Black Friday marketing hacks
It's the time of the year to sell
A running list of all the Black Friday marketing hacks I know and use:
Get on BF listings early, because many of them are shown in chronological order. The earlier you get on, the higher up on top your listing will be seen first. Some great ones here. Or better yet, start your own listing!
Start early. Start your BF sale a week before 24 November, to socialize people to your deal. People need time to think about their purchase. Launching your sale on Black Friday itself might mean it gets drowned in the noise, so launching earlier might help reduce that.
End late. Unlike what we like to believe, our customers are not always on top of our deals. They’re busy with work, or errands. They got Thanksgiving to prepare for. Sometimes they just plain forget. So don’t cut off the deal on the dot on 27 Nov. You can extend it loudly or quietly for another week. For me, I say the sale is till 30 Nov (3 more days after the official Black Friday period), but I actually expire it on 10 Dec. Let the stragglers have a chance to buy even after the last minute. You might get a few more conversions.
Promote multiple times. Don’t just promote once and be done. Again, it might get drowned in the noise, or people forget or get overwhelmed. Remind people, while not threading over into annoyance. I plan to promote early, then on the actual day, and a few days before it ends.
User-generated amplification. I do a 40% baseline discount, then offer a 50% discount code for those who retweet my tweet. That way, more distribution by my customers!
Partnership bundle deals. First time trying this year! Zylvie, an ecommerce platform similar to Gumroad, has a partnerships feature where creators can team up to create a product page to cross-promote their products. So I teamed up with Gregor from Zite Design to bundle a Carrd Mega Pack of 3 plugins with 3 templates this year, at 50% off. We think it’s probably the biggest Carrd bundle deal ever assembled so far!
Urgency. We also set a countdown timer on our product page to show how much time is left till the deal ends, to create some sort of psychological urgency.
The B in BF stands for BIG (discounts). A friend said he doesn’t get out of bed for 10% BF discounts. It’s true. Customers are savvy now. 10% is like a discount for any normal day. You want to make it a substantial chunk of change. I dare say for BF, 40% is the minimum. I do 40% off all my plugins as a baseline, and then offer a separate 50% discount code for those who retweet my tweet. If you can, go straight for 50%. Don’t worry about whether you’re cheapening your product, diluting your brand, or attracting low quality customers. You can worry about that if you’re Apple (notice they never ever have discounts?). For us indie hackers, BF is a great opportunity try out different or new types of customers, and convert those who might be on the fence, or in countries where their currency is not strong. Best part of BF imo is it allows us to do pricing experiments in a culturally acceptable occasion, without huge blowback from existing customers. If it doesn’t work, you switch back to normal pricing after 3 days! No harm, no foul. If it does work, you learned something new.
Any other Black Friday marketing hacks you know of?