In this episode, I dive into a topic that is crucial for your marketing success: why so many Black Friday sales fail and how to avoid those pitfalls. Whether you’re planning to run a Black Friday promotion or not, understanding the key factors that lead to success or failure during this season is vital for any business.
I also break down three things not to do with your promo and then give actionable advice and proven best practices to make sure you see success. From the importance of lead-up and strategy preparation to the role of warm audience engagement, I provide practical tips that will help you optimize your Black Friday promotions and increase your chances of a massive cash boost. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from my experience with over 50 successful Black Friday promotions and discover the formula that truly works.
If you’re ready to take your Black Friday promotions to the next level and maximize your results, listen now to gain valuable insights that will help you make the most out of this season. With my guidance, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and strategies needed to transform your Black Friday sales and create a successful and profitable campaign.
Listen now.
Key Points:
- The Importance of a Warm Audience:
- Black Friday promotions should be targeted towards your existing audience and email list.
- It’s crucial to consistently grow your warm audience throughout the year to capitalize on Black Friday sales.
- If your email list is less than 100 people, focus on building your audience rather than running a Black Friday promotion.
- Creating a Lead-Up and Strategy:
- Plan and strategize well in advance to ensure a successful Black Friday promotion.
- Develop a clear offer and bonuses that align with your audience’s needs and desires.
- Craft compelling messaging and promotional content to generate excitement and anticipation.
- Effective Promotion and Best Practices:
- Understand the formula for a successful Black Friday promotion, considering factors like discounts or bonuses.
- Implement a strategic promotional plan that includes prepping and building your audience leading up to Black Friday.
- Utilize the four-week plan provided in the workshop to ensure your business is fully ready for Black Friday.
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Ways I can support:
Want a cash boost for your business over the next month? Make sure you sign up for my Black Friday Quick Cash Strategy workshop that starts October 27th at 1 pm EST. I’ll be working with you live and take you step-by-step through building your custom Black Friday sales strategy (all without needing ads): https://www.notforlazymarketers.com/workshop
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh:
Hello, everybody! Welcome back to the podcast. Happy Tuesday! If you are tuning in live when this episode drops, I am still coming down off a high from my birthday party. I am actually recording this on a Sunday, which is super rare for me to be working on a Sunday, but tomorrow I’m going on a very quick trip with my husband, and I don’t know where we’re going. It’s a surprise. I love traveling if you didn’t know that about me, so I tell him most years to get me an experience instead of a gift because I really don’t need anything. I would much rather go on a trip, or like last year, we went to a concert and did a night in San Antonio, just anything that’s an experience, or write me a letter, do something like that because I value that so much more than things. So this year, he planned a trip, and I don’t know where we’re going. So we’re going on a quick trip, only three nights away from the kiddos, and I’m really excited, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to bring my podcast mic and have to create content or get to create content before we leave. So here I am, and I had an incredible birthday party yesterday. We had probably 40 people, maybe like 30 adults and then some kids at our house, all different friends from different groups, from crossfit to my entrepreneur friends, to friends through my kids in school, and it was amazing. It was exactly perfect.
My husband planned all of it, and I felt very loved and very grateful and just really, really grateful for the community that we’ve built. That’s been a big intention of mine. So here we are. I am going to talk today about Black Friday, which is so wild that it is so close. We are about to go into November. I just did planning with my team for November, and I was like, how is October like, how are we even talking about this? A month is just not a long time. That’s something I’ve really learned in business. You think, ‘Oh my gosh, a month, we can do all this stuff,’ and it’s like, no, it’s actually only four weeks, which is not a long time. So it is time to start thinking about Black Friday, if you’re going to do something for Black Friday, or at least thinking about it so that you don’t have a last-minute decision around it. I just did an internal team training last week. So I got all my account managers and our essential coach on a meeting, and I did an internal training just on my best practices with Black Friday: your offer, how to create good bonuses, messaging, and how to run the strategy so that they could take that and go and execute it for all of our clients that it’s relevant for. So, if you are an active client, your account manager in the coming week will be having a conversation with you about Black Friday.
We’ll make a recommendation or we’ll say, you know, you don’t have a big enough warm audience. We don’t think it’s a good idea, which is the case for some people’s businesses. But I really love doing that because I was able to do a one-hour training, super value-packed for my team, and now they get to go take it and impact the hundred-plus businesses that we work with. If you are not an active client right now or maybe you’re an essential and you want to run a Black Friday promotion, I am running a paid workshop this coming Friday, and we’re going to deep dive. It’s going to be about probably two to three hours with Q&A workshop where we go really, really deep on your Black Friday promotion. We’re actually going to create it together and decide: are you going to do a discount? Are you going to do a bonus? I’m going to walk you through all of the best practices. I have helped and supported with probably like 50-plus Black Friday promotions in the last several years, and I really know what it takes to create a successful Black Friday promotion, and there is a formula to it. There are definitely some things you really have to pay attention to. A lot of people don’t have successful Black Friday sales because of that, which I’m going to talk about three of those things today. If you want to attend this workshop, you can go to hirsshmarketing.com/workshop. You can save your seat. There is a regular ticket and a VIP ticket. The VIP gets an extra Q&A call with just me.
