Audacious Marketing for Black Friday
Every marketer knows that ol’ November feeling. Staring at the screen, hearts racing. With Black Friday just around the corner, and the stakes are high. The tension? Palpable. The excitement? Overwhelming. Every year, the WordPress ecosystem buzzes with deals and promotions. But how do you create a wave? No, not a wave. A tidal wave.
It’s not about yelling louder, it’s about speaking directly. To YOUR audience. Here’s our tried and true rundown in how to standout on Black Friday when you’re selling WordPress or B2B SaaS solutions.
Beyond Just Discounts
While most are caught in the “discount frenzy,” stand out by thinking differently. Instead of merely cutting costs, consider offering value-added bonuses with each purchase. This not only delights your customers but also ensures they see the extra worth you’re bringing, all while preserving your margins. It’s about creating an experience, not just a transaction.
Give Back, It’s Good Business
Remember Weglot’s legendary move? For every sale during Black Friday, they planted a tree. It’s your turn: Align with a mission that resonates with you. When your audience realizes that their purchase impacts more than just your revenue, it fosters trust and loyalty. Let’s make Black Friday about more than just commerce; let’s make it about community.
Engage, Don’t Spam
In the avalanche of promotional emails, make sure yours is a breath of fresh air. Instead of bombarding, focus on crafting content that addresses real concerns and offers tangible solutions. Remember, communication is a two-way street; it’s about understanding and then being understood.
Update and Test Your Website
Anticipating a flood of eager shoppers? Ensure your website isn’t just up but is primed for peak performance. Optimize for speed, ease of navigation, and, importantly, ensure it can handle the traffic spike. A smooth online experience can be the difference between a sale and a lost customer.
Don’t just ride the Black Friday wave; define it. And if you ever feel lost in the hustle, tune into Audacity Marketing. Together, we’ve got this.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to Audacity Marketing with Hazel Quimpo and Michelle Frechette. On this podcast, we’ll challenge you to think differently and break free of the same old strategies. We’ll push you out of your comfort zone and encourage you to think outside the box. So take notes, make bold decisions and be audacious.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hey, Hazel.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Hello, Michelle.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: How you doing?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: I’m doing great. We are gearing up already for yet another Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Can you believe it?
[00:00:46] Speaker B: It’s like clockwork. Once a year it comes, whether you’re.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Ready or know, I think marketers. You see these posts people make on Facebook of, oh, my God, I’m Christmas shopping in July. And for us, it’s more like, well, getting that email list ready for next year.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: That’s right. And who’s working on the social plan and who’s making the graphics? And what’s our discount this year? And how are we going to cross promote all the things right?
[00:01:15] Speaker C: All the things. So today we’re going to talk about all things Black Friday Cyber Monday, which used to be a true blue American holiday. And we’ve shared it with the world, apparently.
It’s just spread like fire.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It’s a little crazy, for sure.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: What do you think, Michelle?
It has spread through the world. It’s as common to get those emails during Black Friday Cyber Monday week now as it is to get the emails of people complaining about it. So what do you think? Do people lean in? Do people do Black Friday? What should we do?
[00:01:49] Speaker B: I think it’s brand by brand, for sure. I think that it’s not going to hurt you to lean into it if you have the right strategy and you plan accordingly for those discounts and how much revenue you’re not going to get by getting more sales, if that makes any sense. So hopefully you counteract it. I know a lot of people who are one or two people plug in companies, they look forward to this every year, but they don’t like giving away discounts. But also, there’s a huge boon at their end of the end of the year for them to get through the end of the year, being able to make payroll and pay their bills and send their kids to school and put food on the table.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: The timing of the Black Friday sale does lend a lot to why it stuck around for so long in My.
Exactly.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Exactly. It’s also interesting, too. I mean, the original idea behind Black Friday was for us Americans, especially, right, to get our shopping done for Christmas. But now it’s all things right. Like nobody is giving away a plugin to their nephew for Christmas. And here is your SEO plugin. How do I play with this? Does it need batteries? I mean, all the things, right?
