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black friday marketing tips
Imelda @ Payhip

10 Black Friday Marketing Tips for Selling Digital Products in 2024

Last updated: December 11, 2023

For many online businesses, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are one of the busiest days of the year with plenty of opportunities to achieve sales revenue that is higher than the rest of the year combined. However, it can also be one of the most difficult shopping seasons to prepare for.

In this article, we’ll discuss how online businesses of all sizes may get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We will be focusing specifically on businesses that sell digital products such as digital downloads (ebooks, art, etc), online courses, coaching, and memberships.

Here’s a quick list of the topics that we’ll be covering today:

What is Black Friday and Cyber Monday

what is black friday

Black Friday, which occurs the day following Thanksgiving in the US, unofficially heralds the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Cyber Monday occurs on the Monday after Thanksgiving in the US. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, customers around the world expect steep deals and promotions from their favorite businesses as they are ready to spend!

In recent years, online spending via desktop devices surged during Cyber ​​Monday in the United States, reaching nearly $6 billion in 2020. This figure represents an increase of almost 30% compared to the previous year. In the 2020 edition, Black Friday desktop spending was about $4.3 billion and Thanksgiving spending was about $2.7 billion.

This year, Black Friday will fall on November 29, 2024 and Cyber Monday will fall on December 2, 2024.

Now that we got that basic information out of the way, it’s time for you to prepare your online store for the biggest shopping season of the year. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry! We’ve mapped out the necessary (free) tools and strategies that you can try so you can supercharge your digital product sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year.

10 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Marketing Strategies to Try in 2024

black friday marketing strategies

1. Offer Limited Time Price Reduction

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are one of the rare moments when you can offer massive reductions to your product prices without losing your brand identity. The most common limited-time promotions that online businesses can provide are:

  • Coupon codes for a percentage off of customers’ purchases. You can also offer exclusive coupon codes for your most loyal customers to acknowledge their contribution to your business and increase brand loyalty
  • Free gifts with purchase. This also creates a sense of goodwill that can help customers keep coming back to your store. Make sure that you’re giving your customers what they really want i.e. complementary products to what they’re intending to purchase.

On Payhip, the free gift can be uploaded together with your main digital product so that your customers can receive all of them instantaneously when they make a purchase.

2. Launch Limited Edition Products

Releasing limited-edition products usually involves putting a unique spin on your best-selling products. For example, if you’re currently selling digital wall art, you can release a limited edition personalized wall art where your customers can input their names or their loved ones’ photos.

This provides an opportunity for you to test the water on new product ideas, and if this goes well, you can potentially create new best-selling products through this activity. These limited-edition product launches draw attention to your online business and brand. This extra exposure can often lead to increased customers and sales for your existing and new products.

3. Cross-sell Complementary Products

Cross-selling involves offering your customers product(s) that complement their original purchase. Cross-selling is an effective way to increase the purchase size of your new and returning customers who might otherwise be leaving some items behind from your store simply because they didn’t get a chance to see other products they might like.

Say one of your customers bought an ebook on “Beginner Level Vegan Recipes”. Recommend they check out your “Advanced Level Vegan Recipe” and offer a discount if they purchase both of them at the same time. Use engaging phrases like “You may also like this”, and “Others have bought” to entice your customers.

You can set up a cross-selling promotion within less than 1 minute using Payhip’s free cross-selling tool.

4. Bundle Multiple Products

You can encourage your customers to increase the size of their purchases by bundling multiple products into a single product listing. Payhip’s product bundle feature allows you to bundle an online course product with a digital download product. A great example of how this is used is say you’re selling an online course on How to Budget for Your Business, you can bundle it with a printable budgeting template PDF which is also a valuable resource for your customers who are taking your online course.

To put an interesting spin on this strategy, you can also make this bundle a limited-time-only product listing to evoke a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) for your customers and urge them to purchase before the product goes away.

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5. Launch an Affiliate Marketing Program

Affiliate Marketing is a process where affiliate partners can earn a commission by promoting products from your online store. In return for any successful sale that the affiliate partners manage to bring to you, you will reward them with a percentage of commission every month.

Selling your product via affiliates is a great way to multiply your sales and promotion efforts, allowing your network to promote your products for you. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a great time to work with content creators, bloggers, and other influential figures to promote your products and share your revenue with them in the form of affiliate commission. You can even offer an increased commission during this biggest shopping season of the year to incentivize them to promote your products more.

You can easily set up an affiliate program for your online store at Payhip with this guide.

6. Launch a Referral System

Unlike affiliate marketing, a referral system does not involve distributing commissions. Referral System – or sometimes known as word-of-mouth marketing – is a marketing strategy that encourages your customers to promote your products to their friends or social network. In return for a successful sale, both your customer and their referral will get discount codes for their purchases.

