Top 5 Marketing Ideas During BFCM To Drive Sales - Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

The holiday season is upon us, and for eCommerce enthusiasts, that means one thing – Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). For Shopify businesses, these days are the gold rush, a time when strategic marketing can lead to unprecedented sales spikes. As your store has been set up with the new design and the digital shelves get ready to be stocked with discounts and deals, it's crucial for businesses to have a strategic marketing plan in place.

You’ve taken in place many pre-Black Friday marketing ideas but during BFCM time, as shoppers are more willing to pay than ever, you also need to adjust and renew your Black Friday marketing strategies to drive sales to your store.  

In this article, we'll delve into the top 5 BFCM marketing ideas that have been tested, and recommended by seasoned marketers. From leveraging the power of social media to cart abandonment solutions, these suggestions are designed to not only drive sales but to elevate your brand's presence during the holiday shopping frenzy.

Let’s dive into the marketers’ suggestion for the holidays!

Announce Your BFCM Promotions On Social Media

In the digital age, where nearly 60% of the global population uses social media, it’s undoubted that one of the most effective ways to create a buzz around your promotions in the BFCM time is through a well-crafted social media marketing campaign.

A series of curated posts announcing your Black Friday promotions can help you reach your ideal target market and quickly bring benefits to your store. 

• Attract new customers: 27% of consumers prefer to discover new products through social media over any other channel. Hence, your social channels become the ideal platform for reaching and converting more shoppers during the BFCM frenzy.
• Engage existing followers: Social media provides an excellent avenue to maintain ongoing conversations with your existing followers. Use your channels to remind them of their positive experiences with your brand, encouraging them to continue their shopping journey with you. 

Take inspiration from the social post of Makeup brand Natasha Denona. It shows users how to apply and blend its eyeshadows in this Instagram Reel. By showcasing the product in action, combined with a sale announcement, potential customers can see how the makeup looks and performs, making them more likely to make a purchase.

 Source:  Natasha Denona

Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

Collaborate with Influencers

As 31% of social media users discover new products through influencers, partnering with influencers can amplify your message. Whether they announce your offers, create sponsored content, host giveaways, or take over your social media for a day, influencers help tap into their follower base, generating buzz around your products or promotions to drive sales for your stores. 

You can refer to this guideline to learn how to choose the right influencers for your business.   

Avoid Sales-Only Messaging

As customers increasingly focus on what's truly important, a mere discount code may not be enough to capture and convert shoppers. You need to ensure that your campaign's creative content adds value, solves problems, and entertains your audience. Meaningful engagement is inspired by content that goes beyond the transactional.

Make Your Content Interactive

Interaction is the key driver of customer loyalty and retention. Thus, you should encourage your customers to interact more with your brand on social media. By utilizing post polls, and question boxes to inquire about your products and promotions, or host giveaways and contests to foster interaction, you can create more interaction with customers. 

Give different limited-time offers during BFCM

A limited-time offer refers to a special promotional deal that is exclusively available for a specific period. This can range from running promotions for a few minutes or hours to several days or weeks, particularly during seasonal sales.

By offering many different limited-time offers during BFCM, you can gain many benefits for your store. 

• Create scarcity to drive sales: Scarcity is a powerful motivator in purchase decisions. By presenting your products as limited-time offers, you instill a sense of scarcity, tipping the scales from mere interest to a serious intention to buy. This psychological trigger can lead to increased conversions.
• Attract new customers: Shoppers are naturally drawn to cost savings. A limited-time sale not only attracts your existing customer base but also entices new customers to explore your store. The lowered risk, thanks to reduced prices, makes shoppers more willing to explore new stores. 
• Encourage repeated purchases from loyal customers: Introducing different limited-time offers during BFCM can reignite excitement among your loyal customer base. By presenting exclusive deals, you not only retain their interest but also create an environment conducive to repeated purchases.

A prominent example of applying this Black Friday marketing strategy is Best Buy with its 24-hour deal of the day. They pick different products for different discounts every day. As they have thousands of products, the chance that the same products appear in the deal of the day again is low. Thus, it creates scarcity and urgency for customers to purchase immediately when they see the deal.

Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

Segment Users to Provide Relevant Offers 

Limited-time offers are most effective when they resonate with the target audience. Segmenting users allows you to maximize the impact of your promotions by aligning them with the preferences, behaviors, and demographics of each group.

For example, offer first-time shoppers a limited-time discount for the first purchase, and customers with purchase history in your shop should receive offers for related or complementary products. 

Utilize Countdown Timer

Enhance the urgency of your limited-time offers by pairing them with countdown timers. According to WordStream, a countdown timer can boost conversions significantly, ranging from 3.5% to 10%.

A quick and convenient way to create a countdown timer is using FoxKit. You can set an eye-catching countdown timer in your store with just some clicks. To create a countdown timer that converts with FoxKit, you can refer to these tips and tricks. 

Run Flash Sales Every Hour or at Prime Hours

Keep the excitement alive by running flash sales for different products every hour or at high-traffic hours. This dynamic strategy not only engages customers throughout the day but provides them with multiple opportunities to make purchases. This Black Friday marketing strategy is proven to bring an average of 35% business transaction rate growth.

You can check out these expert tips to make a high-converting flash sale section on your website in this guideline. Combining this guideline with a useful tool like Minimog theme, you can create flash sales and leverage your BFCM game effortlessly. 

Offer A Black Friday Gift With Purchase 

“A Gift with Purchase” is a marketing tactic where businesses sweeten the deal by offering customers a free gift when they purchase a specific product or reach a designated spending threshold.

This smart Black Friday marketing strategy can immediately bring great benefits to your store:

• Drive sales: Everyone loves getting something extra. Customers appreciate promotional gifts 2.4 times more than their cost to sellers. Thus, by incorporating a free gift with purchase into your Black Friday strategy, your business can create a positive experience that not only delights customers but also drives sales. 
• Boost brand loyalty: The impact of a thoughtful gift goes beyond the immediate transaction. Nearly 90% of free gift receivers express being "somewhat likely" to buy more frequently from an online retailer after receiving a gift.

A stellar example of GWP effectiveness is Panasonic, which offered free Adobe software, widely used by photographers, as an additional incentive for Lumix G80. This not only amplified the Lumix G80's appeal but also sparked conversations among photography enthusiasts. 

Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

Choose the Right Gift

Your Black Friday gifts should be a balance between customer demand and your inventory cost. It doesn't have to be expensive, but it should be relevant to your products and perceived as usable and valuable by the customer. 

Here are some common gift with purchase examples:

• Cosmetics companies offer bundles of sample-size products.
• Beverage labels offer drinking glasses.
• Jewelry brands offer earrings or bangles.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Urgency and scarcity are powerful motivations for customers to purchase. By creating urgency, businesses can raise the conversion rate by up to 332%. Thus you can make your promotion more effective by offering exclusive or limited-time Black Friday gifts. This creates a sense of urgency, prompting customers to make a purchase sooner rather than later.

Highlight the Promotion 

Spread the word about your Gift with Purchase so every customer knows about it. You can feature it prominently on your store's homepage, across social media platforms, and in your email newsletters. 

It’s highly recommended that you showcase your Black Friday gifts offer above the fold everywhere on your website so every visitor immediately knows about your promotion when they step into your store. 

The easiest way to do it is using the Announcement Bar of Minimog theme. This section is placed above the header so it’s the first thing customers can see when visiting your store and is synchronized on every page of your website.

Learn more about Minimog and Announcement Bar here. 

Craft a Gift Guide for Your Customers

As the festive season approaches, the quest for the perfect gift becomes a common pursuit among shoppers. This year, 86% of BFCM shoppers plan to use this occasion to buy gifts for those on their list. Thus, one of the effective Black Friday marketing ideas for your store to drive sales is crafting a gift guide for your customers. 

A holiday gift guide is a curated collection of products designed to assist customers in making purchasing decisions during the festive season. It's not just a catalog; it's a strategic tool to streamline the shopping process for your audience, bringing great benefits to both you and your customers. 

• Improve customer lifetime value: Crafting a gift guide serves as a compelling way to re-engage past and existing customers. By offering a curated selection of holiday gifts, you encourage them to choose your retail store over the competition. This not only boosts seasonal sales but also increases the overall amount customers spend with your business throughout their lifetime.
• Help customers make the right decisions faster: The holiday season is bustling, and customers appreciate the simplicity of making decisions. A well-crafted gift guide makes it easier for shoppers to select thoughtful presents from your store, especially as last-minute gift-buying tendencies peak.