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Absolutely. I think with Black Friday Cyber Monday, in the world of recurring revenue, people really discovered the magic here, WordPress plugins being a number one of them. But lots of Subscription Solutions have discovered the magic of an initial Deep discount sale, and Black Friday Cyber Monday has Become that tradition for it. And I Think that deep discount really can go well if you have A Good product.
What I mean is, when you get people in for free and they really like your product, and the more integral it is to their business or their life and the harder it is for them to untangle, you’ve got yourself a customer for life. And that only costs you one year. And that’s pretty darn well worth it.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: I started to think about what those discounts should look like. And? Really, it depends on how expensive your product is, right? So if You Have A plugin, for example, that’s $29 a year, a 10% discount doesn’t really Move The Needle for people, because that’s what, less than $3 off for a whole year? So that’s not something that people are looking at and going, wow, I got to jump on this. But if You Have A $400 product and you’re doing 10% off or 20% off, now you’re talking 40 or $80. That’s a much bigger discount. That’s Something that people can Compute to an hour’s worth of work or Paying Somebody To Do Something, as Opposed to, well, that’s a half a cup of Coffee at Starbucks.
[00:04:24] Speaker C: And I think Black Friday, Cyber Monday is really interesting in the way world of marketers. People think of marketers as, like, being tricky at all of those things. And actually, I fight that a lot because I don’t think we are, for the most part. You try to do your thing. However, on Black Friday, man, all of the psychological tricks come out of the bag. The one top of mind for me is how do you say? Your discount. Do you say $20 off? Do you say 10% off? Do you say a free cup of coffee every day, or whatever it might be? Have you think of anything that’s particularly stood out to you, Michelle?
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Well, I’ve seen the things before where people will be like and when they’re trying to charge something.
It’s for the price of a cup of coffee a day or for the price of one pizza a week. You can have XYZ, right? So reversing that and saying the discount is almost like well, I’m not sure how to say it sometimes. Right. And I think again, it goes back to what is the savings? So if the savings is, like, $3 or $20, do you say $20 off of an annual subscription or do you say that’s 30%? Because 30% sounds like a lot more than $20. So there’s where that psychology part of marketing comes in. You really have to think about that? And if you have more than one product and you’re doing the same discount across the board, it’s a lot easier to say 30% off all of our products than 29 99 off this, 149, 99 off that one, so that you can do a better marketing campaign. So really, there’s a lot to think about when you’re putting it all together that way.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree with that. And I’ve worked for clients before who have, for lack of a better word, tried to nickel and dime their sales, and it makes it too confusing for the customers if the sale is not simple and easy to repeat back as a customer. If it is, I need to add this other product and I get another discount, and then I add this one over here, and then I turn around four times and I get 20% off. It’s too much work for a customer to do, and I think you end up losing sales. Right. So what was the point of all of your work to build that sale if it was just to try to beat the two people that are going to try to loophole you? I would say if I had one big tenant of Black Friday is to not worry about the loophole, folks. If you’re going to do Black Friday, don’t leave your doors wide open, but don’t try to account for every single person that’s going to game you because you’re not going to win. And in trying to win, you’re going to lose.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: My least favorite thing, and this is more along the lines of shopping at Old Navy, right, is where they’re like, buy one, get one half off. Right? So it’s like, now I’ve got to do mental math. It’s not like buy one, get one free, which is what we usually think of with Bogo, right, but it’s like, I could buy one, get one half off of the lesser priced one, and like, oh, and I’ve got to do, like, math. I don’t want to do math when I’m thinking about those things. So, like you said, make it easy. Make it easy for people to remember to think about, to want to go spend their money with you on that day. Right. Especially when you’re talking about software and things like that, which are, let’s face it, especially in the United States, it’s the day after. Like, we’re all doing family. Like, nobody’s thinking, what should I buy for my business over the next year? Which is also why a lot of our Black Friday deals go for a full week and in some cases up to a month. People will hold them from like the beginning of November, sometimes even until the middle of December, just to try to get as much of those sales as possible.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: Now, I do think there’s an opportunity for some audacity, if I may, of course, marketing, to get the word out more via the network effect and to show your discount as a value add. Can we dive into that one? First, I want to talk a little bit about, like we talked about the different ways to talk about a discount. You could say 20%, $20 et cetera, but maybe it’s actually adding value. There could be ways to do a Black Friday promotion without a discount. Have you seen any examples of those?
