Black Friday: Collect the right leads at the right time

Friday, 27 November, 2020.

That is the date for this year’s Black Friday. A must-attend trade event in the United States, which has since spread around the world, Black Friday marks the peak season for retailers’ year-end operations. But this year, Black Friday may feel a little different due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, for the most daring online traders, it can also boost turnover that is being driven by increasingly big online sales. The key to a successful event is to make sure you know how to work properly on your prospects. Lead generation, lead nurturing and lead conversion: three key steps for a successful Black Friday!

Lead generation

This is when you collect contacts and prospects who might be interested in your offers. These may come from different sources and have varying levels of maturity. But the most important thing is to create the mechanics that will make lead generation the entry point of your digital marketing strategy. To achieve this, don’t forget that your landing page and your site need to be optimised first. Ideas, examples and illustrations:

• Email campaign: create a form to invite visitors from a site to subscribe to a newsletter. You can also generate leads by offering white paper downloads, event registration, or other custom content.
• Co-registration: this is a partnership between two brands where you fill in a form on Brand A’s website to subscribe directly to Brand B’s newsletter by ticking a simple box. This approach enables Brand B to generate qualified leads in an affinity relationship with both brands.
• Produce content on a frequent and regular basis with an inbound marketing oriented approach.
• Work on your influence and affiliate marketing with performance-based promotions. It’s a good way to secure your investments and move towards an ROI approach. And if you don’t have the resources in-house, you can also outsource these roles.
• Leverage social networks. You don’t have to be everywhere for this, you just have to be active where your personas are. To successfully collect leads on social networks, your team needs to be responsive to engage with your community. 

Lead nurturing

Now that you have prospects in your database, you need to know what to do with them. Nurturing is about activating your most interesting prospects and moving them through your conversion tunnel. For this, you will need to:

• Score your leads, because not all prospects are of equal importance. Focus on those who are most likely to buy.
• Optimise your customer journey.  This is the path from point A (first emergence of prospect) to point B (conversion into a customer). In some cases, this path is simple and straightforward. In other cases, it is time-consuming, arduous and can lead to a dead end. In all cases, there are several key steps you need to take which you measure based on the prospect’s actions (opening of newsletters, social commitment, request for contact, etc.). 
• Automate your processes so you don’t waste time. You create an action once, then software does the rest, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Registration, notification, sharing on social networks, enriching a CRM database, logistics management and so on… automation is essential at every stage of the sales process.
• Be responsive to comments on social networks, questions, dissatisfied customers… Answer quickly, and be reactive and understandable. Your entire brand value is at stake.

Lead conversion

Your prospects know you well by now. They know who you are, what values you stand for, what your position is, etc. All that remains is to convert them into customers by turning their interest into a purchase. Here, more than ever, you need to ensure your communications have a human feel and focus on authenticity. You can do it like this:

• Promote unique offers that will get people talking. Forget the stingy 10% deals on shipping costs. You have to offer major deals right away on one or more star products. Unlike sales, Black Friday has a very limited duration (in theory it’s just one day, but many brands develop a strategy over several days with Cyber Week and Cyber Monday).
• Look after your loyal customers. Why not give your best customers a perk by offering a little something extra (free shipping, free additional service, etc.)??
• Use coupons. This will enable you to offer an additional discount or speed up the conversion during the last hours of Black Friday for example.

In order to collect leads at the right time, it is vital for you to know your customer journey and the major steps that will lead to visitors converting. Monitor your KPIs in real time, set up alert mechanisms in case there are any issues and take the time to interact with your customers. An email or phone call to ensure customers are satisfied can make a significant difference in customer loyalty.

Kwanko can help you in your Black Friday strategy, contact us quickly to boost your cyberweek to the maximum.