how to run a black friday sale

Summary

for eight years I refused to run black friday because I didn’t want to discount what I sold. I left roughly $1.4M on the table being principled about it. don’t do that.

the rules I follow now.

1. focus on new business. drop the price barrier for people who have never bought from you. don’t slash the price for existing customers, they’ll feel punished for being loyal.

2. sell something not normally available. a one time offer, a limited cohort, a bundle that doesn’t exist the rest of the year. this keeps your normal pricing intact and gives the sale a real reason to exist.

the email play is two steps. segment a list of warm leads who haven’t bought. then send a short sequence with real scarcity, a date, a cap, a reason. don’t fake scarcity. people see through it and they remember.

black friday is permission to do bold marketing. take it.

Transcript

introduction to Black Friday strategies and personal experiences

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. Let’s jump straight into it. We’re going to be going over how to do Black Friday.

So if you have an existing business and you want to make some additional revenue, I’m going to be going over how to do this. So this is actually an article I put together and I’m going to go over it. You know, I send this out every single year. So if you’re on the newsletter, you’ll get a different version of this where you can kind of see things and have it all written out for you. If you’re not on the newsletter, well, you might want to get out some pen and paper eventually to write this down, because I send this out every year, kind of at the right time for people to prep for their Black Friday.

And the amount of emails I’ve gotten where people have made some sort of five figure amount just from the steps I’m about to go over is crazy. Well into the six figures just from some free information I give on the podcast and in the newsletter. So if you aren’t a part of the newsletter, go to Jerred.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com. You can sign up for the newsletter to make sure you’re getting these kind of tutorials. But I’m also going to be going over it on the podcast today.

insights into the potential revenue from Black Friday and why it’s essential to participate

So let’s get into it, doing a Black Friday. Should you do a Black Friday is normally the first question, because they see things like REI doesn’t do it, you know, and there have been headlines like REI has quit Black Friday forever. And for the last seven, eight, nine years, something like that, the retailer closes its doors the day after Thanksgiving to give its employees a day off. And I’m like, yeah, that’s so noble, so bold, way to go, REI.

But they made like close to $4 billion last year and they have 16,000 employees. So REI’s logic is not the same as my logic, probably not the same as your logic. I say when my companies make anywhere north of $1 billion, I will highly consider ditching Black Friday. Until then, I will run Black Friday deals in my business and you should too. And here’s how. But first my $1.4 million mistake. So I’ve been running an online business or online businesses since 2011.

detailed discussion on strategies for attracting new business and selling unique offerings

And for the first eight years, I skipped out on Black Friday. My conservative estimates come out to $1.4 million in lost revenue by skipping out on Black Friday. And so don’t be like me. I didn’t have a real reason other than I didn’t want to do it. Honestly, I had a lot of negative thoughts surrounding Black Friday. I was accustomed to running a lot of launches, but not special promotions with significant discounts. I thought Black Friday would cheapen my product.

You probably have some of these same thoughts, some of these ideas. I thought discounts would be the end of my business. And those fears aren’t entirely unfounded. If you do Black Friday incorrectly, it can be bad. Because a great way to piss off your current customer base is to offer the same thing you always provide, but at a 50% discount. So first thing, don’t do that. And a great way to ruin your business is to discount your product or service constantly.

steps to effectively segment and communicate with your audience for Black Friday

Don’t do that. So there are two rules to Black Friday that I have learned. And so here is the first rule. One, make it about new business. Chances are if you have an email list or social media following, many people have never purchased anything from you. Black Friday is a chance to lower the bar or the price for working with you. People who otherwise were on the fence now get a chance at a lower price. Give them that chance.

After that, you show them how outstanding your product or service is so that they become repeat buyers. You may not make much profit at a discounted rate, but you have to play the long game with Black Friday just as much as the short game. And then the second rule, you have to follow both rules here, is sell things you don’t regularly sell. And that’s where I got hung up for a long time because I thought you just had to discount what you currently have, but you don’t.

email strategy specifics for maximizing Black Friday sales

Sell things that you don’t regularly sell. And rule two is critical. And I’ve already stated it in this article, but I will repeat it. A great way to piss off your current customer base is to offer the same thing you always provide but at a 50% discount. Do not sell what you always sell but at a steep discount. That’s how a lot of people screw up Black Friday. They sell X thing at X dollar amount all year long, then come Black Friday, they sell X thing at Y dollar amount, which is typically a lower price point.

What you need to do is sell thing Y at Y dollar amount. So you get it, you’re selling something you do not sell all year. It can be a custom package, it could be a different program, or it can be an additional service. It doesn’t matter. You sell something that is only ever sold during Black Friday. So package your existing service in a new way, offer products that are only available during Black Friday, make a new Black Friday specific product.

closing thoughts on the importance of ethical marketing and maintaining customer trust during sales events

You can do it however you want. You want the value to be there, you want it to be new, and you want it to be discounted, but you also want it to be exclusive to one time per year. If you follow rule number two, you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot with current customers or future business. Follow the rules, follow those two rules, and then take these two steps. So here is a simple two-step Black Friday promo.