[00:08:37] Speaker B: I have, actually. Weglot is a plugin that I use on several of my sites, which is a multilingual plugin so that I can present in different languages, if you will. And I don’t speak different languages, so, like, rewriting all those sites in those different languages doesn’t work for me. But in years past, they’ve done things like planting a tree for every sale that they did or if they would have discounted 20%, all that 20% of their sales during their Black Friday event goes to a charity that they, as a group of people in that company select. So they’re actually using that money for good. I, as the consumer, am not saving maybe $20 or $30, but I know that that $20 or $30 has gone to a good charity to help other people.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: I love that, and I think I’ve seen other ones do before where if you purchase something that’s on sale or perhaps not on sale, you get additional swag or items like that.
I’ve always thought it would be kind of funny to even have one. Say you had a brand that had a strong community. You could do cameo videos from like the community manager or something, right?
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Oh, that’d be fun.
[00:09:46] Speaker C: Videos if you had someone or different things like that that I think the better, you know, your brand and your community, I mean, it goes back to our foundation of it all the more creative you can be in Black Friday and not just have to give away the farm with a 40% off sale.
Customers will understand the value and want to get in.
I think we’ve talked about this example before, but like thank you notes, right? That’s actually the perfect example of a value add that people don’t even realize of. Like, oh my gosh, it’s like a whole handwritten note.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah. It used to be that every time you gave a donation to Big Orange Heart, dan maybe would do a personalized video while he was walking his dog in the morning. And you’d get personalized video thanking you, Michelle, for the $100 that you gave this month or something.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Super cool.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker C: And I know that some brands are doing try to especially tech brands that do sell subscriptions build in, like, hey, you just bought new technology to probably build your business or something. Let’s do some events at this time to help you get that off the ground before the end of the year. I think you can kind of take that, especially in a B to B lens for Black Friday, take that year end as a real sense of urgency, the same that you’re feeling as a business owner to other business owners.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: And some of those value added could be a white paper or an ebook that helps you plan for the next year, especially if it’s around whatever your product does, right. So if your product is give, where I’ve worked for years, you may be given ebook that talks about how to plan for giving for the following year. So there’s a value add right there, right? That kind of thing. I’ll tell you. So this is the most audacious thing I’ve ever thought of and nobody’s ever wanted to do it. But I think a singing telegram would be super cool. Even if it’s like video, right? Like you just do a sing and then you send the singing telegram. If somebody buys X number of dollars or something. Or you could send it to somebody else. You could choose to send it to somebody else. I just think that’d be so much fun.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: I love it. It kind of makes me think of like like a virtual dunk tank, almost like you used to dunk someone forcing the sing almost that was shouldn’t be singing to you.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, maybe it’s audacious and it shouldn’t be done, but I just think I try to think really outside the box.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: I love it. Well, I think that goes into kind of the value add when we talk about network effect. One of the ideas for value add definitely could be adding more products on via partnership or via even affiliate income without an official partnership. But let me talk more about what I mean there. Let’s say you are a SaaS app that has a calendar plugin of some sort and you partner with a SaaS app that does, I don’t know, web hosting and you end up having a win win and you can have that partnership year round. But Black Friday is certainly a nice time to test it out to see if that’s a good partnership. And that partnership could mean an affiliate kickback. It could mean both of those type of companies and any of these type of companies they would partner off of, really thrive off of that ongoing recurring revenue. So if anything is about getting people in the door and if that’s about getting them in for free, most people are going to say yes.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I have a question for you. So what about those people? It’s one thing to buy a TV, right? And you buy another TV next year, big deal. And now you have two TVs. But with a subscription based thing, there are people who will buy your product for whatever your discount is this year with one email address. They will let that expire and buy your product again with another email address next year because gaming the system is absolutely possible. So how do you account for that? Or what do you think of that as a marketer?
[00:13:21] Speaker C: Yeah, it’s an ongoing fight and I think you have to be either very small or very large to care about it. What I mean is very small to where it matters. Each one of those that gains you really matters.
And I’ll talk about the ways to prevent that in a second because all of the ways take work. There’s no automated way to do it across the board because believe me, I have tried.
