Best Practices
Oct 30, 2024
TLDR
When you have limited time to design your Black Friday marketing campaigns, look at the buying behavior of your loyal customers and high-performing SKUs to design your Black Friday deals. Drive your BFCM sales with these seven data strategies around effective segmentation, remarketing, and product portfolio design.
Preparing for Black Friday Cyber Monday sales is the highlight of the year for Shopify merchants—it can be fun, it can be stressful, it can make you want to go bungee jumping without a rope. But if you only have four weeks to go, I’d like you to focus on these two parts of your business to hit a home run this year.
But first—do not run a 30% off site-wide sale on BFCM and call it a day. That is lazy thinking and most customers won’t even spend time browsing around to discover all you can offer.
So what should we do to make the most of the Black Friday sale?
Simply focus on the two parts of your business that matter the most—customers and products. Let’s deep dive into what I mean by that.
Customer segmentation:
Identify your most valuable customers to re-engage them
Not all customers are created equal. Yes, Black Friday Cyber Monday is a sale event and you expect a lot of customers to come to you for discounts. But you also want them to keep buying from you after BFCM.
Run an RFM (Recency-Frequency-Monetary Value) analysis on your customer base to identify your most valuable customers (those that buy frequently, spend more, and have been active recently). Once you have identified this cohort, start remarketing to them 2-3 weeks before BFCM. Also, consider creating a custom audience on Meta based on this cohort to attract new customers who match your current base.
Reach out to customers who have products in their carts
Before a major sale event like BFCM, customers tend to browse your website and add products that they intend to buy during the sale to their cart. Rewarding existing customers is a great way to jump into Black Friday sales.
Get a headstart by adding them to a Klaviyo flow promoting the products already in their cart, maybe with a discount code that acts as an early access for Black Friday sales.
Extract your list of abandoned-cart customers using this automated report.
Once you extract the list of customers, make sure to add them to another remarketing campaign leading up to the BFCM sale to create urgency in customer decision-making.
Design high-value segments based on buying behavior
Another way to customize your outreach to customers is by understanding their buying behavior:
Which specific customers spend the most?
Which customers have the highest AOV?
Who has been around longer?
Which is their predicted spend tier?
Create specific segments from this analysis and upload them to Meta for custom remarketing. Or add them to personalized Klaviyo flows.
Use Airboxr's customer segment builder to extract a list of customers based on their buying behavior.
Product merchandising and pricing:
Just like customers, not all products are created equal. Cyber Monday deals need to be carefully planned to drive repeat customers and acquire new ones.
Identify the products to discount
BFCM is a great time to liquidate your slow-moving inventory. Identify the products that need most support by looking at sell-through rates and identifying how many days of inventory you are holding.
The faster the sell-through rate and lower the days of inventory, the less support those products need for sales. You can limit the discounts you offer on those products.
Products with a low sell-through rate and higher days of inventory are primed for discounts. Even if they are loss leaders, you can consider the following:
Bundle them with fast-moving products
Give them away as a free gift when order value is above a certain threshold
Recommend them on checkout
Run a product sell-through rate report for your store.
Identify the products to promote
Airboxr research shows that certain products acquire customers who display higher LTV over their lifetime. So it only makes sense to promote them on your landing pages.
Do an analysis of your products to identify those driving higher LTV. Unfortunately, it is a long-winded process—but Airboxr compresses the analysis into a single click. Just run this report on your store.
Create special BFCM bundles
Bundles are a great way to discount products and improve sales, while also increasing AOV. But during a sale period, customers aren’t likely to spend too much time creating their own bundles—everyone is worried their product might go out of stock during the sale.
Help your customers out by providing them predesigned bundles that they can easily add to the cart.
But how do you identify the right products to bundle together?
Use this analysis called Market Basket Analysis to identify products that go together. I won’t spend too much time on explaining the methodology (you can read about it here)—simply run it using this report and identify your bundles.
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Review checkout funnel to identify products that convert well
Some products in your portfolio need a lot of consideration before a purchase. Others fly through checkout like a kid on a water slide.
Sale periods are not for consideration, they are for conversion.
Look at the checkout conversion rates for each SKU, and prominently feature those with higher conversion rates.
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When you have a limited time to make the most of your marketing efforts this holiday season, these seven steps will help you put together an effective Black Friday strategy. Go ahead set up your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals with these tips above to make the most of the BFCM weekend.
