Black Friday is the biggest sales event of the year! It’s a great opportunity for brands to reach existing customers and drive online sales. To be successful you need to think carefully about how you’re going to approach your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign. To help you with this, we have put together a few simple tips and tricks on maximising your Black Friday efforts.
Plan your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign well in advance!
The best time to start preparing for Black Friday is as early as possible. Start thinking about the types of deals you’re going to offer, customers you’re targeting, and how you’re going to reach them. Because Black Friday is such a busy time for retailers, many companies will start their marketing efforts as early as October. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to be innovative with your offers and when to send them. To leverage the best results make sure SMS text is used to deliver your Black Friday deals.
Sending at the right time
Timing for a Black Friday SMS marketing campaign is critical to how successful it will be. Many retailers are starting their Black Friday deals as early as the Monday before. Allowing them to beat the competition and engage with their existing customers much earlier. Whereas, other retailers prefer to send an “Early Access” SMS offer on the Thursday evening before Black Friday around 19:00pm. The morning of Black Friday is highly competitive. Therefore, it’s better to schedule your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign as early as possible, at say 8:45am.
But why send at 8:45am instead of 9am? That extra 15 minutes makes a HUGE difference. Mainly because everyone schedules their marketing campaigns at 9am on the Black Friday morning. Meaning your SMS offer could get missed or ignored. In addition, SMS traffic is extremely high at 9am and with some suppliers it could take longer to deliver the text messages. Luckily at Text Global our throughput is up to 16,000 SMS text messages per second! Allowing our clients to send millions of SMS text messages in just a matter of minutes. Our advice is don’t schedule your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign on the hour, do it 15-20 minutes before.
Send exclusive offers to your most recent & engaged customers
When you’re planning your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign, don’t just think about your new customers. Your best customers are the ones who have purchased from you before. These are the customers who are most likely to buy from you again, so it’s important to show them you appreciate their loyalty. Sending to customers who have ordered in the last 12 months will lower the cost of your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign. And as a result leverage an excellent return on investment.
Black Friday SMS marketing campaign examples!
Flat Discounts – In our opinion offering a discount off all items works best. It gives customers freedom to choose any item and enjoy an exclusive discount. Launch your Black Friday sale with say 20% off using code ‘BF20’. Then, to close the sales send a final SMS offer with a slightly better discount of say 25%. The best thing about offering a unique discount code redeemable at checkout, is you can track the exact amount of orders generated from your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign.
Clearance Sales – Heavily reduce item costs without the need to use a discount code. This makes it easy and clear to customers exactly how much items cost up front. You could even offer standard percentage off items and an “Extra 10% OFF with code BF10”.
Daily Deals – If you’re a fashion retailer for example. Sending a specific deal each day during Black Friday can maximise site traffic, sales and customer engagement. This method of marketing is more aggressive and ultimately would require a larger marketing budget.
VIP Early Access – Make existing customers feel valued and important with an “Exclusive VIP Early Access” SMS text message. With a direct URL link to the website code and exclusive discount code to redeem the offer. Use this method at the start if the Black Friday week or Thursday evening before. Another option is to create a pop up form on your online store a few weeks before Black Friday, where customers can subscribe to early access offers. In addition, send a bulk email campaign with a link to the form to obtain a greater amount of Black Friday subscribers.
Wrapping up
Black Friday is always a challenge for marketers, with consumers shopping on the high street and Black Friday being highly competitive. To maximize your efforts, follow these three tips: plan your campaign well in advance, send your marketing at the right times and send exclusive offers to existing customers. Our team can offer impartial advice, strategy planning and existing client use cases. So, if you want to maximise your Black Friday sales contact us at [email protected].
