Every November celebrates an unofficial competition of Black Friday ads. Who will attract most customers? Who will achieve the highest response rates and average spend? In 2018, the expenses per shopper reached striking $1007.24, and they are very likely to grow in the future.
All companies participating in Black Friday promotions do their best to win over consumers and gain a competitive edge. They combine several marketing channels to show Black Friday ads and rethink different traditional approaches. Black Friday flyers are among popular traditional options that give a unique chance to stand out from the crowd.
The need to remain noticeable is particularly pressing for SME companies. The owners of small businesses are often forced to organize everything on their own. They don’t have a budget or resources to hire a team of professional marketers, designers, or other specialists. As a result, their Black Friday promotions turn out to be much less effective than they could have been. Such companies underuse personalization capabilities, neglect targeting, or don’t send Black Friday flyers at all. Fortunately, marketing automation software can help them to upgrade their Black Friday promotions. For example, with direct mail automation, businesses can easily connect Black Friday flyers with digital Black Friday ads for cross-channel marketing.
To show how this works in practice, Inkit has collected use cases of Black Friday flyers and complemented them with professional marketing and direct mail automation tips. We hope that the combination of hands-on experience and our recommendations will help you boost Black Friday promotions.
Black Friday Ads Case Studies: How Businesses Use Direct Mail in Black Friday Promotions
Black Friday Flyers – Case #1.
Jennifer Neylon, Supplement Warehouse
Do you send out Black Friday flyers for your products/services?
This year will be the first year that we are planning on sending out Black Friday flyers to really promote our sales this Black Friday. In the past, however, we have promoted through social media and postcards.
Do Black Friday flyers increase your sales?
We are hopeful that flyers and posters will help customers be aware of our deals in advance, and bring more anticipation of our Black Friday sales. This has worked before with social media, but on a smaller scale.
Do you personalize Black Friday ads? How?
We are not able to personalize our flyers because of how large the customer pool is, however, with our email marketing, we are able to personalize the emails that we send to customers on a first-name basis.
How do you design creatives?
We will be creating banners for all of our individual deals, and then shrinking them to be able to include them all onto a one or two (front & back) page flyer, much like something you would get from Black Friday ads from other stores.
Inkit’s Professional Recommendations on Black Friday Promotions
The company already has email marketing personalization in place but doesn’t use it to its fullest potential. They should pick any CRM and start processing the data of their large customer pool to form mailing lists. Once they segment their target audience into several more specific groups and analyze the preferences of every category, they can tailor their Black Friday flyers. To do this, the CRM must be integrated with a direct mail automation tool that supports variable data printing like Inkit. After the integration, CRM and Inkit will share the same database. Thus, Inkit will automatically print the relevant details on Black Friday flyers and deliver them to the selected recipients.
Black Friday Flyers – Case #2.
Arthur Ruth, Memphis Maids
Do you send out Black Friday flyers for your products/services?
Yes, we do them via email to one time customers and for regular customers. We also put them on our social media.
Do Black Friday flyers increase your sales?
We see an increment from 15%-20%
Do you personalize Black Friday ads? How?
We only personalize them for the medium they are intended. It’s always the same design, but we try to make the best image for Twitter, Instagram, etc.
How do you design creatives?
We do discounts for that day and we select a theme for the season. It depends on the year but we always go with local news and designs.
Inkit’s Professional Recommendations on Black Friday Promotions
It looks like this company uses only email and social media promotions without advanced personalization and marketing automation. They should consider incorporating Black Friday flyers into their marketing strategy to power it with direct mail. Mail pieces are highly effective to inform customers about Black Friday promotions and discounts in advance. Since the company has never launched direct mail campaigns, they should use a mailing tool with flexible batch size and A/B testing. This will help to try and test the created mail pieces before investing in large-scale printing and delivery.
Black Friday Flyers – Case #3.
John Frigo, My Supplement Store
Do you send out Black Friday flyers for your products/services?
I actually just got done creating a Black Friday flyer yesterday evening for our brick and mortar stores. We have several brands/line of online supplement stores, we also have 3 different brands of brick and mortar retail stores as well. For our online store, we can direct traffic to our online store, and people can see all our products there. Our brick and mortar websites are really small websites just showing the locations of our stores, we don’t have our product catalog on there so a flyer was important to use to be able to showcase the deals and what we’re offering as opposed to just saying bit sale come into Capitol Nutrition.
Do Black Friday flyers increase your sales?
I would say the flyers do increase sales, it’s difficult to track as we don’t require people to bring in the flyer but people mention it and some people do bring them in so they are effective. We also have local gyms, personal trainers, athletic clubs to keep them on bulletin boards as well.
Do you personalize Black Friday ads? How?
We personalize them to each brand of store, but not a ton of personalization goes into them.
How do you design creatives?
Here’s the flyer I did yesterday.
Inkit’s Professional Recommendations on Black Friday Promotions
The company successfully uses direct mail for Black Friday promotions but has trouble estimating the results. To launch data-driven marketing campaigns, they need to add trackable contact details to their flyers. For example, they can include a unique phone number, URL, or coupon code to see the actual number of leads and sales. Many businesses also use PURLs or QR codes to record conversions in real-time and get accurate data. That’s an excellent practice, the company should consider borrowing. The key goal is to link their online and offline marketing channels more tightly for cross-channel marketing.
Black Friday Flyers – Case #4.
John Moss, English Blinds
Do you send out Black Friday flyers for your products/services?
We do send out Black Friday flyers, because this approach is less common today now that most businesses stick to email and online marketing channels for seasonal promotions. As a result of this, online ad targeting tends to be easier for prospects to ignore given the sheer volume of it they face around Black Friday, and physical mail becomes more memorable as a result of the fact that it is less common!
Do Black Friday flyers increase your sales?
We can correlate last year’s flyers with a direct uptick in sales, as we integrated a discount code into them that was specific to the flyers in order to be able to identify increased spends and additional purchases made as a result of the promotion.
Do you personalize Black Friday ads? How?
We personalize with the prospects’ names, but we don’t personalize the offer.
How do you design creatives?
Offering an incentive or discount with your flyer that is not available online or to others without the flyer creates an illusion of scarcity and exclusivity, which works well with the urgency of Black Friday to help to incentivize sales.
The discount or offer should make up the main body and message of the flyer, because you’ll only have one chance to catch the prospect’s eye and attention – we used very distinctive, contrasting silver bold print on a black background last year to achieve this.
Inkit’s Professional Recommendations on Black Friday Promotions
This company has already found a way to track direct mail and enjoy high response rates. Nevertheless, they can achieve even better results with advanced personalization. In case they integrate a CRM with a direct mail automation tool, they will be able to activate the delivery based on a certain event or customer action. For example, if a user has shown interest in an online Black Friday ad, they will receive a reminder flyer four days before the start of promotions. This increases the chance that the potential customer will go to this store.
Black Friday flyers significantly expand the capabilities of Black Friday promotions. Use Inkit to automate mailing and launch automated Black Friday marketing campaigns.