I’m covering primarily an email marketing strategy today, but a lot of you do have an email marketing list or an email list, so this should apply. So if you don’t have an email list, start that yesterday. If you have a social media following, all the steps will be the same. Your messages will go out on social media. So you have three options when running a Black Friday promotion. One, blast it to everyone on your list no matter what.

Option two, blast it to everyone, but give them an option to opt out of the Black Friday promotion without opting out of your email list. And step three, segment your list by asking who wants to see Black Friday deals, and then email those who raised their hand only. All options work. Number three is the safest and easiest. Here’s what number three looks like. So you’re going to segment. You’re going to send out emails like seven days before Black Friday starts.

Okay, this is the segmentation phase. The goal is to segment your audience into those who want to hear about your Black Friday deal. You can send anywhere from one to five emails a week before Black Friday saying, hey, do you want to see my Black Friday promotion this year? Most email service providers make this very easy. If they click yes, you put them in the bucket to get the emails. If they click no, you don’t put them in that bucket.

That way you’re not going to piss anybody off who doesn’t want to see it. And I know this is the fear when people aren’t accustomed to emailing a lot or email marketing. You can blast it out to everyone and just all promotional emails everyone gets, you will get more unsubscribes, which again is not the end of the world with email marketing, but you will get more email subscribed on unsubscribes than normal. And then the other option is to have them kind of, like I said, for option to opt out of just that specific thing.

So in all of your Black Friday promotional emails, you just click a link that says, hey, I don’t want to see any more Black Friday promotional emails. They click that link. Now they will no longer get those specific emails, but they’re still on your email list for later. So it’s simple going back to the three, the safest and easiest option, which is just straight up asking if they want to see it or not. You will send people to a page and ask them to opt in to see a Black Friday promotion, or you can do it through link click, like I said, then you will have a list of people who volunteered to hear about your deal.

I like this option because it’ll make you feel more comfortable running the promotion. So if you do it this way, either you say, hey, do you want to see my Black Friday this year? Yes or no. You put them in a segmentation bucket or they actually opt into a new form saying, yes, I want to see your amazing Black Friday deals and it’s going to be less people, right? That’s what segmentation is. But it’s going to make you feel more comfortable because you’re like, wow, a hundred people said they want to see my Black Friday sale.

That means you have people actually interested and you’re not going to feel so like, eh, you know, should I do this? Should I not do this? So the second step after you’ve done that is selling. You are only emailing the people who raise their hand to hear about Black Friday, announce the deal, follow up, close it out. So now it’s your time to run the Black Friday promo. The first email goes out to your list early the Friday after Thanksgiving.

After that, you will send one email each day talking about the deals. You can layer a lot of marketing tactics here so long as they are ethical. You are already putting on pressure by having a limited time deal. The second step is to kick things up a notch and it’d be like having a limited quantity if you really want to go like a scarcity route. But when you do a limited amount like it needs to be legit, again, I’m all about keeping within the ethics of like using things like scarcity in your email marketing, but only if it’s legitimate.

Like if I, if I say, Hey, I’m selling five of these packages and we’ve done a lot of these kinds of things, we sell five. I don’t sell six. I don’t sell seven. And so that’s, that’s the thing you have to be very ethical. Like if there, I don’t do the whole like, Hey, we have seven left, but you sell a hundred more. Even though I’m a digital company and we often don’t have to actually limit some of the things that we sell, we do put an actual limit on these black Friday things.

People email us every year when we do our black Friday, they’re upset, they missed it. They, you know, they’re pissed off, they want it, but we have to stick to the ethics behind it. So if you think I have oversimplified how to run this black Friday, it really hasn’t. You might be over complicating it. There’s little magic in the emails other than, or the sales page you point people to. Their goal should be to run a promotion and improve each year.

So if you haven’t done a black Friday, highly recommend doing it again, following the two rules create something you do not regularly sell. That’s the most important part. Make it about new business people working with you and sell something you don’t regularly sell. Be creative there because if you do that, you’re not going to piss anybody off and you might even get people who already work with you to opt into something that you don’t regularly sell.

So that is the best way to run a black Friday and how you can make a lot of money. People are looking for deals. And if you’re on their like top 10 list of businesses that they’ve been looking to work with, but they’ve been afraid to pull the trigger and you offer them that opportunity, they absolutely will do it. So that is how you run a black Friday. Takes a little bit of planning, takes a little bit of effort and takes a little bit of you trying harder.