On the biggest shopping day of the year, you want to make the most of the holiday shopping season. But most ecommerce brands canât go toe to toe with big corporations like Amazon, Walmart, or Wayfair on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.
For starters, you canât outspend them on marketing and advertisingâWayfair spends $6.8 million on just Google Ads each month. And if you slash your prices to the level that the biggest companies do, youâll be on a fast route to a going-out-of-business sale. đł
DTC brands need a savvier strategy for a successful and profitable BFCM Weekend.
So we reached out to more than a dozen ecommerce experts to get their pro tips to maximize revenue on Black Friday.
1. Raise the stakes with your offers
A deep discount can hurt marginsâparticularly on small orders. Instead, try tiered discounts that reward shoppers for spending more.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Ethan Denney
âThe best way for DTC brands to maximize the revenue per shopper during BFCM is to increase AOV by raising the stakes for every shopper.
How do they raise the stakes? By increasing the reward, as well as the risk of loss, as people shop their products. The more the customer shops, the sweeter the deal they get. But if they don't buy now, they'll miss the biggest deal of the year.
For example, instead of promoting a flat discount across all of their products, they could promote a tiered discount offer. The more a shopper spends, the bigger the discount they get.
This can be promoted like "Get up to 70% percent off during Black Friday," and the shopper would unlock different discounts based on their spending tier reached:
- 20% off purchases of $50+
- 50% off purchases of $125+
- 70% off purchases of $200+
This allows the brand to engage the shopper with an upsell funnel using targeted messages, popups, and sticky bars that help shoppers upgrade from one tier to the next.
Each popup can display how much more a shopper needs to spend to unlock the next big discount, and can also display recommended products based on their current cart, that will help the visitor pass the spend needed to secure the bigger discount.
Beyond this, brands can even play with strategies like creating urgency, scarcity, and exclusivity around the products they promote to help the shopper act now vs later.
This can look like unlocking discounts on specific products with limited supply once a shopper reaches a discount tier, or access to an exclusive discount tier or offer because they are VIP customers or purchased a specific product in the past.â
~ Ethan Denney Co-Founder & CEO, ConvertFlow
Case in point: Long Wkndâs âbundle & saveâ offer from Black Friday 2021:
Long Wknd's home page from Black Friday offers up to 30% off + a surprise gift depending on how much a shopper buys.
The brand advertised an âup to 30% off sale.â But, shoppers had to purchase a certain number of units to get to that 30% level.
The details of the sale can be seen in a nice drop down on the sticky bar that follows shoppers around the site:
Overall, itâs a great tactic to encourage people to buy more.
Tiered discounts are a form of gamification, which is a great way to raise the stakes.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Chris Roth
âUse gamification to increase customer spending on your ecommerce site during the Black Friday Weekend.
Gamifying the ecommerce shopping experience has proven to be highly effective in increasing engagement and customer expenditure on ecommerce sites.
Incorporating gaming elements such as lotteries and quizzes with prizes, as well as random rewards, will not only excite your customers but will encourage them to spend more throughout the weekend.â
~ Chris Roth Founder & CEO, Highline Wellness
You can offer increased loyalty points for certain kinds of actions to encourage purchases or referralsâlike posting about a purchase on social media.
Or you can boost cart values with cart thresholds that offer different rewards at every tier like free shipping or gifts.
In its shopping cart, teeth whitening brand Snow offers a mystery gift, free shipping, and free whitening toothpaste depending on how much a customer spends:
And the brand makes sure customers know about the first offer (plus its BOGO offer) by announcing it in a Black-Friday specific sticky bar and on the product page:
2. Plan ahead
If you are like most of the ecommerce brands we speak with, you make a significant chunk of your annual sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. So you want to be prepared with your best campaigns and offers.
The more time you have to start planning, creating contingency plans, and fine-tuning your offers, the more prepared youâll be for Black Friday, and the easier it will be to adjust in the moment.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
âCreate a master plan. Companies often struggle to address BFCM since it relies on many interdependent components. On average, about three months of planning are needed to pull it off successfully.
There can be no room for error; every process must be carefully planned and fine-tuned to ensure the company can handle an influx of new clients.
