Black Friday – THE shopping event

it’s almost time again for Black Friday. Black Friday in the USA is traditionally the Friday after Thanksgiving, the American harvest festival and the shopping highlight of the year.

Black Friday is also enjoying increasing popularity in German-speaking countries. Considering the ever growing turnover on this very day in the past years, the hype is well justified. The big online shops in particular are throwing around with discounts.

Besides Black Friday the Cyber Monday has also established itself pretty well. This year, the Cyber Monday takes place on the 26th of November

Especially if you are an online retailer, it can be worthwhile to use this occasion. Many customers have planned this day as a shopping highlight and they will strike as soon as a special offer is attracting them. But even in the B2B environment, you can give it a try it and see if you can win some new customers due to a little discount. Maybe you even get the chance for some additional business with an already existing customer. In contrast to the B2C sector, your offer will certainly attract more attention, as Black Friday has been neglected in the B2B environment so far. In addition, a limited time availability triggers the hunting instinct.

In the B2C sector, it is difficult to attract attention among all the colourful advertisements and campaigns at such a hyped major shopping event. Especially the big online shops advertise immensely for every single special offer. But what’s the best way to avoid drowning in shopping madness?

First of all, you should inform your customers that you are participating in Black Friday with appropriate offers. You can build a smaller or larger campaign for this purpose, depending on your possibilities. Inform your customers at least two weeks in advance that you are participating in Black Friday. In this newsletter you can already start teasering first actions, e.g. “Black Friday is approaching! Take the chance and save up to 45 percent on this day with our special sneaker offer”. To attract even more attention, take advantage of the opportunities offered by modern e-mail marketing: For example, you can build in a countdown that counts the days until Black Friday, or how about changing or dynamic images? (You can find more information about this and other possibilities for Dynamic Content in our article on Dynamic Content) You can then send a second newsletter of this kind shortly before Black Friday to remind cusomters of your offers.

On Black Friday itself or perhaps even the evening before, you can then run the full program and submit your offers to the customer. A special possibility is a Dynamic Content Newsletter as a daily campaign. For this you prepare a single newsletter. However, the offer changes every three hours. You can also use a countdown that tells the recipient how much time he has to accept the offer. You can place the offers parallel to those on your website, but marketing as an exclusive offer, only for newsletter recipients, is also possible. The advantage of a Dynamic Content Newsletter is that a certain “must-have feeling” is built up on the recipient due to the short period of availability until he orders the object of desire. In order to achieve this, these offers should also be actual bargains, otherwise the customer will very quickly lose interest in your offers. Best case scenario, your customer will look at the newsletter every few hours to see what’s available right now.

Example Dynamic Content Newsletter:

To show you which possibilities Dynamic Content Newsletter offers, we have an example for you here. This is a newsletter of a café that updates its contents hourly. The arrows mark the contents which adapt themselves.

In this example of a café, the header text changes from “Time for something sweet” to “Watch out! In line with this, the description of the offer changes from ice cream to cake with the matching picture. The countdown is renewed every time and counts down another hour. Also the actual newsletter text adapts to the respective offer. Of course, other elements can also be designed dynamically and the offer time can be shortened or extended as desired.

If you have a wider product range, you can also categorise. For example, offer sneakers for the first three hours, T-shirts for the next three hours and jeans for the next three hours. It is possible to offer only individual, selected products or to grant a discount on an entire product category. You can pre-announce the next category of offers in order to not put the customer on the receiving end of the torture. If you would like to know how you can best implement the Dynamic Content Show in the EMM, simply contact us. We’ll be happy to help.

In addition to this dynamic newsletter campaign, it is also possible to integrate other channels. Push messages are particularly suitable for this. Did you know that with Web Push your messages arrive regardless of whether the recipient is currently on your website or not? So if your customer doesn’t look at his e-mails all too often, it might be a a way to reach him.

By the way, Web Push messages can easily integrate links and images. This channel is therefore predestined for offers with a short availability. This means that your customers can no longer miss a single offer. Web Push messages can also be easily sent from the EMM.

Even though the term Black Friday has established itself in German-speaking countries bynow, the name is still protected under trademark law according to our current information state. The proposal for the deletion of the term has been pending with the Federal Patent Office for some time. Strictly speaking, this name should never have been registered. At the end of March this year, the DPMA decided to cancel the registration. However, as the trademark owner, Super Union Holdings Lts., filed an appeal with the Federal Patent Court, the decision is not yet final.

This means that the Black Friday trademark is still protected. For you, this means that you may be threatened with a warning when using the term. So if you want to use the name Black Friday, we recommend that you get the appropriate legal advice from a specialised lawyer. An alternative is not to use the term and to invite the customers instead to Shopping Friday with black offers, to Buy Day, Special Shopping Friday or something similar.

We wish you good luck with your personal shopping Friday event!