The popularity of Black Friday in South Africa seems to be exponential in nature. Battling it out for consumer attention on the day will be, quite frankly, impossible, so a coordinated effort to do so beforehand is key. If you’re going the automated marketing route, whether through email or SMS, here are seven key fundamentals to implement before the big day.
1. Start small, build up to big
For Black Friday, there’s no need to go all in from the get-go. Start small and work diligently to craft your emails and build an audience. If you’ve been busy with automated marketing throughout the year, remember your wins and learn from them. Black Friday is going to be all about audience curation and timed delivery, so don’t wait – but certainly don’t rush either.
2. Hypertarget!
Talking about curation, yes, you can offer a broad variety of offers, but hyper-targeting will get the best results. By starting to offer different types of content beforehand that your customers can click on to show interest, you’ll be able to subdivide them into very specific audiences, each with its own preferences.
Remember that in the lead up to Black Friday, if you market the right message to the right person before others do, you’re set to score big.
3. Getting the message right
By advertising compelling offers that provide real value, you’re already halfway there. When crafting your email message, most important is getting the subject line right, but equally important is having an engaging preview message. A general rule is to have a question in the subject and the preview message hinting at the call-to-action required.
A/B testing is crucial to this, as you can send smaller samples and get feedback on which subject/preview pair is working best before opening the floodgates. The A/B testing of content is done quite easily with marketing automation systems, which include detailed email-click heat-mapping.
4. But when?
Being too late with your marketing is not going to get you anywhere, but starting too early will be money thrown down the drain, especially with expensive SMS campaigns. Two weeks ahead of the big day is about right, keeping in mind that the Black Friday buzz will really kick-off on the Monday of the same week. If you are dependent on a call centre to manage sales, ensure that you are able to scale your marketing efforts either up or down depending on the amount of seats available.
5. Marketing co-ordination is key
The left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing. If your social media person is different to your marketing person, let them come up with a coordinated strategy going forward. While marketing automation works as a stand-alone solution, it performs best if the company incorporates other marketing efforts around it. Constant retargeting of the consumer puts your message front of mind.
6. Have a back-up plan
Apart from receiving no response on Black Friday, perhaps even worse is getting the response but your site crashing. We’ve seen this happen to the best of them over the past few years, so have a strategy in place in case something horrible happens. Make sure you can put a hold on outbound email and SMS messages.
If the system sends out all one million emails you have no way of stopping the onslaught and your marketing budget has been wasted. Critical is that you are able to adjust your outbound marketing immediately, based on your call centre or site uptime.
7. And don’t forget about Cyber Monday
Yes, Black Friday is important, but don’t forget Cyber Monday. Usually reserved for online offers only, email marketing is by far the biggest value driver for e-commerce sales in general. Use the lessons learnt during the Friday to get the marketing message right for Monday. Don’t forget the mantra: The right message to the right person at the right time. Get it right and you’re heading towards major success on the day.