The Secret to Big Sales on Black Friday

Are you a DZO who could do with a cash infusion? If that’s a yes, I implore you to keep reading.

With the onset of the sales frenzy known as Black Friday, this is the last-ditch effort to get some cash in the bank before winter sets in (for those DZs facing the impending winter season).

In this article, I’m going to share the steps we implement that has netted one of our clients over $90,000 in sales in just four days. There is no magic to generating these sales, but there is a method – a method that can be implemented by any dropzone in any market (of course, volume of sales is dependent on the size of your marketplace).

As a former DropZone Manager, I’ve experimented with lots of different sales promotions through the years and some of what I’ve tried completely bombed, but more recently, we’ve found a method that does work. In the interest of providing value, I’m going to lay the steps out for you.

The elements of a great Black Friday campaign require the following:

I. Sales Psychology

II. E-mail Marketing

III. Social Media

IV. Google Ads

V. Positioning in High Traffic Areas

Before you decide to launch your Black Friday promotion, it’s important that you give some thought to the psychology of a sale. Skydiving is a want, not a need and during Black Friday, your skydiving center is competing against every business (not just other DZs) to capture the attention of the consumer. This is super hard to do. For this reason, you need to tap into the psychology of the consumer. The key element to generating sales is urgency. FOMO (fear of missing out) is a real thing, especially with our most prized demographic – millennials (who are now in the 23 – 38 age range).

Some DZ’s will offer a holiday sale that may run from Black Friday thru Christmas Eve in order to capture as many sales as possible with a long sales run. This would be a mistake because there is no urgency. If consumers are interested, but have time on their hands to make the purchase, then generally, they’ll delay until the last moment by which time they’ve either forgotten about your sale or spent their money elsewhere. It’s important to generate friction whereby the risk is that the consumer misses out on the offer entirely. For this reason, you’ll want your best offer to be during a finite time – between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Also, it’s important to note that consumers are smart and the societal expectation of Black Friday is to truly get a great deal – so offer the best deal you possibly can.

Increase the urgency even more….. 

With a defined timeline of four days to capture an incredible deal, what if we could increase the urgency even more? My recommendation is to declare a max quota on how many gift certificates will be offered within the four day period. In other words, your amazing Black Friday Offer will end at 11:59pm on Cyber Monday or when xxx amount of vouchers are completely sold out – whatever occurs first! To increase the FOMO further, be sure that your messaging includes the fact that this truly is your best offer and it won’t be seen again until next year.

With the above elements of:

• A rare deal that only occurs once a year
• Available for a finite time
• In limited supply

You have now set a sales psychology of urgency which is required.

I should mention that how your brand is perceived in the marketplace will also help generate sales. If your DZ is known for great service AND is the obvious choice in the marketplace, then it’s likely that those who have already made tandem skydives with you will purchase your promotion as gifts for their family and friends. If your DZ is known to run sales throughout the year (say with Groupon), then the urgency is reduced as consumers who pay attention to deals will know they can purchase a deal at anytime.

Once you’ve got the parameters of urgency in place, it’s time to set your offer in motion.

The most important element of generating sales during Black Friday through Cyber Monday is via e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is very effective if implemented correctly. Many dropzones have given up on e-mail marketing because it’s yielded poor results, but the reason results have been weak is because of poor implementation starting with the database. You will not have success using e-mail marketing if the quality of your database is poor.

The reason most e-mail marketing campaigns don’t produce much for dropzones is that the database used is from your past customers (who have already spent money with your business). Importing e-mails from customers who have filled out your waiver and jumped with you is a weak database especially if they didn’t opt-in to receive your e-mails in the first place.

Think about how many e-mails you receive that are unwanted? Tons, right? Chances are you’ll glance over them or delete them without even looking… unless you’ve willingly signed up to receive them because they provide some value.

Through the years, our highest sales conversion for gift certificate sales has derived from a database from people who have voluntarily signed up to receive e-mail messaging.

How you build a quality database is a strategy of its own and if you don’t have a quality database, then your Black Friday sales will not realize their full potential.

To learn how to develop a quality database that converts, read this article here.

Highlighting your Black Friday promotion should definitely be part of your social media rollout, but to get the most out of your effort, you need to spend some money on Facebook. Facebook  is still relevant today and the targeting offered through the platform still works very effectively. While ‘boosting’ posts should be part of your social strategy, you should also be utilizing Facebook Ads which allows for more robust targeting towards relevant demographics in order to receive a high click through rate.