This is a powerful marketing strategy because your customers’ friends and family are getting recommendations from their trusted networks, making it more likely for you to successfully land multiple sales on your online store.

You can easily set up a referral system for your online store at Payhip with this guide.

7. Run a Giveaway

black friday giveaway tips

Running a giveaway on your social media channels is a great way to encourage real engagement from your target audience. Offer a chance to win prizes after they have accomplished certain tasks e.g. following your social media accounts, sharing your products on social media, etc. This is a great way to build your social media presence while delighting your existing and new potential customers.

8. Launch pre-sale or pre-order items

By definition, a pre-order or pre-sale is an order placed for an item that hasn’t been released. Selling pre-sale or pre-order items during BlackFriday allows you to gauge the level of interest that your customers have in your upcoming products. In addition, pre-orders give your customer a reason to be excited about coming back to your online store and generate sales for your other items as well.

See this guide on how to set up pre-orders on your Payhip store.

9. Provide Upgrade Discount

Remember that the shopping season does not end with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Christmas is also one of the biggest shopping seasons of the year. Providing upgrade discounts to your customers will incentivize them to come back to your store at a later date to purchase additional items at a discounted price.

See this guide on how upgrade discounts work and  how to set it up.

10. Offer Social Discount

It is well known that one of the best ways to encourage customers to share your products with their social media network is to offer them an incentive, perhaps in the form of a social discount. Payhip’s social discount feature allows you to offer customers an automatic discount on their purchase simply by sharing the product on Facebook, and more. This is a powerful way to tap into your customers’ network who might potentially become your future customers and increase your brand exposure.

8 Tips to Prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024

black friday preparation tips

1. Keyword Research for Trending Items

You can determine whether certain products’ popularity is trending upward or downward during the holiday season using Google Trends. Remember to tinker with Google Trends’ settings for example countries and timeframe. For example, if you search “personalized gift” on Google Trends, you’ll see that its popularity tends to peak around the holiday season. That would be an excellent product to add to your store if you create products such as personalized digital art.

2. Optimize Product Page’s Purchase Conversion and SEO

Online store sales do not just happen by accident. Remember that your customers go through a series of complex decision-making before deciding to purchase your items. Optimizing your product pages allows you to influence your customers’ decisions and ensure that you are turning most of your website visitors into paying customers.

Here are a few ideas on how you can optimize your product page’s conversion rate:

Implement Countdown Timer

countdown timer

Using timers to create a sense of urgency for your online store visitors can encourage more people to buy now instead of bouncing off your website to “think about it later”. Many customers procrastinate when shopping. While you certainly shouldn’t trick your customers or turn them into frantic buyers, we want them to take action. This is where timers can be your savior!

Enable Payment Buttons

payment button

Payment buttons provide a sense of transaction security and can increase your purchase conversion. On Payhip, you can enable payment buttons by going to the Store Builder > Footer > Show payment icons

76% of customers want safe payments more than convenience when they’re shopping online. It’s worth closing this loop in case you have customers who are worried about the security aspects of purchasing items online.

Showcase Customer Reviews

88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Since your customers can’t tangibly feel your products in their hands and see them with their own eyes, they’ll have to rely on online reviews from other customers as social proof. Reading other customers’ product reviews is a part of their purchase decision. Instead of letting them bounce off from your online store to look for reviews elsewhere, make those reviews readily available on your own online store instead.

Here’s a short guide on how to set up customer reviews on Payhip. Payhip’s customer reviews feature also comes with a review approval system and automatic post-purchase review requests to make the review-collection process more effortless.

Optimize Product Description Copywriting

Words are powerful when it comes to optimizing your product pages. To encourage web visitors to make a purchase, consider optimizing your product description to remind them of the value of your products.

Remember that any copywriting on your product page also contributes to SEO optimization efforts, allowing your product pages to rank higher on Google search results. This results in more traffic for your product pages and your online store overall. You can use tools such as Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to find keywords that you should be using to get your products more visibility on Google Search.

Here’s a short guide on how to further optimize your website SEO on Payhip for the holiday season.

3. Organize Your Featured Products

Turning your website visitors into paying customers involves a careful curation of your customers’ experience. Throwing a bunch of random product listings in front of your customers won’t do it!

Create a special holiday collection to showcase products that your customers will most likely be interested in during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In addition, consider creating a collection specifically for sale items.

Here’s a short guide on how to create product collections on Payhip.

4. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Ecommerce

According to Statista, 72.9 percent of all retail e-commerce is expected to be generated via mobile-commerce, up from 58.9 percent in 2017.

One thing is for sure, your online store needs to be optimized for customers who are intending to purchase via their mobile devices. Make sure that all the important information about your products is visible on mobile view, and any other unimportant information should be collapsed under an FAQ section.

