MBA2184 Should You Run a Black Friday Promotion in 2022?

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Hey oh welcome to the $100 a show powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and in today's lesson you will learn should you run a Black Friday or Cyber Monday promotion in 2022? Black Friday Cyber Monday this is the time of year where a lot of companies try to promote their products and services to entice customers to to buy. Is this a good idea or are you going to be buried under the promotions tab of all the companies running deals at this time? With a recession looming, I'm going to share with you some of my advice when it comes to running a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal. How to position yourself so that you stand out and you actually help your potential customer make the right decision. It's easy to get caught up in the hype of the season and feel like you have to do it. I'm here to tell you that you don't have to do anything, but if you do choose to do it, do what works for your business. We get into what that exactly means and how to do it in Today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Every year at this time, we all get flooded with emails with promotions and sales and offers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This is where companies want to give their customers a reason to buy. Now, often they promote deals that say this is the best time to buy the best deal of the year. And it seems like it's a screaming match. Who can scream the loudest and get the most attention. And I'm here to tell you it doesn't have to be that way. I'm going to give you some options. Maybe you don't run a Black Friday deal. Maybe you do something different. Maybe you don't run a deal at all. Let's get into these details. First of all, I want to say that for the last two years, my software company, Webinar Ninja, we don't run a typical Black Friday deal. We actually run something called Green Friday. If you want to learn more, you go to webinarninja.com green Friday. What's green Friday? Well, it's our way to say, hey, we know our customers are maybe interested in a deal. They're reaching out. Are you running some sort of promotion? But at the same time, we want to do something that's more aligned with our values. So instead of pushing promotions and special discounts, what we do on Green Friday is we plant trees. We plant 20 trees for every new customer that signs up for an annual plan or customers that upgrade to an annual plan. So if you were thinking about buying our software anyway, this might help. You want to do it now because you'll be able to help the earth and get some trees planted. We also give a really cool certificate that shows that you have planted 20 trees. That's a kind of nice thing that you can print out and hang on your wall. But along with that, we also throw in some add on products that we don't normally offer to reward people for taking action and helping our earth be a little greener. We make it very clear to people on the page where this promotion is is that, hey, if you don't want to buy, don't buy. No pressure, but if you're going to buy anyway, buy during these days, so we can plant some trees on your behalf. And this is just more aligned with who we are as a company. That's what we do. Something a little bit different, something that is not the typical Black Friday. There's no discounts. There are some special things that we're going to be giving them, but it's our way to kind of stand out from the noise. Now, I know companies that don't do a Black Friday deal at all. Cyber Monday, nothing. Instead, they do a day to celebrate their business. It's kind of like their business's birthday, especially the day that they started their business. And this is very similar to Amazon Prime Day, where they basically run a celebration offer during a time of year that is not really celebrated as a holiday on the calendar. Now, the reason why these companies do this is because it allows them to do the promotion when it's not noisy. They're not competing with other emails. They create their own holiday. This is something that we honestly have considered in our company, but never actually did. Maybe something in the future we might consider as our company starts growing each year. But I like the idea. I like the idea of just celebrating your business and rewarding your customers or your potential customers on your email list with some special deal. The other thing is that you control the narrative with this type of promotion, people don't have expectations. With Black Friday ceremony, people are expecting crazy deals. They want 50, 60, 70% off. And maybe that's not a good idea for your business. Maybe you don't have the margins for that. Maybe that is just leaving too much on the table, meaning not a great financial decision for your business. So why put yourself under that pressure in that kind of context where people are expecting, you know, prices to slash? When you create your own day, when you create your own promotion, there is no expectation. It's whatever you say it is, because there's only your day. Now, I want to say that it also depends on your business. If you're a B2C company, meaning that you sell to consumers and people buy your products for holiday gifts. Let's say, for example, you're a toy company and you create toys and sell them online. This is your time. You need to make sales. The holidays is your season. I know this because one of my first jobs when I was in university was working at Toys R Us. I did tech support over there and man, it is incredibly busy during the holiday season. At the time, 60% of all of Toys R Us sales were made during the holidays. So your business might hinge on this, and you need to do this, and this is not even optional. But if you're a B2B company, especially your mid market or enterprise, this might not be the best idea. It might not serve you well. You might want to wait a week or two and do an end of quarter deal where businesses are looking to dump their budgets and spend money to renew their memberships or their subscriptions or buy new subscriptions so they deplete their budgets for the quarter and end of year. So that might be something that you might want to consider instead. Now, one of the things you need to look out for if you're going to be running any kind of promotion at any