So that’s why it also works on the really big companies who have the resources to build the algorithm for every little one to be like, no, you can’t game this system when you’re in the messy middle man. My biggest advice is to figure out whatever your margin of error is that you’re okay with some number of people gaming the system and not stress about it because you’re not going to win that if you’re in the middle ground. If you’re going to do a sale like this. Now, whatever software you’re using to sell your products, I’m sure there’s a million built in things that help with it.
Do the best you can.
If I were a very small company, I would go as far as refunding people and telling them, no, they can’t.
I would track them one by one and say, hey. And I would be upfront with them and say, hey guys, we are a small company. And I get that you’re trying to do this, but you’re a small company and I’m a small company and I don’t think you realize how small we are. Very honestly. If I was that small, sub $100,000 company, sub $500,000 company, I would be saying this type of stuff to customers and that resonates it works, actually, because people are like, oh shit, I didn’t know you were a small business too.
But I do think you’re not going to win them gaming the system. You’re going to stress yourself out. So if you are going to play the Black Friday game, decide to do it and go for it and do your best and don’t look at every single loophole because you won’t win.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: I actually did a poll last month on actually September 26. So not that long ago on Twitter where I said Black Friday is coming. How do you feel about people who game the system and repurchase each year with a different email address and the options were I think that’s awful, at least they’re buying. Fine by Me and other right. So I think that’s Awful was only 17%, fine by Me was 29%, almost 50% of almost 100 votes. So like 50 people said at least they’re buying.
[00:15:52] Speaker C: I mean, there’s something to that.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:15:56] Speaker C: I do think for a subscription product, one thing that we’ve done with success in the past, you and I have done this together, Michelle, is discount on renewals specifically to throw people into a separate track, specifically that did Bible last year. They’re all tagged. Anybody who bought Black Friday is tagged and send them into a specific renewal discount track so that they don’t do that so that you’re going to have more control over that. And I didn’t tell you our numbers if that helped the margin of error, I couldn’t remember. Now, there’s been a million lifetimes since this happened, but I remember it being successful. Vaguely.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, exactly.
And the thing that people will say over and over if you do ask them, if you tell them, hey, you can’t do that, is why are you penalizing me? Who’s been a loyal customer, just to get new customers? And you could say to them, well, don’t you understand? And whatever. But ultimately, hey, they’ve re upped. They haven’t canceled. They’re still your customer.
I think this is the one time of year, maybe, unless it’s really hitting your bottom line, you kind of just got to go look the other way and let it go.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: Yes. I’ll throw one more out there for Black Friday, especially if you are like, a SaaS product or a WordPress product. I would really empower your teens to be on live chat all week and wheeling and dealing like they’re car salespeople. And what I mean by this is not trying to sell the $79 plug in even cheaper, but on Black Friday, you’re going to get people who are interested in buying your whole suite or whatever thing that you’re selling that’s the most expensive. And you might not have that on your Black Friday deal, but if they can talk to someone on Chat and I say this as someone who has sold packages to on live Chat via WordPress plugins on Black Friday, people are actively looking for this at this time, and you’ll make like $800 sales that get a $2,000 renewal. It’s magic.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: It’s pretty awesome. It’s amazing what speaking to a human in the digital age can accomplish, for sure.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Yeah. When GIB first started calling people when they made a purchase, people were shocked. When they knew that there’s a phone number they could call to get help, they were shocked. And it made a difference. It made a difference in how we perceived as a brand, and it made a difference in renewals, for sure.
[00:18:08] Speaker C: Absolutely. That human touch. Well, I hope we got you ready a little bit for Black Friday. I’m sure we’ll be talking about it maybe another time before the holiday hits.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Absolutely. If you have any questions, hit us up. We’re on social. We’d love to hear your pain points and maybe even help you solve them a little bit.
[00:18:25] Speaker C: And you know what? I’ll get into a hot Black Friday debate or two.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. Why not, right?
[00:18:32] Speaker C: All right. Well, thanks so much again, Michelle.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you, Hazel. We’ll see everybody on the next episode. Take care.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: This has been Michelle Frechette and Hazel Quimpo with Audacity Marketing dare to be different and dominate your market with Audacity the City.