I’m betting you’re reading this because Black Friday is coming at you faster than you ever thought it would — and you don’t have anything organized and you’re wondering
“How will I ever be ready for Black Friday in one month?”
…and you want me to tell you what you should do, and that’s exactly what I will be doing in this article.
Sure, it’s better to start early, but if you haven’t we’re going to talk about what you can still do now – whether you sell on Etsy or on your own website – and then break that down for you into achievable steps.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
So in a perfect world, you’ve read my article where I told you how to prepare ahead of time for your best Black Friday yet — and in doing so, in a perfect world, you’ve attracted new people into your world… so you’ve added people to your social media following and to your email list.
And you’ve welcomed them, gotten them to like you, and earned their trust, essentially priming them so that they have enough trust to buy when Black Friday comes.
You’ve also warmed up existing customers, existing followers, and existing email subscribers, and you might have done that either with an organic strategy or paid strategies, as I highlight in my other Black Friday article.
Now if you’ve done that, great! This article builds on top of it, and we’re going to talk about what you should do now that you’ve done those things, like how do you practically run the sales, what are the dates and strategy going to be, and what needs to happen when.
But if you haven’t done that, you can still organize a Black Friday sale in time, it just means that you are going to be focusing on your existing audiences.
It’s not that it’s not possible to build your audience now, it’s just that it’s a bit late to make that happen from a timing perspective, especially if you are talking about Facebook or Instagram ads or anything like that.
Not only are paid ads really expensive at this time of year, but there’s also not much that you can magically do in the next two weeks organically to ramp up your follower count or your subscriber count.
Don’t panic though — there’s still a lot that you can do with your existing audience, which is what we’re going to talk about today.
[free] get your black friday prep guide
This free GUIDe will help you strategically plan your black friday offer, maximize profitability, prepare a well thought out promotional plan and keep everything organized with a practical checklist and clear timelines for smooth execution.
So for your Black Friday strategy you are actually going to organize two phases of your Black Friday sale: The Early Bird sale and the actual Black Friday sale.
So first is the Early Bird sale.
Your Early Bird sale is going to be in the week before Thanksgiving or Black Friday, and it’s going to be exclusive for only the people who have said they wanted to know about this early bird sale.
For this sale you might offer higher discounts than what your Black Friday discounts will be, or if you don’t offer a higher discount you might choose to do a different sale, something that won’t be available for your Black Friday sale. You could create a special bundle, or maybe offer a special product, but whatever the case may be it will essentially be something different or extra on top of what you will offer for Black Friday.
And then you will have your Black Friday sale, the sale that is open to the public, to anyone visiting your shop or website.
Now that you’ve defined each phase of your Black Friday sale, let’s talk about the steps you need to take to prepare.
First let’s take a look at the stages of your Black Friday preparation.
The goal of the first stage is to get people to register for your early bird sale.
So this is where you get on your email list and on your social networks, whichever ones you’re using, and email and post content that says you have an Early Bird sale coming up, and give people a chance to sign up for it by submitting their email.
Even if someone is already on your email list, they’re not going to have access to this early bird sale unless they say “Yes, I want to know about your Early Bird sale!” and then you will segment those people into your early bird email list.
When this first stage ends you will have everyone who is interested in your Early Bird sale signed up, and you are going to email your Early Bird promo information to only those people, because remember — the Early Bird sale is not public, it is only for people who have raised their hand and signed up for that email list and said, “I want to know about all of your Early Bird deals!”
Next, in this middle section, you will have two things going on:
For people registered for the early bird, they will be receiving the actual Early Bird sale. So they’ll be getting your emails with the Early Bird details and link and they’ll be purchasing those things on your website.
For people who haven’t registered for your Early Bird sale, you are promoting your actual Black Friday Sale.
And then the final stage will be your actual Black Friday sale.
Now that you have the stages of your Black Friday planning mapped out, your next goal is to define your dates for:
Your Early Bird promo starts about a week before your Early Bird sale, this is the week where you will be sending emails and making social media posts to get people to sign up on your Early Bird notification list.
Then comes your Early Bird sale and your Black Friday promo period. The Early Bird sale will typically end a day or two before you start your Black Friday sale. I would recommend running your Early Bird sale anywhere between three days to a week.
If you run it for less than that it will be hard to leverage, and running it for more than that is just too long — people will lose interest and the sale will lose momentum.
Your Black Friday sale can start on Thanksgiving or it can start on the actual Black Friday, and the sale will usually go all the way through to Cyber Monday, which then also covers Small Business Saturday.
But, again, here you can decide whether you want it to actually just be the one day of Black Friday, but my recommendation is to extend it all the way to Monday. This is very common these days, and it gives you more chances to send more emails and get in front of more people.