And it should be really good. Also, one thing we’re doing differently this year is I’m giving you a four-week plan from the day of the workshop all the way to Black Friday to actually start prepping and building your audience and your list if you need to do that leading up to Black Friday. So that’s included this year too, a four-week plan between now and Black Friday to make sure your business is ready for Black Friday, and then we’re going to talk all about your promotion, how to promote it, all the best practices, etc. So if you want to join hirshmarketing.com/workshop, you can join in on that. Otherwise, let’s dive into today’s content. I’m going to talk about why so many Black Friday sales fail, and I have three specific things. First of all, before I dive into those three things, I do want to say one thing: Black Friday, as a whole, is dependent on your warm audience, meaning your existing list, your existing audience that follows you, your web traffic, people who consume your content, your social media followers. It is an opportunity for businesses who are consistent all year round to capitalize on that consistency and create extra cash for their business. If you don’t really have a warm audience, like if your email list is less than 100 people, I probably wouldn’t do a Black Friday sale. And I’m actually telling people that who are looking at my workshop because Black Friday is not a time to be promoting something to new people.
It’s a time to promote to your existing audience, and as a business, you get to reap the benefits of consistently growing your warm audience and your list during this time. This is a conversation I had with my team about some clients who they knew wanted to do a Black Friday sale, and I said, ‘Look, we, of course, will execute anything for those clients if that’s what they’re adamant about and want to do that. But my strategic recommendation is not to put the effort into it because their audience and their email list is too small, and they could run a promotion in January after building up their list and their audience between now and then. Because it takes effort, like it takes writing promotional copy, coming up with the promo, actually executing it, and if you’re going to do that for not very many sales because you don’t have a big warm audience, your energy and your effort is probably better spent going into creating and building that big warm audience. So I’m putting the number on your email list is over 100. That’s the minimum. If your email list is not over a hundred people, put your energy right now and for the remainder of the year into growing your list. Don’t pause because of the holidays. You need those leads and that audience between now and the end of the year so that you can have a killer January. Everybody does. You should not be pausing your marketing through the holidays. I’ll do a separate podcast on that. So I want to be clear on that with Black Friday.
It is, to be successful, a warm traffic promotion, so you really start to feel it during the holidays and during this time of were you consistent all year round. Did you grow your list? Did you grow your audience? And if you didn’t, remember this next year so that you can get consistent starting now, starting right now, because times like this, the businesses who have been consistent really get to reap the benefits. Let’s talk about three reasons why so many Black Friday sales fail. The first one is not enough lead-up and strategy created beforehand to have that solid warm audience, but also to be connecting with them. So mistake number one would be if someone executed a Black Friday sale, but they haven’t grown their list and they haven’t grown their warm audience. It’s almost guaranteed it’s not going to do very well. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, ‘Well, shoot, I haven’t grown it that much,’ but if you have an audience over a hundred people on your list, you can execute a Black Friday sale. If you haven’t, don’t try because it probably won’t do well. But the other mistake people make is they get really busy leading up to Black Friday, leading up to the holidays, and during the month of November, and they stop nurturing their list, or they slow it way down. And then they pop up when it’s time for a Black Friday sale, and they’re like, ‘Hey, buy my thing, sign up for my service,’ but you’ve barely talked to your leads in the last month or your audience.
And so right now, part of what I’m going to teach on Friday is how important the engagement and the nurturing of your leads and your audience right now between now and Black Friday is because we need to be making sure we have a solid relationship with our leads and our audience between now and Black Friday so that when it comes time for Black Friday, and we want to promote and we want to have a promotion against all the other businesses that are also promoting to your audience and leads, we will have the right to do that because we have put in the work nurturing and giving value leading up to that. So this is something I lay out in a four-week plan on Friday, but it’s just really important that right now you’ve got content happening on your social media. That you are emailing your list at least once a week with a nurturing email. And as it gets closer, about the week before, I would definitely start teasing that something’s coming soon. Like, ‘Pay attention because you want your audience to know to pay attention to what you’re putting out during Black Friday because there’s so much noise during that time.’ So that’s mistake number one: going silent, going dark, not being consistent with your, first of all, growth with your audience and your leads. But then, second of all, your relationship building and your nurturing.
And you can’t just pop up on Black Friday and expect to make a bunch of money if you haven’t put in the work beforehand. Okay, the second reason why so many Black Friday sales fail, hands down 100%, you might be able to guess what I’m going to say. What’s the most important part of marketing? Poor messaging. Or maybe even a poor offer. So I’m going to go into really in-depth detail about this on Friday and the best practices. You don’t have to do a discount. That’s only one of three options for Black Friday. But if you do choose to do a discount, that’s not reason enough for somebody to buy your offer just because it’s 10% off or 25% off. I still need to understand the benefits and the outcomes and the reason why I should buy your offer. So I see this all the time with Black Friday sales that people just focus all about their offer, their service, it’s 25% off. That is the deal. It’s like, ‘Okay, yes, that’s going to get someone over the fence, that’s going to be a reason why they maybe take action right now, but you still can’t get out of actually selling your offer by connecting it to your audience’s pain, frustrations, and desires.’ The number one reason why offers don’t sell in general, not just in Black Friday, is honestly because of messaging. It’s because people are talking about the what, the features, the title of the offer, the discount, and all of these things that don’t actually matter to the leads, to your audience, because what matters is why would they buy your offer, your product, your service?
