Recently, it was Black Friday - arguably one of the biggest if not THE biggest shopping day of the year.
In short, people are out there looking for deals.
They’re in buying mode.
And as a CoFounder of a SaaS blogger outreach software, NinjaOutreach, it seemed only pertinent that we had some deal that people could capitalize on.
Now, I’ve never “done” Black Friday before, at least not on the selling side - so I didn’t have a crystal clear strategy on what I could do.
But after speaking with Matthew Woodward, who urged me to put together some sort of a campaign, it seemed clear that I should muster up whatever spare time I had and throw something together.
And what I realized was that if you have the right tools in place - it’s really not that hard.
Here’s what I did:
- Setting up a coupon (using Stripe)
- Building a landing page (using LeadPages)
- Creating an email sequence (in Drip)
- Setting up Facebook Retargeting (in Perfect Audience)
And I believe the same concept can be used in the holiday season as well.
Setting Up A Coupon In Stripe
The first thing you need to capitalize on the Black Friday (and holiday buying) frenzy is an offer - why should people buy your product today and not any other day?
If you’re not sure what a “good” offer is, take a look at some of the deals that other businesses have offered:
What you’ll notice is that many companies “go big” and do heavy discounts, sometimes as much as 90%!
As for us, we decided to offer a 30% monthly discount for life off any of our price plans, which we thought would be very well received. Once we came to that conclusion, we simply had to set up the coupon in Stripe, which is our payment processor.
Stripe makes coupons easy and here’s how you can do it:
Go to their coupons tab and create a new coupon. The fields are very self explanatory - they are:
- Percent Off - How much are you discounting it?
- Currency - In what currency?
- Amount Off - If not a % discount, how much off?
- Duration - Will it expire or is it for life?
- ID - What will it be called?
- Max Redemptions - How many people can redeem it?
- Redeemed By - When does it have to be redeemed by?
The setup only takes about 5 minutes and then you’re done.
Setting Up A Landing Page
Alright, now you need a landing page.
For this, I use LeadPages, which is an easy way to create a landing page by simply using their go-to templates, integrations and assembling one.
Here’s how the page I created looks like.
Again, nothing fancy about this page, but it comprises the following key elements:
- Call to action at the top explaining what the offer is and when it ends
- Count down timer to convey a sense of urgency
- Product video
- Social share elements
- Opt in button
This took me about 20 minutes to set up, and that’s mostly because I don’t use LeadPages that much and I always find myself fumbling around a bit.
Setting Up An Email Sequence
OK, so if someone opts into the landing page - then what?
Well, you need an email sequence.
For that, I use Drip. Drip is marketing automation at its finest, and it’s a new tool I just started with, but I’m already loving it over Aweber.
The process was so simple - all I had to was to:
- Create a form on Drip that added people to our general blog list if they opt in
- Create an additional trigger email so anyone who signed up through that form got a special email delivering the coupon and was tagged as Black Friday for future reference (See Below)
- Integrate the form with LeadPages following these easy instructions
The total time I spent on this was probably another 20 minutes or so.
Driving Traffic Through Perfect Audience Facebook Ad Campaigns
Alright, I’ve checked the box on pretty much everything on the setup checklist - people can now opt in through a landing page and they will receive a coupon for 30% that syncs with their Stripe data.
Now I just have to drive traffic.
For this, I went to Perfect Audience to set up two retargeting campaigns - one through Facebook and another through Web.
Setting up a campaign in Perfect Audience is very simple but there is one important caveat.
The caveat was that it is a retargeting campaign, which means you are retargeting your website visitors, which means that you have to have a retargeting pixel on your website and depending on your site’s traffic this can take weeks or even months to build up.
Luckily, we already had one going from past campaigns.
If you think you’re going to want to do some retargeting in the future then I highly recommend setting up a tracking pixel now.
Because we had that, we already had an audience of thousands of people to target, so we just had to set up the campaign, which took 5 minutes:
In Perfect Audience, I clicked on “launch a new campaign” and in this case, I chose Facebook (and later on a web campaign too).
First I selected my audience to include anyone who had visited the website or the pricing page in the last 90 days.
Then I added my ad, which was a banner ad I had created some time ago (and slightly adapted to add some text about Black Friday and the 30% off deal.
Then I just set the campaign budget and schedule.
Finally, it was ready to go, and I had the following working for me:
- 2 means of traffic generation
- A simple funnel
- Landing Page
- Email Newsletter
- Fulfillment via coupon
At this point the only thing left to do was to test each part of it and make sure I could opt in to the landing page, get my email, be added to the list (with appropriate tag), and checkout with that coupon to receive a 30% discount.
Once I confirmed that everything worked - I set it live!
The total time for all of the above was probably 2-3 hours and that was a lot of me fumbling my way through it.
Conclusion
This strategy could easily be effective for days of the year outside of Black Friday. It’s simply standard paid advertising - with a twist in that we were capitalizing on buyer’s fervor around the holidays.
The total cost of the campaign was $200 in advertising (the tools were already paid for as we use them elsewhere). While the total revenue in terms of lifetime value of new sales was easily in the thousands.
So…how was your Black Friday? If you missed the chance to capitalize on the holiday, you’ve still got another 2 to 3 weeks left to make the most out of the remaining Christmas shopping window.