Strategic Sales Prep for Black Friday: 14 Decisions for Small Businesses

Season 4, Episode 21

In this episode, I’m breaking down the decisions that matter for small business owners and marketers when they’re planning to run a sale in their business.

Whether they’re in retail and ecommerce, or offer services to their clients, a discount can be the thing that gets people over that hurdle into purchasing what you offer. However, there are questions we have to answer to create a strategic sale, to generate profit and curate a positive experience for our customers.

At peak season, and at any other time of the year, these 14 decisions will help you focus on what really matters, rather than copying what everyone else is doing.

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Transcript

We are fast approaching the biggest online retail sales period of the year. It can be exciting, but it can also be overwhelming for business owners and marketers who are trying to figure out what they should do. For this episode today I wanted to dive into what some of your options are but specifically the decisions that you need to make in order to do a sale.

The origins of Black Friday come from the USA as that pre-holiday season buying date so you can do all that seasons’ shopping at a discount the day after Thanksgiving. Then it ballooned to stampede tier midnight shopping and now the online shopping version exists too.

Even service businesses offer discounts this time of year. And sometimes I wonder if the volume of sales all at the same time just waters down the market, so business owners have to be very clear on how they’ll stand out.

As our cost of living rises, its reasonable to expect that people’s shopping will decrease versus previous years. There might be less impulse buying this year, because people have less of a budget. Instead, I’d hope for everyone’s overdraft that they shop more mindfully and intentionally. We should be planning accordingly, in line with our perfect (and existing) customer.

These sales can serve as a way to thank your customers and show them that you appreciate their business throughout the year especially if it has been a hard year for you so it doesn't necessarily have to be buy buy buy but that is up to you. And no, that isn't an *NSYNC lyric.

People often do their Christmas or other holiday shopping or buy things that they’ve been lusting after all year, at a new lower price. Sometimes I’ll want to buy those things that would usually be a stretch without a discount.

For business owners though, it’s a whole load of preparation and hope and then running to keep up with demand. What do we do, how do we do it and what will everyone else do?

You could pick a random % off and post it in some places and give yourself a pat on the back, sure but by taking a more strategic approach, this can be more purposeful, and connect more with your audience.

Black Friday does tend to get out of hand. I’ve already seen ads for it and we’re a month out. Even if you’ve started planning, or plan to repeat what you did last year or two years ago, I still recommend working your way through this list ahead of putting your sale live.

As I go through this, it can serve as an on-demand workshop if you like. If you’re more of a visual person, there’s the Youtube version, but you can also listen to this on your podcast app of choice as well.

Rather than getting stuck in analysis paralysis, let’s get straight into the decisions you need to make, that actually matter.

Decision #1: Your profit margin

We are starting with the somewhat monotonous math and accounting, but this is what your business lives on, money.

Hopefully you know your profit margin to start, at least what it’s been for the past year. Maybe if you ran a sale last year, you know how that impacted that.

If you were to have have a calculation that you can bring down to a product level as a percentage, that will help you to understand your numbers more specifically. The simplest way to trust the number you get in this calculation is if the period you’re snapping your revenue and expenses from are a somewhat busy time of year, but ideally without a sale on.

So that calculation is Profit divided by Revenue, which you’ll then times by 100 to get your profit margin as a percentage. Sometimes different products have different margins but a general percentage can make things simple if there’s not much disparity.

Gross profit is revenue minus cost of goods sold,. However, net profit is revenue minus all expenses, so that can be a lot more accurate of the total picture.

To work out your profit margin, your first calculation is revenue minus all expenses to get your net profit, then net profit divided by total revenue, times by 100. Let’s pretend you’re comparing the numbers from a period where you didn’t have a sale, so you can see what your discount could be.

So if your revenue for either the quarter or whatever period you’re going based on was $500,000 and your expenses were $300,000, your net profit would be $200,000. $200,000 divided by $500,000 is 0.4 times by 100 is 40%.

This can then give you an idea of what you might be hoping for as an average order value, or the maximum discount that makes sense financially.

This does shift based on the volume of products you ultimately sell, so projecting it isn’t 100% accurate. That’s why it’s helpful to look back, but still adjust if you’re planning to spend more on marketing or your team during this period, or if other costs have gone up like rent or cost of your goods since whatever prior period you’re getting these numbers from.

You can see from this that the brands that consistently do 40-60% off sales or even more are making a rather large profit margin when items aren’t discounted, and that’s usually a slim portion of the year. For the brands who do run massive discounts often, you’d be surprised at the disparity between their quote unquote full price and the average price they sell it for. possible if their full price is $100 their median purchase price could be as low as $60-70. These are businesses that sell based on those supposed deals and not the longevity of their brand.

I have heard that Amazon grabs the full price as some sort of calculation across the 30 or so days before their prime day, and sellers will sometimes raise their prices so that they can give a bigger looking discount. These aren’t the tactics I would ever recommend, it’s not very sustainable.

What we want to figure out first before we get all excited about the possibilities, is how a certain level of sale or discount might impact your profitability.

As much as we want you to make a lot of revenue, it needs to translate into profit so that you can continue to invest back into buying even more product, and ideally taking some off the top for yourself.

