25 Black Friday Marketing Ideas to Try in 2024

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Discover some of the best marketing tips and ideas to try on Black Friday weekend of 2024, featuring well-known marketing tactics and innovative new strategies to engage customers and boost your online BFCM sales.

Black Friday weekend is a pretty exciting time for online merchants. It’s that time of year that signifies the beginning of the holiday shopping uptick, marked by a flurry of sales and promotions all around.

We’re sure that you’re looking forward to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, building up a strategy as early as now to make the best out of your BFCM sale period. To see a successful Black Friday weekend, you need to carefully start planning out your marketing strategy. After all, with the rising cost and effort of customer acquisition and rising competition to selling online, it's crucial to have a well-crafted and innovative marketing strategy to stand out and maximize your sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period.

In this article by Ecommerce Pro, we are pulling out our extensive list of Black Friday marketing ideas to try in 2024. These tips aren’t just great for Black Friday weekend, but they’re also helpful all year round.

Here are our top 25 marketing tips and strategies to have a successful Black Friday and holiday shopping season ahead.

1. Early Bird Discounts:

Get ahead of everyone by kickstarting Black Friday early with an early bird discount strategy. Some brands have been opting for a headstart by tempting their customers with some great promos a week or so before the BFCM weekend. Usually, these sales are targeted at subscribers and members of the brand, giving them exclusive access to their special-priced items before the rest. Providing a sense of exclusivity for your loyal customers is a powerful way to make customers feel valued. By offering these early bird discounts to subscribers and members, you not only reward their loyalty but also create a sense of urgency and excitement. Not to mention you’ll be generating a flurry of sales even before Black Friday rolls around.

2. Teaser Campaigns:

Teaser campaigns are all about building hype and anticipation for your upcoming sale. By engaging customers early on with a well-planned teaser campaign, you’ll be securing customers in advance, who are poised in anticipation.

You can build anticipation with countdown timers, or create sneak peeks of upcoming deals through subscriber emails and by posting exciting updates on social media.

3. Limited-Time Flash Sales:

Putting time constraints on your sales is a great way to create a sense of “buy now” urgency. Giving customers a limited time to get their hands on your on-sale items prompts them to act faster and make quicker purchase decisions so as not to miss out.

Having flash sales, especially spaced out during different times of the BFCM weekend across different items can keep customers coming back for more to check out fresh deals. Overall, it’s a great way to increase customer engagement and boost sales. This strategy also plays on the fear of missing out, or good old FOMO, which can be a powerful motivator for customers to make impulse purchases on the spot.

4. Bundled Deals:

One of the ways to make a killing over BFCM weekend is by increasing your average order value through attractive sales and special promotions, and one of the best ways to sell more is through bundle deals.

Bundle deals increase AOV by essentially encouraging your customer to buy multiple products bundled together at a discounted rate. Bundle offers give customers a sense of increased value for their purchase. Buying more is suddenly more convenient and cost-effective, prompting fuller shopping carts and more sales for your brand. This strategy not only helps you move more inventory but also introduces customers to products they might not have considered purchasing in the first place.

5. Loyalty Program Perks:

Loyalty ought to be rewarded, and this Black Friday couldn’t be a better time to reward your loyal customers with additional discounts and exclusive access. Loyalty program perks are great for enhancing your degree of customer retention and deepening relationships with your customers. You can reward loyal customers by providing them with exclusive access to special discounts and deals, or inexpensive but appreciated gifts to help them feel valued by your brand. This not only encourages them to shop during Black Friday but you’ll also strengthen your relationship, making them more likely to stick around and keep coming back in the years to come.

6. Influencer Marketing:

Collaborating with an influencer is one of the most powerful and effective paid marketing strategies out there, allowing you to reach more of your target audience and boost sales—given that you choose to collaborate with an influencer under the appropriate niche.

Influencers you choose to work with need to be chosen carefully, usually by matching their content with your niche. For instance, if your brand sells products related to health and beauty, collaborating with a beauty influencer may boost your sales during BFCM weekend. Partnering up with an influencer to promote your products can be a great way to boost brand discovery and drive traffic to your website during Black Friday weekend.

Influencer partnerships and collaborations aren’t free, so it's important and scope out the influencer scene and determine your budget early on.

7. Gift Guides:

People shop for holiday gifts as early as Black Friday when items first go on sale, and a great marketing tactic is creating gift guide collections. Much of the time, people are clueless about what gifts to give during the holidays, so providing a gift guide facilitates the gift-giving spirit. Create collections like gifts for mom, gifts for dad, gifts for your wife, you name it.

Gift guides not only make shopping easier for your customers but also allow you to showcase your products in a curated and even thoughtful way. By categorizing items into specific themes, you can highlight bestsellers or under-the-radar products that might otherwise be overlooked. Your gift guides can even be used as marketing material that you can promote through email and social media.

