The busiest online shopping day is almost here! Black Friday is certainly one of the most anticipated events of the year in terms of discounts: and it is expected both by the buyers, who want to find and take advantage of the best prices of the year for their much-desired products, but also expected by online stores, their main objective is to significantly increase their sales.

And because 2020 has not been the best year for ecommerce businesses so far in many areas (most buyers being much more restrained this year or even economically affected), we thought we would list 5 easy marketing strategies to apply for any online store, through which you can maximize your Black Friday 2020 sales:

1. Test and optimize your website’s loading speed

We’ve said it before and we still stand by it: the website loading speed is one of the main aspects that can influence the performance of a campaign. A longer website loading time will lead to a bigger bounce rate, and this means only one thing: you lose money - both from those invested in Social Media Ads or Google Ads campaigns, and also from potential orders that would have been placed on your website by those who were not patient enough for your site to load.

You can test your loading speed with Google PageSpeedInsights - pay attention to the time until the first wave of content is displayed, but also to the time elapsed until the website becomes interactive. Our recommendation is to keep the latter at less than 3 seconds, especially if it is an ecommerce website. This tool will also give you recommendations to improve the loading time.

Based on our experience, most of the time, the images are the ones that cause most problems, because many do not optimize their size before uploading them. If you want quality images, but that do not affect the performance of the site, we recommend that you upload them to a width of 1024px, and have a size of around 100kb - in this case, TinyJPG will rescue you with image compression.

2. FOMO is a must on your website

FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out is the feeling that you are missing something important that everyone else except you already knows and is taking advantage of - it is a psychological impulse that people cannot refrain from. FOMO can also be applied in marketing, in the form of messages that arouse in your audience the desire to buy for fear of losing something important. If you familiar with the travel industry, you have certainly noticed the notifications of this type used intensively by Booking.com.

How can you implement FOMO on your website?

• Show that people buy your products

• Highlight the missed opportunities

• Highlight the limited stock levels

• Set an expiration date for offers on product pages

3. Use Pop-ups

Even if you have amazing discounts, not everyone who enters your website is ready to buy at that time - they may want to either look for more offers before deciding, or maybe they have to rethink their budget or do more research about the product. No matter the case, if they visited your site, it's important not to miss them - use a pop-up that detects their intention to leave the website and give them a reason to stay (or even buy).

For example, you can offer them a free shipping code regardless of the order, a discount or even a bonus product for a higher value purchase - whatever you offer them, don't forget to capture their email address and send them their surprise on their email. Make sure to catch their attention with the "offer expires soon" reminder, if they don't make a purchase in time.

4. Automated emails are the key to conversions

Speaking of emails, we are huge fans of Email Marketing - this channel has a very high ROI (Return Of Investment) for our clients, so we can only recommend you to you include it in your Marketing Strategy. In addition to the regular newsletters announcing your discounts for Black Friday 2020, you should also include automated emails in your plan to increase your conversion rate.

The one we recommend for this event is the Abandoned cart automated email - as we have mentioned before, not all website visitors are ready to buy, so we must apply a strategy for those who abandon the shopping cart.

One hour after leaving the cart, you can set a reminder email, along with an extra motivation, such as free shipping or extra discount, but make sure not to forget to add recommendations for similar products, as well as a section of positive reviews for your products / services to give them more confidence.

5. Use Social Media to your advantage

According to a recent study, Millennials are the ones who buy the most on Black Friday. You might also wonder where do you find this segment of buyers, and the answer is… in Social Media! And that is because social networks such as Facebook or Instagram are dominated by people between 23 and 40 years old.

Take advantage of these insights and include Social Media Marketing in your Black Friday marketing strategy - don’t forget to also feature your offers and products with the best discounts on organic posts, and also, don't forget to tag your products in your Facebook / Instagram Shop, create Paid Campaigns Ads (ideally with Add to Cart objective) well targeted to your target audience and don't forget about remarketing, because it is much easier to convert a person who has already visited your site than one who is at the first interaction with you!

Pro Tip 1: Make sure to use visuals in the right formats for each social network. If you need help with design, we highly recommend Canva - it's a free tool with many templates that will help you improve your online image.

Pro Tip 2: Use around 25-30 relevant hashtags for each Instagram post - they will help you increase your organic reach and, of course, your brand awareness.

We hope that our marketing strategies will help you with preparing for this year’s Black Friday and will help you reach the sales goals you have set for this event. If you need extra help, give us a shout either at hello@marketiu.ro, on Facebook or on Instagram and we will answer you as soon as we can.

Have a great Black Friday!