Black Friday and Cyber Monday: what are the differences and what is the best strategy?

Despite being two very similar days, Black Friday takes place on the last Friday in November and is a special day for consumers and extremely important for brands.

It’s a day when stores, essentially physical stores, offer big discounts. In recent years, this trend has also spread to online stores.

Cyber Monday, which takes place on the Monday after Black Friday, usually deals on technology items in online stores, but as with Black Friday, this trend has also spread to physical stores.

In recent years (with the exception of the Covid years) there has been an increase in sales and records have been broken in the number of online sales. 2023 is no exception.

In 2022, Salesforce reported that historic results were achieved and that around 107 billion euros in online sales revenue was generated during the Black Friday period, with the “Buy Now Pay Later” model playing a major role.

  Source: Think With Google 2020

According to data provided by Google, in the United States and the United Kingdom, 84% and 73% of people wait until Black Friday to make a purchase, which represents a good opportunity for your brand to stand out in the market and consequently increase the number of sales and your customer base.

It’s also important to realize that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are not just two isolated days in the calendar. Increasingly, the event extends over a week or even the entire month of November. It is no longer just a Friday, but the entire week or month.

Brands should therefore plan a strategy in advance, so that there are no impediments to the consumer’s purchasing decision and they can achieve a greater volume of sales.

Source: Think With Google 2020

Why should you start planning your Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategy in advance?

Consumers usually start planning some of their purchases for Black Friday and Cyber Monday at least 30 days in advance, so it’s important to start early in September to check if there are any unresolved product/service issues and define the strategy and best practices if necessary.

The marketing department should draw up a detailed schedule of all actions, including the start and end dates of campaigns, dates for sending promotional emails and social media posts.

In addition, the ideal is to start launching the campaign at the end of September, but on a smaller scale, in order to increase and create awareness and also to be able to resolve any problems that may arise with the campaign, ensuring that everything is perfect at the time of the big launch.

Just as important as planning is creating truly irresistible offers, with discounts that are worthwhile and have real added value for the customer.

What’s more, if the strategy is planned in advance it’s possible to create audience lists for remarketing and product standards (where the magic really happens), which will mean that in the end the campaign is as appropriate as possible for the consumer, as it will take into account their demographics, interests, behaviors and, above all, purchasing intentions.

You should therefore divide your customer base into groups, understand their profile, which route they take to reach your brand and look for new, similar customers.

It’s important to have a consistent presence with your consumers, with a relevant message, since consumers are much more likely to buy a product they’ve heard of or are familiar with on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This is called creating a competitive advantage.

Starting your strategic planning early will help you maximize your cross-channel impact, as there needs to be coherence across all channels for the campaign to actually generate good results.

Omnichannel maximization is essential, as it is necessary to connect all business segments consistently in order to integrate the consumer experience, regardless of the channel they are using. It is increasingly clear that many consumers are often influenced by digital channels before they go to a physical store and, therefore, if there is no coherence between online and offline communication, this can lead to a problem and the consumer ending up not making the purchase.

Essentially, you need to understand how to impact consumers, how to measure this impact on total sales and how to turn insights into omnichannel strategies.

You also need to check that your website is prepared (and optimized) for the long-awaited increase in traffic.

Tips for better results on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

• Be present, be personal and be quick.
• Take the opportunity to meet and increase your loyal customer base.
• You need to have good logistics skills and prepare for possible stock-outs.
• Everything needs to be integrated and aligned with the business strategy to get the best results, i.e. the Merchant Center needs to be aligned with Shopping Ads and the Landing Page.
• In order for everything to be integrated so as to achieve the business objectives, it is recommended that you have an excellent feed, a campaign structure aligned with the feed and its objectives, the right bidding strategies and, finally, correct measurement to assess the business impact.
• Optimize the loading speed of your most important pages.
• Solve problems such as non-responsive scrolling, content that changes position.
• Try to be present at every point of purchase.
• Be prepared for traffic peaks.

Aspects to take into account when planning your strategy

• On mobile and desktop, slow loading speeds, long forms and poor UX leave users frustrated.
• When a user has a bad online experience on mobile, they are 62% more likely not to buy from that brand again in the future.
• 53% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
• 90% of users give up if they can’t remember a username or password.
• Consider the growing demand for “installment payments”, searches for “free shipping”; searches that have the keyword “gifts”, “promotions”, “coupons” and “promotional coupons” associated with them.

With the growth of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it is extremely important to plan in advance and in detail the strategy that best suits your brand.

In this period, having a brand with great awareness is a crucial factor, since although the lowest prices are still often decisive in the purchasing process, there are many other factors that are also essential and that influence the consumer’s final decision.

In addition, at Smartlinks we recommend that you have campaigns before the peak of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with the aim of creating audience lists, as this will allow us to make more incisive investments at the peak of demand and thus maximize every euro invested by our partners.

In this sense, each brand must have a digital strategy with its positioning, message and communication well defined, as well as a well-structured, appealing website with interesting content for consumers and an effective presence on social networks.

This is definitely a channel to make the most of. Use social media to create a buzz of anticipation. Posting teasers, sharing stories of satisfied customers and promoting products in a creative way are all actions that will attract the public’s attention.

Are you ready for Black Friday? Smartlinks can help you define your digital strategy by always offering the best solutions.