How to Make Black Friday a Huge Success
When you hear “Black Friday” what do you picture?
Personally, as a consumer I think of people lining up outside retail shops at 4am the day after Thanksgiving looking for insanely good deals. But as an entrepreneur, think of it as one of the biggest sales days of the year.
Black Friday isn’t just one day anymore. Now, it’s turned into a 4-day (or more) event, usually ending on “Cyber Monday” as more and more businesses go online.
If you’re like most consumers, you know what Black Friday is and might have even gotten up early to snag some deals yourself. But in a post COVID-19 world, this year, Black Friday will look very different from recent years. Instead of people lining up on Friday morning (or even Thursday afternoon after a Thanksgiving feast), almost all retailers are going online to avoid crowds and maintain social distancing.
If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s time to take advantage of this “holiday” to help you generate more leads and sales. Check out some of these stats from Forbes for some extra motivation:
- “60% of holiday shoppers said a majority of their weekend purchases were driven primarily by sales.”
- “The NRF (National Retail Federation) reported shoppers spent an average of $335 per person during that five-day period.”
That’s right, 6 out of 10 shoppers purchase because of sales! Plus, the Washington Post said, “The biggest spenders, millennials aged 24 to 35, paid out an average of $419.52 per person.”
As an entrepreneur, I’m sure you can see all the potential for offering special deals for the biggest shopping weekend of the year. In this post, I’ll help guide you in the right direction so that you can put together an irresistible offer and capitalize on this huge opportunity.
Black Friday For Entrepreneurs
According to this article, Black Friday 2019 saw 93.2 million buyers shopping online and sales hit 7.4 billion, an all-time high!
But it’s not just about generating more sales. Here’s the thing, Black Friday helps your business a few different ways.
1. Buyers are Ready
First, buyers are already spending more money during these 4-5 days than any other time of the year. At this point, society has programmed us to buy more stuff around the holidays, especially on Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
While it used to mean finding great deals to put under the Christmas tree for your loved ones, now basically any and all businesses run some sort of deal. Since people are already looking for deals and ready to spend, it’s vital that you get your offer in front of them.
As an entrepreneur, you need to take advantage of warm buyers and give them the final push to invest in your offer.
2. Scarcity and Urgency
The second reason Black Friday is great for entrepreneurs is because there is built-in urgency and scarcity with these deals. Since it’s a limited-time offer, people know when the deal ends and are much more likely to pull the trigger.
As an entrepreneur, this is great because with the right offer, you can get people to finally take action! Having a clear deadline is a cornerstone of running successful offers, especially for online entrepreneurs using live and automated webinars.
Now that you see how this holiday can help your business, let’s dive into the specifics of what makes an irresistible offer.
Creating Your Black Friday/Cyber Monday Offer
1. Get Clear on Your Irresistible Offer
Before we dive into the ins and outs of promoting your limited-time offer, let’s make sure that you have an offer your audience can’t refuse. This is the time to go big as it’s a once per year offer.
Do not run the same special offer that you normally run as it likely won’t be enough. This offer should be unique, otherwise it won’t have the same shock factor.
The one thing I would say is to be careful about discounting your offer as a coach or course creator.
Discounting leads you to becoming the Walmart of your niche instead of Nordstrom’s. Plus, if any of your existing customers see a huge price difference from what they invested in, it could lead to some disgruntled customers.
Instead of discounting, I suggest bonus stacking multiple offers that pair well together. Here’s an example for how it could work if you have multiple offers:
Example:
Let’s say that you are a photographer and have two offers currently:
- $197 paid webinar/masterclass about starting a photography business
- $997 online course that helps people market their photography business, land clients, and go full-time
Since these two offers work together, offer the $197 FREE for anyone who enrolls. If you only have one offer, add on a free 15 or 30-minute coaching session with you to increase the total value. Plus, this strategy could lead to a future upsell into a higher ticket coaching program as well.
Once you narrow down on your offer and figure out what will help your audience the most, I suggest creating an FAQ page for consumers too. This way you can answer any common questions and link to this resource instead of answering every question one at a time. By linking to an FAQ page, it will save you a lot of time and hopefully lead to more sales as well.
2. Have a Firm Deadline
Once you get clear on the offer, next up is figuring out the launch window. Just like you would with a live webinar launch, it’s essential to have a clear start and end time for your offer.
Based on nearly 10 years of running webinars, I think you should make the offer 3 to 5 days, especially if you’re a solopreneur.
Longer launch windows don’t mean more sales! Instead, the longer the launch window, the more work and followup is needed.
If you’re a one-person business, keep your offer simple and easy. For example, it could run with the traditional Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
Regardless of your launch window, just make sure you communicate the deadline in all of your marketing as buyers will have tons of messaging from other businesses as well. If you’ve done a great job promoting your offer, hopefully your audience will be eager to invest when the doors open.
