Black Friday is a high marketing weekend with large competitive discount amounts. But how much of a discount should you offer for a Black Friday sale? In our experience, it would be best if you aim for a 30-50% discount. Anything outside this range might not compete for customer’s attention during the high volume of offers.
In this article, we share our thoughts on pricing Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other seasonal sales.
Tips on Discounts During Black Friday
First, don’t run a sale if there’s too much competition (to sell a particular product) since your efforts won’t make an impact, i.e., netting in profits or bringing in new customers.
If you’re going to raise rates during the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend, test the price increase through some customization efforts before running the sale. You can update the price everywhere to be the “highest test price” except your checkout page.
We tested this (needs traffic levels to support it), and we found that there was not much difference between the click-through rate and conversation whether the customers saw the higher price first or the actual price first. So that validated that we could proceed to implement the strategy.
However, you don’t need to go through all these customizations and experiments. You can raise the rates and tell yourself you’re just going to bump the price for a period and watch how things unfold. If things don’t go well, you can always course correct.
You’ll often realize that there isn’t a notable concern in customer behaviour due to the price difference, which can be a sign to raise rates. Also, raising rates is in itself a sale opportunity. When people know that you’re raising prices and that it’s their last chance to get the subsidized price, they may go ahead and buy your product/membership.
In short, if you need to raise your prices, don’t bother yourself with BFCM. Also, you don’t have to put everything on sale. If you have more than one product, create a discount code only for a few items. This makes a lot of sense in the retail space, especially if you’re trying to sell off excess or old inventory.
Another thing to keep in mind is that having some items/products missing in the sale can frustrate your potential customers. It’s safe to avoid the “doorbusters” game with digital products e.g., software/membership since they are certainly unlimited.
Always keep your ethics. It’s a bad sign if you ever feel guilty for creating false scarcity.