Black Friday is a BIG DEAL if you’re a handmade seller!
It’s one of the biggest opportunities – if not the biggest opportunity – to make a good amount of sales on your website and take advantage of the pre-holiday shopping frenzy.
And you might wondering,
How do I make the most out of this opportunity?
A lot of making the most of it is about timing — if you start working on your Black Friday plan in November you’re too late to the party.
So the million dollar question becomes
“When do I start planning my Black Friday strategy . . .
and what all do I need to do?”
Believe it or not, if you want to make a ton of money on Black Friday you need to start working on your strategy at the end of August or really early in September.
And in today’s article, I’m going to
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
Now the first thing I want to talk about in relation to your Black Friday strategy is defining the 2 phases of your Black Friday plan.
Black Friday is a date, we can’t move it, right? So you’re obviously preparing for that date.
But before that, I recommend that you have an early bird Black Friday sale for people who are already part of your world, as in your existing social media audience, existing customers, and people on your email list.
So your first two phases would be your early bird sale before Thanksgiving, and then your Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales.
Now that you know the timeline that you’re working towards, the question becomes how are you going to make the most money from these events?
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Well, as a rule of business there are only three ways to make more money. You can
. . . and ideally you want to do ALL these things at the same time!
So how can you do all 3 in the context of Black Friday?
The first thing we’ll talk about is finding new customers. Basically, there are two ways to get them:
The first is attracting new customers from people who don’t know who you are, who have never heard of your products or your shop.
New customers are really expensive to acquire on Black Friday, because everyone is running ads — and I can guarantee there are some people out there with bigger ad budgets than yours that are going to outbid you when Black Friday comes around.
So what you want to do (and this is one reason this article is coming out in August instead of later) is to start now to build up your lead (or prospect) lists. This means focusing heavily on adding people to your email list and adding people to your social following NOW instead of waiting until November. So that when November comes, you have a lot of NEW engaged followers and email subscribers and don’t need to buy leads when they’re expensive. You did that work ahead of time.
So essentially, you have people that are not in your world at all right now, that don’t know your brand and products even exist – and you want to find them and welcome them into your world starting now and all the way to November. I’ll tell you how to do this in more detail in just a minute.
The second avenue to generating new customers is converting current leads and prospects into customers.
So here you are looking at the people that are already in your world but aren’t customers yet. Maybe they know your business, or maybe they follow you on social media or are on your email list . . . but they haven’t bought from you yet.
Your goal here is to make sure your products are top-of-mind for them when Black Friday comes. You want to warm them up to your brand, essentially putting your brand and products top of mind again for them in the weeks and months leading to Black Friday instead of waiting until a week before.
By doing this for them, you’re ALSO engaging your newly found followers and leads, so it’s a win-win.
The second way to make more money is to sell more to existing customers. We just talked about getting new customers, but what about the one you already have?
You’ll want to re-engage them, mostly via email campaigns.
Again you want to warm them up to your brand and bring your brand and products top of mind for them in the weeks and months leading to Black Friday.
But for existing customers your campaign will be a bit different. These people are your VIPs so you may word their campaigns a bit differently, you might offer them a bigger early bird discount or a special offer for existing customers only.
So with these first two points you are making more sales by targeting both the people not in your world (which I call cold leads) and the people in your world (warm and hot leads, as in prospects and customers).
Finally let’s talk about increasing your Average Order Value, or AOV.
In the context of Black Friday, increasing AOV is about figuring out how – despite the fact that you are going to be discounting products, because that’s how Black Friday works – how you can add bumps and upsells to your orders to push that order value up and, in a way, compensate for that discount.
I have a full article about how to increase your average order value that walks you through the many ways to do this in more detail that you will want to check out!
Doing that, in addition to finding more customers and selling more frequently to your customers, is a sure way to increase your Black Friday sales.
Next, I want to give you a to-do list and explain what accomplishing these things looks like for you in August, or in early September.
One thing that I want you to do is what I like to call “price checking”. To do this you want to look at your prices and ask yourself if you think your products are priced well. Do you have enough profit? Have you priced strategically?
You want to be sure that when you head into discounting for these sales that you’re still making money after the discount.
I actually had someone comment on one of my videos saying she couldn’t afford to discount — and my answer to her was that this is a huge problem.
You don’t need to “have money” to put your products on sale or run a promotion, because your pricing strategy should allow for a profit margin even when you offer discounts.
Say you sell earrings for $28, which cost you $7.00 to create. Your profit is $21, which is a lovely 75% profit margin.
If you run an offer for…
10% off → the new price is $25.20, and your profit is $18.20 which is still ~72% profit margin
30% off → the new price is $19.60, and your profit is $12.60 which is still ~64% profit margin
Basically, it shouldn’t cost you money to run sales. You make less profit, but you absolutely 100% STILL make a healthy profit.
Not being able to “afford” discounts is a 🚩red flag because low margins impact more than your ability to offer promotions — they impact your bottom line and your ability to grow your business.
