Black Friday Strategies for Any Business | Ep 20

Speaker A

00:00:01.360 - 00:17:38.349

This is episode 20 and I'm going to share all the ways I've helped clients maximize their profits during Black Friday, regardless of their industry or what they sell. So you can do the same thing in your business. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits. That's foreign. Hey. Hey.

So we've got Black Friday coming up here in a few months in the US this is an episode that you want to take notes and go take action on because you've still got time, if you're listening to this in the first few weeks that this came out, to go get a project outlined and figure out what you want to do to take action on this. So I got into this probably about 10 years ago, had a client that was doing, of all things, English as a foreign language test prep business. Okay.

A test prep course, sold it all year round.

People take that all the time when they're coming to go to universities or get certified jobs here in the US and they have to prove that they can speak English. So not a sexy business, right? And I said, let's try a Black Friday promo.

I think it was November of 2013, and I outlined the campaign and I'll give you the details of all of it in a minute, but I outlined the campaign. We did the, did the promo and we made more in that weekend than he had ever made, I think in a two or three month period ever.

And it kind of overwhelmed him and kind of set him into a tailspin because he had sold so much from that Black Friday promo.

So what we did, as you start taking notes, what we did was, and I've refined this over the years with other clients, is we start seeding your list early. So I would say no later than the first week of November. You need to start this.

And what you're going to do is make an email, send it out, say, hey, we've got a special Black Friday promo coming up and we just want to know if you're interested. Do you want to get on the early bird list and the early bird list with all kinds of promos? I'm not big on launches.

I don't care for launch business as much. They're kind of exhausting to stay on. But this kind of stems from the launch business model.

But getting on the early bird list is fantastic because what you do is send an email. I like using action buttons in those emails that allow people to click.

It takes them to a confirmation page, but it tags them in the system that they are interested in getting on that Early Bird list. And so what I do in that first email is actually put a few action buttons. So we say, hey, we've got something special coming up after Thanksgiving.

Would love to share it with you if you're interested. If you are interested, click on the early bird button below, Early Bird list button below, and we'll add you to the early Bird list.

Make sure you don't miss out on it. If you're not interested at all, let us know and we won't bother you with any emails. And so that way it's kind of like a light unsubscribe.

It's like a campaign unsubscribe. And you just have the two buttons stacked on top of each other throughout towards the bottom of the email.

And that way you're able to start segmenting the list. And what I do is send email one to everybody on the list, then email two.

I send like three days later that first week of November and I send it to the people who opened but didn't click. And you may say, well, but there's a third segment of people that didn't say they wanted to know it and didn't say they didn't want to know it.

So they're probably in the middle ground. Don't we want to avoid offending them? Definitely you want to avoid that.

But I'm happy to send them one more email and do the same thing, kind of, same game plan, get on the Early Bird List, maybe sell a little bit more about why to get on the Early Bird List.

Don't reveal anything but say it's going to be worth your while if you've been a follower of ours or if you've got any of our products or if you've used any of our stuff.

And after that second email and they click or don't click, then I send one more email and this goes out to everybody who's not opened those first two kind of seed warm up emails. And it's the same game plan, just join the Early Bird List or opt out of this, of this promo. So now you've got your Early Bird List.

What do you do with it? Well, you've got the campaign and it should be ready to launch the week of Thanksgiving.

So that's the third week, third Thursday in America every year in November.

And that Monday what I do is I send a notification to the Early Bird list saying, hey, hope you guys are ramping up for Thanksgiving Hope you're excited. Just wanted to remind you you're going to get noticed right away when we get our Black Friday special going. So be on the lookout.

We're excited to share it with you. And I do a little. I may send one the week before. Maybe it's a value post. I've done that for sure.

The week before Thanksgiving, just some kind of value post to that early bird list. But you don't have to. But definitely on Monday of Thanksgiving week, get that email out to the early bird list.

Then instead of releasing on Thursday on Thanksgiving, I send out end of day Wednesday just to the early bird list. And I say early access. Get this before anybody else and open the cart, make it available, whatever, give them the offer. And if you.

