How to make Black Friday last 6 months

Black Friday is such a big noise in the retail world that it can leave people deaf to the opportunities that come right after it. These come under two headings. On one hand Black Friday kicks off a season of holidays that also includes Christmas and the January Sales, as well as trailing Thanksgiving in the USA. Consumers are thinking about these - but retailers often allow themselves to focus exclusively on Black Friday and don’t give them the love they deserve.

On the other hand, Black Friday gives you customers. Customers who are positively eager to spend, and who feel that they’re getting a bargain. At times like that, they’re more willing to share information with you, so it’s a perfect time to harvest data that can go toward the construction of more effective marketing down the line. Put those things together and you have a couple of ways to make Black Friday last six months or more, and at least two good reasons!

Black Friday is all about the buildup. Companies gear up, build killer email campaigns, landing pages, get all over social, and the Black Friday is upon us - and then it’s over, and we put the decorations back in the box til next year. But here’s a question for the sales pros out there: How many sales do you close on the first touch? The first call, first email, first meeting? Even when your marketing guys are killing it and handing you armfuls of qualified, warm leads, it still takes multiple touches, a gradual process of building trust and rapport. So why should it be any different with Black Friday?

Make Black Friday a part of the plan

It makes way more sense to treat Black Friday as a part of a year-long, coherent plan that’s built around how customers behave. Now, I’m sure you have your own customer personas, but I think that we can hugely overgeneralise in the name of covering all the bases, and talk about three general types of customer. We can call them Price-rights, Buy-rights and Live-rights.

Price-rights are looking for a bargain. Cut 20% off and they’ll come to you. Buy-rights are looking for a tool. They’ll pay for quality and utility, shopping around to make the best investment but knowing that you get what you pay for. That’s the same mentality whether they’re shopping for a chainsaw or a cashmere coat. Live-rights are about brand identity, lifestyle and loyalty. They’ll buy from you if you can make them love you.

So far, that’s about the most clumsy segmentation you’ve probably ever seen. But I’m not trying to get great segmentation that puts just the right people on just the right list: that’s your job. I’m trying to show how so many people are missing out by not joining the dots, treating big events like Black Friday like they’re isolated occurrences where all the normal rules are suspended. Then you sell more to the Price-Rights, a few Buy-rights bide their time to get money off purchases they were planning to make anyway… and you make no long-term gains from all your efforts.

Almost 85% of retailers will send their customers an email in the run-up to Black Friday. That’s a lot of ‘x% off’ subject lines. If that’s all you’re doing, you’re likely to get snowed under - and suffer in a price competition with organizations that can afford massive loss leaders, like Amazon.

In action: How to build the campaign

Even with only a couple of days to go until Black Friday, there are still things you can do to build anticipation. Start by changing banners and signs on your website to encourage visitors to opt in to your Black Friday email alerts. In return, offer real time alerts when products they’re interested in or limited-number stock items are discounted, and direct them to a dedicated landing page with a webform that build a Black Friday list in your autoresponder; consider segmenting it by interest, letting new signups choose what they want to be alerted about.

Now you can start nurturing these leads right away; offer Black Friday specific onboarding, early-bird discounts, real-time alerts throughout the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period and even subscriber-specific product lines or discounts. Your emails will stand a better chance of being opened because these customers chose you, you’re not just scattergunning your whole list; and you’ll get better click-through rates and ultimately better sales if you’re offering these customers exclusivity, personalization and rarity.

The benefit to you is clear: by making your Black Friday about experience and service, you net the Price-rights who wanted a bargain to begin with and now have easier access to it, but you’re also catching customers whose primary concerns are service - and that’s a majority of customers!

While the majority of customers might make their initial purchase based on price, they won’t make the next purchase if the service isn’t right. ‘One of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they view the customer?’s purchase as a transaction versus an interaction,’ says top customer service pro Shep Hyken. ‘There is more than a subtle difference here. A transaction has an ending.’

Make Black Friday last a month

Black Friday is four weeks from Christmas. The chances are that some canny shoppers are using Black Friday bargains to buy Christmas gifts. In fact, three quarters of British people ranked price as the decisive factor in gift buying, and more Christmas gifts are bought then than Christmas week.

Sounds like we blew it. If everyone’s buying Christmas in November, aren’t we done by the time actual Christmas comes around?

Black Friday is tending to alter the pre-Christmas spending pattern. But even so, most people won’t buy everything they need for everyone on Black Friday. 20% say they shop for gifts on Black Friday to ‘get it all done at once.’ That leaves 80% with more shopping to do.

During the run-up to Black Friday, your emails can stress price with relative impunity, since that’s the decisive factor for many shoppers. But if you stress only price, you could be setting yourself up for a mere day of Black Friday benefits instead of half a year or more. Shoppers will need to buy more gifts, sometimes in a similar category or related to your space or niche, later in the run-up to Christmas.

With these shoppers, Black Friday can be the jewel - but don’t forget about the ring. Jo Causon, Institute of Customer Service CEO, says, ‘rapid-fire stock shifting can do retailers more harm than good’ around Black Friday, pointing to a ‘huge polarisation in performance between the organisations intent on improving the customer experience and those with their eye looking elsewhere.’

Many deals offered in Black Friday sales are illusory, according to industry experts, and consumers are beginning to agree. They’re also thought to cost retailers full-price Christmas purchases. Add in retailers start to look for ways to make Black Friday and Cyber Monday last longer, and the effect is a spread of deals, offers and enticements that looks less like a simple binary spike - normal, Black Friday, normal again - and more like a big end-of-year swell that incorporates Christmas shopping too. That means the frenzied competition on price alone that characterised the old Black Friday is decreasing and a more considered approach is taking hold, and it’s good news for businesses that have something to offer besides low prices.

