Q4 2023 - Post 9: How to Make the Most of the Post-BFCM Period

64% of businesses acquire Black Friday shoppers that have a lower lifetime value than shoppers acquired at any other time. 

Acquisition gets all the attention during BFCM, but the real value is in converting one-time buyers into long-term customers. Improving retention and building a loyal customer base is the key to turning your good Black Friday into a great one.

Turn value shoppers into repeat customers & subscribers

Black Friday isn’t when people are looking for new products. They’re looking for deals and added value for products they’ve already had their eyes on. 

Since any new BFCM customers are coming in with the expectation of added value and discounts with their first purchase, it’s essential to do everything you can to improve retention and LTV for this big influx of new customers. 

Retention starts by capturing customers’ contact information to stay in touch with valuable content they’re interested in, new product releases, and offers based on the products they bought and any first party data they provided during the purchase process. 

There are many tools out there that can help improve LTV, retention, personalization, and managing subscriptions to make the post-BFCM experience more seamless:

• Wonderment - start the retention process as soon as the purchase is made with proactive order updates and custom order status landing pages.
• Lifetimely - measure, analyze, and improve your customer LTV with actionable metrics and insights with detailed reports.
• PushOwl - collect store subscribers with one click and without any personal information through the use of web push notifications. 
• ReConvert - instantly improve LTV and repurchase revenue with one-click upsells, customized thank you pages, and more. 
• Retextion - subscription management platform that increases LTV and reduces churn.

It’s also worth implementing loyalty and referral programs ahead of BFCM to capitalize on all the newfound customers and interest you’ll have in your brand.

50% of consumers say their main reason for joining a loyalty program is to earn rewards and it keeps them coming back, so it’s important to make sure the rewards are attainable and valuable for customers. You can encourage recent customers to join for additional benefits, and return after the holiday sales with a dedicated week for 2-3x the loyalty points during your slow season.

A few loyalty, referral, and reward apps we’ve heard good things about are ReferralCandy, Smile.IO, and Rivo.

Keep BFCM customers engaged and get them to buy again

It’s important to keep Black Friday customers (and all customers for that matter) engaged with regular communication that adds value to them and their experience with your brand. It should nudge them to check in with your site even when there aren’t any discounts running. 

There’s a huge opportunity for segmentation and personalization with this big influx of new customers as well. Use purchase data to recommend new product ranges and upsells, offer discounts on products that compliment their BFCM purchase, or encourage signing up for a subscription if your product is consumable. 

Customize your email preferences page in your email service provider (ESP) to get more first-party data from subscribers and improve engagement throughout the year:

• Birthday - if you want to get a birthday email flow going. 
  
• What they're interested in and the type of content they want.
  Allows you to exclude them from things they're not interested in and reduce unsubscribe rates. 
  
• Whether they buy for themselves or as a gift.
  If they select gifting, re-target them in common gifting periods.

Being able to identify and segment gift shoppers can be valuable for retention. If this is a trend you notice, minimize communication throughout the year but remind those subscribers of gifting opportunities and sales around the holiday season. A specific BFCM/holiday shoppers segment can be super effective in converting those who have been stagnant all year, but have high potential for gifting conversions. 

Email preferences are underutilized by most brands, but can be a huge unlock for personalization if you drive subscribers to fill out their preferences. It helps with segmentation of future campaigns, exclusion segments, and opens up opportunities to personalize offers and recommendations based on data gathered. 

A yellow flag: implementation can be a challenge, so brands need to have the resources to properly segment and respect their customers preferences once the data is collected. Otherwise it leads to bad customer experience, which is worse than an unsubscribe.

Ask Black Friday customers for reviews and ratings

Getting Black Friday shoppers to review and rate your products can add social proof and credibility to help overcome objections for future prospects. Feedback can also be used to gain valuable insights into what customers like and don’t like about the product and purchase process, so it’s important to ask for honest feedback and reflect on it.  

Email reminders and push notifications can encourage customer feedback and reviews, and there are several apps available to seamlessly add those reviews to your site, product pages, and data feeds for paid advertising. Okendo, Junip, and Stamped.io are all review apps we’ve had positive experiences with in the past.  

There’s also an opportunity to incentivize BFCM customers to share pictures and videos of their experience to add to your user-generated content stockpile. Some review tools have the ability to request UGC, while Archive is another one of our favourite apps that can automatically save Instagram posts and stories your brand is tagged in and request permission to use that content in promotions and ads.

December Shipping Cut-Off and Post-Holiday Campaigns

Once your BFCM offer is over, get spend back to normal levels and start running creative that highlights last minute gifting opportunities, wish lists, and the last day for shipping cutoffs to get your order in time for Christmas. 

This will be the last big push of the year, so it’s important to lean into urgency and drive more sales after the BFCM shopping window closes. Once your last day to ship passes, make sure all ads are off and enjoy the holidays before rolling out a post-holiday campaign.

Post-holiday campaigns offer an opportunity to get rid of extra inventory from Black Friday in the form of a clearance sale, or Boxing Day sales for our fellow Canadians and Commonwealth countries. But be mindful of offer oversaturation following BFCM; running too many offers back to back can give the impression that you’re a discount brand. 

You can also use that post-holiday campaign period to tease new January releases or a bigger push in the New Year if you have a product in the better-for-you niche that typically capitalizes on resolutions in Q1.

Okay, NOW you made it to the end of Black Friday Cyber Monday. If you're interested in a recap, check out our TL;DR BFCM Review here. And if you just want to go to bed, same here.