Payhip’s store builder allows you to switch between desktop and mobile views to ensure that your website is optimized for both views.

5. Optimize Your Checkout Experience

A clunky checkout process is a recipe for low purchase conversion as this puts unnecessary barriers between your customers and their purchases. Don’t let your customers’ patience wear off simply due to a frustrating checkout experience.

Thankfully Payhip’s checkout experience is already optimized for digital product sales as it doesn’t ask for unnecessary information such as a physical address.

Go through your online store’s checkout process as a customer and ask yourself if there’s anything that can be improved. If you’ve implemented a coupon code, make sure to test the checkout process to ensure that you’ve set up your coupon code correctly.

In addition, check if you’ve already provided as many payment options as possible for your customers. At Payhip, you can connect to both Stripe and Paypal to provide as many payment options as possible for your customers

6. Get Your Customer Service Ready

customer support for black friday

Getting your customer service under control involves planning ahead for expected inquiries from your customers. You can create an FAQ section on your website to address your customers’ burning questions and to reduce the volume of incoming support tickets.

Make sure you have enough bandwidth to handle customer service requests because bad customer service is a recipe for negative online reviews. Create saved replies for your most commonly asked questions to reduce the time taken to respond to support requests.

A good customer experience is necessary to build trust between your online business and your customers.

7. Get the Word Out! Promote, Promote, Promote!

Remember that your amazing online store deals don’t just speak for themselves. Now is the time to heavily promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and get the word out through every possible means including but not limited to:

  • Email newsletters. Your customers will be searching through their inboxes for amazing deals from their favorite online stores. Consider segmenting your email list, sending more personalized content that engages with your customers, and getting the right offers to the right people. Remember that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all about time-sensitive deals. Create email copy that evokes a sense of urgency.
  • Social media. Social media channels such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are great channels to communicate your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals with your audience (through organic posts and paid ads).
  • Blog. You can create gift idea guides for your customers to spare them from struggling to come up with great gift ideas for their loved ones.

8. Remember to Prepare for The Next Biggest Thing….Christmas!

Now that you’ve maximized your online store sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s time to think about the next big thing… Christmas! Rather than thinking about nailing one-off purchases during Black Friday, think about how you can turn those one-off purchasers into loyal, lifelong customers.

You can use the marketing strategies we’ve laid out above for Christmas. In addition, it’s always a good idea to check in with your customers by sending a quick email. Some ideas to make your emails more interesting include using an online QR code generator and getting your customers to scan your QR code to see all of your upcoming Christmas promotions, or by sending a customer survey to make sure that you take in feedback on how you can improve their Christmas shopping experience with you even further.

Top Digital Product Ideas for Black Friday

Ebook

ebook

Revenue from ebook sales reached 1.1 billion dollars in 2020, up 11.86% from 983.3 million in 2019. Adult fiction accounts for 41% of all ebook sales in 2021.

Selling ebooks allows you to make your books available to your readers without having to go through the painstaking process of paperback publishing. Readers can buy your ebooks online and can read them instantly on their electronic devices.

Some ebook ideas for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday seasons include health and fitness ebooks, self-help ebooks, and entrepreneurship ebooks.

Audiobooks

audiobook

According to a recent study, almost 20 percent of Americans listen to audiobooks.

The profit margin for audiobooks is high because the cost of converting books to audiobooks is small. Not all book lovers enjoy reading, so audiobooks allow you to reach and engage new and different audiences. More and more people who are dyslexic, visually impaired, or just busy are buying audiobooks. Additionally, adding an audio version can help boost ebook purchases.

Personalized Digital Art

digital art

Christmas is right around the corner after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Personalized gifts are one of the most common Christmas gifts for families and friends. Upon searching “personalized gift” on Google Trends, this item is consistently popular around the holiday season.

Personalized digital art allows customers to give memorable gifts. As an added bonus, it’s a green gift because it doesn’t require packaging.

Online Course

sell online courses

Online courses are great for customers who are determined to acquire new skills for the upcoming new year. This is also a great gift idea for their loved ones.

Bundling it with a free digital download gift (e.g. free ebooks, free workbooks, free printables, etc) will make it quite tempting to customers for purchase your online course bundle.

Ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Is your online store ready for the biggest shopping of the year? With a little preparation, you can exponentially increase your sales revenue this holiday season.

If you don’t have an online store yet, this is the best time to get started for free using Payhip. If you already have an online store, it’s time to put those marketing strategies into action!

If you play your cards right, your holiday sales revenue could be more than you ever thought possible. Let us know in the comment section below if you have any questions.

Related Articles

If you’re keen to learn more about selling digital products, check out these additional resources:

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