Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two occasions that most businesses plan to launch promotion plans to boost their sales. However, which is better for your business’s promotion plans?
What are Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the world. It is also seen as the start of a critical holiday shopping season – the day after Thanksgiving. On this occasion, most stores will offer limited money-saving specials at their offline and online stores.
On Black Friday, customers will only find greater deals than on Cyber Monday on products that you can buy once a year or less frequently. This is the reason why high-end famous brands, for example, Dior, Hermes, etc., prefer to choose Black Friday. Their positioning brands are exclusive and high-end items, which means their promotion deals should be limited in years.
Cyber Monday is an e-commerce term that falls four days after Thanksgiving. It was created to encourage customers to shop online.
After COVID-19, most customers chose to shop online for Cyber Monday. In a research report from PracticalEcommerce in 2022, people spent more on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday.
Customers prefer Cyber Monday for many reasons. A lot of people don’t want to spend time away from family during the holiday or stand in numerous lines at offline stores on Black Friday to get the deals. They can easily purchase items on Cyber Monday and may get many great discount offers. Most of the offers will include free shipping, which makes shopping online more attractive.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Which is better?
As the time goes on since COVID-19, the difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday becomes more unclear. Many stores provide the same discounts all weekend long, both in their offline and online stores.
Black Friday
Most retailers may spend an entire year planning their Black Friday sales. They take advantage of the day to offer doorbusters and deep discounts on seasonal items like holiday decorations and traditional holiday gifts, for example, Halloween or Christmas, as well as to give rock-bottom pricing on leftover stock.
Retailers also give deep discounts on expensive items like the best-selling brands of televisions, smartphones, and other electronics to attract customers inside where they would then buy higher margin items. The retailers will take considerable measures to ensure that the information and details of Black Friday advertising campaigns don’t leak out to the public in advance because they are frequently eagerly predicted.
Last year, numerous sales started to appear weeks before Black Friday. In an important difference to other years, retailers encourage customers to shop online and early.
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday was coined in 2005 by Shop.org. One theory suggests that Cyber Monday is a potential ecommerce day that will replace Black Friday.
Following this theory, based on customers’ behaviors in the early 21st century with no smartphone and high-speed Internet connection, people saw items in offline or online stores and shopping malls over the weekend but waited until Monday to buy them at work, where they had computers with a faster Internet connection.
Nowadays, with the support of smartphones, convenience delivery services, and technology devices, as well as during COVID-19, when all the offline stores and shopping malls had closed, young customers in the M and Z generations preferred shopping online on Cyber Monday. This changed their shopping behaviors.
Which is better?
In our opinion, if you want to focus on the offline store, let’s focus on pushing promotions on Black Friday. You can use many offline marketing tactics, like giveaway flyers, and leave an attractive banner in front of your stores to notify customers about your sales promotion on Black Friday.
On the other hand, if you own an e-commerce business, Cyber Monday is the best choice for you! You can prepare discount promotions or free shipping codes. To make items more attractive when customers visit your stores, you can add some promotion banners and product badges.
And nothing is better than having both offline and online stores. You can boost sales all week by using promotion campaigns for offline and online stores. We suggested that you should have a clear campaign for each type of store to attract customers.
For example, with offline stores, you can offer deep discounts like 30% or 40% for customers who are shopping at traditional stores. On the other side, the online stores can offer customers free shipping and bonus 10% or 20% discounts. Additionally, you can set some discount conditions for the number of orders or the number of items to encourage customers to buy more.
Moreover, you can blend Black Friday and Cyber Monday into one big holiday shopping event. Start by using social media and online stores to announce your promotions, then encourage customers to buy online and choose to pick up items at brick-and-mortar stores in case they want a bonus item or service from you.
When is Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Black Friday occurs the day after Thanksgiving. In 2023, Black Friday will take place on November 24.
Cyber Monday takes place on the Monday following the Thanksgiving weekend; it will be on November 27, 2023.
You need to remember and set the alert for the time of this period to prepare and launch the promotion plans on time for these holiday shopping events.
Some Suggested Preparations Before Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Online Store Website
Site speed: If your e-commerce website wasn’t created using a trustworthy cloud platform like Shopify, be sure your servers have been upgraded to handle the increased demand.
Conversion Optimization: Make sure your collection pages and product pages are fully optimized for conversions.
Customer experience: Make sure the checkout procedure, abandoned cart email flows, and payment gateways all function properly by reviewing the visitor journey.
Pre-season
Plan your budget: Increase your advertising spend for BFCM by 200–300% to take advantage of consumer trends while also reducing higher-than-normal advertising costs (CPMs, ATCs, etc.).
Messaging: Focus your messaging on your holiday season sales and promotions.
Timelines: Establishing all offerings, advertising campaigns, and timetables well in advance is important for success.
Testing: New channels, creatives, messages, etc. should not be tried out on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Find out that all testing is finished by late September or early October.
Postseason
Email Flows: By designing post-holiday email flows, you can maximize your efforts throughout the season.
Upsells: Use upsells to keep customers interested.
Tips
Always remember these points to consider before planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday events:
- What is your budget/how can you best use it?
- Keep your core KPIs at the forefront of your strategy (i.e., adding more volume to the site / how can you achieve this?).
- Inventory Management: Stock up on popular items and ensure your supply chain can handle the surge in orders
- Less is more – don’t try and do everything
- Always assess effort vs. outcome
- Does the campaign fit your customer? If a giveaway campaign has never worked – it’s not going to work on BFCM!
- Don’t sacrifice margin for BFCM hype; rather, think of other ways to capture your customer.
- TEST TEST TEST (last two weeks of October)
In Conclusion
Based on your business models and sales targets, you can choose to focus on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or the holiday shopping season. Hope you will have a great selling season!
