Black Friday or not Black Friday, that is not the question

Black Friday is back in France even if Thanksgiving is not a significant date. With one month to go before the Christmas holidays and a month and a half of private sales and sales, what is the place of this annual event in the customer marketing strategy of brands?

In a complicated economic context, the Black Friday frenzy has intensified in Europe  and is part of a trend towards an accumulation of promotions, particularly since 2020, when retail brands have found themselves with substantial stocks of unsold products due to the COVID .

The question is not so much to do Black Friday or not to do it, except obviously for positioning or strong ethical issues, but rather what role to give it. This raises a fundamental problem for marketing teams, which is to integrate all on-off promotional operations into their overall customer marketing strategy.

On the eve of Black Friday, how to justify this emphasis on low prices a month before Christmas? What strategy to adopt a few weeks before the private sales and Winter Sales? 

We suggest you discover how to reinvent your promotional campaigns so that they are part of a long-term customer relationship management.  

Customers face over-solicitation during Black Friday

The end of November marks the beginning of a crucial period for brands. Customers are more inclined to spend, especially on gifts. Brands multiply campaigns and commercial proposals on all channels.  

The countdown has begun for customers who have to finalize their purchases before Christmas, but also for brands who have to reach their sales target, which is often high during the month of December!

Black Friday is therefore part of an already very busy period in terms of communications encouraging purchases. Moreover, since this event is very short, brands concentrate all their sales efforts at the same time. And very often, the law of large numbers and generic messages with "full base" targeting are used because they are easier to to manage for marketing teams. Customers are then quickly overwhelmed by communications that are often not very personalized, highlighting promotions on items that do not necessarily correspond to them.

Individuation® advantage - the centralized management of the marketing pressure: by defining your rules of marketing pressure and by centralizing the management of all the channels in a single platform, you will be able to increase or decrease the pressure to reach your objectives of additional sales. But you will do it in any case by taking into account your customers' appetites and will avoid unnecessary solicitations.

The objective of the Black Friday operation is not always clearly expressed by the brands

How do brands use Black Friday: is it Winter Sales before Winter Sales or a destocking operation? Isn't there a risk of harming the following operations? Is it always useful to offer promotions before and during the Christmas shopping period in a massive way?  

All customers typically spend more at this time. So the question brands may ask themselves is: will all customers buy more if I offer them a promotion? Would they not have bought anyway?  Would they have bought a product from my catalog without a discount anyway? By pushing a promotion on a product they didn't necessarily need, am I not depriving myself of a sale on a product that suits them and generates more margin? Is it the right time to do destocking?

Individuation® advantage - promo sensitivity by client: to target only promotion-sensitive customers identified through daily updated indicators. There is no need to present promotional offers to customers who never buy discounted products. Reserve your communications for them to present new products for example.

The content of messages often undifferentiated during Black Friday is not relevant to a large number of customers

This type of "one-two punch" event generates a lot of debates and some customers are quite reluctant, mainly for ethical reasons: they consider that Black Friday generates impulse purchases and they do not want  to be exposed to these commercial operations.

It is therefore important to know your customers' interests and appetites: maintaining a long-lasting relationship is based on a two-way commitment. Your customers will commit to your brand if you commit to respect and meet their expectations. If some of them are not sensitive to this type of offers, there is no need to provoke annoyance or disinterest in the brand by soliciting them.

Advantage Individuation® - Relevance: adapting content to the interests and appetites of each of your customers is essential, but you have to accept that you won't send anything if it doesn't match them. 

By integrating Individuation® to your CRM, you will evolve and optimize your Black Friday campaigns. Not sending a solicitation at the time of Black Friday does not mean that the brand is depriving itself of sales. On the contrary! It frees up "room" for another type of communications that is more adapted to the appetites of non-targeted customers. In the end, the turnover/customer will be higher!  

Result: a successful Black Friday operation that respects your customers  

• You save money because you send fewer messages and only to the right channels 
• You increase the ROI of the operation because the targeted customers are more receptive to the offer and will be more reactive 
• You don't create customer dissatisfaction because you avoid unnecessary solicitations by not offering them content that doesn't correspond to them  

The goal of Individuation® is to help marketers optimize their customer marketing. Contact us to unleash the potential of your campaigns and integrate them into a sustainable and respectful customer relationship strategy.