Black Friday brand benefits: more than just a sales frenzy

Black Friday is regarded as one of the largest and busiest shopping days in the world, with brands recognising it for its significant sales potential and opportunity to capitalise on the 'official start' of the festive shopping season among consumers.

Naturally this offers up several sales-oriented benefits for brands, such as the opportunity to reach lagging sales targets, and clear old stock to make way for new products aimed at Christmas shoppers.

But more than this, Black Friday provides a chance to connect and engage with new and existing customers.

In its report-back on a Black Friday survey of US and UK retailers, SaleCycle notes that acquiring new customers is expensive.

'However Black Friday offers retailers a chance to acquire new customers at a key time of year. If you acquire customers around Black Friday, and keep them happy, then you have a chance to drive repeat sales in the Christmas period and beyond using a good post-purchase email strategy. If customers can be retained in the longer term and they buy at full price later, this justifies discounting around Black Friday,' the British customer journey specialist says.

Black Friday also taps into consumers' readiness and willingness to spend money, meaning brands have access to captive audiences that are primed for sales and positive interaction. This provides an opportunity to sell not only heavily discounted items like old stock, but even newer items that are not discounted.

Feedback in the SaleCycle survey, for instance, showed that some online retailers noticed that consumers would search for specific items on Black Friday to see if they were discounted, and then go ahead and buy them anyway, even if they weren't on sale.

This mindset is also believed to account for lower shopping cart abandonment rates during the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, demonstrating consumers' willingness to follow-through on their desire to purchase at this time.

As a retailer, this means that newly acquired customers who were drawn by sales prices plus loyal, existing customers who expected big discounts and received them, chose to spend their (highly coveted) Black Friday shopping time with your brand.

This provides an excellent opportunity to deliver an outstanding, memorable brand experience. It also points to the reason why a solid brand engagement strategy should underscore all your Black Friday activities.

Black Friday activations shouldn't be done in isolation. Rather, they should be contextualised against your broader, ongoing customer communications and interactions, ensuring consistency in your customer engagement approach and alignment with your brand values and brand equity. After all, this is what creates brand loyalty.

The optimal way to achieve this is to include various tools in your customer engagement mix, from competitions and games to innovative apps.

At FoneWorx, we provide brands, marketers and creative agencies with cutting-edge integrated campaign management services, spanning mobile, chatbots, channel incentives, loyalty programmes, competitions, personalised customer experiences, and bespoke campaigns.

All of these services can be customised to include Black Friday deals within a larger, more sustained approach to engagement that keeps your customers connected and tuned in every day of the year.