What is Black Friday Marketing?

As an online merchant, Black Friday is essential to increasing your sales. It is the day after American Thanksgiving. This marks the start of the Christmas holiday shopping season for consumers, meaning retailers often heavily promote their stores and mark down prices to entice shoppers to buy products both online and offline. Some businesses offer different types of discounts or Black Friday deals during these days. For example, a fashion retailer may have 50 percent off everything on Black Friday, Buy One Get One etc. 
Black Friday may look business-driven, but it’s the consumers who actually started this shopping event. It was first observed in Philadelphia where there was always high traffic the day after Thanksgiving. Here I am going to enlist some Black Friday marketing strategies to strengthen customer engagement, conversion rate, average order value and more.

1. Test Your Website for loading: A successful Black Friday marketing strategy is to prepare for a potential surge in traffic. To do this, contact your web hosting provider to discuss the traffic limitations of your store. While many servers should be able to handle increased traffic sustainably without upgrading, be sure to analyze the data from previous years to prepare for the worst case scenario.
2. Prepare your site for Pop-ups: There are two predominant challenges you face during Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
   • First of all, customers leaving without making a purchase.
   • Secondly, the often transient value of visitors to your site on that day. But, luckily for merchants, pop-ups can be used to help with both of these issues. Keep shoppers on their way to the check out by using pop-ups, triggered when someone goes to leave your site, to offer them sweet Black Friday deals, offers and even a free gift that will seal the deal. As a pop up you can send coupon code or free shipping messages.
3. Personalized Black Friday Advertising Emails: You can set up email marketing campaigns targeting those people who visited your store during Black Friday, using the insight you collected to add relevant product recommendations that encourage engagement and a potential purchase. While promoting your most popular products is a standard part of your overall product recommendation strategy, dates such as Black Friday is particularly suited to driving traffic to these products.
4. Display Your Black Friday Deals and Discounts: During the sale period customers expect a great deal on your inventory without having to actively search out the discounts. It goes without saying that every part of your website should have discounted items and that these should be pushed to the forefront – but what’s the best way to display them? One way to beef up your Black Friday marketing campaign is to drive the discount home: amend your styling to include the crossed-out full price or even show the exact percentage that would be saved. It sounds simple, but really emphasizing the potential discount will motivate shoppers that are unsure.
5. Use Messaging to Increase Conversion: If email sounds kind of obvious and many don’t even question it when planning their marketing campaigns, SMS still has to work much harder to make it to the list. SMS is actually one of not that many channels that can cut through the noise and ensure that your audience hears what you’re saying. There are a few easy, yet effective, ways to leverage messaging in your Black Friday marketing strategy to steer your customers to checkout. Let’s look at some of the most effective tactics. 
6. Return policy need to highlight: A poor returns policy is one of the biggest barriers to purchase, and on these sale days a clear returns policy is a make-or-break in your holiday marketing strategy. If you have a fantastic returns policy, highlight it everywhere you can. During Black Friday people are buying in a hurry, the sales cycles are substantially shortened and they don’t have the time they usually do to research. Your job is to make them feel comfortable making a snap decision- and it is your returns policy that will do this. If there is transparency (somewhere on product pages or during the checkout process) allowing a customer to fully understand the terms under which they buy a product.
7. Retarget your customer: Black friday shoppers have incredibly short attention spans and will compare deals across multiple vendors and price comparison sites. Give your customers ample opportunity to conclude their purchase by retargeting through email, Facebook and display advertising. For example you can take abandoned cart emails, where normally you may wait a few hours or a few days to remind abandoned cart owners of the goods they were about to buy on Black Friday lower this to five minutes to avoid them going elsewhere.