You must prepare the marketing strategy for months and consult with the logistics team and your suppliers to achieve the best outcomes.â
~ Kevin Wang Co-Founder, Inyouths
Some brands start preparing for Black Friday as early as April and May. However, if that isnât feasible, begin planning no later than three months before Black Fridayâor around mid- to late-August.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Matt Lally
âStart building momentum now. Every failure I've seen from DTC marketing teams during hyper-sale periods was trying to compete too late.
If you haven't begun planning your advertising ramp for September and October, you have already lost the war in November.
Successful DTC brands will invert their prospecting and remarketing budgets from September to November. Your goal should be to start acquiring cheaper users in the non-sales period.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, use remarketing and nurture campaigns to re-engage for more sales or upsells.
Using this strategy, you will dramatically reduce your acquisition cost and increase ROI.â
~ Matt Lally Founder, Mattyads
In other words, treat Q4 as a retention period for the customers you acquired throughout the year.
Plus, an additional reason to plan ahead is you can test-drive offers before Black Friday.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
âIn any industry, the best way to create optimal marketing materials is by testing. Instead of running your deal solely on Black Friday Weekend, test various deals in the months and weeks leading up. After running a few promotions at once, you'll soon find that certain ones outperform the rest.
Once that time hits, you'll want to decrease spending on the other campaigns and reinvest that marketing budget into the successful ones. From there, you can make more small changes and tests to pinpoint the approach that works best with your audience.
Marketing, even on Black Friday, shouldn't be a gamble. Instead, treat it as a science and use the months leading up to test your hypothesis.â
~ Jerrel Reigada Blog Manager, ReConvert
One key testing ground for your Black Friday sales? Labor Day.
Save your best deals for BFCM, but test the types of offers that get customers reaching for their credit cards (e.g., free gift, loyalty incentives, limited edition products, BOGO deals, different types of discounts, etc.).
And test the copy and CTAs in your sales announcements, abandonment campaigns, and welcome popups.
3. Simplify your offers
If your offer is too complicated, shoppers will go elsewhere to buy their holiday gifts.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
âOne of the best ways to maximize revenue per visitor is to simplify your offers. Complicated offers and discounts throw off shoppers. You don't want to confuse them by giving too many conditions.
This goes for bundles too. DTC brands shouldn't limit the choices in their bundles. The simpler your offers, the more people will be willing to spend this BFCM.
Smaller brands should fall back to traditional sales to compete with bigger brands. The Buy 2 Get 1 Free offer is best at increasing average order value. When each customer buys more, your profit margins will increase too.â
~ David Lee Owner, Neutypechic
Complex conditional logic can annoy shoppers and lead them to abandoning your site. For example, offering 25% off a few specific categories, but not others. So use this method carefully.
Outway Socks lets shoppers know in clear, simple language what to expect: 50% off sitewide.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Kevin Wang
âWe've found direct offers work best, such as a flat discount, a bundle, or different products. Complicated deals confuse clients and potentially cancel sales.
By introducing if/then conditions or bundling only specific products, you make people second-guess their decision and think they're not getting a fair deal. It's also confusing to run non-BFCM offers at the same time.â
~ Kevin Wang Co-Founder, Inyouths
4. Add a bonus gift
Bonus gifts can increase cart values and conversions depending on how you use them.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Cody Arsenault
âWhat Iâve done in the past to help increase conversions during BFCM is to include a mystery Black Friday gift with every purchase. This not only helps pique the interest of the buyer, but also encourages them to complete their order as itâs a limited-time offer for something that wonât be restocked.
For example, when we ran this last year, we included a free kidâs winter hat with every purchase of kids' shoes. This was a low cost item but increased our BFCM revenue by 15% compared to the previous BFCM with all else being equal.â
~ Cody Arsenault Growth Marketer & Owner, Codyarsenault.com
Another way to boost orders aside from discounts? More generous shipping, returns, and warranty policies.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Freddie Chatt
âLast year, we ran an extended warranty and reduced our free delivery threshold. This gave added benefits for our customers beyond the saving (which they also expect) but allowed us to exceed our revenue targets whilst also maintaining decent profitability.â
~ Freddie Chatt Owner, Village Cricket Co.
TEMPLATE:
Make your free shipping threshold clear using this sticky bar template with dynamic threshold merge tag text:
!https://img.convertflow.co/production/templates/2557/ctas/free-shipping-sticky-bar.png
Free Shipping Sticky Bar
by Jonathan Denney at ConvertFlow
See more free shipping templates
5. Prepare your website for the surge in traffic
Itâs game over if your website crashes during Cyber Week. Or your checkout is broken. Or your standard and BFCM welcome popups both trigger.