We'll get into offers in a second.

But I think if you want to do some scarcity and just have a limited number of super bonus offers, say like the first hundred units or the first 10 buyers or whatever, you're sending that to that early bird list and you send it out on Wednesday and you'll be amazed at how many people just jump at it. So then Thursday, what I do is get the, get the offer started in the afternoon to the entire list and you may break it up in one of two ways.

You could send a first thing Thursday morning email saying, hey, just a heads up, we're releasing our Black Friday promo tonight at X time. Be on the lookout.

And I send that to the whole list and then send the regular offer for the Black Friday promo, let's say 5pm on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day for the offer. And you'll be amazed how many people just jump at it. And you're sending that to both the early bird list and the entire list.

And I plan on sending two or three emails to the entire list. So if you send that Thursday morning heads up, Thursday evening it's open, and then Friday morning to the main list and call it.

Or Friday afternoon and call it a day on the main list. But the early bird list, I'll send again Wednesday night, open it up Thursday morning, make it available to them.

Thursday night, make it available to them, say, hey, this is when the rest of the audience was able to get access to it. So if you didn't take advantage of the early bird access, you're gonna miss out and then send to them Friday and then again Saturday.

And then I usually send to the entire list on Sunday and say, hey, just closing shop, wanna make sure you didn't miss this. And that's it. Now you can carve this up however you want, whatever fits the integrity and style of your brand and your business.

Some people just want to make it Thursday night only. Some make it that the Black Friday offer is only open Thursday night through, say, noon Friday.

You can put those deadlines on it and hold, hold to that.

The thing that I don't like is setting a deadline of when you're going to close it and then extend it to keep it opened by with all sorts of stupid excuses like, oh, we had a cart go down, we had glitches on the server, we had, I mean, just all the stupid Internet marketing stuff that smarmy marketers have done over the years. I hate that stuff. Now, if that's part of your culture and you do that regularly, then by all means do it.

But if you're not a typical strong marketer and you're not doing things on the regular to promote to your list, I would definitely avoid that. To me, it kind of is trust breaking for most audiences.

Now there is also Cyber Monday, which is the Monday after Thanksgiving, and feel free to extend or change the offer to that. So you could say, hey, we know you're busy with your family. We know you want to spend time with your family.

You don't want to think about buying stuff.

So because of X, Y and Z, we're going to participate in the Cyber Monday promo or discounts or whatever, and you can totally realign your offer to match with Cyber Monday. And that works too. So I've not done many Cyber Monday offers.

I've had a couple clients where we just extended it from Wednesday night all the way through Monday night to get as many sales as possible. And that works fine too. But just find whatever you think fits with your audience.

And so as you go through the structure of this, you're going to start thinking about, well, what in the world do we offer? Obviously the default is just a discount, and I always recommend against that.

Because discounting, as you probably know, let's say you've got a 20% margin net profit on your business.

And after everything's said and done, and so if you discount by 20%, you are cutting right into your profit line significantly, maybe all of your profit.

If you do it wrong and you can't make up for it in volume, if you have something that is a higher margin product and maybe you've got a lot of old inventory you just want to get rid of, then obviously discounting is the easiest, fastest way to ship off that inventory. But for most businesses, discounting is just negotiating against yourself and the amount of volume that you have to sell to offset that.

If you have any kind of service deliverable, whether it's a fulfillment product or you actually do labor, or you actually have some kind of tangible cost other than a digital delivery or an info product or something that has essentially zero marginal expense for each additional client that buys at that moment, you're gonna have a hard time offsetting that discount. It's just kind of like the Groupon effect. So when Groupon was around years ago, so many companies thought, oh, I'll just discount.

And they thought it was an easy way to find a customer. Well, these people are already on your email list. Most of them are already customers. So that Groupon effect really doesn't translate here.

And the only time I ever recommend discounting is in a time like this. Two is if you have a very sticky product where if they can get a taste of it, they're gonna stick around and buy more of it.

