We recently blogged about how high or low you should go with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Our data from last year’s season suggests that the most lucrative discount rate range is between 30% and 40%. 

Each company and its product(s) are different, though, so don’t take this decision lightly. Do your research on what your competitors offered last year; what is considered common within your industry (essentially, what have relevant audiences grown to expect during this season); which of your initiatives over the previous years brought the highest ROI etc. before crystallizing your Black Friday strategy.  

Johan van Meeuwen, Account Manager

On top of the above, it’s worth considering another approach led by different audiences you want to target during this period. You can estimate the potential revenue different segments can drive based on how large your pool of target users for each segment is. The main segments you can look into with this approach are: 

• Prospects (customers you want to target but have never purchased from you before)
• Users currently on free trial / demo of your product
• Previous trialers who never converted
• Existing customers (especially those in sub-group of customers you could upsell or cross-sell to)
• Customers who have churned 

Once you’ve uncovered which segment demonstrates the highest potential of driving revenue, you might want to offer them bigger or exclusive discounts compared to the rest of the users. 

Paul Tebbs, Account Manager

You may not have the necessary resources or budgets to reach new customers out there in time for Black Friday. If this is the case, consider partnering up with one or more software companies so you all benefit from each other’s promotions. This is probably one of the most cost efficient ways to get your message exposed to new but relevant audiences. 

The idea is simple: You reach out to another company out there that targets the same or a similar audience or whose products are complementary to yours. For example, if your product is a project management tool tailored to the needs of content teams you could reach out to a business selling content management software. 

What happens next is either party pushes the other party’s promotion to their audience through their online channels (e.g. newsletter, social media, blog etc.) or even through a product bundle.

Tip: Prefer to reach out to companies with similarly sized customer base or revenue as yours. Of course, you can’t be 100% sure, but use any industry knowledge you may have access to as well as any information you can get from their website to assess whether they would be a good fit. If they’re disproportionately smaller than you then your message won’t travel far whereas if they’re considerably bigger they will more likely be reluctant to promote your offer without any monetary rewards.  

Paula Recker, Account Manager

You may have heard of “rollover” budgets, but this is not as common practice as you may think. This means that any budget you don’t use within the quarter or year essentially you end up losing, you don’t just transfer it to the next one. Black Friday presents companies with this unique opportunity to increase sales not just thanks to their offers during that period but also by promoting a messaging of making the most of your remaining budget just around when you’re about to lose it. Often, Q4 sales quotas are higher than previous quarters, so for any SaaS companies cultivating sales-assisted deals Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be a good time to close those deals based on potential end-of-year IT budget surplus.

* However, remember that not every business runs their financial year based on the calendar year, so it’s always worth knowing your customers and your market. It’s not unusual for many companies amongst them to end their financial year on a different month and/or budget differently to what described above.

Paul Tebbs, Account Manager

Pushing your Black Friday promotions through your affiliate network can be a lucrative tactic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Consider increasing their commission during this period to incentivize them to prioritize your deals over other affiliate partners or competitors who may also be running promotions around the same time on their network.

Wahid Tashkandi, Account Manager

Maximize your selling potential through your existing customers. They already have first hand experience of your product(s) and (hopefully) they love it. There are two ways you can achieve this:

• Encourage them to gift your software to a third party offering a special discount for these cases.
• Create a limited time referral scheme and reward them for each new customer they bring you. (Don’t forget to specify what the timeframe for this promotion is!)

Johan van Meeuwen, Account Manager

If offering a discount on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is not an option (or you’re simply not keen on the idea), then it’s time to become creative with the incentives you offer. Explore other options that can add value to your target users, such as offering a free consultation with one of your experts, running a free webinar, or offering a download of one of your resources for free (for example, if you host ebooks or whitepapers on your site that you usually charge for, consider promoting your “best seller” as a free resource for a limited period).

 

There are many ways in which to amplify the reach of your Black Friday offers. Surely you’ve come across advice online, or even been in numerous strategy meetings, where the idea of running a sweepstake or hosting a competition (with the reward being a free or discounted version of your product) is proposed as a good way to help your promotion reach a wider audience.

Of course, all the above are perfectly good tactics to use to attract more potential customers, however they are no more relevant to Black Friday than any other time of the year, plus you’re risking these messages getting lost in the wider buzz around Black Friday. 

Instead, opt for a “star promotion + nice to have” strategy, meaning you can complement your main deal by bundling in limited edition/time content or some company swag (or other goodies that you know your audience will love). These are nice-to-haves and relay a message to your audience that you’re going above and beyond this period, with the main driver of sales still remaining the discount on your main product.

Harrison Rose, Chief Customer Officer and Co-Founder

The snippet on the right demonstrates US user interest around Black Friday and Cyber Monday over the past 10 years:

Interest around Black Friday and Cyber Monday is increasing YoY (with a consistent positive trend in the last 5 years). What the above also demonstrates is that interest around Black Friday is substantially higher than Cyber Monday. However, don’t disregard how inflated the former is due to interest in retail offers and how much more relevant to software businesses the latter is due to focus being placed solely on online offers. 

Looking closer into peak and low points, interest around Black Friday starts to peak around two weeks earlier than around Cyber Monday (although they’re only a weekend apart). Similarly, interest doesn’t die out as soon as these days are gone, but it remains considerably high for a few days (sometimes up to a week) afterwards.

What the above means is that in order to capture as much of relevant Black Friday traffic as possible your offers should span across a longer period and not strictly over just two days (and the weekend in between). Set your promotion live one or two weeks before Black Friday and let it run until you see interest flattening a few days following Cyber Monday. 

Here’s an example of one of our customers here at Paddle: Realmac launched its Black Friday deals two weeks ahead of Black Friday 2019. 

Erika Varangouli, Senior Content Marketing Manager

Before you even launch your Black Friday deals, get potential customers excited by setting up a countdown a week or a few days in advance. Don’t just leave it there, though. Add a feature to your site to allow users to sign up for email alert(s) when your promotion goes live. This way you can expand your existing email base of potential customers but also target these site visitors more efficiently once your Black Friday campaign kicks off. 

Hide.me made the most of this tactic when they launched their countdown two weeks ahead of Black Friday.

 

Black Friday presents a great opportunity for marketers but it can also turn into a marketing budget black hole. Before deciding on which channels you’re going to invest the best part of your budget, dive into any available data you have on previous year’s performance. 

For paid strategies, be aware that targeting specific terms during this period can prove to be a very costly practice so you can quickly max out your budgets with time still left on the clock. Instead, start your paid promotions early on (align with an early launch of your Black Friday offer - see above) and get ahead of the curve by bidding on competitive terms while costs remain low.

Paula Molinar, Digital Marketing Manager