While there are some things that are out of your control (like an ecommerce platform outage), there is a lot you can do in advance to make sure your store is optimized and your website stays online.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
David Lee
âMake sure your website is prepared for the traffic. You must ensure that your website can handle the increased traffic that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will bring. This includes ensuring your website is fast, mobile-friendly, and secure.â
~ David Lee Owner, Neutypechic
Test new pages, popups, and buttons to ensure they look and function how you want them on desktop and mobile.
Run a sitewide test with a program like Lighthouse to evaluate site performance and identify any errors you might not see.
And go through your checkout experience like a shopper would to ensure itâs smooth.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Rodney Warner
âThe best way to maximize revenue per visitor around BFCM weekend is to remove distractions. This might sound like a known fact, but how many ecommerce stores actually do it?
So, you should double-check there arenât any unnecessary distractions. This can help you streamline your marketing efforts. As a result, you can increase your conversion rate and lower cart abandonment.
Small brands may not be able to slash prices like huge franchises. But they can still make a difference by offering a guest login option. This isnât something every ecommerce brand provides. But this is a make-it-or-break-it moment for small businesses. Thatâs because you canât risk losing your customers.â
~ Rodney Warner CEO, Connective Web Design
For example, letâs take the checkout experience of Tylerâs, a fashion apparel brand out of Texas. It is designed to minimize distractions and reduce friction:
6. Optimize your mobile shopping experience
During BFCM 2022, 73% of Shopify sales were made on mobile.
Since nearly three-quarters of shoppers will likely buy from you on their phones, prioritize your mobile shopping experience with easy-to-click buttons and a single-column layout.
You can also drive more conversions by meeting customers where they are with mobile-oriented campaigns.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Gabrielle Wooden
âOne of the best ways smaller retailers can improve BFCM sales is to focus their strategy around mobile shoppers, and here are a few ways they can do that:
- Create exclusivity. If a shopper knows they canât find the same deals in-store during BFCM, it will increase the likelihood of converting sales.
- Use push notifications. 60% of mobile app users opt-in to push notifications, and businesses that utilize push can experience a 9.6x increase in sales. Push notifications can draw attention to specific BFCM deals, encouraging people to open the mobile app and shop.â
~ Gabrielle Wooden Sr. Content Marketing Manager, Tapcart
Besides increasing sales, push notifications are cheaper to send than texts. And they offer more flexibility in formatâlike having subject lines and being able to connect the notification directly to a page on your app or website, as demonstrated in these effective push notification examples.
7. Run retargeting ad campaigns
The people who are the most likely to buy from you are the people who are already familiar with your brand, especially past customers.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Rengie Wisper
âThe best way to maximize revenue per website visitor on and around Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend is to use a combination of tactics. This includes:
- Using retargeting ads to bring back previous website visitors who have left your site without purchasing anything, so that they can be shown a special offer or coupon code.
- Creating a landing page that will cater to people who are looking for gifts for kids, pets, partners, etc., and then using retargeting ads to bring back people who visited that page but didn't convert.
~ Rengie Wisper Co-Founder & Designer, Ever Wallpaper
If you are running retargeted ads to people who have been on your site but have never bought anything before, setting up abandonment popups can be an effective last-minute tactic to get a hesitant shopper to buy an item.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Jerrel Reigada
âAnother effective way to increase sales on any occasion is by making use of exit-intent popups.
Offering an extra item for an added discount or free shipping to customers about to exit the page won't stop every one of them from abandoning the cart, but it will certainly help prevent a decent few of them from falling through the cracks.â
~ Jerrel Reigada Blog Manager, ReConvert
8. Build FOMO and urgency
FOMO marketing taps into some key psychological responses like the scarcity principle, loss aversion, and social pressure.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Helen Armstrong
âCreate a sense of urgency. Use countdown timers, scarcity messaging (e.g. "only X left in stock"), and other techniques to create a sense of urgency and encourage people to buy now.â
~ Helen Armstrong Founder, Apsley Australia
Here are some effective FOMO hooks you can use with your BFCM offers:
- Only X items left in stock
- Only X days, hours, or minutes left to get this deal
- X people have already bought this product in the last hour
- X people have given this product five stars
- X influencer/celebrity just bought (or shared) this product
For instance, if you have a product that is 50% off on only Black Friday, you can use a flash sale sticky bar in ConvertFlow to display a countdown timer.