Decision #2: Should you do a Black Friday sale at all?

This decision has to come after the profit decision. If it doesn’t make sense to your profit margins, a sale might not be a good thing either way no matter what way you slice it.

If your profit margin is good with a sale, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that Black Friday is the right move for you.

The perks of doing a Black Friday sale specifically is that people are ready to shop, they do this every year, some customers purposefully wait for this time to shop because they expect sales, and therefore the best deals. Your sales push doesn’t feel as pushy at this time because everyone is doing it. It’s timed well for gifting season, and either summer or winter depending on where you are based and who you serve.

However, there are other things to consider before you jump straight in.

If you sell an item or items that people use purchase repeatedly, for example dog food or supplements it might be good to consider: will people just stock up at a lower price point and then not purchase for a while. That might impact how hard you go with this type of sale or if a sale at a different time of year is better for you.

Part of this decision comes down to the competition in the market, so you might like to take that Black Friday energy and run a sale at another time of year, when everyone else isn’t running a sale too. That could be a good option if the discount that makes sense for you is considerable but not as competitive as to what might be on the market.

As a shopper, I also enjoy those who do their biggest sale at the most relevant time of year for them because it makes sense for me to shop then, and not in late November.

I’m also not usually choosing between them and 10 other brands, because they’re the only ones running a big sale that week.

Some brands might be best to run a sale at the end or start of the financial year if they primarily serve businesses.

Others are based in the northern hemisphere and sell swimwear, so Black Friday timing is essentially just clearance time for them, so they might like to focus on a mid season sale instead to attract more shoppers.

If you sell gardening supplies, you might choose your sale timings around the right time to plant seeds.

Some businesses are better off to provide a pre-order discount, where those customers who buy early (and help you reduce your risks in buying too much stock) get the item a little cheaper because they’ll have to wait, than those who buy after you can ship instantly. You might time that with Black Friday, but realistically everything else they’re shopping for has instant gratification and that makes it harder to compete.

The ultimate alternative to all of this is to get quiet while others take over your customer’s inbox and start up again after.

If you’re not in retail, you can still run a sale, although you might like to do it a little differently. If you sell a course or resources, you’ll probably want to follow the retail methodology, but if you offer services, you can still run a sale, even though it’s less common. It is becoming more common, so there might still be some competition in your target market.

If you sell gift certificates or allow people to pay for a service in some way before booking in a date, that discount off of a future booking could be the ticket.

An example of this is a photographer selling packages that can be booked in the new year.

If you own a gym or run online workout classes, you’ll be used to the new year rush, but a different time might be better to offset that than what is really only one month earlier.

It could be maintenance hours bought in bulk, or an added service, as in they buy branding and get a set of 3 illustrations included where you’d usually charge for that.

Choosing the right time for your business, and your customer, is the best guide, regardless of what everyone else is doing.

Assuming you’re going to run a sale…

Decision #3: What you want to achieve

The default answer might be that you want to get more orders, or more revenue, but there can also be other motivations for running a sale. Your goal, or goals, will help you to decide what to put on sale, for how long and how you’ll promote it.

You might want to move some stock, say your sell through percentages are a little lower than you'd like, or you’re hanging onto certain stock in a way that can mean that it’s coming up to its expiry, whether that be literally because its a fresh product or because there’s some element of trend or seasonality to what you sell.

You might want this sale to particularly engage new customers. There’s always a subset of people who are interested, but won’t be buying at full price or have some level of hesitation, so a sale is one way to get them over that hurdle of shopping from you for the first time at a lower price, and then they can see the quality of your product or service and your great delivery and they’re on their way to becoming a loyal customer. Depending on how much interest they’ve shown, you might be able to market to them more directly, whether they’re somewhat interested and have engaged on social media, or have visited your website but not purchased, or if they’ve started a checkout but not completed it.

You might want lapsed customers to come back around and try you again. Maybe you’ve made some improvements to your offer, or your delivery, or its a particularly relevant time for them, or you’ve got a new range of products, or because you’re able to offer that discount.

Maybe you want your average order value to go up. By doing a multi buy offer, or a percentage that is just too good to pass up, this can happen. Without a larger number of orders, you can still make more revenue if your average order value is up. This might be a good goal to strive for if you have a niche audience, or don’t have a large advertising budget.

Maybe you just want to learn something. If this is the first sale you’ve run, you’ll probably want to keep it simple, but you can learn a lot about running a sale. You might want to try a new type of sale, or new marketing formats. You’ll also learn how your order packing or delivery services work when you’ve got more orders on the go, assuming the sale works.

This goal is up to you, and maybe you have a few in mind, but I do highly recommend choosing one as at least your highest priority.

Decision #4: How you’ll keep this on brand

You’ll want your sale to be competitive, yet brand authentic. Running a sale at the same time as everyone else does mean that you need to stand out, to your target audience. How you do that is as unique as your brand. You still need to hold fast to your brand values and mission, that doesn’t go out the window just because you’re running a discount.

A reminder that comparison is a trap. What others do is not always right for your brand.