time, that is huge. It's going to bring in a lot of traffic and customers is being prepared. Make sure that your team, your customer support team yourself, all hands on deck, everybody knows what to do, what the procedure is the sop, the standard operating procedure to fulfill these deals and make sure the customers get the bonuses or whatever you're giving them because you're going to get more traffic than usual, you're going to get more questions, more emails, more chats. So make sure that you are ready for it because you don't want to disappoint customers anymore and waste this opportunity. You want it to be a smooth process. So inform your team, give them instructions and let them know what they should expect before it happens. Even with our Green Friday deal, we have a clear game plan weeks in advance for our whole team so they know what to do, who's doing what, how are we fulfilling these special gifts, what are the days and times and the cutoff times for this type of deal, who's sending the certificates, all that kind of stuff, Right? We want to make sure that the whole team is singing from the same song sheet so there's no confusion when the day arrives. Make sure you communicate expectations to your customers as well. Remember, Black Friday is usually a deal that runs from Friday through Monday, meaning it lands during the weekend. So if you don't have people to answer emails or chats during the weekend, make sure you communicate that to the customers with a banner on your website or a message in your chat that says, hey, we'll be back this day. We'll be answering emails this day or this time, so there are expectations set so people are not disappointed and just waiting for a reply, thinking they're going to get a reply immediately. Now we're in a looming recession, so if you're looking to do any kind of promotion, keep this in mind. This is not like where people are spending money like crazy and the economy is booming, people are looking to tighten their belts. They're looking for a deal or maybe looking for a way to save some money in the long run. This is a great opportunity for you to lock in customers for annual and two year deals at a low price. Listen, look at your churn, look at your lifetime value. Look at your average customer and how long they stay with you. It might serve you better to have a customer stay with you if you have a reoccurring membership or subscription, even at a discounted rate. If they stay for two years, if they stay for a year or even six months. This is also a time that you might want to promote some of your lower plans. For example, at webinar Ninja, we have a plan that's $29 a month or two 90 a year. Very, very affordable. This is when we really want to push this plan because it's attractive to people that are being a little bit more cost effective. They're price sensitive. They want to try before they buy or invest more money and get in front of it, say hey, we get it. Inflation is at an all time high. This is why we offer this type of plan. Lower the risk for them and let them know, hey, I get it. I'm not going to ignore the fact that you know, the economy is not at its best right now. In fact, I'm going to show you how I can help.

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A couple more tips. When it comes to running your Black Friday promotions this year, if you have stipulations, rules, deadlines for your promotions, codes they have to use, links they have to click. Make sure this is super clear. In every communication, in every tweet, in every email, in every ad, you need to make sure that what they need to do is clearly communicated. And in this time of year, you really can't over communicate. So if you typically send three or four emails out for a promotion, it's okay for you to send a few more, maybe five or six or even seven because people are gonna need more reminders, especially when the deadline is approaching because they're getting tons of emails from everybody else. This is also a great time to leverage retargeting ads. If you run paid ads on social media, retargeting is basically an ad that you show to people that have been to your site or a landing page for this promot so they see an ad for the promotion on these platforms because hey, they visited your website before and this just keeps you top of mind especially as the deadline is approaching. This is a very low hanging fruit, cost effective way for you to use paid ads to convert for you. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I wish you all the best in the holiday season as you do your promotions, your sales and get in new customers. Yes, it's a busy time, but it's also a great time to evaluate if these promotions are working for you. Okay? Be critical about it so that next year you can evaluate if you should do things differently, if you should double down on something that works or not do it at all. If you love this episode, if you love this podcast, make sure you hit, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. We're on every single podcast app so whatever you're using right now, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio, Overcast, we're on every single one, hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss an episode and get access to over 2100 episodes in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Don't forget about gift cards. Gift cards are a great option to include in your promotions. Meaning they get a discount when they buy a gift card. Meaning if they buy a gift card for $100 they can buy for 90. This is especially a great way to promote during the holidays. If you're B2C. I did this when I had my clothing line. You might have customers that had just bought products from you and they're like hey, I'm happy with these products. I don't need anything right now but might make a good gift idea. But they're not sure of people's sizes or their preferences for color. A gift card is a great way for them to give somebody a gift and say hey, these guys are great. I love their products. Go ahead and have a little mini shopping spree. When I was running my e commerce store, Zenma Designs a little over a decade ago, our gift cards were was the number one seller for the holidays. Pretty cool thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of Foreign.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save Big. It feels good to geico.