When you tap into the right amount of FOMO and see sales skyrocket, it can be tempting to fake low product volume.
However, if shoppers realize that you are deploying fake FOMO to sell more products, this can destroy your brandâs reputation and credibility. They wonât believe you when you use these tactics next time.
TEMPLATE:
Drive urgency and FOMO in your BFCM sale with this flash sale timer sticky bar:
Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale Sticky bar
by The Team at ConvertFlow
See all Black Friday templates
9. Invest in your brand ambassadors
Your influencers, affiliates, and brand ambassadors have built audiences that trust their opinions. Use the relationships youâve grown with these partners to amplify your BFCM sales.
Consider offering boosted commission rates to reward them for their partnership and loyalty to your brand and encourage them to promote you more to their audience.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Brian Lim
âWe utilize our brand ambassador program to help promote our Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Typically an ambassador will receive a 10% commission on any orders they generate on our website, but during this time we offer them extra incentives for helping us promote our sales to their friends and followers.
In the past, we've asked them to post to at least three different placements on social media such as Instagram feed, Instagram Stories, and Snapchat. In exchange, they not only receive a 10% commission on any direct sales they drive, but we also enter them to win a gift card giveaway or give them a 30% off coupon to use anytime the following year.
Typically we see a 20-30% boost in affiliate sales during Black Friday / Cyber Monday when we run this campaign annually.â
~ Brian Lim Founder & CEO, iHeartRaves & INTO THE AM
However:
Be cautious with discount codes. Create clear influencer guidelines and expectations upfront about what is and isnât allowed.
This is something that many ecommerce entrepreneurs, including Bill D'Alessandro, learn the hard way:
In Billâs case, his company lost more than $100,000 when some affiliate discount codes wound up on Honey and RetailMeNot.
So, they ended up paying out affiliates for undeserved commissionsâand losing profit on orders that wouldnât have had that discount applied otherwise.
10. Focus on quality, not quantity
Slashing your prices because your competitor or Amazon is doing it can backfire.
Instead, position yourself as a premium or higher-quality option to open up additional BFCM tactics that you can use.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
Luke Lee
âOne way that smaller direct-to-consumer brands can compete with bigger stores during Black Friday and Cyber Monday is by focusing on quality over quantity. While it may be tempting to slash prices across the board in order to attract shoppers, this strategy can actually end up hurting your bottom line if it results in selling products at a loss.
Instead, consider offering a smaller number of high-quality items at a significant discount. This will help to attract serious shoppers who are looking for deals on quality products, and it will also help you to avoid selling products at a loss.â
~ Luke Lee CEO, Palaleather Fashion Company
11. Personalize your website
You can use personalization to create highly targeted offers.
EXPERT INSIGHT:
âLeverage insane personalization on your DTC website. For example, let's say you're an apparel store.
If a customer has purchased only men's shirts from you in the past, tweak your website during BFCM to highlight all the deals that they're likely to be interested in.
Instead of a generic headline like âBlack Friday Deals: Save 30% Sitewide,â you can show them a personalized âBlack Friday Deals: Save 30% on Men's Shirts Sitewide.â Same goes for the individual SKUs that you choose to feature.
If you segment your customers into buckets, this is easier to pull off than you'd think. Website personalization can drive a double-digit increase in your AOV and revenue per visitor during BFCM. Make sure you take advantage.â
~ Zach Grove Growth Advisor & Founder, ZachGrove.com & Imagine Woodworking
Creating targeted offers also reduces distraction and helps customers find products they actually want to buy.
Launch your BFCM campaign today
Playing the same game the biggest companies play is a recipe for sub-par BFCM sales. Instead, these ten strategies can help you increase your average order value and maximize revenue.
The good news?
ConvertFlow has all you need to get your on-site campaigns ready to go.
Quickly build out and A/B test product landing pages, exit-intent popups, flash sale sticky bars, or other personalized and targeted BFCM marketing assetsâall in one platform.
Get started today by creating your free account and see how ConvertFlow makes it easy to build personalized offers and targeted messages for your ideal customers at scale.
Here's to your success this BFCM!