If your brand is somewhat luxurious, or high quality, how will you maintain a high value feeling while discounting?

How you refer to this sale, and talk about the discounts or the value customers can get, will change how people see the value of your products. If this is yet another sale, it’s harder to really convey the original price to those who know your brand well enough to see those regular discounts.

Talking about the quality of your ingredients, fabrics, construction methods or the uniqueness of your product can help.

You can also share reviews and customers photos to show how great the products are for past customers.

If you offer a service, you can share a testimonial or proof of your work through analytics or by showcasing your work visually if that’s possible.

Sharing these messages alongside your sales prompts can help to reinforce the quality or whatever else is most important to your customer and for your brand. Whether that be in your email campaigns or automations, ads, organic social content or all over your website. Ideally you’ll do this on all of the above. At any time of year, you can do this by adding extra content to your abandoned cart flow, and other timely messaging, so that there is always a secondary message instead of just a reminder.

You might also beef up the elements of your website that showcase your quality ahead of this sale, and then keep those features year round.

With any form of content, by integrating this within your sales experience, the two messages are received simultaneously so your brand is still front and centre.

Decision #5: What products you’ll include in the sale

A site-wide sale can be simpler for people to understand and for you to run, but it might not serve your ultimate goals, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going by the default and not considering alternatives.

If your goal is to move specific stock, running a site-wide sale might not achieve that if you don’t make that product really obvious. You can recommend those products across your website and feature them in your collections so that they’re likely to be seen, so you don’t have to be tempted to only discount those.

You can also run the sale on top of clearance pricing, so they get a double discount on the items you really truly want out of your warehouse.

Running a sale on only your clearance items or prior sale items is probably not gonna stand out in the market. It gives people something, but not necessarily where they're going to probably wanna spend their money in this crucial week given they probably don’t have an unlimited budget. They’re probably less likely to tell someone about it as well.

If you choose to exclude a limited number of items from the sale, it could be a good idea to not recommend those so much for just this period.

If you do choose to run the sale on particular items only, you may want to have options at multiple price points so that your audience can shop at the price that suits them.

Ultimately, a site-wide sale is the quickest to set up, and the least confusing, so there’s a reason it’s the default.

Decision #6: What discount you’ll offer

A percentage off is simple, it can be stated in massive figures and means that no matter what they buy, they get a straight discount. It also means that they continue to receive a benefit the more they buy.

A percentage off sale doesn’t necessarily incentivise the purchase of multiple items as directly as a multi-buy offer but if your range is cohesive, and of a reasonable size, you can still expect people to buy more items than they usually would.

A Buy 2 get 3rd 50% off sale is more likely to increase that average order value, in theory, but it requires the customer to want 3 items. I'm sure there’s studies on this, but my assumption and my experience as being a shopper is that if I like four items but I definitely don't want 6 I'm probably going to choose which item to remove from my cart at a certain point, to get the best deal. If I did add two more items just to get the discount I don't necessarily feel like I'm getting as good of a deal. Whether I realise that before I click pay now is another thing. The same goes for: Buy 3 get 4th free. People only get the discount of whatever the cheapest item, so you might want to assess how you group items for these to retain the incentive.

With an option like Buy 3 for $40, they’re getting equal benefit no matter what, but usually they’re basically the same item, like 3 lip gloss colours, or 3 camisoles.

If you offer a Spend X Get Y deal, the more they spend, the better deal they get. That could look like Spend $100, get 10% off, Spend $150 get $20 off. These numbers would be centred around your average order value, and rising that a little bit. You could also run it as Spend $100 get a fixed amount off, but that is both psychologically smaller, and literally a smaller discount if they spend $190.

Mystery Boxes are a unique type of sale because people don’t totally know what they’re buying. If you sell candles, they might know what size of candle, but not what scent. For clothing, they might know what size and whether it is a dress or a top and skirt, but not what pattern or style. This is a great option if your products are pretty universally loved but customers do tend to understand that the items in these are ones you probably want to get rid of, so if you’re mixing in popular colours or flavours, make that known. When it’s possible, try not to have them be completely clearance items, since customers will probably be disappointed. You might get this purchase, but will it turn them off for future purchases?

Offering a new deal every day can get tricky. You’ve got to set each one up and keep your team up to date, and this can also be confusing for your customers. It can lead to issues around perception when someone shops one day but then thinks that the next deal is better. It also means a lot of shipping costs if people want to shop on multiple days i you’re running a deal on dresses one day and leggings the next. If you really want to run multiple offers, to learn what your customers react to, it might be beneficial to instead run 2-3 deals across the whole of November and December and spread them out a bit. You could also trial those at other points of 2026 too, and particularly watch your conversion rate or average order value during those sales, instead of focusing on revenue alone to compare them.

A sale is essentially an incentive, it gets people to want to buy now while they get more for their money. There are other ways of doing that. A gift with purchase allows people to get something of extra value, without discounting the core product. That gift has to be an incentive though, if it’s not something they would otherwise pay for, it’s not going to be something they see as a real benefit of purchasing right now. This gift could be a small new item you are stocking, that you want people to try. It could also be something you have been asked to sell, but that you don’t otherwise stock, so there’s some exclusivity there, where only those who shop this sale will get that item. Whether you sell the leftovers later is up to you.

