Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022 – Preparing Retail Deals

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, SaleCycle looks at key examples to determine how online retailers have been building up to this huge sales period.

Now a highly popular sales event – highlighted in the majority of retailer’s calendars – online brands are currently planning specialised promotions and sales events to achieve the best possible outcomes, to see them into the Christmas period and beyond.

Black Friday Promotions – Building Awareness 

With so much competition for traffic and visitors in the days around Black Friday, it pays to drive awareness of your sales and get your brand in the customer’s mind. Once you’ve captured a wider, more engaged audience along with your loyal customer base, it becomes easier to predict customer behaviour and respond to their needs.

Retargeting and remarketing emails, sent early in November, are designed to raise awareness of the offers on your site. Offering early access is a good way to drive sign-ups to loyalty schemes and branded credit and debit cards. Following these examples, users who sign up for either can access sales two days before Black Friday.

In the same vein, onsite conversion messages also help to bring attention to certain promotions and create a sense of urgency before the sales even begin. 

For Walmart, Black Friday deals don’t begin until the 27th of November, but in this example the brand decided to tease some upcoming offers, as well as a guide to the visitor’s nearest store.

Black Friday Extended Deals

After gaining popularity in the UK and beyond since its origin in the USA, Black Friday has evolved into a much longer sales event, with most sales taking place in the weeks surrounding the date – with pre and post-sales events, leading to Cyber Monday.

Traffic tends to build up in anticipation of sales events like Black Friday as shoppers check out upcoming promotions and offering early deals can persuade some of these visitors to buy before the big day. It’s wise to take advantage of early Black Friday sales to gain brand exposure, and help to take an advantage over rival businesses. 
In this example, HP had already begun to offer promotions, with a three day sale on selected products. This limited time sale, helped by the use of an ecommerce countdown timer, can persuade people to buy long before Black Friday.

While early offers can spread the load of customers to your site, our own data suggests that many shoppers still wait for bigger deals on Black Friday itself. Home Depot has taken a similar approach here, with its homepage already in full Black Friday mode.

One way to address this is to offer price guarantees, as Currys PC World is doing in this example – they offer to refund the difference if prices are discounted further on Black Friday.

This is one way to give shoppers the confidence to buy without fear of missing out on better discounts, overall decreasing those cart abandonment rates.

Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities

Upselling and Cross-selling for any ecommerce site can be utilised both throughout the customer’s browsing session and during the checkout process of the initial sale. Choosing where and when you can put forward upselling and cross-selling opportunities is all down to knowing your customer base.

With the added drive of Black Friday sales, customers may be more inclined to purchase an additional item since they’ve already saved money. This is a great opportunity to push certain items and increase overall AOVs, so it should definitely be part of your Black Friday sales plan. Take a look at these cross sell email examples, to build that pre-sale customer service and retention.

Driving Repeat Visits

One aim of Black Friday marketing should be to drive repeat visits by giving visitors plenty of reasons to keep coming back to the site.

Here, Best Buy’s ‘doorbuster’ deals are a good example of this. These are time-limited daily deals which encourage shoppers to buy there and then rather than waiting. By offering to send daily text alerts, Best Buy is also helping to build a bigger database to market its Black Friday deals.

In this example, Kohl’s is offering $10 in ‘Kohl’s Cash’ for every $50 spent up to the Black Friday date. This works in two ways – people are incentivised to spend more in the run up to Black Friday, but the cash (essentially in the same way a gift card or promo code works) encourages people to return later to buy more.

Reviewed by Brad Ward
Written by Casey Turnbull
— Updated on 15/09/2022