With Black Friday and the peak period just around the corner, it’s time to put your plans in place to capture new customers and preferences of your existing customers!
Customer’s anticipation and awareness for the event has become a mainstay of UK culture, with a continued trend towards customers organically searching earlier in the year for Black Friday or specific offers.
Searches began to rise as early as late August all the way into October according to Google Trends data.
In this blog we will tackle how brands can capitalise on these early spikes in behaviour to capture new customers, as well as understand existing customer behaviour to inform their personalisation and segmentation strategy.
How do I capture new customers intent?
Black Friday Landing Pages
The prolonged anticipation on the run up to Black Friday offers brands a fantastic opportunity to capture new customers as well as preferences for your existing customers.
Many brands will utilise landing pages to capture this type of opt in and preference data for their Black Friday event.
Brands such as AO.com already have their Black Friday pages live to capture search activity prior to the event. These pages are a fantastic tool to make people aware that you have an event taking place and to capture customer interest.
You may even want to consider exit intent overlays targeting unidentified customers if your Black Friday pages are carrying high bounce rates before the event.
Paid Social Adverts
Over the past couple of years, we have seen paid social ads increase in popularity as a great channel to acquire and capture preferences of a new customer before peak with brands such as Wex Photo Video and Dyson utilising them.
Paid social adverts are targeted to encourage new customers to sign-up to your brand either linking to signup pages or using lead generation adverts. Test to see what works best for your brand!
Acquiring customers and then converting them over your Black Friday event via a direct channel such as email, is a far lower cost tactic than paying a premium to convert them during the event itself. There are several clever ways to utilise your data:
- Create segments of previous Black Friday shoppers or VIP’s to create a lookalike audience.
- Retarget customers using the Facebook pixel who have visited your site, sales pages or Black Friday pages but aren’t signup to your brand.
Ensure you use an exclusion audience of your opted in customers across your campaigns to only acquire new customers to your database.
How can you grab your existing customers attention?
As important as acquiring new customers is, focusing on your existing customers carries more importance to the success of the Black Friday event. There are several ways to capture customer preference and opt in on the run up to Black Friday.
Remember as well as you know your customers, their purchase behaviour and preferences will vary during the Black Friday and the Christmas period, making it crucial to capture updated or event specific preferences.
This data capture can help form both your segmentation and personalisation strategy during your event.
Opt in Campaigns or Save the Date Campaigns
Opt in campaigns are a fantastic way to gauge which of your customers will be interested in your Black Friday event, see the below example from Espa. Customers who opt in can form the first part of your sending strategy as priority customers for your event.
Your campaign can be coupled with a preference capture to help capture which customers are going to be most engaged, as well as their preference for offers.
Wishlist Campaigns
Aside from preference data another powerful way to capture insight into what customers will want to purchase for themselves, or as gifts, is the use of a Black Friday specific wish list campaign.
In previous years we have seen brands such as Farfetch running ‘win your wish list’ competitions on the run up to Black Friday.
For a brand this provides a wealth of data to target customers but can also help to power automated or dynamic segments of your email wish list campaigns, or even price drop wish list campaigns during the Black Friday period.
Re-engagement campaigns
Before the Black Friday period look to re-engage lapsed customers and gauge their interest for the Black Friday Event.
Consider offering customers the option to opt out of Black Friday or snooze communication from your brand to retain them in your database.
Preference Campaigns
Consider collecting specific brand, product or category preferences on the run up to Black Friday. This is valuable data when it comes to creating segments, subject line personalisation and dynamic content in your Black Friday emails.
Nothing is more powerful than a subject line and email content personalised to the preferences a customer has pre-selected.
Channel Opt in
Additional preferences can be key to extend the reach of your campaign. Offer SMS alerts to existing customers as part of your campaign emails to make sure they didn’t miss the big event.
Remember snooze, don’t lose
As compelling as your Black Friday offers are planned to be, not all customers will want to hear about your event.
Research by Statista suggests that the UK customers are divided, with 41% of customers saying they are either not interested or do not intend to buy during Black Friday.
Sending to customers who don’t want to receive your campaign raises the risk of spam complaints and unsubscribes potentially impacting your deliverability, or loss of key customers during this key period.
Simply implementing a snooze option or Black Friday opt-out allows these customers to be retained.
Brands such as Papa John’s achieved amazing results with a 30% deduction in unsubscribes through offering their customers the opportunity to ‘snooze’ their emails for a short period of time.