When your sale requires too much explanation, it can get a little tricky. It’s not as punchy, but people can also get confused on whether they’re actually getting a deal. An example of a messy offer is when people have to buy a certain amount and then they get to choose between 3 gifts. In text form, that’s a lot of words. You can explain this visually, and it can also be simpler if you let people choose their option at checkout, but there’s still a lot of details to take in.

Choose what suits your setup the best, and what you think your customers will find as the best value. If you’ve run sales before you hopefully have a bit of an idea on what people have responded to before.

Decision #7: Product timing around the sale

If you’re going to do a site-wide sale, it might make sense to hold your newest range to release after the sale. Including them in the sale is not as great for your profit margin if people would otherwise buy it at full price.

It can also mean that you have something new and fun to talk about after the sale is over, which can help with the post-sale slump.

On the other hand, if you’re running a sale on specific items, it might make the most sense to put your new range on the website so that it gets seen. Especially if this is a slight foray into a new arena, you might like to promote it when you have the most eyes on your website, and therefore, on your products. People might not appreciate that the new items are excluded from the sale, but you know your customers best, and the amount of stock you’ve ordered of that new range, so that’s up to you.

Decision #8: How people will activate their discount

You can decide whether people have to enter a code at checkout, or if the discount or free gift will be applied in their cart automatically.

Making them enter a code would mean that some people might not use the discount and get frustrated when they figure that out. In general, it's better to make it as automatic as possible so that people don't get confused. If they do get confused they're more likely to not make a purchase.

If it's say, a buy two get third free situation, it's good if you make it clear that they have to add all three items to the cart to get the discount and that isn’t automated since you want them to choose the item they want. You'll need to make sure that is clear within your explanations and if possible within your cart. If it’s possible with an app or extra bit of coding, you can detect there’s 2 items in the cart and prompt them to add the third to qualify.

Ideally if it's a free gift with purchase it needs to be added to the cart automatically. It's really too difficult for people to have to go and find that item and then add it just to get it for free. When I say difficult, I don't necessarily mean that they're incapable of doing it. What I mean is that it takes enough time that it adds friction and any extra time that you add to the process can mean that that person gets distracted by something important that comes up and then they never come back. Anything that makes it too hard, even if that's only a little bit harder, is just too much. Any add to cart app can be installed easily, especially if you’re on Shopify, and that will do the trick.

Another option is that the website is kind of closed down and that they have to have a password to access the website, but then any discount is automatic once they’re in. You might want to do this if you want people to get onto your email list to enter the sale because then they have to get the password for your website. They’d land on a full page that explains the sale with a signup email, as well as the password field, because if I landed on a website that just had a password, I’d think they’d shut down. This is one of those situations where you're forcing people to do the thing because if you allow them to shop but then they just don't have the code to enter at checkout they might not necessarily realise. The easier you can make it for them, the better.

Just a reminder that although you want this to be automated, it’s a good idea to exclude other discount codes from being used during this time, so that people can’t get a double discount, if you don’t want them to. That also means pausing any email automations that might promote discount codes that can’t currently be used, until the sale ends.

Decision #9: Your sale schedule

You can run the sale for two weeks or you could run it for one day only, it is completely up to you.

Looking back to 10 years ago we ran a one day sale for Black Friday but then I left it on over the weekend and then came in on the Monday and we ran a secondary sale on Cyber Monday which was online only.

Now, it's more common for brands to want to get in first. Realistically what ends up happening is that they may have like a half a day head start and then very quickly inboxes are filled with other sales, but they run their sale for 2 weeks or longer.

Being the first is not a fix all for your sale, so this is not necessarily the tactic to win all tactics.

The excessively long sales periods are getting so out of hand that I've also been in many an office or in a group chat where as soon as we all start getting emails for Black Friday and it's weeks till Black Friday we’ll start making fun of those brands. The same goes for a Boxing Day sale that starts on December 16th, it makes no sense, just call it something else. Especially when what happens is that by Boxing Day the sale items have changed, so it literally was a different sale.

This also goes back to the profit margin piece, of if people aren't even looking for the Black Friday sale yet because it's two or three weeks out, but they were going to purchase anyway you've kind of just taken away your own profit, although you could phrase it as a bit of a reward for that customer, and maybe they buy more in that purchase.

This is one of those situations where you could really do anything. What I like to talk to clients about in this scenario is what kind of message are you wanting to get across here and what is the experience you want people to feel, so what is kind of the point of the timing here. A lot of big box retailers will do this long sale now and I honestly wonder if some of that comes back to the fact that it's mostly an in store purchase at least that most people shop in-store still with those brands and so they want to allow people time to learn about the sale and make it into the store. If instead you're an e-commerce business or at least an e-commerce predominant business then having it be more of that quick sale might be a little bit more aligned with the fact that people can shop immediately. I say this as someone who has worked with businesses who have zero stores all the way up to 65 stores so it really just depends on your mix and the split and behaviours of your customers. Don't worry, even I understand that the number of times that I say something along the lines of it depends it is annoying but it really does depend, but you do need to decide on something.