8. Interactive Contests:

Engaging customers with online contests or giveaways is a fun and engaging way to get customers hyped up for the coming Black Friday weekend sale. Many people already love joining contests and giveaways for the chance to win free stuff—because who doesn’t love to win contests and free stuff?

Interactive contests don’t have to be so elaborate and costly, but they can benefit your brand by creating more engagement and interactions for your brand.

Contests and giveaways can be held on social media, like Facebook and Instagram. The rules can be as simple as following your page, liking a specific post, and tagging a friend to get individuals to qualify. You can even have followers share your post in their stories for a chance for them to win freebies. With contest conditions like this, increase your reach and attract new customers for your brand.

9. Offer Free Shipping:

Nothing encourages hitting the buy button more than free shipping. Offering free shipping is a proven way to reduce the instances of abandoned carts and boost conversions—especially during Black Friday when every shopper is looking for the best deals, including free shipping.

For one, your competitors will certainly be doing it, and so should you to reduce the risk of card abandonment. To increase average order value, you can set a minimum purchase requirement for customers to qualify for free shipping, for instance setting a minimum purchase value of $39, encouraging customers to essentially spend more to reap the benefit of free shipping.

10. Extended Sale Periods:

Aside from an early bird sale strategy, you can extend the sale period beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday to capture more sales and new customers.

Extended sales allow you to work with the momentum generated during BFCM weekend, keeping the excitement going late into the holiday season. , it’s a win-win strategy for both you and your customers.

This approach also gives late shoppers more opportunities to take advantage of discounts, reducing the pressure to purchase within a limited timeframe.

11. Exclusive & Limited Products:

Generate more excitement and urgency by launching exclusive and limited edition products during Black Friday weekend and into the holiday shopping period. Limited edition and exclusive products tend to sell out faster and better. Because of their limited nature, they are seen as more exciting and desirable, which can drive customers to act quickly to secure their purchase before the items are gone for good.

Exclusive and limited products are released to create a sense of urgency and exclusivity, encouraging impulse buying from loyal customers and new ones eager to get something unique. By carefully planning your limited release, you can boost sales and enhance your brand's appeal during the Black Friday period.

12. Buy One Get One Free

We’ve mentioned above that everyone likes free stuff, and that’s why buy one get one, or BOGO promotions are so popular. BOGO marketing tactics get customers into your virtual doors like nothing else, as the sense of value and savings customers get when they shop with your brand doubles over— a strong motivator for adding to the cart and checking out.

You can do BOGO deals on your lesser known products, products customers wouldn’t consider buying otherwise as a strategy to have these products become better known by consumers, this way you can boost awareness and sales of slower-moving products.

13. Abandoned Cart Recovery

There is no better time than Black Friday weekend to launch an abandoned cart recovery campaign, drawing those potential customers back in who didn’t complete a purchase in your online store weeks and months prior.

You can re-capture these potential buyers by following up with retargeting emails or retargeting ads on social media, encouraging them to finalize their purchases that now come with a Black Friday special offer that is harder to resist. Also, it’s important to note that many shoppers postpone purchases to wait for a Black Friday deal. The limited-time offer of a good Black Friday sale brings on a sense of urgency increasing your conversion rates and decreasing the instance of abandoned carts, allowing you to recover lost opportunities in making that sale.

14. Email Marketing:

Email campaigns have been used for a very long time and in the face of social media and AI personalization, it seems less innovative and dated—but it doesn’t mean it’s any less important in 2024, so don’t overlook email campaigns in your BFCM marketing campaigns.

You can keep your Black Friday email campaign simple and basic, with a no-frills Black Friday reminder email sent out to your subscribers. You can also use email to announce flash sales or use emails to send out exclusive shopping vouchers to members. There are just so many ways to capture your audience’s attention with an email campaign done right, so on Black Friday 2024, don’t sleep on your email campaign.

15. Live Shopping Events:

Live shopping events are catching on. They typically involve a host live-streaming on social media or a dedicated ecommerce site, showcasing products, while customers can interact and shop for these items in real-time.

It’s a great way to showcase your products live and interact with customers. Much unlike pre-recorded video, live sessions bring more opportunities for real-time interaction  Moreover, live shopping is a top-notch way to build a sense of community among followers of your brand, as customers interact with the host and each other. If you have a loyal fan base for your brand, try dabbling in live shopping.

16. Referral Discounts:

When it comes to incentivizing customers to market your products for you, having a referral discount program can work wonders. Referral discounts incentivize your existing customers to bring new paying customers into your store and reward them with special discounts for every customer they acquire for you.

Referral discounts can be set to a certain rate or percentage, awarding your loyal customers and members for marketing and referring your brand to their friends, family, and even their social media followers.

