Black Friday Toolkit

It's going to be a Black Friday unlike anything we've seen before, but with challenges comes opportunity. Here are the top trends to stay on top of for Black Friday 2020 alongside predictions on how it's likely to play out.

Trend: Adapting to new consumer behaviors
Prediction: Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPIS) options are critical as consumers have both safety and convenience top of mind. 

Trend: Everything ecommerce
Prediction: ecommerce sales are already up year over year and are expected to remain elevated throughout the holidays across retail categories, according to eMarketer.

Trend: "Early Bird" October Shoppers
Prediction: Savvy spenders will start spending as soon as the deals start to drop. 

Trend: Staying on top of microtrends
Prediction: Staying on top of short-term shifts in behavior as consumers adapt to lockdown is key. During the pandemic, some categories have shown very specific micro-trends.

Trend: Christmas arrives early
Prediction: The holidays will hit retail at the earliest point in history, as consumers seek a bit of good tidings and joy. 

According to Gallup and the National Retail Federation, the historical holiday trend of consumers spending more YoY as a whole continues, even when they profess they will spend less. This applies even in a year of crisis.

Inside the toolkit, you can see more information about these trends — and the steps you can take to plan for them.

Your Black Friday marketing doesn’t start on the actual day – or even just a few days before. Black Friday marketing preparation has a lot of moving parts that take time to coordinate. From social campaigns to email campaigns, you have to make sure everything is ready to go.

This preparation calendar has the most important milestones you have to cover when planning your Black Friday marketing, including: 

• Optimizing your store for mobile shopping
• Creating abandoned cart automations
• Pre-writing every possible customer response you may need

Don’t let these 8 important prep dates pass you by! Use the calendar to keep your marketing plan on schedule and ready to execute.

Did you know that 77% of online shopping carts are abandoned? That’s more than three-quarters. It’s 6 slices of an 8-slice pizza. And it’s even worse when it happens on Black Friday – one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

There’s no doubt – abandoned carts aren’t fun to deal with. You get so close as a customer adds item after item, and then all of a sudden...poof! They left and didn’t take the cart with them?

Why does it happen? The reasons are many:

• They were just browsing and never intended to buy
• The total cost was too much
• Shipping costs felt unreasonable

Yes, there are a lot of reasons why people abandon carts. But it’s actually a lot easier to get people back than you think. And all it takes is an abandoned cart email series. 

This guide shows you a 3-step abandoned cart series that can save even more of your almost-customers than just a single email could.

An abandoned cart series with more than one reminder email gives you more chances to reach people. Learn how to use a series of emails to persuade customers to cross the purchase finish-line.

When you run an ecommerce business, there are a lot of customer interactions you have to manage. Everything from order confirmation emails to reward program updates and answering support questions is your responsibility.

The only problem? You only have 2 hands. And way more than 2 customer interactions to deal with.

This is where automation swoops in like a superhero to take over manual processes and give you the time to run your business. This is especially helpful during Black Friday – if you tried to send every abandoned cart email by hand you’d never do anything else!

In this guide, you get immediate access to 18 ecommerce automations that help make your life (and your customers’ experience) so much better. These automations help you with things like:

• Recover revenue with abandoned cart emails and automations
• Win-back campaigns that keep customers coming back
• Send automated ecommerce upsell and cross-sell campaigns to your customers

Ecommerce marketing automation recipes help you send revenue-boosting emails to help keep your active customers engaged.

When Black Friday prep season rolls around, your customers are going to get emails from every business with an email address.

How will yours stand out? 

It would be easier if you had 10 ready-made ideas to get you started. And that’s exactly what you get in the Black Friday Toolkit – 10 of the Best Black Friday Email Examples to Inspire Your Holiday Marketing

After you see these strategies used in these examples, you’ll be ready to create a Black Friday email strategy that stands out — and brings in your best Black Friday email revenue ever.

Who doesn’t love a discount?

Everyone! It’s the reason that Black Friday is such a popular shopping day. Millions of people are vying for a chance to score a great deal on the products they really want.

People really, really love coupons. But are they right for your business?

• How do you manage people’s expectations with your business needs?
• How do you create a good incentive for people to buy?
• What types of email coupons can you send?

This guide to email coupons has everything you need to prepare your Black Friday deals.

Your business is yours, and it’s different from every other business. The ways you process payments or handle support requests or operate other parts of your business can be done with a variety of software tools.

Here’s the thing: there are so many different software apps that you can use to operate your business, and you may already have several in place. What do you do when you want to add ActiveCampaign too?

It’s easy – the ActiveCampaign API is used to enable integrations between your ActiveCampaign account and 3rd party services or a custom interface you created.

When it comes to Black Friday, you’re going to need some ecommerce apps to handle your orders and customer needs. Here are a few of the most popular ecommerce apps you can integrate with ActiveCampaign:

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce
• Square

These (and other) ecommerce apps can help you connect your customer data with your sales and marketing processes in ActiveCampaign. With their help, running your Black Friday campaigns gets a whole lot easier.