Long sales do tend to lose their fire, and you simply sell things at a discount for a longer amount of time, watering down the wow-factor.

Giving people at least a few days can be a reasonable length, it’s like a medium way of doing it so it's not a surprise “shop by midnight” super flustered feeling sale. Some people, especially when their inbox is extra full might not see it for a day, and same with seeing an Instagram post two days later and so they've actually missed the sale.

This decision might be led by your goals that you set at the start of this but it also could be led by how large of a decision it is for people to shop for your item, and therefore how long they might need to sit on that decision. As an example if you sell phone cases it's not exactly a large investment and people might want something new and they might want a discount because maybe you do the higher end ones. However, if you're doing a Black Friday sale and you sell spa pools it might be a little more of a decision for people. They need to talk to their partner about it, they need to think about whether it actually fits in their backyard, all of those types of things to where they need a few days to think about it. If it's only a day or two you're really only going to convert people who were already pretty decided on what model they were going to get.

A week could be a good starting point if this is your first sale, with a few days before and after Black Friday.

Decision #10: How you communicate your sale

This is one of the most important decisions you’ll be making, so this is where you’ll spend most of your planning time. This is also the part of it that takes the most action.

Email marketing is one of the most intimate options, as well as being pretty low cost. As much as ads drive revenue, email tends to drive both revenue and profit, especially with an engaged email list.

You can send announcements via campaigns, for the start of the sale, and at least one more reminder before it ends, but you can also adjust your automations like abandoned cart emails to specifically make a point of the sale. Everything hinges off them having given you their email and permission to send to them, so still be mindful of what and how much you contact them.

As an announcement or at other times in the sale, it can be beneficial to send a text only email. This stands out as something different, or at least it does at the time of this recording, and it tends to get you through some of the junk filters. If you still want to include some imagery, that’s ok too, but there’s something about a personal note from the founder. You’ll want to get to the point, but leaning back into junk for a moment, too much emphasis on dollars and sales will probably send up a flag, so keep your subject line on point, without it sounding like a phishing scam.

You’ll also want to edit your popup so that it is relevant for the sale and promotes the special deal, or something they can get on top if they sign up for your email list.

Email marketing also opens up the option to A/B test. Ideally, you've been running some A/B testing for months, so you have a good idea of what would usually work whether that’s timing or subject lines or the content or style of the emails. However, it can be good to still run some A/B testing throughout your sales so maybe there is a couple of options with the subject line, or how you phrase the sale or how you phrase the call to action and see which one converts best before you send it out en masse. If the email is super timely you will not have time to run an A/B test but if there is an option it can just give you that little bit more of understanding and ultimately, improve your overall performance.

When you use imagery in emails, use photos that are bold and stand out, as much as your brand permits. Showing the deal right off the bat gives you the best chance of people actually taking it in. After all, the deals are flowing into their inbox at record speed. The second most crucial part though, is to focus on what gets them to click through to your website. Without that, you’re not making a sale directly from that email.

SMS is another great option if you have people’s permission to contact them. It’s more costly than email, and also more invasive, but you do tend to get a really high open rate, with it usually being at about 95% or more. That doesn’t always mean it converts, and you should know your audience well enough to know if this would be too much of an interruption, but sending a text when your sale launches and when there’s 24 hours to go could be a good option. Just don’t go overboard. If you can say something like our biggest sale of the year accurately, or the deal you’re offering and include a link, that might be the perfect message to get them interested, and not annoyed. You don’t want them to miss out, but also don’t want to harass them. If your software for email and SMS are the same, you could delay your SMS send by a few hours and only text those who haven’t opened the text after 4 or 5 hours of your first email announcement. This will both lower the cost and number of people you would text. You might also only send an SMS to your most active email and website visitors, so you’re not blasting your whole list. Every text adds up, and a reminder that we want profit.

Organic social media is something that is important to any sale because you're likely to get in front of people when they're just browsing. They're already on a device that allows them to shop. Realistically, only a certain subset of your followers are going to see this content so it's an important part of the process but it is one that you have the least control of distribution. While I say it's important, it's probably not where you should be putting the majority of your time, unless this is your most engaged platform. You can't dictate when people see it although I do have a post on my website about how you can stop the distribution of a Facebook post while still keeping it on your profile. You can also archive posts after the sale if you want to post quite a lot organically but maybe don't want all of that then sitting there as a history. You could create a few posts to make sure that there's something relevant to the sale on your profile when people click through to it, but organic social might not necessarily have the return on investment at this time as it might other times of the year.

Because more brands are running ads as we lead into the holiday season your organic content will probably be seen by less people. You can still go viral, you can still get really great customer engagement, just with a small caveat that you might see those numbers dip. You might find that a sale message but with that product shown might break through the noise a little bit more than just percentage off fireworks and confetti and all of those things. Now might not be the right time for jumping on an audio trend, instead focusing on content you can prepare in advance and schedule.

At least with something like stories it's most likely filtered down to people who follow you so it's letting people know but it's not necessarily their first introduction to you. You can also add a link in Stories, which can make it simpler for people. And you can post Stories daily, about the sale, but also about the behind the scenes too so it stays interesting.