Not everyone is going to see your email on Black Friday because it’s a really crazy day, right? So by making the sale a little bit longer you can increase how many times you email people, which in turn gives you a higher chance that one of your emails will be seen.
Now you have all the dates that you need to plan and block it out – because without knowing those you can’t decide on anything else, right?
Next we move to step 3, which is to create a page where people can sign up for the Early Bird sale notifications.
This will be the landing page that people are taken to from your emails or social media posts that advertised the Early Bird sale and said “click here to sign up!”
Your goal here is to make it easy for your customer to enter their email, and to set it up so these customers are seamlessly added to your email list and tagged to receive your Early Bird sale emails.
Once your landing page is up and running, you then want to decide on what product(s) and what discount strategy you will use for your sales — essentially deciding what your offer will be for Black Friday and for the Early Bird sale.
Your goal here is to come up with a list of sales that will really appeal to your ideal customer and make them want to buy your products!
You want to think about details like:
There are many options here, if you would like some clever ideas I have an article that is full of tips and ideas to increase your average order value.
Remember that you will need to do this for both your Early Bird and your Black Friday sale, so you need to plan for both.
For example, let’s say you make candles. You might decide that you will create some exclusive candle gift sets, and in your promo emails say “Get your hands on those exclusive, limited edition holiday gift sets and for my Early Bird sale enter code ‘EXCLUSIVE30” to get 30% off these coveted sets.”
This 30% discount is the highest discount your customers will ever see for those items, so they’ll know it’s an amazing deal that they won’t see again for a long time.
And for your Black Friday sale, you might decide to offer “20% off all gift sets” or “20% off your entire order.”
If you are going to offer a blanket discount like 20% off your order, it’s very important that you still specify specific products on sale in your promo messaging.
What I mean by this is, if every day your messaging in email and on social media is “Everything is 20% off! Everything is 20% off!”, it will get old, very, very quickly.
It’s not specific enough to appeal to people and entice them to click and go to your shop and buy.
So in your messaging and promos you want to define things: you can define the categories on sale but mostly define those key products that are on sale because you know they are the best sellers or you know that other times of the year they are the ones that people like to give the most, or they are your most recent releases.
So for our example that would mean instead of spending a week sending emails and making social media posts that each say “everything is 20% off!”, you maybe send ONE post or email saying that and in the rest you focus on one specific product or angle.
Maybe one day that means emailing only about what you know are your top 3 best sellers.
The next day about your “relaxing candles range”.
The next about your holiday gift sets.
Etc.
One precise framing in each email or piece of content rather than the very broad “all for 20% off!”.
Once you’ve decided your promo strategies, your next goal is to decide which platform you’re going to be promoting your sales on.
Email is obviously always going to be one, but then maybe you’re on Facebook, maybe you’re on Instagram, maybe you’re on Tik Tok — whatever the case, write that down and then write down how many content pieces you’re going to need across those weeks.
You will need content for the Early Bird promo stage which is probably going to be a week before the actual Early Bird sale, every day… so you need a piece of content each day to get people to sign up on that landing page.
Then you have the actual Early Bird sale every day. – what is the message going to be in your email?
And in that week while the Early Bird sale is live, what are you going to be posting to tease Black Friday to people who didn’t sign up for Early Bird?
And then finally for Black Friday, you will want content that says what great deal you are offering that day. Don’t be afraid to post and to email several times a day during that time to make sure you reach people with that day’s deal.
Now on to your final step! Your goal here is to be sure that you don’t make any small mistakes that can cause BIG problems during or after your sale.
I know you’ve heard this if you’ve read my other Black Friday preparation article but I want to say again that using videos is soooooooo so very important, as is making sure everything is mobile optimized — because people are going to be on their mobile, they already are but even more so for Black Friday.
Also, make sure to adjust your production levels to ensure you have enough stock of the products that you’re selling, and clearly communicate the delivery timeline, as in telling people “This is going to take me five days to make” or “I will ship your order in 2-5 days.“
When you set these timelines, be sure to adjust them to be realistic if you were to get high volumes of orders.
Now I know that preparing for Early Bird and Black Friday sales can be a bit overwhelming, so I put together a checklist that you can print out and work through one step at a time — this way you’re sure not to overlook anything and will have an easy guide to follow!
Just click this link to download and you’ll be ready to hit the road running and plan an amazing Black Friday promotion!
Thanks for reading and until next time, aurevoir!
[free] get your black friday prep guide
This free GUIDe will help you strategically plan your black friday offer, maximize profitability, prepare a well thought out promotional plan and keep everything organized with a practical checklist and clear timelines for smooth execution.
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