Because they want to solve a problem, because they want to achieve a desire, you are fulfilling something for them that doesn’t change just because you have a discount. It can also be a poor offer. So, one of the other options that I’ll talk about on Friday is actually creating a different offer for Black Friday that will help sell your regular, your core offer, which is definitely like a science to it. So I’m going to talk about it. But you have to understand that in the time of Black Friday, people want to buy something that is a quick win. They want to buy something, or they want to have a reason to buy something that like they can get a win from. They can get to their desired result faster and easier. So this really has a lot of intention behind it, and if you don’t focus on how do I make sure my Black Friday offer is a no-brainer because when someone sees it, they’re like, ‘Oh, yes, that will totally solve my problem, or that will totally get me to the desired result that I want.’ Or when you’re talking about your existing offer, you’ve got the discount as a reason for people to take action. But then you haven’t lost sight talking about pain, frustration, and desires. And you’re still tying the fact that your offer is going to solve those things and support with those things that you’ve identified, and then it’s like, ‘And buy now because there’s a discount.’ So that’s the second reason why so many Black Friday sales fail: poor messaging or maybe even a poor offer. The third is a poorly executed promotion so that you are completely drowned in all the other noise. I’ll hear people say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to do Black Friday because everybody does Black Friday sales,’ and yes, there are a lot more sales, that is true. There’s a lot more noise, there’s a lot more emails, there’s more commotion from businesses.
But if Black Friday sales weren’t successful, then nobody would do them. People buy during this weekend. There are people who wait to see what your business is going to put out and buy it during this weekend. So on one hand, yes, it’s louder and it’s noisier, but on another hand, if you have an audience and you have leads, why would you not create a Black Friday promotion to generate revenue for your business? Because your people are likely looking for something from you or expecting something from you. Everybody’s got different situations. There are some clients where I’m like it doesn’t make sense. You’re doing a live launch right before it, or let’s focus on this and do this in January. It is very custom, and on the workshop, if you come and you want to ask me some custom questions about your business and if it’s the right time, we can totally do that. But if you’re choosing to move forward with a Black Friday promotion, it is still possible to stand out, and it’s still possible to be successful even with all the noise, but you have to have a properly executed promotion. So that means enough promo materials, number one. It also means materials, copy, creative that stand out. How do you get it to stand out while you bring creativity, and you also connect it to what your audience is going through right now and why they buy right now. They’re paying their frustrations, their desires right. This is what I’m going to give you in the workshop is like exactly how to run the promotion, how many emails, how many social posts. But if you’re planning to do a promotion, don’t let it fail because you just throw together promotional materials at the last minute. Be really intentional with the angles, the messaging angles that you want to talk about. How you want to attract your ideal customer into this offer, meaning the pain, the frustrations, the desires that you’re going to tie into your offer. Maybe testimonials, maybe stories. Maybe there’s a reason that they buy it now and use it before the end of the year, like what is different for your audience right now that would get them to buy. That we can bring this into your messaging, your emails, your social posts, your ad copy, and use it to sell your Black Friday offer. And that’s what you need to be thinking about because that’s how you stand out and standing out and being intentional with this promotion means getting started on it now.
It means thinking about it now and messaging angles and work on that now, not the day before, not the week of Thanksgiving, because we can’t do our best work if we’re rushed and throwing together a promotion. So that’s the third reason why so many Black Friday sales fail. So my challenge to you is this week, make a decision. Think about, are you doing Black Friday or not? If you are, then I would definitely come to my workshop on Friday because the small ticket price for coming to the workshop will definitely make you a lot more money. We have so much feedback. We did this workshop last year. We have so much feedback from people about how successful their Black Friday sale was because they came to the workshop. I’ve got it down, the Black Friday process and sale pretty nailed. So if you do decide to do it, come to the workshop on Friday, and just make sure this week you’ve got an intentional decision. No more like off-the-cuff, throw spaghetti at the wall marketing stuff. That’s not what we’re doing anymore. Intentional yes, or no, and then yes, okay, we’re going to build it out. We’re going to build out the foundation. We’re going to make sure we have everything in place for it to be a 10 out of 10 promotion because if we’re going to put the energy and the effort and the resources into it, we don’t want anything less. All right, everybody. I hope this was helpful and gave you something to think about. If you haven’t thought about Black Friday yet, you’re like, ‘Oh shoot, it’s coming. It’s in like a month.’ Yeah, just about a month from when this podcast episode comes out, Black Friday and the promotion will be here. So that’s so I’m giving you a four-week plan. It’s about four weeks exactly from the workshop. Yeah, I hope this was helpful, and I will see you guys on Thursday.