Should you have a Black Friday Sale?

We always see ecommerce sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You probably get tons of emails from Nordstrom, Macys, Home Depot and more. The question is … should us coaches, consultants, and service based entrepreneurs do this as well?

Let’s start with some of the issues with having Black Friday sales before we talk about the positives.

When I did marketing for an appliance company called Big Chill, this is something we chatted about. Will we devalue the brand by having sales on Black Friday? This appliance company has luxury items, fridges and stoves in the best colors like beach blue and pink lemonade and super cool metals like matte black. We didn’t want to cheapen the brand since it was a luxury brand. So that is something you need to think about, will this devalue your brand? Or will people in the future never buy during the year again because now they know you will have a Black Friday sale. This happens, people may not buy until November rolls around again.

Let’s chat about the good stuff. Well, this is easy, more sales.

Many people, especially Americans, are psychologically conditioned to start buying around Black Friday, so taking advantage of that phenomenon is smart for the business.

What do you think is best for your brand? If you decided, no, sales are not good for me, that’s totally cool, you can still take advantage of Black Friday. You could do some kind of bundling offer. So maybe you can throw in something for free on Black Friday to an existing service you have. Something to think about.

For those of you that are going to do a Black Friday sales, here are some tips for you:

1. Start your sales a week before Black Friday so you can get ahead of your competitors
2. You can even start teasing your sales a week before that (so basically, start now)
3. If you are on Instagram and talking about your upcoming sale make sure you use the hashtags #BlackFriday, #BlackFridaySale, #CyperMondaySale, #Deals, #BlackFridayShopping, #BlackFridayDeals, #BlackFriday2020
4. Extend the sale a week after Black Friday so you hit Cyber Monday and any people that were on the fence
5. Remember to email your list multiple times during this sales cycle
6. For those of you that do affiliate marketing, you can create gift guides with links to the products that you are an affiliate for (hint: this works for Christmas too)
7. For those of you running ads, you can ramp up your ad spent around this time, but know that your competitor will be as well, so the ads cost go up during this time