It’s important to run multiple targeted ads and pay attention to the data especially your ads relevancy score. Multiple ads will allow you to A / B test and figure out which ads are being the most effective. You’ll also learn that there is a lot of nuance between ad copy and photography that plays into your relevancy score.

The details in how we setup Facebook Ads is another blog post all to its own, but there are many videos on YouTube that can walk you through the process step-by-step.

Through our years of executing Facebook Ads, we have identified the most effective targeted audiences dropzones should be targeting.

Through the years, we have experimented with multiple audience types and we have found that the highest converting audience tends to be the ones that most closely fit the stereotypes related to skydiving. Targeting men between the ages of 25 and 44, who are interested in:

• BMX
• Skateboarding
• Red Bull
• Marathon Running
• Surfing
• Mountain Biking
• Kite surfing
• Paragliding
• Adventure Sports
• Hang Gliding
• Bungee Jumping
• Climbing
• Water Skiing
• Wakeboarding
• Caving
• Motocross
• SCUBA diving
• Sailing
• Rafting
• Whitewater rafting
• Shark cage diving
• Ice climbing
• Kayaking
• Hiking
• Orienteering
• Freediving
• Ski jumping
• Abselling
• Trekking
• Snowboarding
• Longboarding
• Bodyboarding
• Canoeing
• Snowmobiling
• Skimboarding
• Flowriding
• Parkour
• Ziplining

The right caption with your ads is important as is the picture. Not surprisingly, our data has shown through A/B testing that attractive women used within the ad photography receives the highest click rates.

How does the world find anything? It’s on Google. Running Google Ads for your Black Friday campaign gives DZs the opportunity to wedge to the top of Google’s search results page, but let’s be clear, of all the marketing strategies we implement for Black Friday, this tends to have the weakest ROI, but it’s still worth it as there is sales conversion. It would be a mistake to run ads for common terms like ‘Black Friday Sale’ or ‘Best Holiday Sale,’ because the cost per click is too high. Win the day in Google Ads with skydiving-relevant terms to capture whatever search is occurring for people looking to buy skydiving gift certificates but are not aware of the brand names of the local DZs in the market.

A word to the wise on Google Ads. If you don’t know what you’re doing in Google Ads, hire a professional. Through our years of digital marketing we have seen lots of wasted money on this platform to the tune of thousands of dollars each year. There’s a lot of nuance to this powerful platform and unless you’ve spent months learning the ins and outs of this platform, I wouldn’t recommend you go it alone. Additionally, if you are using Google Ads throughout the year, be sure that conversion tracking is implemented between your Google Ads, booking software and Google Analytics. You should be able to identify every dollar generated as a result of your Google Ads activities.

Recognize the high traffic areas of the web to share your promotion. When rolling out a Black Friday campaign, we focus on the following areas for our clients:

• Home Page Promotion (website) – update the home page to show the offer
• Prices Page (website) – add a pricing table showing your special
• Blog Post – Create a blog post that highlights all the details of your offer
• Facebook – edit your cover page
• Facebook – Make a Facebook Offer on your page
• Facebook – publish posts and countdowns to the offer
• Facebook – Boost Posts to the Audience That Follows You (and their friends)
• Facebook – Run targeted Facebook Ads
• Instagram Posts – Post to Instagram without it feeling like an ad (use the right hashtags)
• Instagram Stories – utilize Instagram Stories to highlight your promotion
• Instagram Highlights – publish your stories into Instagram Highlights
• Google Business Page** – update your GMB page using ‘Posts’
• E-mail Marketing – message the people that love you already and to new users!

** Don’t take for granted the power of your Google Business page because there is a lot of traffic that sees this page! The Google Business Page has an area dedicated to businesses  promoting their offers. Not unlike Facebook promotions, be sure to A/B test photography and subject line headings for your offer on this platform.

When rolling out a Black Friday campaign, it’s important to keep all of your details organized. As you can see above, there are a lot of elements to all of this. Use a project management tool or a simple Excel spreadsheet to plan your rollout – you’ll need to see a big picture of what’s coming so you can plan out your creative.

Have questions about all of this?

Join me for a complimentary 90-minute webinar on Wednesday, November 20th at 4:00pm EST to discuss these details!

Are you running a Black Friday promotion? Would you like to get feedback or insights on how to improve it? Join James La Barrie this Wednesday, November 20th for a complimentary one hour webinar to discuss Black Friday sales strategy. This webinar will help dropzone operators create a marketing plan for a successful Black Friday sale and have clarity on how to best execute it. Limited space available, sign up below to receive access information to the webinar this Friday.