In action: how to build the campaign

Building on your Black Friday signup collection, you can drip those people deals and offers throughout the run-up to Christmas. But don’t shoot for a strategy that’s based around repeating short-term, price-driven sales over and over. What you want is customers who think of you first, who regard you as useful and able, and who reach for you first. So make Black Friday the bait. Entice buyers to sign up with deals, sure. It’s probably the one time of the year when that price-forward strategy doesn’t select for the exact customers you don’t want, because everyone is offering deals. But aim for Christmas, right from Black Friday. Use Black Friday purchases to segment buyers and fork them onto appropriate email workflows so you can nurture them through Christmas. Use a mainscale Christmas workflow that everyone who signed up on Black Friday gets too, and use data from both plus website behavior to tailor your offers. Remember that Christmas purchases are much more about other people, while Black Friday purchases might be for the buyer or a gift, so don’t segment too narrowly too quickly. I buy stuff at Christmas that’s way outside my normal purchasing patterns, and I’m sure you do to; so will your customers.

Make Black Friday last two months

Right after Christmas is another traditional retail bonanza, this one even more likely to be about buying for yourself rather than about gifts: the January sales. Traditionally, January sales incur massive slashes in retail prices and see a corresponding explosion in sales. If you’re an etailer the news is good: retail sales fell 0.6% in January 2013, 1.5% in January 2014, and 0.3% in January 2015; but the consistent trend is in the opposite direction online. Online sales rose 8.9% in January 2014, far exceeding growth in the economy as a whole and suggesting that in January, etail has effectively eaten retail whole.

How can you use Black Friday to pick up some of this action for yourself?

In action: building the campaign

January sales emails can be based on Black Friday purchases. They’re much more likely to be about people buying things for themselves, but Black Friday seems to be more about electronics and consumer goods while January seems to be more focussed on clothes and department store products. So the key, as always, is data. If you have enough background on your customer base you can begin by looking across those categories, within demographics. If you don’t sell products within those ranges, you can capitalise on those sales nonetheless, by offering ‘companion purchases’ that would go with items that do fit into those categories, or by appealing directly to the niche audience you already have - the approach favored by Brayola and ThinkGeek respectively.

Build drip email campaigns that begin before Christmas. Because the ‘January sales’ actually begin on Boxing Day in bricks-and-mortar stores. That means your customers are already thinking about them in the run-up to Christmas, so it can be a good idea to combine email campaigns and test them against each other in terms of open and click-through in the pre-Christmas period.

Once the January sales season is underway, it normally runs on for the full month of January, though there’s a trend to extend a couple of days into February now. Don’t forget that the end of the sales is an event; warn customers that it’s approaching to create urgency. Offer last-minute discounts to capitalize on price sensitivity. And consider making some discounts or lines exclusive to customer groups - like your Black Friday signups - to create exclusivity.

It’s also worth remembering that returns are a big part of the traditional January sales experience. ‘Tis the season to return stuff that clueless but well-meaning relatives bought you for Christmas, and exchange it for things you actually do want, in keeping with most stores’ returns-but-no-refunds policies. If you have a bricks-and-mortar store and you expect to see some of this, take the opportunity to garner email signups at the checkout. Now you have emails, and two pieces of crucial data: what that person likes and what they don’t like. While they may not have been the original pre-Christmas, Black Friday customer who actually bought the product they’re returning, there’s scope for marketing to them based on the information you have now - and that came from the sales generated pre-Christmas.

Make Black Friday last six months

When the January sales are over, you should have three big, reliable data sets on your Black Friday signups:

• Purchases on Black Friday, a mixture of buys for themselves and gift buying
• Purchases pre-Christmas, mostly gifts
• Purchases in the January sales, mostly for themselves

That means you can utilize those data sets to communicate with your Black Friday signups and offer them content you know they’ll be interested in. When things return to normal at the end of January, there’s not a dearth of holidays until the end of the year. In the six months after Black Friday comes Valentine’s Day, Easter and Mother’s Day, with Father’s day just outside the window in June. That’s an opportunity to offer your Black Friday signups gift-buying ideas based on their Black Friday and Christmas purchases, which were probably for their partners, parents and the children in their lives, amongst others.

In action: how to build the campaign

Use a mixture of purpose-specific purchase history - for gifts, for themselves - to target customers at the right time as well as with the right items. Feed that data back into your CRM and your autoresponder by testing it on a customer-by-customer basis. Use automatic forking to transfer customers over to the correct workflow, or if your customer base and product range is large enough, use dynamic content within emails. For example, say you have a customer who buys a dress and a TV on Black Friday. In the run-up to Christmas that same customer buys a bottle of perfume, a vase, a NERF gun, and a shirt. In the January sales, we’re seeing a gents’ coat and a pair of men’s shoes. Knowing the customer is male, we can surmise that when Valentine’s day comes around we should send him emails offering dresses and perfume. One of these may have been for his mother; both could have been for his sisters, for all we know; but we can track his Valentine’s purchases and figure it out. Rather than hunch over customers’ purchase logs, again, use a mixture of forked workflows and dynamic content to narrow the focus.

Conclusion

Making Black Friday into more than a cutthroat price war that swallows the whole month of November is going to be the next big shift in retail; as pre-Christmas and January spending moves online, it’s going to be a shift that’s increasingly eCommerce-led and in which email marketing will play a large part even for bricks-and-mortar stores. So it’s not about whether retailers need to change how they approach Black Friday; it’s about when you want to do it. Start now and you could be reaping the rewards well into next year!