Black Friday is here. The deals have started and you’re facing pressure from leads and competitors to start offering discounts for your products and services.
Before you announce your deal, read our top tips for selling your products and services during Black Friday so you can come out of the busiest week of business in the black.
Start building your list, now!
The money is in the list. Your Black Friday sales will directly correlate to the amount of traffic you can push to your site. More subscribers = more traffic = more sales.
The start of November is a great time to start building your list as people start searching for deals. You can take our free Ultimate Black Friday Strategy course to learn how we and other businesses build our lists using Popups, lead magnets, and more simple to set up strategies.
Create your offer early
The last thing you want to be doing on Thursday, November 25th is rushing to create some kind of offer to send to your list and offer on your site. Start planning early (right now) and begin creating your assets.
If this is your first Black Friday you may have no idea what to offer. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Don’t be afraid to draw inspiration from colleagues and competitors. At the very least it requires minimum effort to create a discount code!
The first deal we ever ran was just a 25% OFF discount code we pasted on the checkout and pricing page. Easy!
Make it easy to get the deal
Your checkout process is the biggest obstacle customers face when trying to claim a Black Friday deal. The easier it is to claim a discount and use it during checkout, the higher your sales will be.
If your discount form is not clearly marked, or obscured in any way, your sales will suffer.
Common ways businesses make it easy to get the deal are:
- Site wide banner with the discount code on it for easy copy/paste
- Automatically applying the discount code at checkout
- Manually setting the price of any products to the discount price
- Creating product bundles with the discount prices
If your deal isn’t discount-based, make sure you have clear site signage guiding people to a landing page or post about how to claim the deal using a banner, popup, or other site-wide means.
You don’t need to undercut your competition
Our first instinct when we see our competition offering a ridiculously deep discount is to offer an even deeper discount. But before you do there are a few things deep discounting does to your brand you may want to consider.
- Deep discounting can devalue your brand, and actually drive away high quality customers
- Deep discounting can often attract customers we don’t want, and tax you and your staff with unrealistic expectations
- Deep discounting eats away at profitability
- Deep discounting sets an unhealthy expectation to potential customers that you can offer deep discounts all the time.
By choosing to sell at a higher price point than competitors, you are essentially saying “we are the premium option” and that will attract buyers with more money, more patience, realistic expectations and create long-lasting customer relationships.
Remember, you can make the same amount of money selling a $1,000 product to 10 people as a $10 product to 1,000 people.
Offering a deal doesn’t aways mean offering deep discounts
A discount code is the easiest form of deal to set up and is the preferred method of offering a deal during Black Friday, but it isn’t the only way.
Before you offer a discount on your products and services, consider offering one of these instead.
- You can extend the lifetime or warranty of a service or product sold
- You can bundle in lesser products for the same price
- You can offer additional service hours
- You can bundle “special” products and services for no added cost
- You can offer exclusive discounts to other products and services
- You cna invite buyers to a special exclusive event
These are just examples, but there are lots of ways to add value that doesn’t include discounting your products and services.
You can also supplement a discount with an added value bonus as well. It’s not an either-or world.
Have a discount policy in place
This is very important! Without a policy for using discounts, you can open yourself up to some tricky and uncomfortable questions that might jeopardize your bottom line.
- Do discounts apply to renewals?
- Can existing customers get a rebate?
- If a customer gets a refund and comes back to they get to keep the discount?
- If someone buys before the discount goes live, can they get a partial refund?
- Can you stack discounts?
- Etc…
You can reference our own discount policy for inspiration. If you get asked these questions, and you will, you can simply reference the discount policy and no one can fault you since it’s written in black and white.
Sell susatainably
You’re a business. You need to make money to pay your bills, employees, fees, taxes, etc. In order to do that you need to be profitable, and you need to respect your margins.
It’s easy to get caught up in Black Friday fever and throw caution to the wind and offer a huge discount, maybe even a lifetime deal, and make a bunch of money in the short term.
But when the dust settles, you could be caught out with more work and support than you can handle, causing anguish, fear, and anger among customers resulting in a whole lot of refunds and a loss of brand goodwill and reputation.
Think long-term, think about what your business can support, profitably. The bottom line always comes first and if that means skipping Black Friday altogether then that’s always the right call.
Show existing customers some love
There are 3 ways to make more money as a business.
- Raise prices
- Get more customers
- Sell more to existing customers
There are a few ways you can activate existing customers to spend more during Black Friday.
- Add new products and services. VIP services and bespoke work is always a big seller.
- Offer pay-up-front deals to put off future renewals
- Black Friday only products and services are also a big winner.
It’s easier to get customers with pre-existing relationships to spend money than it is to get new customers, so don’t forget about them!
Communicate clearly (and early)
Communicate your plans to your audience. Write a post and share it via all the channels you have access to. Create a timeline and share it so it’s not a surprise when your deal goes live.
By publishing a timeline and your deal before it actually starts, you are enabling your customers to plan ahead how they are going to spend their money during Black Friday.
Stick to your timeline
Listen, I think at some point we’ve all been guilty of extending a deal to a few days, maybe even a week to keep the gravy train rolling. I think that’s fine. What’s less fine is missing your start date!
If you set a time to start a deal, you better be ready because if you are not and your potential customers are unable to spend their money with you, they will spend it elsewhere.
Just a personal preference/observation, extending a deal more than a week seems a bit tacky and de-values your brand and the true value of your offer. Anyone buying past Black Friday will purchase regardless of whether or not you are running a deal and you’re just giving money away.
Putting it all together…
In the end, what matters is that your business continues to add value to the marketplace, and to do that you need to make an offer that makes sense for you, and your customers.
- Be generous, but not to your own detriment.
- Have policies in place that protect your customers and you.
- Focus on providing value, not what the competition is up to.
Good luck!
