EPISODE 108 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: MISTAKES WE SAW BUSINESSES MAKE ON BLACK FRIDAY, AND WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM THEM
Sonya:
This year’s Black Friday saw businesses in Australia hit some of their highest sales figures EVER,
breaking all kinds of records - DESPITE whispers that projections were over inflated, and we shouldn't expect too much, considering:
- the economy,
- the events of 2022, AND…
- the fact that we’re all whinging about having no money these days!
Plenty of businesses, including some of our clients, absolutely SMASHED their targets for Black Friday, where others fell short of their goals.
For many, planning was what set them up for success or failure.
For others, they made some silly mistakes that could have easily been avoided.
I’m going to take you through a few of the mistakes my team and I observed over the Black Friday weekend, and what YOU should do to avoid making those same mistakes - not JUST when it comes to Black Friday, but whenever you're planning a sale or promotion for your business.
Make sure you stay tuned for the last one - it’s a bit of a doozy.
As I mentioned in the intro to this episode, this year’s Black Friday sales smashed ALL kinds of records.
Not only did businesses achieve some of their highest sales ever, we also saw the price of ads shoot up like you wouldn’t BELIEVE.
And because retailers started their campaigns even earlier this year to avoid that Friday spike in ad costs,
if you were one of the clever few who took my advice and set your ad sets up two weeks before Black Friday…
But then didn’t check on them at ALL in the lead up… Or on Black Friday itself... Or across the rest of the Cyber Weekend…
Let’s just say, you may have had a nasty shock when you opened up your ads manager the next week and saw how much it cost to get a single sale through your ads.
And if you didn’t set a spending limit?
Well. That may or may not have been a VERY expensive lesson to learn.
You’ve heard me say before that ads aren’t set and forget, and this illustrates my point.
If you run a small business and you can see that you’re paying upwards of $10 per conversion, on an advertised product that only costs 15, that ad is going to be COSTING you money once you factor in all your overheads and the costs of running your business.
And when you throw a Black Friday discount into the mix? Forget about it.
I’d be switching those ads off or bringing my budget RIGHT DOWN, and I’d look at sending a couple of extra emails out to my email list.
Because I would ABSOLUTELY have an email list.
One that I’ve built. And nurtured.
Because you cannot rely on a platform that you do not own.
You may have heard me say this, oh, a million times? Because it’s TRUE.
Once you have an email address, you ‘own’ it. You don’t own your followers on Facebook and Instagram.
Speaking of email lists, I read on a marketing forum that a LOT of business owners experienced unprecedented levels of unsubscribes from their email lists over the sales period, and they couldn’t figure out why.
It only took two questions for it to become pretty obvious why this was happening:
First question: Before the Black Friday sales period, when was the last time you sent an email out to your list?
And the second question: Do you ONLY email your list when you have a sale on?
I said this in a previous podcast, but it bears repeating: if you only contact your list when you want THEM to do something for YOU (ie. buy your stuff because you’re having a sale), you come across like that friend that only ever contacts you when she wants a favour, or that ex boyfriend who pops up every six months or so to get himself back on your radar.
If someone is willing to enter their email address into a box to subscribe to your emails, you need to value their time, energy (and their POTENTIAL LIFETIME VALUE as a customer), and provide them with value REGULARLY, not just when you feel like it.
And finally, the big doozy of a mistake that stopped us in our tracks and actually made me send a DM to the business owner who made it?
This one broke my heart a little.
Let me set the scene a bit for you first…
This business owner was in the digital product / coaching space. So her offering was a fairly high ticket digital program that would have cost upwards of $900, if I had to make an educated guess.
I’ll just point out here that the higher the price of the product you’re selling, the more you’re going to have to spend on ads to net ONE sale, let alone enough to make all the effort that goes into setting up a premium campaign worthwhile.
One of my team stumbled across the ad.
The photo was high quality, the tag line was catchy, and the product addressed a pain point the person on my team was looking to fix.
So far so good, right?
My team member clicked on the link at the bottom of this beautiful ad, and…(pause for effect)
She was redirected to an error page. (pause for effect)
This business owner had gone to all the effort to get a photo shoot done, test out different hooks and captions and possibly even price points… only to have that effort go to waste when the ad went to a page that didn’t work?!
Now, anyone who clicked on that ad BEFORE the link was fixed up would still end up being retargeted with ads forever and ever until they either hid the ad from their feed or exited out the other end of the advertising funnel…
But can you IMAGINE how many sales that business owner missed out on? Especially when you consider that it took over 24 hours for them to fix the link?!
What my team member did next was something that I would argue MOST people would do when they hit a roadblock in the buying process:
She closed the tab and went on with her day.
Actually, first she sent me the link to the ad, with a message saying “when you don’t check your links before publishing your Black Friday ads”... THEN she closed the tab and went on with her day.
The only reason she gave this business a second thought was because we’re always on the lookout for podcast content!
As a marketer this absolutely BREAKS my heart, and it’s a great lesson in not only slowing down to make sure that everything is in order BEFORE you hit publish, but to also get a second pair of eyes on everything you do to make sure that you haven’t missed a vital aspect of your campaign.
So there you have it. Three of the biggest mistakes we saw business owners make on Black Friday, and what you can do to avoid making those same mistakes. And they all come down to not paying attention, in one way or another.
It’s a good lesson for us business owners, who so often try to power through when it comes to getting an ad campaign up and out of the way, or who get caught up in the day-to-day and push back that email to our lists until next week. And then the next week. And then six months have gone by and it feels weird to pick it up again.
When it comes to running ANY type of sale, identifying what COULD go wrong, and taking steps to avoid those mistakes, could save - or even make - you thousands of dollars, in the end.