Best Buy’s smart use of a holiday gift guide is an exemplary illustration. They created a gift list by price and the recipient to cater to the different needs of customers. With this Black Friday marketing strategy, they can improve customer experience and encourage them to purchase. 

Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

Analyze Data to Craft Gift Guide 

Gain insights into what customers are buying during the holiday season to inform your gift recommendations. You can make use of Google Trends to find trending products this holiday season and the Analytics Feature of FoxKit to understand customers’ buying trends in your store then make a gift guide based on these trends. 

Learn more about FoxKit and FoxKit Analytics. 

Personalize Your Gift Guide 

Personalization is always the priority of many businesses as 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Thus, you should also personalize your gift guide to enhance customer experience. 

You can look into customer data including geography, demography, and browsing history to tailor an exclusive gift guide for them. You can explore this article for more details on how to personalize recommendations for your customers.

Apply AI Chatbot Technology 

You can try employing AI chatbots to enhance the gift-finding experience for customers. Whether based on past purchases or through interactive dialogues, AI chatbots can guide customers to find the perfect gift within their specified parameters, such as price range and product category. This Black Friday marketing tactic also helps you save the human resources spent on consulting customers to find gifts in your store. 

To set up an AI chatbot on your Shopify store, you can refer to these apps:

1. Tidio: This app provides NLP-based chatbots that can give the right product recommendations to potential customers
2. Relish AI:​ Relish AI chatbot asks customers and visitors relevant questions to understand customer needs and preferences to deliver personalized answers and recommendations. 

Send Abandoned Cart Emails 

During BFCM last year, 80% of online shopping customers abandoned their carts before purchase. Thus, the Black Friday marketing effort should also focus on finding cart abandonment solutions. 

An abandoned cart email has long been one of the most powerful cart abandonment solutions. It is an email sent to customers who have added products to their shopping cart but failed to check out. The email acts as a friendly reminder to consumers who may have been distracted and never checked out. 

This Black Friday marketing strategy effectively earns back lost sales for businesses. A recent report from Klaviyo reveals that businesses using cart recovery emails earn back 3%–14% of lost sales, with an average revenue per recipient of $5.81.

Winc, a well-known wine company is a fantastic example of using these cart abandonment solutions. It utilizes a $20 off offer for the first order to sweeten the deal for shoppers. This email sets a great first impression for new shoppers and entices many of them to come back and finish their purchase.

Marketers’ Suggestion For The Holidays

Sending a series of abandoned cart emails 

Instead of a single reminder, consider implementing an abandoned cart email series. This approach provides more opportunities to send enticing offers, increasing your chances of converting those abandoned carts. In fact, email campaigns with 3 cart abandonment emails generate the most revenue - $24.9 million compared to $3.8 million for those who only sent one email. 

Craft compelling subject lines 

The subject line of your abandoned cart email plays a pivotal role in grabbing attention. Clearly communicate the content of the email and, if applicable, highlight any special offers to encourage customers to open. 

For more tips and tricks to write a compelling subject line, refer to our blog on BFCM email subject lines. 

Use the biggest numbers 

When presenting offers in your abandoned cart emails, use the biggest number you can. For example, instead of saying a discount of $10 for a $50 order, let’s say a discount of 20% for a $50 order. This not only makes your offers appear more significant and attractive but also contributes to higher conversion rates.

In conclusion

As you gear up for the bustling Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales extravaganza, integrating unique and creative Black Friday marketing ideas into your Shopify store can make you stand out from the crowd and set you on the path to unprecedented success.

From leveraging the power of limited-time offers to crafting personalized gift guides and applying cart abandonment solutions, each BFCM marketing strategy plays a crucial role in capturing the attention and loyalty of your diverse customer base. 

To turn these Black Friday marketing ideas into effective implementation, you can combine the expert tips in this article with powerful tools like Minimog, the Next-gen multipurpose high-converting theme, and FoxKit - the All-in-one Sales Boost app.