Black Friday is coming! This is a massive opportunity for your direct sales biz, especially combined with Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.
Although Black Friday started as a US tradition following Thanksgiving, it has spread around the world and is now a global opportunity for us all. But as always, you’ve got to prepare to take advantage of it!
Don’t make this mistake…
I’ve observed many direct sellers making this mistake: focusing entirely on sales during this special weekend. Although Black Friday is a massive sales opportunity, you want to make sure you focus on future business growth too by collecting bookings and encouraging joining.
This is the time to use whatever stock supplies you’ve been able to gather throughout the year and invest them back into your biz this weekend. Offer prizes for everyone who books a December or January event and also put together ‘Lucky Friday’ bundles for everyone who joins your business.
Remember that a new team member is worth the most to your business long-term! Bookings help your business to continue to roll forward while sales are your income right now. Don’t make the mistake of only focusing on your income today – also work to grow your biz for tomorrow!
As very few direct sales companies add joining or booking incentives to their promotions, you’ll have to plan ahead and create your own!
Your Social Media Strategy
The more time you invest throughout the year into developing great online relationships, the better your results will be when it comes to promotions like this.
People don’t like to be sold to constantly, so you want to be adding value or entertainment in your social presence and your VIP groups.
But even if your VIP group is new or you haven’t been posting valuable content throughout the year, there are still some things you can do to promote your awesome Black Friday offers:
- Go Live in your customer group. This is a great strategy for a few reasons: Facebook prioritizes live video content in people’s newsfeeds. This means you’ll get great reach with a Facebook Live. Second of all, live videos resonate with people as they can see the real you and catch your enthusiasm and excitement about the offers.
- Use every available means to reach your customers. Use emails, text messages or messenger bots to promote your offers. I like to build up text groups and email lists as they are lists that I own and I don’t have to worry about Facebook or Instagram making changes to their platform.
- Amplify features and benefits. Make your offers awesome and irresistible to your customers. Here are some ways doing that:
- Bundle Deals: if your company offers special bundle deals they’ll sell better if you explain the benefits of each product in the bundle and add suggestions who might like to receive these products as a gift.
- Discount: In the lead-up to Black Friday, encourage your customers to prepare a wishlist and tease them with ‘something exciting coming’ type posts. To make the most of discount offers you can create your own bundles and add a freebie to up the value. This helps to increase the average spend per customer.
- Build Excitement: Add to the momentum of the weekend by adding your own giveaways. As I mentioned above, it’s a good idea to have some incentives for bookings and joining your team, but you can also use gifts to encourage orders placed by a certain time, the first 20 orders, a draw from all Black Friday orders, orders over a certain amount, etc.
- In-home Event: Host your own in-home shopping event. There’s nothing better than the excitement of a group of people shopping together. You could even do a Live from the event into an online party or your customer group to share the excitement.
Takeaways:
- Plan ahead to be ready to make the most of the Black Friday weekend.
- Don’t just focus on sales. Encourage bookings and joining with special offers.
- Share your Black Friday offers through text, email, and social media to maximize your customer reach.
I’d really love to hear what you’re planning to do for the Black Friday weekend. Let us know in the comments below!
