As you crunch the numbers on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, you’re going to ask yourself: What’s next?
You want to keep the momentum from both events going into the holidays and beyond.
Why? These sales events are about much more than just the revenue you generated. They’re about bringing new people into your brand ecosystem—and keeping them there.
Think of it in pure sales terminology. Thanks to Black Friday, you have a whole new set of warm leads to follow up on. These leads include converting customers—i.e. people who actually bought from you—as well as shoppers who browsed your products but did not purchase.
Your goal in the coming weeks should be to continue to reach both sets of shoppers, albeit in slightly different ways.
Here’s how to make the most of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday even after those sales events come to a close. From re-targeting to cross-selling, we have a few tactics we recommend.
First: Non-advertising tactics to convert new shoppers
Advertising is inevitably going to play a large role in converting curious shoppers into paying customers in the coming months. But advertising isn’t the only lever you should pull.
Before you spend big on ads, you should make sure you have the following in place:
Inventory. For most brands, the end of the year is the biggest inventory crunch of all. For the next month, it’s going to be a game of monitoring inventory.
If you’re running low on stock, be sure to pause your ad spend. Amazon only automatically pauses ad spend for out of stock products on Sponsored Products ads.
For Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP, you need to pause your ads yourself.
For what it’s worth, if you wish you had a simpler way to view your advertising spend and your inventory levels in the same view, Intentwise Ad Optimizer can do that for you.
Amazon Posts. Amazon Posts is a simple, free way to defend your product detail pages and hijack your competitors—yet most marketers continue to overlook it.
We recommend creating Posts at a regular cadence, whether it’s every day or 3x a week. For simplicity, you can re-use your Instagram content. Then, tag relevant products, so your Posts show up on product pages.
The good news: Amazon Posts is becoming even easier to scale. You can schedule and scale your Posts, as well as track metrics, with the brand new Amazon Posts API.
Brand Tailored Promotions. Brand Tailored Promotions allow you to dole out custom discounts to specific groups of shoppers. Rather than a one-size-fits-all offering, you can display unique discounts to different shopper segments.
Plus, right in time for the holidays, Amazon just released a whole new set of audience targets for Brand Tailored Promotions.
Now, you can reach not only high-spend customers or cart abandoners but also:
- Top-tier customers (customers who bought from you recently, and who tend to spend a lot in general)
- At-risk customers (customers who haven’t bought from you recently).
Coupons. Coupons are an important way to entice shoppers who were curious about your brand during Black Friday but didn’t ultimately make a purchase.
Coupons are especially valuable when paired with ad campaigns: If you have a coupon running on an ASIN, and you launch a Sponsored Display or DSP ad, your ads will automatically highlight your coupons.
Re-target and upsell with a smart advertising strategy
No post-BF/CM strategy is complete without a complementary ad campaign.
There’s plenty you can do to keep your Black Friday momentum going, but here are two tactics in particular we recommend:
Re-target curious shoppers. Following up on the leads you generated but didn’t close is one of the best strategies to deploy in December. Reach out to the shoppers who, say, viewed your products on Black Friday but didn’t purchase.
You can run re-targeting campaigns, with varying levels of complexity, across Sponsored Display and DSP ad types. Sponsored Display lets you target people who viewed your product but didn’t purchase, or who viewed your competitors’ products but didn’t purchase.
Meanwhile, DSP takes re-targeting a step further. You can target shoppers who added a product to their cart but didn’t purchase, for example.
Finally, Amazon Marketing Cloud lets you get even more granular. Want to reach people who added a product to a gift list and didn’t purchase? Or who viewed one of your sponsored ads on Black Friday but didn’t purchase?
You can create an audience like this—or, really, any audience you can imagine—in AMC.
Upsell and cross-sell to new customers. The great thing about Black Friday and Cyber Monday is that now, suddenly, you have an influx of New-To-Brand customers who are curious about the rest of your brand.
Keep this new group of shoppers in your ecosystem by pitching them other, similar products in your ecosystem.
How do you do this?
First: Analyze what else in your catalog is frequently bought together with the products you ran deals on. You can do this through Amazon’s Market Basket Analysis report, versions of which are available to both vendors and sellers.
From that report, you’ll find the products frequently bought alongside your deal ASINs.
Let’s say you got a lot of traction with your burr grinder during Black Friday. Once you do a market basket analysis, you might find that the best route forward is to sell those new customers on your coffee maker next.
Second: Once you identify a smart upsell or cross-sell, you can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to push it to those new shoppers.
Create an audience of all of the shoppers who bought Product A during your November sales events. Then, push that audience to DSP, and run targeted ads offering them end-of-the-year discounts on Product B.
Once you know which products are frequently bought together, you could also consider offering those two products together as a bundle to entirely new shoppers.
If people are frequently buying the burr grinder with the coffee machine? Sell them together, at a discount, in your end-of-year ad campaigns. And if you need help creating audiences, Intentwise Explore can do this for you simply and at scale.
