Last year during the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday I made over $10k in revenue. It was the best week ever in my entrepreneurial life. Read on to learn how I did it by leveraging my turnkey website system and how you too can do the same this year.
Black Friday through Cyber Monday is the one time of year when everyone around the globe is surfing the web with their credit card in hand looking for deals.
This is a unique opportunity for you as a business owner. You should leverage the mass consumer craze of this period to attract new customers into your ecosystem, and encourage your existing customer to spend more with you.
That’s exactly what I did last year when I decided to put together a few different deals around my turnkey websites. It turned out to be more successful than I had anticipated and I learned some great lessons about how to maximize your Black Friday earning through strategic deals and partnerships.
Some business owners are hesitant to participate in Black Friday because they feel it might cheapen their product are lower their perceived value. I tend to agree with that when it comes to discounts during other times of the year, but Black Friday is a unique animal, and people are used to seeing deals from all sorts of providers.
But don’t take my word for it, I’ll let the number speak for themselves.
By the Numbers
Just to give you some perspective, during this that point in my business I had only been running my turnkey websites product for about 3 years, of which I was averaging just under $3k/month. It was nothing that was going to put me on the cover of Forbes, but it was nice steady recurring revenue that I could use to supplement my web development business.
And on a good month I would maybe break $10k in revenue for the whole month across all my business projects. But earning that much in a week was unprecedented.
When the week was over I was blown away when I checked my Stripe account and saw this:
As you can see, I made sales for two separate products. One was my turnkey platform itself, and the other was a course I put together for my turnkey customers.
What were the deals I offered to get me there? Let me show you…
The Deals
Here are the exact deals I offered on this particular Black Friday weekend:
- 40% off the annual plan of my WaaS (Websites as a Service) product
- Buy one get one half off (or buy two get one free) for my WaaS add-ons
- $399 Lifetime deal for loyal customers of my WaaS product
- 50% off my marketing course targeted at the niche that used my WaaS product
A lot of thought went into why I chose those particular deals. Let’s dig into the methods behimd the madness.
8 Tips for How to Kill It on Black Friday
1. Diversify
Don’t just offer a discount on one product. Think creatively to find ways to offer multiple types of deals on different products. It’s a way to make sure you have something to offer your “tribe” that fits their particular needs. On Black Friday I offered discounts on services, products (WaaS), and training. Different offers at different price points for every need and budget.
2. Go deep, not wide
They say your best customers are the ones you already have. In my experience, that’s absolutely true. So a large part of my strategy was to promote new or add-on services to my existing customers and less effort was spent trying to find new ones.
3. Automate and systematize
Systematizing your product and service delivery, and then automating it as much as possible, will allow you to discount your offerings and still make a profit. The deeper the discount, the more likely it will end up as an impulse buy for a hyped-up deal seeker.
4. Reward customer loyalty
If you’re like me, you cringe when you see a HUGE discount given to new members of a service you just paid full price for earlier in the year. This happens all to often, and it can leave a sour taste in the mouths of your loyal customers.
So instead of rewarding only new customers, show your existing customers you appreciate them by offering a loyalty discount that new customers can’t get. Two of my Black Friday offers were only made available to current customers who had been with me for a year or longer, the add-ons deal and the lifetime deal. I made sure to emphasize that fact in the sales email too, calling these deals “exclusive loyalty offers” for existing customers only.
5. Reanimate a dead product
You’ll notice one of my deals involved a course. This was actually a video course that I released over a year before and it was a bit of a flop. I felt the course was good, I just hadn’t had the time to really focus on marketing it properly. So when Black Friday rolled around I thought I’d breathe some life into it by bumping the price down from $199 to $99. What could it hurt? No one was buying it anyway. It turns out removing that extra 1 at the beginning made a big difference, and I ended up selling more enrollments to the course in that one weekend then I had the entire time previously.
6. Make it a win/win from the beginning
People are literally begging to buy something from you during this time of year. It’s up to you to find a way to give them something that they perceive as valuable, but has an upside for you as well. That’s why I chose to go with the “buy one get one half off” offer with the add-on services.
Unlike my WaaS itself, which is very hands-off for me to manage, the add-on services require some manual work to fulfill. That means the profit margin on those is a little slimmer. So in order to remain profitable I made sure customers would purchase at least one service at full price as part of the deal. Also make sure you specify that the second discounted product will need to be of equal or lesser value than the first.
7. The power of the niche
The power of the niche is stronger than ever in this scenario. People bought from me because I’m a trusted provider in their niche. It takes time to build that reputation and at times it seems like it’s not going to be worth all that time. But trust me it pays dividends to those who persist and continue to deliver consistent value. This $10k is proof.
8. Partnerships are crucial
One thing I failed to mention thus far is that the only marketing I did for this sale, aside from sending it to my existing list, was to participate in a “deal roundup”. The idea behind this is that a group of vendors for a particular niche will collect all the deals from everyone in the group and send it out to THEIR email lists. In other words, my deal was part of the “Black Friday Deals Roundup” emails that got sent out to about 8 other lists in my industry niche. This resulted in thousands of new eyeballs seeing my deals and my products. Look to partner with others in your own customer niche industry to create your own “deal roundup”.
My Biggest Mistake
There was one big downside to the success I experienced that weekend. I actually had to fulfill all of those add-on orders.
At the time, I was still involved in executing a handful of the tasks myself. Not to mention it was the holiday season, which is always a crazy busy time. So I became the bottleneck. As a result, the deliver of those orders were delayed significantly, up to a couple months for a few of them.
On the positive side, my customers were understanding and didn’t complain (a side benefit of building a loyal to be). Still, I feel this type of delay is unacceptable and not a reflection, of the level of service I strive to deliver.
So this year I spent a lot of time removing myself from the execution of my add-ons. Through processes and automation (sounds familiar right?) I’ve been able to offload the work to my part time VA. If things get crazy, I can ask my VA to work full time to fulfill all the orders that, hopefully, come flooding in.
I have a similar plan for this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend and I hope it’s even more of a success this time around!
What deals are you planning for Black Friday this year? Let me know in the comments below.
My hope is that you all can say in December that you crushed it with your turnkey Black Friday deals!
Black Friday is still a fairly new concept in Australia but there are some great tips here. I don’t quite have enough of my product ready to go yet but I will be bookmarking this post for next year. Thanks. 🙂
With the rise of international e-commerce the Black Friday virus is spreading world-wide 😉
Same here in Europe. I met in techie market in 2012 but soon found out its spreading to consumer market. But established businesses find it hilarious. Also personally I find it more serious to offer good prices 24/7/52.
It is quite an odd phenomenon. I used to despise it before I started a business. Now people throw their money at me, so why not take advantage of the craze?