17. Pre-Sale Registration

Allow your customers to sign up in advance for an exclusive pre-Black Friday sale, with more perks and exclusive access that they can enjoy. This strategy is great for building a sense of anticipation in your customers. You can build a dedicated landing page for the pre-sale registration, offering exclusive early discounts, access to limited-stock items, and special bundles only available to those who sign up. To keep the hype going post-registration, you can send email reminders and countdowns to the day and the hour. You can also keep engaging pre-sale registrants by offering them referral bonuses for sharing the pre-sale registration with friends, adding to the Black Friday excitement all around.

18. Gift with Purchase:

As we mentioned above, everyone likes getting free stuff, and your customers are no different. Throwing in a gift with your customer’s purchase need not be expensive, and it’s a great way to encourage them to hit the buy button. One great strategy we see often is to offer a gift with a minimum purchase to add value and encourage customers to spend more to reach that minimum threshold.

19. Urgency-Driven Ads:

Creating a sense of urgency is an age-old strategy in commerce, and it’s still valuable to this day, especially when trying to drive sales or create excitement about a sales event. What many online stores do is incorporate countdown timers directly to their product pages or home pages to highlight when a sale will launch or how long a particularly attractive price will be up for certain items.

You can also display real-time stock updates, showing how many items are left— this effectively creates a sense of scarcity, prompting customers to buy now before stocks run out completely. You can also make use of phrases like "Last Chance" or "Only a Few Left" to emphasize the urgency. There is an art to urgency-driven strategies that you can play around with and master during the Black Friday weekend.

20. Mobile-Optimized Experience:

It's important to pay just as much attention to the mobile experience as the desktop experience as we approach Black Friday. With mobile consistently growing in popularity, you would be remiss not to give any attention to how your store appears and behaves when customers decide to browse your store through their phones.

Before Black Friday comes, it’s important to check how your website performs on mobile, going over the mobile experience from the point of view of the shopper, and checking to see if there are any improvements to be made to optimize the mobile experience before the big day.

21. Social Proof:

Social proof through customer reviews and testimonials is a treasure trove and business asset to online businesses, and this Black Friday, you should display them prominently. Social proof through user-generated content, or UGC, builds trust and credibility and it also helps customers gain valuable insights into the products they are interested in buying as they get to read real user reviews.

If you haven’t already, include user-generated content in a dedicated section of your product page, and allow customers to share content like photos and videos to make the reviews more compelling. Finally, don’t forget to build strategies to keep those reviews coming, encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews by offering small incentives, like discounts on their next purchases.

22. Gift Wrapping Services:

Many people start buying holiday gifts as early as Black Friday when things first go on sale. If you want to go the extra mile for customers, offer them a gift-wrapping service for the items they buy in your store. You can offer free gift wrapping or charge a fee that’s enough to make a small profit for your business.

You can include gift wrapping services as a convenient add-on at checkout, making sure to include options for different holiday-themed paper and personalized gift tags with special messages that can be personalized.

23. Charity Partnerships:

With the rise of the socially conscious shopper, having an online store with a charity program or partnership will attract customers who value brands that give back to the community or support meaningful causes.

Your brand can select a charity or cause that aligns with what your business does and what your business values. Done right, you can appeal to socially conscious shoppers who prefer to spend their money with businesses that reflect their charitable and socially conscious values. Having a charity partnership allows customers to feel even better about their purchases and form a deeper impression of your brand. You can also consider offering a limited product, the profits of which will be sent to your selected charity or cause.

24. Personalized Recommendations:

Personalized shopping recommendations have only been getting better and better with the rise of AI technology. One of the rising trends of 2024 is the adoption of AI hyper-personalization that curates shopping journeys. Think of it as a fine-tuned algorithm that has taken and analyzed the data from previous purchases, browsing history, and customer profiles to come up with an even more curated shopping experience.

AI-powered personalized recommendations can be a game-changer during Black Friday, and there are apps and programs already available today that you can integrate into your store.

25. Post-Black Friday Engagement:

Engaging with customers does not end with the BFCM. After all, every sale you make is an opportunity to build a long-term relationship with a customer, and this is what makes a post-sale strategy so vital.

Post-sale strategies can be automated, yet personalized. You can send out automated thank-you emails, and even send out incentives to have customer return, like a sale voucher they can use during the Christmas holiday. You can also attach recommended products or send customers your latest blog posts, for instance.

Moreover, attempts to gather user-generated feedback through customer reviews. This kind of approach will help you keep customers engaged even after Black Friday and throughout the year.

Don't miss out on Black Friday 2024! Let Ecommerce Pro—trusted Shopify Expert Agency, help you craft a winning strategy. Contact us today.

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