While some people will buy as soon as you open the doors, others might come in over the weekend and some might wait until the last minute. But as long as you are following up with the right message to the right people, you should keep getting sales until your offer expires.
3. Seed Your Offer in Advance
After you nail down your offer and timeframe, start seeding details about it on your social media and email list. Since people won’t see all your social media content or open all your emails, it’s important to get the offer out there early and often.
While you shouldn’t give away all the details of your special away just yet, instead make sure to seed how valuable it is and how it can help them get results!
Remember, people don’t buy online courses or coaching, they buy to get results. Focus on the results and the transformation that each of your offers and bonuses provide.
This is also a great time to share testimonials and case studies from people that you’ve already helped get results as well.
4. Be Everywhere
The fourth tip is to be as omnipresent as possible.
You want to be everywhere your audience is so they can start to learn more about your offer and see it multiple times. Sometimes it takes several marketing messages for your audience to really connect and consider your offer.
Once your offer is live, go all in on promoting your offer with:
- Social Media: Post your offer to all your platforms regularly or schedule in advance so they automatically.
- Facebook Groups: Make sure to promote your offer to your Facebook group by going live and sharing details about the offer.
- Facebook Ads: You can use paid advertising to promote your offer to a new audience, target warm audiences, and retarget segments of your list as well.
- Email List: Finally, make sure you email your list with all the specifics of your offer and send them plenty of follow ups to get through their busy inbox.
5. Follow up (A lot)!
Finally, make sure that you are following up with your audience during the launch window. Since pretty much every business is emailing their list, consumers’ inboxes are swamped.
As a marketer, you need to break through the noise with clever subject lines and consistent emails. While it might feel like you’re sending a lot of emails, you want to make sure that your audience sees it!
Also, make sure to post on social media, go live in Facebook groups, and keep monitoring your ad spend and sales. If things are working and your funnel is converting well, increase your ad budget to keep generating more leads and sales.
Finally, make sure to reiterate that this is a once per year deal! Shout your offer to the rooftops so people can get excited about it and take action before the deadline expires.
EasyWebinar Makes Black Friday Simple
While this can feel a little overwhelming, make sure to keep it simple. Luckily, when you use EasyWebinar so much of this is taken care of for you. As someone who’s had their life changed from webinars, I am proud of the fact that our all-in-one software can help entrepreneurs just like you.
Here’s just a few examples of how you can use our platform to run epic Black Friday offers.
Power Webinars & Automation
Since Black Friday to Cyber Monday is such a busy time for most people, it’s probably not the best time to run a live webinar. From past data, we’ve found that most users don’t get nearly the same registration and show up rates.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use webinars during this busy time. Instead, we encourage you to take advantage of evergreen webinars to sell your offer.
>>Related: Avoid the 5 most common pitfalls and 5 best practices for automated webinars
Since people can consume automated webinars on their schedule using the “Just-in-time” feature, it will get more people to see your offer.
CRM Integrations
While automated and power webinars are great for Black Friday, don’t forget about all of our integrations when using EasyWebinar. Our all-in-one software makes it easy to segment your list and automatically add registrants plus trigger specific actions.
Our software works with the biggest email providers in the game including:
- Drip
- Mailchimp
- ConvertKit
- Get Response
- Active Campaign
- Keap (Infusionsoft)
And more! Click here to view the full list of integrations.
EasyWebinar Dashboard
Finally, don’t forget about our easy-to-understand analytics. While we don’t talk enough about the analytics EW provides in knowing and understanding who came, who watched, what actions they took and more. You can use this data for future launches and see what you need to tweak to get even better results in the future.
Final Thoughts
While it’s easy to feel like people are bombarded with endless offers on Black Friday, it’s worth your time creating a huge offer. Remember, people are in a buying mode and understand that sales are limited. This naturally helps you create urgency and built in scarcity with your offer.
But don’t forget, you want to make sure whatever promotion you run is right for you and your business. Don’t give away the house if it doesn’t feel right.
Instead, make sure your offers help you generate more leads and sales with bonus stacking not steep discounts.
Even if it’s a lower ticket offer, getting people in the door is huge. Remember, a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. If you can get people to buy smaller offers, they’re much more likely to buy larger offers in the future.
This year, I encourage you to take advantage of the online shift and start running Black Friday deals to generate more leads and sales.
EasyWebinar Black Friday Offer
Speaking of Black Friday, I wanted to let you know to be on the lookout for our upcoming promotion. If you’re a course creator, coach, and webinar user, you will have a chance to save BIG on our upcoming offer.
While I won’t give you all the details just yet, make sure that you take advantage of our 14-day FREE EasyWebinar trial. When you join and see the amazing features of our webinar platform I’ll send you all the details on the upcoming EasyWebinar Black Friday offer.
>>Click here to start your 14-day FREE EasyWebinar trial.
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