4 Tactics for Effective Black Friday Campaign for Outdoor Brands

Key Takeaways

‍

In 2020, 81% of brands offered discounts or bundles during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In fact, Cyber Monday 2020 was the largest online spending day in US history, followed by Black Friday. In preparation for the holidays, brands should consider the following best practices:

• Highlight shopping options based on category — Customers are more likely to visit offline stores while shopping for clothing, footwear, handbags and accessories. To make it more convenient for shoppers to select specific products, brands should consider virtual fitting rooms or VIP services that allow customers to try the product on and then immediately return them if they didn't fit. 
  

• Prolong sale period — Online shopping is no longer constrained by brick and mortar store opening hours. There was a noticeable shift to prolonged shopping periods when shoppers can buy goods with a Black Friday discount. Many retailers let the sale last for as long as a week. 
  

• Make your experience mobile-friendly — 25% of online shoppers make purchases on their smartphones. With even more customers doing their pre-shopping research on their mobile devices, it’s critical to ensure that a mobile experience is fast and seamless.
  

• Drive loyalty with existing customers and win new ones — brands come up with creative ways to engage their existing customers to make repeat purchases. For example, Stance rolled out a comprehensive email campaign offering discounts to drive its audience to the website. At the same time, brands that are trying to tap into new audiences and are spending significantly more advertising dollars during November than during any other month.

‍

In 2020 Cyber Monday and Black Friday were the largest online spending days in U.S. history. The data also showed that for the first time, the number of online Black Friday shoppers passed the 100 million mark in 2020 (+8% from 2019) while Cyber Monday remains a higher spending day than Black Friday. 

‍

81% of brands advertised discounts or product bundles, where 30% was the most popular discount.

‍

Black Friday tactics to consider:

1. Highlight shopping options based on category

Customers are motivated to visit offline stores and try products when they are looking to buy apparel, jewelry, handbags and footwear. To facilitate purchases and mimic product trials, brands can highlight digital experiences such as virtual fitting rooms and augmented reality filters.

‍

Champs was the first sportswear retailer that created an AR try-on with SnapML. The footwear retailer leveraged Snapchat’s shoppable AR features that let users overlay digital shoes on their feet. 

Technology: Champs leverage third party (Snapchat) technology and community. 

Adidas enables shoppers to apply AR filters in their shopping app to selected shoe models. By offering this additional feature, Adidas not only incentivizes purchases but builds long-term relationships with their customers. 

Technology: The brand invested in building their own technology that enabled Adidas to enhance its app shopping experience. 

‍

2. Prolong sale period

A shift to digital shopping enabled retailers to prolong sales periods — instead of all sales happening in-store during 24 hours, brands start sales a few days before the actual Black Friday and keep them going until at least Cyber Monday.

‍

Both shoppers and brands expect to have more days to do their Black Friday shopping. 42% of buyers admit they start buying goods earlier than usual. At the same time, brands like Nike and Peloton advertise that their sales periods last up to a week.

‍

3. Make your experience mobile-friendly

More than 25% of online shoppers are making purchases on their mobile devices. Google searches for “online shopping app download” have increased by 300% since the pandemic started. Brands have to understand the nuances of each shopping channel and tailor the experiences accordingly.  

‍

Major outdoor brands see their mobile traffic share grow year on year.

‍

4. Drive loyalty with existing customers and win new ones

Companies are willing to spend advertising dollars to drive traffic to their websites. On average brands spend 3.1X on e-commerce traffic ads during the holiday season than on any other day throughout the year. However, beyond investing in digital advertising, companies first focus on their existing users and come up with creative ways to cut through the Thanksgiving noise. 

‍

Stance developed an email campaign to maximize sales from its existing audience. 

Stance leveraged its email list to roll out an elaborate shopping campaign consisting of 7 emails sent between November 8th and December 2nd offering various discounts.As the result, Stance’s website traffic grew by 86%. Read more in this case study.

Brands are willing to invest advertising dollars to tap into new audiences during the hot shopping season:‍

Compared to the average daily spend for the November “ramp-up” period (Nov 1-25), advertiser spending on Black Friday was:

• Up to 3.1X for Ecommerce Channel Ads (Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.)
• Up to 2.9X for Paid Search
• Up to 2.1X for Social Advertising

‍