Black Friday Marketing Strategies for Spiritual Businesses

Have you prepared your Black Friday marketing strategy yet? At the time of writing, the single biggest shopping extravaganza is around the corner. If you haven’t primed your offers and specials already, take the last week of October to knuckle down and nail this. Time is running out!

Black Friday ushers in the busiest shopping period of the year. Typically, shoppers are geared for in-store shopping, but with the Covid pandemic of 2020, customers have shifted their purchasing behavior almost exclusively online. This brings huge sales opportunities for you, even if you haven’t hosted a Black Friday sale yet.  

You can bet that this year, your audience will be prepped and ready to go; waiting for your deals and specials to hit their inbox. 

In this post, I’ll share a few Black Friday marketing strategy ideas to help you prep your specials. There are:

• Sales and promotions strategies for psychical and digital products
• Sales and promotions strategies for service-based businesses
• Extra strategies for a boost in sales 
• Advertising your Black Friday promotion using social media 
• Prepping your Black Friday promotions with an email sequence
• Getting your website prepped for the big day

Let’s dig in!

Black Friday marketing strategies for physical products 

If you have an online store and are selling physical items, plan out your products sales strategy.

Whether you have your own online store through your website (such as a WooCommerce or Shopify store) or you’re selling via a third-party retailer such as Etsy, you can easily add a sale price to your products and advertise these prices to your customers. 

Take some time to think of creative ways that’ll make shopping with you easier and more exciting:

• For example, if you are an esoteric shop selling oracle or tarot cards, candles, smudge stick or similar, curate lists of products that pair well together. You could create blog posts that share a collection of your top sellers or highest rated products and what they’re bought in conjunction with.
• If, for some reason, your site doesn’t list related products, get a developer involved and ask them to script this in for you. Sharing related products at the bottom of your product page is a great way to encourage cross selling. 
• If you’re tapping into social channels, take advantage of Facebook and Instagram commerce. Set each product up as a shoppable item and advertise them online as such. For a product bundle or collection of linked products, use Instagram carousel and tag the products. 

One important thing to note is if you are discounting physical products that you sell and ship, remember to calculate the shipping costs. Shipping via your courier will not be discounted, so keep this charge in mind when setting your discount sale prices.

Black Friday marketing strategies for digital products 

In this day and age, almost everyone sells a course or program. You could easily offer a discount on your digital product, possibly a percentage discount for a select time period, that intensifies for a shorter space of time. 

Here’s an example:

• If you’re selling an astrology course or a coaching program, offer a small discount for two weeks leading up to Blak Friday weekend. Here, a 10-15% discount could apply.
• As the time draws nearer to Black Friday, increase the discount for a shorter space of time, for example 20% off for three days leading up to Black Friday.
• On the day of Black Friday itself, offer an intense discount of 25-35%, possibly more, as a flash sale of 12 hours only. 

Courses and programs aside, if you sell PDF downloads, such as recipe guides, mindset workbooks or even pre-recorded webinars, you can discount these too. 

Black Friday marketing strategies for service-based businesses 

Typically, we tend to think that Black Friday sales are more suited to physical products. Most of the time, we associate sales and promotions with physical goods, but service-based businesses can also take advantage from the Black Friday hype. 

Examples of service-based business can include:

• Astrologers
• Human design practitioners
• Energy healers such as reiki healers, body code workers, kinesiologists
• Coaches selling individual sessions

If you are selling services, even one-on-one sessions that are billed per hour, start to think of these services as products. With this shift, you can apply a discount strategy to your offering. 

Here are some examples:

• If you are a reiki healer, you could offer a % discount on all one-on-one sessions booked over the Black Friday period. These sessions can have an expiry date of a few months. This is great for encouraging the pre-purchase of sessions. 
• You could bundle a number of one-on-one sessions together and form these into a product. You could sell a x3 or x5 bundle of sessions and include a discount rate for the bulk purchase. Selling packs of your sessions is a great way to secure longer-term work. It’s also easier for your customer to make a single payment. 

If you have active social channels, you could share these in your Instagram stories or Facebook pages, but if you’re a bit more intimate in your approach to marketing, you could create an email and share these special offers with your list. 

If you don’t have an email list and are not collecting addresses in a CRM or email software, take the time to send emails to your previous customers. This is time-consuming, but you’ll more than likely have some interest generated as these would-be customers who have already purchased from you. These ‘warm leads’ are more likely to listen to you and buy from you again as it’s not the first time they’ve interacted with your brand. 