If stories is a part of your marketing plan, or you can whip up short form content quickly, you might like to share your team packing orders, the courier labels printing (from the side so no details shown, or announcing items that are about to sell out, or sharing that XYZ has sold out, but if you’re shopping for a gift, here’s something the same person might like, so there’s still something that suits that shopper.

If you are running a sale on only particular items or you want particular items to move during the sale, posting those on social media would obviously be a good play here.

When it comes to ads, you'll probably find that you still get a reasonably good cost per click at this time of year, although it again will probably go a little higher than it would at other times of the year just because there's so much competition and they operate on supply and demand based costing. It is an auction after all. However if people are spending more you can offset that a little bit, or by gaining new customers you can look at it as a longer term investment. Just like any time of the year it's still important to balance a little bit of messaging in terms of what people should see if they are new person to your brand versus someone who has seen your brand a few times versus someone who has purchased from you before. You might find that by using audiences like your website traffic and plugging that into your ads platforms that those ads using those audiences convert more but it's not necessarily that those should be the only ads that you run.

With ads you can get really specific as to who you're targeting but you might also find that a slightly wider audience is more interested in shopping from you at this time of year. That might mean that your conversion goal ads go out to a wider audience than you usually would throughout the year, rather than only showing them brand awareness style content. And again you can run multiple ad creatives, as an A/B test with different imagery, videos or text to see what performs the best.

If you traditionally don't run ads all year I wouldn't recommend that this is the time of year that you pick it up because it's a very expensive time to trial things and start from scratch.

Once you get people to your website this is really where that conversion rate optimisation will have a massive impact on your sales, so if there are things that you've been putting off now would be a great time to do them. Ultimately if you have hundreds of hours of work that you want to do to your website it's possibly a little bit too late and this is why we work on this incrementally year-round.

Your homepage is really critical. Anyone who sees something but then comes back to the website on their own will probably land on the homepage so making sure that you have not only your sale very very obvious but also that you're showing recommended products, that you have imagery of your range, rather than it just be that someone lands on your website and all they see is text and photos of text and sale sale sale. That doesn't necessarily grab their attention with anything that they might want to add to their cart so ultimately above the fold it's really good to both have the sales message and something that would possibly make you want to buy the thing. What you feature might be something that's really popular or that you particularly want to sell. It’s a balancing act of whether the things you want to move have been popular or if you want to move them because they haven't been popular. If that’s the case, of them not being popular, it might instead help to showcase something that hooks them in, but that the products you want to move are also on whatever page your homepage banner links them through to, like you’re putting the vegetables into the pasta sauce.

On every collection page and product page there should be something that reminds people that there's a sale. Partly because they could land on any page when they get to your website but also so that you're confirming that the sale is still running as they click on the website and that that product is included. That could look like banners across the top of your website it could look like an announcement bar or it could be sale pricing, or a particular little sticker about the sale next to the details.

If you have control over your cart and checkout page designs, those are also very great placements to showcase your sale, especially if it's ending soon.

If they need to purchase a certain amount, for free shipping or to get a free gift, a progress bar in the cart can serve as a reminder and drive that message home.

Again you want that discount or deal to show in the cart in terms of either a discount showing or that the bonus gift has been added with a zero dollar price.

Landing pages can be really beneficial for sales because you can have people land on a page that outlines really specific information that might not make sense for your homepage. Instead of simply sending them to your homepage you can send them to a page that really specifically outlines what the sale is, when it's going to end, the best products or anything like that. It can also specify reviews, user generated content and information about the quality of your goods, laid out in a way that is really specific to the places where you're going to link to this page from. You might have multiple landing pages for the sale, so you might have one that is specifically for a certain type of ad, or three different landing pages for different types of ads. You might also have specific landing pages for different email campaigns where you want to send people to a specific link, where a collection page or a product page doesn't really suit.

If you have an in person retail experience, using posters will also be useful, possibly in the same ways you showcase products or deals year round. One thing you probably will want to be mindful of is if you’re running the same sale online, make that clear on your signage. That way if people can’t find something they know they could look online and get the same good deal, and also that they can shop again online.

As you create your comms plan, you might like to look a little wider, so that you warm people up over the next couple weeks, hit them with a great sale and move straight into gifting content. This heps you maintain the flow and allows you to decide what you could talk about thats interesting, before your brain gets wrapped in sale prep.

Decision #11: How people will discover the products they want

Ahead of your sale, just like any other time of year, we want to review how your products are found.

You might adjust your navigation in your header to be more specific for the sale so adding a drop-down or portion of your menu that allows people to browse the sale not only in its totality, but also different buying motivations or segments of the sale that makes sense depending on how you see your sale up. That might be certain multi buy offers or price points. It could equally be certain themes for example if you're going to send emails around certain collections that are on sale maybe you sell items particularly by the type of fabric so you might have linen sale silk sale satin sale for example so that people can immediately see that collection that they want to see but also filtered for the sale.

This still works if you're doing a site wide sale it just reinforces the fact that these items are on sale while also allowing people to navigate to them more easily.

