You want to make sure everything you can do in advance is done, you’ve planned everything you can down to a tee and it’s all running like clockwork. Obviously, something else will go wrong! But at least you’ll have done all you can to set yourself up for success.”

Speak to Mat and Aftab about how to get the most from Black Friday – or any of the Growth Foundation’s experts about how to grow the right way across all your foundations, all year round. [email protected]

www.thegrowth.foundation

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