Sales strategies for Black Friday

A few ways to boost your sales on Black Friday:

• Encourage upsells. Once someone places an item into their cart, before letting them checkout, offer them a time-sensitive discount for a related product. For example, if you’re a nutritionist and someone has purchased a detox program, offer them an upsell for a discounted related product such as an intuitive eating guide, a recipe guide or similar. 
• Extend your sle to Cyber Monday. Some brands, not all, take advantage of Cyber Monday for extending their sale period. If this fits your sales strategy, you can offer a few days of bonus sales to your audience. You may find that some of your customers will wait until Cyber Monday or even afterwards to wait and see if your prices drop further.  
• Share a special offer with your top consumers. If you want to show love to your loyal customers, you can create a special discount that’s only shared with your email list, Facebook group, online community or Instagram Story viewers. 
• Combat cart abandonment. Carb abandonment occurs when a consumer adds a product to their cart but leaves an online store before completing the purchase. There are a number of things that you can do to discourage abandonment, such as shortening the purchase steps, being clear about shipping costs upfront, offering multiple payment options and so on. You can also invest in a plugin that’ll help you send an automated email to the user with a discount code once to encourage them to return to your store and continue shopping. 
• Pay attention to your copy. There’s a fine line between effective copy and cheesy sales lines. Whether you’re writing web copy, email subject lines for Instagram captions for your sales promo, make sure your copy is on brand, captures your brand voice, commands attention and converts. If words aren’t your strong suit, hire a copywriter. 
• Offer a free gift. Sometimes, it’s just really nice to be nice. Offer value for the sake of it. Every person and their dog will be blasting out Black Friday deals and promotions, so perhaps, offer your audience something free. This could help you cut through the clutter and make your brand stand out as one who adds value at every turn. 

Advertising your Black Friday promotion

Now that your promotions are prepped and ready, it’s time to think about marketing your deals. You need to get in front of your audience and let them know about your specials, well in advance. You can start sharing information about your Black Friday specials up to a month before the time. 

AIDA

Consider the classic advertising AIDA model. AIDA is an acronym that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This model explains the various stages that your audience need to be led through until primed and ready to make a purchase.

• Awareness: First, you need to make it known to your audience what it is that you’re selling. If your audience is warm and they are already aware of your brand, you only need to share information about your products/services and, in the case of Black Friday promotions, which offers will be special. If you attract new leads or customers who are new to our brand, you’ll need to educate them about your brand by explaining who you are, what you do, what you sell and why you’re relevant.
• Interest: Next, you need to get your audience excited about what you’re selling. You need to catch their attention and get them considering your offer. At this stage, you’re sort of planting the seed of your offer, explaining what it is and why it’ll help them. The idea is that they may research your offer and start considering the purchase. 
• Desire: Then, you need to appeal to their desire. At this stage, you’re trying to form an emotional bond for your customer’s needs to your offer. This is often done by relaying more personal sides of yourself, sharing your brand story or punting the emotional or self expressive benefits of your brand’s value proposition. 
• Action: Finally, after your audience has had multiple exposures to your message, they’ve mentally rationalised the purchase and emotionally connected with you and your loveliness, driving them to an action point of purchasing the offer. 

You can use both your social media channels and email marketing to increase awareness, garner interest, illicit desire and encourage action. 

Advertising your Black Friday deals on social media

Whichever network you use, make sure you start sharing your specials well ahead of time. 

Instagram

If you’re using Instagram, make use of all of the app’s features. Post to your feed, share to Stories, Create a Reel, and consider Using IGTV.

• Feed: Share a few posts in the weeks leading up to Black Friday that showcase your offers; whether it’s a course, a one-on-one session, a program, anything. Make sure each caption’s call-to-action shares the news of your Black Friday promo and gives your followers instruction of where they can find more info (do they DM you for info, do they click on a special Black Friday link you’ve created for your site and set in the bio).
• Stories: Stories should be shared on the daily, so, throw in a few Black Friday stories into your daily rotation. Tease your followers by letting them know that you have deals, and that they should stick around to find out what they are. Use the Story stickers to entice; set the countdown timer and give your followers alerts for when your deals drop. 
• Reels: Reels are still getting crazy engagement so if it’s recommended to create one to share your specials. You can share a short Reel that summarises your offers, the discounts, the launch date and how your followers can purchase. 
• Highlights: Create a special “Black Friday” Highlights reel and save all of your promo info shared to stories there. This way if a new customer lands on your page, they’ll be able to find all of your promotional information.

Promoting your Black Friday deals with email marketing

Email is one of the most important marketing channels for a multitude of reasons, even more so when you have promotions and specials. If you’ve been building a list, you can send them mails advertising your offers. 

