What's Your Black Friday Offer?
It is estimated that 9.8 billion dollars will be spent on Black Friday in the United States in 2023. The question is not whether people are going to spend money on Black Friday, the question is how much of that are they going to spend with you. My name's Tim Burtt, welcome to Marketing with Tim. And I have been conducting Black Friday research and promotions for many, many years, and Black Friday as we know it is forever fractured, hopelessly broken, irreparably harmed. Why? Well, you can thank the internet for basically diluting Black Friday to the point that it's, yeah, it's still a thing, it's still a day, but when you have companies really in mid-October saying, oh, it's early Black Friday, it really does lose some of its luster. If you're over the age of, let's say, 30, do you recall maybe camping out at a big box retailer for an insanely low price on a TV or a toaster or something like that? And then, of course, once the doors did open and people rushed in and you found out there was limited quantity, well, you just had to be one of the first to get in. If you didn't, well, maybe next year. Or what about the people that would get into a fracas, basically a fight, it looked like a bunch of wolves jumping on a carcass in the wild when some poor minimum wage schlub working at a big box retailer unveiled the, you know, pulled off the cellophane wrap of the pallet with the microwaves or the video game systems, the TVs or whatever it might be. I kind of enjoyed those days, to be honest with you, but look, they still exist, they're still a thing, but they have really gone down in numbers. Now it's more of who's offering what, when, and on what website. So numerous retailers are doing Black Friday deals, really starting in mid-October, they call them Early Access Black Friday. And really, Black Friday is not even a thing. I got an email the other day from a retailer that was doing a thing on, they called it Black Tuesday. Whatever. Okay, that's fine. We know that there are going to be insane deals in October, November, every year now. The question again is how much of this money is going to be spent with you. If you've never done a Black Friday deal in your life and you own a business, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Let me tell you something else. If you don't offer something on Black Friday, your audience, your current audience, the people that you have spent time, effort, and energy and money to get on your email list or to become customers, to convert from cold traffic, they will actually look down on you. And here's why.
People in, really starting around Halloween, all the way through the end of the year, which I call Q5, not Q4, I call it Q5. We have programmed these people, we have programmed the general public to become zombies. They think differently. They act differently. They behave differently. They shop differently. And this is why I say, if you don't offer them something, they will look down on you because their prevailing thought in their mind when they're shopping is, where's my deal? How come you aren't offering me something? That's not a very good place to be. So you have to make some sort of an offer on Black Friday at a minimum. Now, this can go all the way through the end of the year if you play your cards right. But you have to make, you have to at least show them up front that you are going to do something for them on Black Friday. And the best offer always wins when it comes to Black Friday.
The best offer always wins. Why? Because there are too many options for people to buy stuff from places online right now, 24-7, anywhere in the world. So you have to give them a reason to shop with you. Again, don't you want a slice of that $9.8 billion pie? I would think that you do. If you have never done anything on Black Friday and you want to start, you need to do something with, basically, you got to do something very quickly. It's...