So when you do your price check you are first determining if you need to adjust your price and your pricing strategy. I do not want you to go into discounting if you don’t have confidence in your prices and know that you’re still making money.
Your goal is to know exactly how much profit you are making on each product, so that you know what your profit will be if you offer 15% or 20% or 30% discounts, and to have all of that listed out so that you can refer to it as you plan.
The second thing you will do is decide on the product(s) and what discount strategy you want to use for your sales. So essentially deciding what your offer will be for Black Friday. You want to think about details like:
Note: You don’t have to release new products, it’s just an option to consider.
In all honesty, if you are going to launch new products, a better strategy might be to launch after BF and promote them in early Dec for Xmas sales.
But if you don’t have the resources and time and energy to do a new product release, please don’t worry it’s not a necessity.
There are many options here and if you don’t know what these are or how to get started with this I have an article that you will want to read that is full of tips and clever ideas to increase your average order value.
Once you make these decisions, you can turn your attention to building new audiences and warming up current customers. This is what I said earlier I’d explain in more detail. Remember, we want to start growing your audiences (finding new customers) and engaging and warming up existing audiences AHEAD of time.
There are three main methods that you can use here: your organic socials, your email list, and ads.
If you don’t want to run ads, you’ll be using your organic social media strategies to build up new customers and actively stay top-of-mind for your existing followers.
Now, let’s be honest here, that’s nothing different than what you do any other time of the year. . . or hopefully it’s not!
But, starting in August or early September I would recommend that you ramp up your content on social media a little bit.
Next is emails. Emails are going to keep the new people that you add to your list engaged, AND keep warming up the people that were already on your email list, so you want to be sure to send those out at least weekly starting in August or early September.
If you are already emailing weekly, ramp up your frequency and start teasing them about upcoming early bird sales as you get closer to the date.
Finally, as I said earlier, if at all possible you want to run some ads — and I’m going to recommend a two-step approach for your ad strategy.
Normally the goal of ads is to make a sale. That’s why we run them anyway, right? To make money. And I know it’s nice when you know that you paid $3 for a click on your ad and it turned into a $50 purchase. That’s a direct return on our ad investment and our brains love this and can compute it fairly easily.
What I am about to recommend here is different.
I want you to think about running campaigns that are NOT intended to make sales straight away. I know I know “whaaaaaaat?!” But again, you have to look at these ads as an investment and have the mindset that they will pay for themselves down the track — and trust me, they will pay back tenfold.
The goal for your Black Friday ads is to find new audiences AND to warm up the audiences that you already have so that when your Black Friday promotion comes, we have a lot of engaged prospects super keen to buy from you.
To do this, you first run ads that have the objective of either video views, engagement, or possibly traffic (although video views and engagement objectives are probably going to work best).
You can use video content created with user-generated content (UGC), for example.
You want these ads to essentially engage people with your brand – without necessarily sending them to a product page or pitching a product, without trying to make a sale as your primary objective. You want to educate, engage, entertain. You’re essentially just making sure that your content is getting in front of people who are already in the “warm bucket,” or getting in front of new people in a way that’s helpful, engaging, and valuable.
For example, you could show them an engagement ad about an interesting blog that you wrote that’s really helpful for that person, or a video ad showing a UGC video that you’ve created of someone using your products.
Running these ads serves two purposes. For the “warm” people – people who already know your brand – these ads do the job of keeping your brand top of mind.
And for the cold audiences that see your ads – so people who weren’t in your world – what it does is set you up to run simultaneous ad campaigns that are going to retarget those people that have viewed that video, that have engaged with that post, read that blog article on your website — and actually retarget them with a new ad that you’re going to optimize for converting them into an email list subscriber.
So instead of going and trying to get everyone to sign up on your list by running an ad that’s for list building that is sent to people who have never heard of you, you have a strategic ad progression: the first ad you send to people who’ve never heard of you warms them up to your brand. And then for those who engage with those ads, you send them an ad that encourages or incentivizes them to sign up for your email list.
That’s also a cheaper way to build your audiences and email list using ads. So you have a two layer ad strategy here that builds your audiences and email lists way ahead of your Black Friday sales while also warming up the people who have previously engaged with your brand or your shop.
Bonus tip: when you’re creating your ads be sure to review my article about 7 paid ad mistakes you want to avoid, if you’re going to spend money on ads you want to get the most bang for your buck!
Finally, you want to use this time in August and early September to create the assets for all of these things.
So your ads, your organic social posts, your creative and your graphics – all of it that you can do ahead of time. And, most importantly, the emails that you will be sending to people in September, October, and November to warm them up and get them excited about the upcoming sales.
Because once sales start to increase in the fall you will have less time for creating these things since you will be making and selling more of your handmade products!
If you liked this article, be sure to subscribe to Tizzit TV (my YouTube Channel) — each week you will receive a new video that teaches you practical tips and actionable strategies to help you grow your handmade shop!
Thanks for reading and until next time, aurevoir!
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