You can also review your search, and make sure that terms that people might search will still match up to your corresponding products, with similiar phrases. Shopify allows you to do this in the settings. There’s also reports on search which might help to identify any issues, like Searches with no clicks.

Another way is to re-jig how your collections are sorted. When someone lands on a collection, which for those who don't use Shopify that might be called a category, they have a different way of phrasing it, but a category or collection is a really great place for people to land and browse, but also it's a really great place for you to be able to showcase those like top 4 to 8 items in particular. The recommended or default layout allows you to decide which items they’ll see first, for whatever motivation that aligns with your goals. Then if they choose to, people can still sort by price or whatever they want, but they’ve still seen those items you wanted to highlight. It’s such a simple thing to do, but it truly has impact. I have worked with many brands that will have a certain item they want to move and by simply moving it to the top of a few collections, it starts to sell. This is just a time when there’s more eyeballs on those collections, so this has an even larger impact.

You can also create any new collections that you maybe haven't had before to link to on emails or ads. Not every collection of category that you have has to go into some form of navigation menu, it can just be an unlinked collection that you linked to with ads, emails or social links.

The items that you recommend throughout your website can help with that discovery too. Whether that be through “customers also bought” or “complete the outfit” or any of those kind of sections on a website that would allow people to see items that go with other items. If you're not doing this through some kind of automation or AI or allowing the website platform that you use to pick which items are recommended by default in some other way, what will happen over time is the say four items that you've chosen go out of date. You sell out of those and very soon instead of 4 items, only 2 show. Before any sale or any big shopping time of year is just another motivation to check back in on these and see whether they need updating or whether you could improve how you do it so that you're allowing say an automation to choose those items.

Those automations could be based on if it's a handbag recommend a shoe it could also be if it's a shoe recommend a sock or other accessories, but also you could have different settings to suit your customer’s motivations for liking certain items, so if you have range of leather items but then you also have vegan items you can have it that if it's a vegan item that it recommends other vegan items so that you don't go on there and find that you're looking at a vegan handbag and it's recommending you leather shoes. If you’re using more complex criteria, the products could be based on what others buy or what others also look at, so they see items that are theoretically their style.

Whether you're running a multi buy offer or not, it can be really good to have recommended items on the cart page too so that there's essentially an upsell as they go through the process. The more that that can be relative to the item they've already added, the more likely it is to actually convert rather than if what you're recommending is the same for every product, that's not as intuitive.

Who will they likely be shopping for, themselves or gifts?

By creating a gift guide, or a quiz, people can better choose the right item or items for them. This reduction of overwhelm can mean that you help them, but that they’re also more able to make a decision, instead of thinking they’ll come back later because a certain number of them won’t come back. This guide or quiz can also help customers into the future if you keep it up to date and available, despite your motivation being this sale.

Blog content can also be really handy for a sale, not only from an SEO perspective but for helping people understand what they should buy or which item is correct for them in a longer format. Maybe you don't have a comparison option like a lot of websites have like Apple where you can look at the different MacBooks and decide which one you prefer. A blog post could add this sort of solution for people without having to build out added website functionality. This could be especially beneficial if you saw something at different tiers so Pilates is very hot at the moment and if you were buying a Pilates reformer you might be shopping from a website that has five different options. If you aren't a super fanatical Pilates attendee or you don't teach Pilates you might not necessarily know all of the features and elements of especially the fancier Pilates reformers so a blog post might be really helpful to understand what to do with each of the components or why they’re beneficial to have. You could answer questions people commonly have when they’re looking for what you offer, and they might discover the website that way, but you can also link to resources from the product page to help with people’s purchase decision. If you prefer, a video could suit you more than a written format.

Again this content can live on beyond your sale but the sale is the incentive for you to hurry up and get this done.

Decision #12: How you’ll create urgency

The reason a sale works so well is that it is urgency and exclusivity and priced to sell.

When people know when the sale is ending, there’s some urgency built in there, to at least come back and shop before the sale ends. However, some urgency about the possibility of selling out the items they want is what will often push people to purchase on their first session of browsing.

This is a great time for your stock amounts to be shown, like only 3 left, or selling fast notes on products.

If people browse and buy the item it'll be pretty common for you to send an abandoned browse or cart or checkout reminder email. You can add messaging into this around items selling out or the sale ending, just for this fixed amount of time and that just adds that little bit more urgency.

You could also be posting on your organic social media about how items are selling fast or sold out.

Often times you would want to remove products from your website once they sell out but you might not want to be rushing to do that as fast just so that people can see that items have sold out.

Decision #13: How you’ll prime your audience

Hopefully you've been building and nurturing your audience all year but there are still some things that you can do in these last few weeks to ramp up that understanding of your brand. Now might be the right time to send some emails or structure your social media content around your core brand messages as a bit of a reminder of why people love your product and why they’re so popular.

If your goal for the sale is to sell a certain subset of your stock, those should probably be the products that you're featuring right now, maybe not completely but so that they’re in the mix. If there were items that you sell that have a higher profit margin than others, you might want to focus on those too.