So what do you do besides discounting? Well, I always like adding bonuses. What can you do to supersize the offer?

So maybe you keep the same regular price, but you throw in a whole bunch of high perceived value bonuses.

So off the top of my head, I can think of a past client who's got a landscape business and he does pest control and weed control and a whole number of things services for properties. And maybe he throws in a free fertilization and weed control treatment with pest control.

If they're buying pest control, he throws in a bonus of fertilization weed control.

If it's something that his crew can already go out and do at the same time and it's a marginal add on, but it's high perceived value and maybe it has a stickiness factor that the people want to get more of it, then that's great. Or let's say that you've got a marketing service and you do various marketing implementation for companies.

Throw in a search engine optimization audit, throw in a conversion rate optimization audit, throw in something, an analytics audit. Something that doesn't take much time but is high perceived value and continues the conversation or deepens the engagement with the client.

So when you think through offers, make sure that you're not just shooting yourself in the foot with a discount because as you know, there's nothing worse than making more sales and keeping less money in the end. So in summary, I'd say get your project outlined of the timeline. You want the first email to go out first week of November. Get that early bird list.

You want to make sure that that early Bird list is communicated with early in that week of Thanksgiving.

Make sure that you've got timing and segmentation around how you're going to follow up with people and then make sure that the offer is compelling and really, really valuable.

This is your time to shine, to get people that have been on the fence to take action and purchase and move forward with you and maximize as much as you can from that email list that you've got now. You could look at this and say, well, gosh, why just Black Friday? Why not during our slow season? Why not Christmas, why not New Year's?

All of those work. I've just not found something that's worked better than Black Friday.

I have had a client in the past where Amazon's Prime Day in July was a huge day for them, but they sell through Amazon and so that's kind of a big deal to transition to if you're not already on Amazon to try to take advantage of that. So I wouldn't go out of my way to try to take advantage of Prime Day if you're not already on Amazon.

Christmas, I find, is too consumed with other purchases, other holiday events. I just don't find people buying as much over the Christmas break as I do over Thanksgiving.

There's something that is psychologically primed for the consumer in Black Friday. It's just been marketed really, really well over the decades. New Year's can be.

I just find that a lot of people, if it's consumer focused products, a lot of people have the Christmas and credit card hangover as they kick off the new year and they're just not spending much. There's most retail industries, I find, are really dead in January.

And so I don't find New Year's to be particularly great for B2C businesses, but B2B, you can make New Year's work really well because everybody's got their fresh plans for the year and objectives and budgets and they want to get things off to the right start. So you could do the first week of the year. I would not do the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's too slow.

There's just not as much activity or attention while people are taking downtime between the holidays. So the other time that I do think this works really well is in your slowest season.

So if you've got a heavy seasonal business and you can still service clients in your slow season, making some kind of off season promo can be really great because it can stimulate conversations for your sales team.

It can incentivize people who have been on the fence but haven't moved forward yet to take action because they can get better attention, they can get a better price, get a better deal, whatever when you're slow. But it's not as effective as during Black Friday because everybody's just ready.

And again, it doesn't matter what industry you're in or what product you sell. I've seen it work for metal clear coat products for home projects. Like I said, the English is a foreign language test.

I can't think off the top of my head right now. What other businesses? Oh, education like info products works great. So think through does this fit? Does it fit your priorities right now?

Does it help add to your bottom line as we head into the winter to end of the year for this year and let me know your thoughts. Shoot me an email podcastottleneckbreakthrough.com Very curious if this ends up working for you.

I'm also gonna put together a course on my website bottleneckbreakthrough.com where you can go and buy the templates and outlines and I'll have the copy written and details if that would be helpful for you. So go check that out. Just go to the website and go to training section and there will be a page there with some details on the Black Friday promo.

So hope that's helpful.

Hope it gets you lined up in time to profit as much as possible before the end of the year and get you thinking outside of the box on other ways that promos could work this season. Promo could work for your business regardless of what industry you're in. Trust me, it works for everything. You just gotta execute Take care.

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