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You’re probably going to schedule your posts on social media, send a newsletter to your mailing list or run some other type of promotion. It’s all great, but it’s not enough – you also need to give people a reason to buy. I know it sounds obvious, but I don’t see it enough and it can make a really big difference in your conversion rate. People like to be told what to do, and even though they might love your product, if you don’t give them a reason to buy it, they probably won’t.
Black Friday is the start of the holiday shopping season, and it might be a perfect reason to buy from you – you just need to remind your audience of that. You can, for example, send them a recommendation or create one image per recommendation and suggest a few of your products as gifts. It may be something like: ‘Get X for your sister’ or ‘Save 50% off dad’s Christmas present with our Black Friday sale’. Try to make people think about why it’s a great idea to buy their Christmas present now while it’s Black Friday and explain that your product is a great gift.
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You don’t have to have a sale on Black Friday. It’s great if you can, but I don’t want you to do it unless you know your numbers very well and are very clear on how big discount you can afford and still make a profit. If you’re not sure I want you to go back to your pricing strategy and understand what is the profit margin on each of your products and which ones you can put on sale.
Don’t feel pressured to give a big discount because everyone else does it. You really don’t have to do it, unless you know it’s still making you money or you want to get rid of some stock. Even discounted items should still make you money! I know it sounds really obvious, but if you don’t know your profit margins, running a sale can be dangerous and detrimental.Â
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Paid ads are wonderful. They are a great way to reach a wider audience, get people to your shop and turn them into customers. Although they are fabulous, I think you shouldn’t be using them in a few cases. The first one is if you are not experienced at all with paid ads. Don’t start on Black Friday unless you can get help from a professional or have time and money to invest in a training and do some experiments beforehand. The reason for that is because Black Friday is really competitive and ads are more expensive at this time of year. It may end up costing you a lot of money and not bringing results.
Another situation I don’t want you to be using paid ads on Black Friday weekend is if you’re not clear on what your conversion rate is. I don’t want you to start bringing paid traffic to your shop if you don’t know for sure that this traffic is going to convert into sales. If you don’t track conversion rates, again, it’s probably not the best to test that on Black Friday because you could be paying a lot for ads to be sending traffic to your site and then that traffic would not convert into a sale. That’s pretty much just money you put out the window.
I’m not writing this to scare you out of using paid ads. They are great and I do think that:
then 100% go for it because it’s a great opportunity.
Are you running a sale this Black Friday? Are you using ads to help you with sales? Let me know in the comments below!
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