Giving people a heads up that you're going to do a sale has its risks. If people know you're about to do a sale categorically, especially too far in advance, then they will possibly delay a purchase that they otherwise would plan on making. However with something like Black Friday, people know that you're probably going to do something, so sales for November do tend to a dip in anticipation of Black Friday and other peak shopping season sales anyway.

For a sale at any other time of the year I would also probably recommend not telling people but then having the length of the sale be long enough that they can hear about it and browse and shop in their own time.

The only time it really makes sense to warn people is if you want them to be online at the start, just like a new collection drop. You could maybe send an announcement with a countdown timer to the start 3-5 hours in advance. If your sale will start at 6pm, a lunchtime email could be a good fit. That way you’re not deterring too many shoppers, while still setting yourself up for a great launch.

If the goal of your sale is to bring in new customers, this is a really good time to not only broaden your horizons a little bit before the sale, but also to re-engage people who have been on your website in the past six months but have never purchased, for example. The easiest way to do that is through ads, although you might be able to segment your email list too. By getting in front of these people ahead of the sale you're reminding them that you exist and how great your product is before they see something about a discount.

Decision #14: How your business will best serve your customers

This is a time of year that isn’t just about sales. It’s about how you engage with your customers and serve them as well. It’s especially how you’ll be remembered beyond the sale.

How you manage your customer service or live chat especially in how quickly you're able to get back to people is really important during a sale. You can adjust this as you go, but some planning in terms of if there's certain canned emails or canned chat responses that you can create can be really helpful. Having discussions with your team if you have one, about how this could be done is also important so that they are empowered to make decisions on the go once the promotion has begun.

Your dispatch times should be considered. Having the fastest shipping time might not be the play here, if you can’t match that expectation. If you would usually dispatch the same day that orders are placed up to a certain time of the day, you might like to either take that away during the sale or adjust that guarantee to an earlier time in the day. While you might still like to promote the speed because other stores might take days to ship what you don't want to do is over sell it and then have a customer service issue where people don't get their orders when they expect. Some of your customers might still be ordering for something urgent. The good thing about Black Friday is that it's early enough ahead of the Christmas holiday shopping time that usually the couriers are busier but not backlogged. You also don't have necessarily a universal date that people want to get their orders by so there's not necessarily any kind of courier deadline as you would have for something like Christmas Day or Mother's Day.

This is a good time to consider how you offer and promote payment plans or apps like Klarna, Afterpay and if this discount can make purchases more accessible.

Adding extra purchase options at checkout, whether that be Apple Pay or Google Pay, on top of these payment plan options can also just mean that people don't have to go and find their card and that they can check out in a couple seconds if they're already logged in on these payment apps on their device. That can be another distraction that stops them from making their purchase.

Free Returns might be a great way to entice new customers who may want to buy two versions of something and send back one, like 2 sizes of a dress, so that they can find out what size they are usually in your range. Ultimately it has a cost for you, and buyer’s remorse makes those returns all the more common, but it’s something to consider.

You might choose to create a certain part of the sale that's going to reward your existing customer base. That could be something as simple as one day of early access so the sale itself will run automatically but for that first 24 hours people can access the sale pricing earlier by using a discount code. This might be the one time Id consider warning people about the sale, as their reward.

You could also offer an additional small gift with purchase or free shipping to those on your email list if you wanted to. This could be based on people who have purchased from you before or it could be everyone who is on your email list.

You can also add certain apps that allow people to add an item after they check out, that they might've forgotten. That means that you've already got them locked in on their initial purchase but you're still giving them a chance to edit the order by adding something. You might choose very specific items that are either super popular or items that are a quick and easy add-on. Since usually an item isn't fully secured until you're checked out, people do tend to check out pretty fast to lock their order in and so sometimes they want to add something on and they don't want to place a second order and possibly pay for shipping twice. You also don’t want to process two orders instead of one.

Other apps allow people to change the address if they realised that it's wrong after checking out which saves on customer service time and stress for your customer.

The better the experience your customer has, beyond just the browsing and buying part is how they’ll really remember you.

To quickly repeat these 14 decisions for you:

1. How this will impact your profit margin

2. Whether you should do a sale

3. What you want to achieve

4. How you’ll keep this on brand

5. What products you’ll include in the sale

6. What discount you’ll offer

7. Your product timing around the sale

8. How people will activate their discount

9. Your sale schedule

10. How you communicate your sale

11. How they will discover your products

12. How you’ll create urgency

13. How you’ll prime your audience

14. How your business will best serve your customers at this busy time

Whether it’s Back Friday or any other time of year, these are the decisions to make to curate a strategic sale.

It's all up to you and there isn't one set way that you have to do Black Friday or any other type of sale. These 14 decisions will help you to break it down into something that is a little bit more manageable and where you aren't starting from scratch. You’re also ready to take action and set everything up once you’ve completed all 14. I’ve covered some options, but do what feels right for you. Ultimately you might decide to stop at number two because you decide not to run a sale.

So if you're still listening to this, I wish you luck, I wish you revenue, I wish you all of the good things and that your customers are excited about your sale and that you meet whatever goal you set at the start of this that you wanted to achieve. I hope as a bare minimum that you at least learn something for next year.