Black Friday Promo Ideas to Increase Sales (great for product-based businesses!)
Welcome to part two of my Black Friday series. Today, we're going to be talking about five different promotional ideas you can use this holiday season to make more sales of your products while people are really excited for gift giving, for purchasing multiples as gifts, and also preparing for a new year where your products might align really well with new year messaging.
If you want to learn more about that, I talked about it more in my last post, part one of this series. You can find that here: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/blog/how-to-increase-your-sales-before-2025-ends
Prefer to watch or listen rather than read this article?
I think the product-based business community is a little bit mixed in terms of Black Friday and what that means for businesses. Some of us may not have the margins to offer big discounts or simply just don't want to devalue our products and lower the price a lot. It also is a very high consumer time. Things are a little bit hectic, and it can be harder to gain attention online with how much noise, how much posting, how many sales there are going on.
Whatever bucket you fall into—whether you're excited about having some sort of holiday campaign or promotion, or you're not interested at all, or you're considering it and know it can be valuable—I want to share five different ways you can potentially host some sort of campaign or promotion during this season.
Last time, we also talked about timing and that you don't have to do it during Black Friday weekend. You can make it sooner if you want to. In fact, a lot of companies started doing that because of the noise and also the higher ad costs during Black Friday weekend. I'm also planning to do it early. So, do keep in mind that your time is yours and you can definitely have a campaign earlier in October or early November if you want to beat that Black Friday rush.
So, now that we've talked about timing, let's dive into the five different Black Friday promotion or campaign ideas that you can possibly have. You can also do a combination of one or more of these; that is what I’m planning for my own Black Friday promotions.
Discounting Products
This is what a lot of businesses do. They will put a pretty steep discount on all of their products or maybe their new releases or just their older products and leave their new things full price. So you definitely have that bandwidth and that decision for what is best for you. Not every product-based business is going to have the margin to reduce the prices of your products drastically, which I completely understand.
*Those on our wait list will receive an invite to join us inside the Club in early October: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/creatives-content-club-waitlist
Free Shipping
Another thing you can do, if you ship out your products yourself, is you can offer free shipping for a limited window of time. Everything else stays the same, but free shipping can be enticing. Or once you reach a certain amount in your cart, you qualify for free shipping.
Bonuses
The other option that I really like is offering a bonus instead of a discount. So, maybe whenever they make a purchase during this certain campaign window that you're running, they get a bonus item included with their purchase.
If you are an author who sells on Amazon and you're not really in control of when someone makes a purchase, and you're not shipping the product out yourself, you can have a form that people can use to submit their proof of purchase. And then you mail them their bonus. Or maybe it's a virtual bonus, which would be even more cost-effective, such as a virtual Q&A, a special event, or a meeting.
Or you send them virtual bookmarks, a virtual ebook copy of the book they purchased, or something else that would make sense for your audience. And if you do ship directly and sell directly through your website, you can throw in an extra bonus with their purchase. Just make sure that is super clear on your website and in all of your Black Friday marketing that they are getting this bonus item when they purchase and how to qualify for that.
Tiers
Now, that leads me to number three, which I've been seeing more and more lately, and I honestly really like it. There are different tiers, and as you spend more, you get more bonus items. A market that I really like recently did this where they had it set so if you spent at least $50, you got this one item that was worth about $10.
But if you spent $100, you got a couple more items as a bonus thrown into your order. If you spent $150 . . . and so on and so forth. And the final one (I think) was around $500 if you were spending at this boutique. You got a lot of extra gifts, and it really felt like you were getting almost the equivalent money's worth to what you were actually buying.
Maybe your customers buy multiples of something from your site and give it to multiple friends because they're also getting a gift for themselves included. So, that's something to consider if you do have multiple products to buy from to encourage people to not just buy one but to buy those multiples.
Repackaged Offers
That leads me to number four, which is offering your products in a different way than what you would normally offer them in. For example, maybe you typically sell books year-round, but during this season, you offer signed books. Or maybe you offer handmade items year-round, available individually, but during this season of the year, you offer a bundle deal where they can get more for a slight discount than if they were buying separately.
*For more ideas on ways to effectively repackage, check out the corresponding YouTube video or podcast (linked under the image at the top of the page).
Daily Specials
The next thing is one that I'm excited about and one that I’m doing this year for Marketing by Shelby, which is having a different offer each day of your campaign.
I've been seeing this for a while now, and it's something that I've wanted to do, but haven't quite been able to pull together in time. So, I'm starting very early this year and have my list of things that I want to do for my campaign in November, which, for me, is actually going to be one or two offers per week for November.
Say, for example, we're doing Black Friday to Cyber Monday (4 days), and you offer the same deal for all four days. Instead, change it up so that each day is a different deal. That way, during your promotion, you have customers not only buying on day one, but they also come back day 2, 3, and 4 to see what you have to offer that day.
With this strategy, you can run your business however you like, but we also want to maintain trust with our audience. So, I wouldn't advise offering something like 30% off of everything day one, and then on day two, offering 40% off everything, right? Because then those customers from day one are going to be upset. And just make sure that if you do decide to try this, offer something different every single day that doesn't overlap.
*To learn more about the specific ways I plan on promoting my offers using these methods, check out the corresponding YouTube video or podcast (linked under the image at the top of the page).
Coming Up
So, there are 5 different ideas, but remember that you can layer multiple or just pick one and run with it—or you can think of something else entirely! If none of these resonated with you, let me know in the comments if you have a different promotion idea that you're going to be doing this season as well. I would love to cheer you on and support you in that.
In November, I'll be sending out those promotions, bonuses, discounts, all of the things, including some things that I've never offered before, so there's always something new going on. If you want to stay informed, join my newsletter: Marketing Monday (click the link and scroll all the way to the bottom)
In October, I will also have custom marketing strategies for sale. Me and my team do all of your audience research, your messaging, and put together a 60-day roadmap for you and your product.
There are only five available for October and five available for November. The wait list for that is marketingbyshelby.com/custom if you’d like to sign up, because I’m only emailing the wait list about them since they tend to sell out fast.
Also, the Creative’s Content Club is opening back up to the public in October! If you'd like to get on the wait list for that, you'll be the first one who is invited to join us: marketingbyshelby.com/club.
And if you would like a freebie in the meantime, I have a variety of free resources at: marketingbyshelby.com/freebie.
Thank you so much for reading. I hope you found it helpful, and I'm excited to cheer you on with any promotions you're doing during Q4. It is a very exciting time, and honestly one of my favorite times of the year because we get to be so creative and just experiment with our businesses these last few months and see what happens
See you next time. Bye!