Through your email marketing client, set up a Black Friday promotions list and integrate the list with a form either on your website or a special Black Friday landing page. Now, whether you have new customers entering your funnel or existing customers that are already familiar with you and are used to getting emails from you, you can share your Black Friday promos all around. 

Here’s an idea for a Black Friday email sequence: 

1. Two weeks (or even three!) before Black Friday: Send a teaser email notifying the audience of which specials and promos they can expect. Include a date here so that they know when the specials will go live.  
2. A few days before Black Friday: Send a reminder email reiteratign what they can expect. If your promo emails started earlier, add a few more reminder emails here. 
3. On Black Friday: Send an email alerting your audience that your deals are live. Send them directly to your shop so they can start browsing. Maybe even include a few “Bestsellers” in this email with links to the product pages so they can start shopping immediately. 
4. Weekend reminder emails: If your sale spans the entire weekend, send reminder emails on Saturday and Sunday, and let your audience know how long they have left to purchase
5. Sunday evening: If you’re participating in it, send a mail the night before Cyber Monday to alert your audience of the bonus deals coming their way. 
6. On Cyber Monday: Send an email about your Cyber Monday deals. Possibly include a few “Last of the Bestsellers” or “Final sale” items in this email with links to the product pages. 
7. 24 hours before your promotions end in full: Send one final reminder and let your audience know they only have 24 hours left to shop.

When you set up your email sequence, make sure you enable link tracking so that you can see which email element performa and which don’t. This data will be great for your next promotion sequence. The Christmas holiday season is around the corner.

It’s also advised to set up tagging for each user depending on their performance during your email campaign. By enabling tagging of users you’ll be able to segment your list at a later stage once the dust pf Black Friday settles.  

Preparing your website for Black Friday sales 

Things you should do on your website to prepare your brand for the Black Friday onslaught: 

Create a Black Friday landing page. Create a new page on your website and use it as the place where you drive all of your traffic to. If you start advertising your Black Friday sales easley, this page could have a few product images greyed out and then revealed each day to entice your audience. Add an email opt in form to this page so that your audience can leave their email and join your Black Friday promotion list. You can include a countdown timer here so that your audience knows when your deals will be live. 

Prep your server for an influx of traffic. You’ll have more online shoppers flooding your site, so make sure your server is ready for this. If you can estimate what the traffic influx will be, contact your host and consider upping your server resources and bandwidth allocation for the period. The last thing you want is your site crashing or tripping out when you’re supposed to be making millions of sales.

Set up your offers, with respective discounts. If you haven’t already, set up your products or services as saleable offers. If you haven’t set up your offers on your site, you can use Facebook or Instagram Shopping to run it through a social channel. If you don’t have an online store or social commerce pages, and are selling one-on-one offers such as astrology or human design sessions, send an email which details the discount offer. 

Style the Sale! button to match your branding. If you haven’t already, use CSS to style the Sale! button or badge for your online store. My store uses WooCommerce. Out of the box, the Sale! badge is a light orange colour. I’ve changed this to display as hot pink, which is way cuter. If you know your way around PHP, you can also change the text of this badge to reflect something different. You could make the badge display as ‘Black Friday Sale!’ or similar. If you’re not CSS or PHP savvy, hire a web developer to make this process run super smoothly. 

Plan attention-grabbing graphics and micro-interactions for your website. Start thinking of the design and copy of the sale promo assets for your site. Plan these ahead of time so that when go-time comes around, you’ll be prepped and ready. Some cool things you can include to mention your Black Friday sales on your website are:

• Include a promo bar at the top of your website that sends to your Shop page.
• Add a menu item to the end of your navigation menu called ‘Black Friday Sale!’ and use CSS to transform the standard menu item into an attention-grabbing call to action button.
• Get creative with pop up alerts and triggers so that when a customer either clicks on an item or reaches a section of a page, a pop up will arrive, sending them to your Black Friday sale page.
• Add a countdown timer to your site (either the home page or special Black Friday promotions page) to let your customers know when they should return. 

Backup your site, your data, your files. Double-check everything. We’re still in the Mercury retrograde for a few more weeks, so if you’re working on your site to prepare for Black Friday, pay special attention to your tech, computer and equipment. 

I could go on and on about Black Friday plans and promotion ideas. I hope these few ideas help your brand and business make bank this Black Friday. 

If you found this post useful, let me know by posting in the comments! I hope you have a great, successful Black Friday season and make a bunch of sales!

Thanks for reading!