Building a comprehensive strategy ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) is critical. When creating a seamless customer journey, an omnichannel marketing approach produces a consistent and delightful experience for prospective customers while solidifying recognition among your existing customer base.
Omnichannel marketing, as opposed to multichannel marketing (which is a product-focused approach), makes the most of your customers’ available—and preferred—methods of interacting with your brand. With an omnichannel approach, your customers come to you on their terms, and you’ll be able to reach a significantly larger audience. For example, if you have a customer who prefers Instagram over Facebook and another customer who wants to speak on the phone, they aren’t restricted by your preferred channels.
A comprehensive omnichannel marketing strategy brings your brand to your consumers across a variety of channels, allowing you to meet their needs, answer their questions, and create opportunities for conversion along the way.
Your Pre-Black Friday Marketing Strategy
Optimizing your online presence ahead of Black Friday is key. A proper omnichannel strategy incorporates social media, email, SMS, paid media, and all available channels into a seamless customer experience to keep your brand at the forefront of your customers’ minds before your sales launch. Creating a consistent identity across your available channels is key to engaging and retaining your customers.
If you have a brick-and-mortar location, you can optimize your local listings with tools such as Yext to rank higher in local search results while maintaining a consistent online presence in multiple locations—Yelp, Google Business, Apple Maps, and more.
However, the omnichannel marketing strategy you create should go far beyond your Black Friday strategy. With many channels working together to create a seamless experience, you’ll have access to an incredible amount of data to inform your ongoing marketing efforts post-sale. Here are a few examples:
Paid Media
A solid paid media strategy is an excellent way to drive brand awareness before your sale even starts. Retargeting and Google Shopping ads will bring your brand right to your customers—but make sure to keep messaging consistent across all channels. Creating a comprehensive and recognizable experience starts from your customer’s first touchpoint.
Email/SMS
From teaser emails to early sale access for subscribers to personalized recommendations, you can leverage your email and SMS lists to generate significant buzz before implementing the rest of your Black Friday marketing strategy. With tools such as Klaviyo, you can easily manage interactions with both SMS and email subscribers with a suite of analytics.
Social Media
You can drive awareness and brand recognition with user-generated content (UGC) callouts, influencer collaborations, countdowns, sneak peeks, and much more. Social media is a powerful tool to capture an audience that may not have been exposed to your brand yet—and it’s a fantastic way to drive email and SMS list growth, too.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Beyond the basic need to ensure website stability and fast loading times to handle an increase in traffic, a huge component of your omnichannel marketing strategy is offering consistent deals across channels. From your social platforms to Amazon to your brick-and-mortar store, creating that sense of consistency helps your customers not only recognize your brand through whichever platform they’re using but also recognize the deals you're offering, wherever they see them.
On top of consistency, another part of your omnichannel strategy should include comprehensive customer service across channels. With an increase in traffic, volume, and possible questions throughout the customer journey, providing multiple touchpoints for customer service across social media, chat, and via phone helps your customers feel supported and may clinch the conversion.
Post-Black Friday Cyber Monday
Even after your sales, you have an excellent opportunity to maintain relationships with your customers. By leveraging the information and data you’ve gathered, you can increase the use of personalization in future campaigns. Take advantage of abandoned checkout and cart opportunities for your email subscribers, as well. You can offer them a smaller discount to incentivize more purchases.
For example, some customers will inevitably miss your big sale. Running paid ads on social media and sending your SMS or email subscribers a 5 percent discount as a consolation prize can drive conversion post-BFCM—plus, the response you get will help you identify where your long-term customers are going to continue engaging with your brand.
Don’t forget to maintain support across multiple channels as a part of your long-term omnichannel marketing strategy. Customers expect ramped-up customer service during big sale weeks; you can go the extra mile to delight them with long-term support through their preferred channel long after the leftover turkey sandwiches have been eaten.
Put Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy to Use
Now that you’ve collected data across multiple channels, it’s time to analyze your overall omnichannel marketing strategy—which channels were the most successful for conversion, which contributed heavily toward list growth, and so on. You can use all of this information to create targeted campaigns via the most effective channels for your desired outcome in the future.
Developing your strategy ahead of time is integral for a successful BFCM, but it doesn’t stop there. Collecting and analyzing data during high-traffic times is the next step in your process to maximizing revenue and creating loyal, long-term customers. With an omnichannel strategy that keeps your brand recognizable and accessible across platforms, you’ll build recognition among prospective clients and retain existing customers with consistent messaging and an incredible user experience.
Our BFCM Playbook is a great starting point for both your omnichannel and BFCM strategies. SmartBug can help you identify and implement the top tools for your brand and integrate them seamlessly into a comprehensive omnichannel strategy to keep your customers excited and engaged through the end of the year and beyond.
