How brands can retain Black Friday shoppers

British con­sumers may have been in the midst of anoth­er lock­down in Novem­ber 2020, but that didn’t stop them splash­ing out rough­ly £2m per minute on Black Fri­day deals. 

In total, about £6bn was spent dur­ing this annu­al fes­ti­val of con­sump­tion, as house­hold brands slashed prices on items rang­ing from cos­met­ics to elec­tron­ic goods. This year, the fig­ure could be clos­er to £9bn, accord­ing to PwC. 

Black Fri­day – which arrived on these shores from the US in 2010 – is one of a small num­ber of key sea­son­al events that retail­ers rely on to boost sales and attract new cus­tomers. 

Dur­ing Decem­ber, the aver­age UK house­hold spends 29% more than it would in a typ­i­cal month, thanks to gift-buy­ing and extrav­a­gant gro­cery pur­chas­es for Christ­mas, accord­ing to the Bank of Eng­land, while research by Bar­clay­card has found that Valentine’s Day gen­er­ates an extra £36 of retail expen­di­ture per per­son in the UK. 

But, while these tem­po­rary upticks are wel­come, how can brands and retail­ers cap­i­talise on the inter­est gen­er­at­ed in the longer term? After all, con­tin­u­ing to offer the size­able dis­counts that have made Black Fri­day so attrac­tive to bar­gain-hunt­ing shop­pers is hard­ly a sus­tain­able strat­e­gy.

“Major shop­ping events such as Valentine’s Day and Moth­er­ing Sun­day can nat­u­ral­ly cre­ate a sud­den influx of new cus­tomers, which is bril­liant for boost­ing sales,” says Neil Deben­ham, an entre­pre­neur, investor and busi­ness trou­bleshoot­er. “But too many busi­ness­es focus pure­ly on get­ting new cus­tomers through the door at these times and over­look the impor­tance of build­ing a strat­e­gy for retain­ing them. This can often result in exces­sive costs for cus­tomer acqui­si­tion and a lack of loy­al­ty from arguably ‘expen­sive’ cus­tomers.” 

Accord­ing to research by ecom­merce soft­ware firm Loy­altyLion, 64% of retail­ers report that shop­pers attract­ed to them dur­ing big sea­son­al events have a much low­er cus­tomer life­time val­ue (CLV) to their busi­ness than those acquired at oth­er times of the year. There is only a 27% chance that a cus­tomer acquired dur­ing these peri­ods will make a sec­ond pur­chase. 

“Offer­ing oth­er­wise unat­tain­able deals to get cus­tomers through the door is a good tac­tic,” Deben­ham says. “But, if you don’t have a reten­tion plan, the like­li­hood is that these shop­pers will resign them­selves to a one-off pur­chase and become part of a rapid churn cycle.” 

Well­be­ing brand Neom Organ­ics oper­ates five stores in the UK and is also stocked at John Lewis, Sel­f­ridges and Space NK. Its co-founder and CEO, Oliv­er Men­nell, says that Black Fri­day is an “impor­tant time of year for cus­tomer acqui­si­tion”, but he stress­es that his com­pa­ny is well aware of the need to con­vert this increase in inter­est into cus­tomer loy­al­ty. 

“Our strat­e­gy for acquir­ing cus­tomers dur­ing Black Fri­day is focused on prod­uct dis­cov­ery and tri­al. For exam­ple, all our offers include gifts with pur­chas­es, so that new­com­ers can expe­ri­ence more of what we have to offer,” he says. “This means that we can intro­duce them not only to our prod­ucts but also to our unique holis­tic approach to well­be­ing. This encour­ages them to take a longer-term view, adding man­age­able steps into their dai­ly rou­tines beyond the peak buy­ing peri­ods.” 

Dis­count shop­pers who sign up for online updates will receive con­tent such as well­be­ing advice and invi­ta­tions to exclu­sive brand events. To ensure that it doesn’t alien­ate its exist­ing cus­tomers, Neom uses social media and email to keep them informed of any major cus­tomer acqui­si­tion activ­i­ty before it hap­pens. 

Online con­sumer goods retail­er Buy it Direct takes great care to ensure that the right autho­ri­sa­tions are sought to ensure ongo­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions with cus­tomers after a sea­son­al shop­ping event has passed. 

“Dur­ing the peri­od itself, it’s impor­tant to have a vis­i­ble email sign-up facil­i­ty, ide­al­ly test­ed and opti­mised before­hand,” says the company’s head of reten­tion, Lau­ra Robert­son. “You need to ensure that per­mis­sions are sought for mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions, along with any oth­er rel­e­vant data cap­ture.” 

Once these are obtained, a retail­er can take a new cus­tomer on that cru­cial post-pur­chase jour­ney towards long-term loy­al­ty. 

“At this point, it’s impor­tant to engage cus­tomers with your wider offer­ing and demon­strate why they should keep com­ing back,” Robert­son advis­es. “It might be appro­pri­ate to offer a dis­count on a sec­ond pur­chase, but it would be wise to show­case a full-price offer­ing. This could be a best­seller or part of a new range, for instance, or anoth­er item that tells the brand’s sto­ry. This ‘wel­come jour­ney’ is also a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce new com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, such as a social media plat­form or an app.”

Data ana­lyt­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems can sup­port this effort, she adds, by using behav­iour­al data to offer cus­tomers per­son­alised mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions and iden­ti­fy the most prof­itable cross-sell­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. 

“For even greater insight, con­sid­er actu­al­ly ask­ing cus­tomers for more infor­ma­tion about the type and fre­quen­cy of com­mu­ni­ca­tions and offers they’re most inter­est­ed in receiv­ing,” Robert­son rec­om­mends. 

Deben­ham sug­gests that retail­ers should also con­sid­er using a major shop­ping event as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to per­suade new cus­tomers to sign up to a loy­al­ty scheme. 

“This could be a pro­gramme that encour­ages them to spend a cer­tain amount in exchange for fur­ther dis­counts,” he says. “Or you could reward loy­al­ty by offer­ing a dis­count every three or six months, say, so that shop­pers feel val­ued. Such tac­tics will not only increase your CLV; they will also dis­suade recur­ring shop­pers from vis­it­ing your com­peti­tors.” 

It’s also vital to take as much stress as pos­si­ble out of these big sea­son­al hol­i­days, he advis­es, by tweak­ing all post-sale com­mu­ni­ca­tions, offer­ing a great deliv­ery ser­vice and “ensur­ing that shop­pers are wowed by both the prod­uct and its pack­ag­ing when it arrives on the doorstep”.

The over­rid­ing mes­sage to retail­ers, then, is to treat these peak shop­ping events as a start­ing point from which to engage with new­ly acquired cus­tomers and, ulti­mate­ly, form far more last­ing – and lucra­tive – rela­tion­ships.