Black Friday Chatbot Marketing Ideas to Skyrocket Your Sales

Nowadays, Black Friday is one of the world’s largest shopping events and can significantly enhance the sales performance of any business. For sure, it represents a huge opportunity for online retailers to boost their revenue by offering attractive deals and juicy discounts to their customers.
However, the heavy competition in eCommerce makes all these businesses consistently implement new marketing strategies and advanced approaches to stand out from the competitors during sales seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also known as BFCM.
If you want to make the most profit from all of the Black Friday fun, then chatbot marketing may greatly help you. In this article, we’ll uncover the main eCommerce insights about BFCM marketing, as well as how to use chatbots for marketing during Black Friday and the pre-holiday season. Additionally, you’ll find out the most effective ways to strengthen your customer service and nice Black Friday tips for preparing for such an extensive sale campaign.
Let’s get it started!
Inside Black Friday marketing
Needless to say, Black Friday is one of the most famous sales events business owners can take advantage of. In the last year, overall online sale spending hit a record high of $9 billion, with over 100 million people snagging their Black Friday deals online. To compare, in 2019, BFCM sales clocked in at $7.4 billion, up from $6.2 billion in 2018.
To stand out from the competition, many retailers start their BFCM promotions weeks in advance, with over 75% offering most of their deals before Black Friday sales — as early as late October. Starting early helps you avoid shipping delays during the Black Friday madness. Thus, both sides win: the retailers can enhance their sales during the upcoming holidays and obtain more clients when customers get better service by buying the products at the most attractive price.
All these insights indicate that online shopping is one of the best options for businesses to consider in their marketing strategies.
Benefits of chatbots for Black Friday marketing
After we learned about the importance of building a solid marketing strategy for the upcoming pre-Christmas sales, a question arose: is implementing a sales chatbot actually worth it? In fact, it is. Black Friday chatbots help businesses make the most of eCommerce by reducing the workload on customer support, providing additional assistance for visitors during their shopping experience, and establishing better interaction with your potential clients and loyal customers.
As you can see, one cannot overestimate the importance of chatbots for your Black Friday marketing strategy. To prove this, let’s now take a closer look at the key benefits this technology can bring to your eCommerce business.
Increase the average cart size
First of all, the Black Friday chatbots can work as a digital assistant that helps your customers make a purchase decision. How? Well, they can efficiently deliver more details about your product quality, shipping methods, order total, return policy, and more. According to Shopify’s recent research, if a prospect feels that they lack any information about a product, 26% of them would be more likely to purchase the item with a different online retailer, while 8% of customers will go into a physical store to purchase instead of online ordering.
However, with chatbots, customers can:
- find out the essential details about a product or service;
- understand which problems or pain points this product or service can solve;
- make more purchases on the site.
Additionally, recent research from Forbes has shown that implementing chatbots into various sales events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday can increase sales by 67%.
Here’s an example of a footwear brand reminding its chatbot subscribers about Black Friday discounts to increase sales.
Best-Ever Boots’ chatbot offering Black Friday bonuses. Source: Chatfuel
Reduce the shopping cart abandonment
Every eCommerce business has encountered shopping cart abandonment, a problem that results in huge loss of revenue, especially for the fantastic sales like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
However, the Black Friday sale chatbots are the perfect solution for this issue: they allow you to easily follow up with an abandoned shopping cart’s owner and offer additional incentives to encourage a purchase.
See an example of how a coffee store reminds customers about uncompleted purchases and offers a discount to maximize the possibility of order completion.
Coffee Fanatic Store’s chatbot reminding subscribers about an abandoned order. Source: Chatfuel
Streamline customer support
In times of high competition in eCommerce, the quality of customer service can often become the final factor that determines customer conversion rate. The better service you can provide, the more likely you are to enhance the client’s experience and win loyal audiences.
Implementing sales chatbots can reduce the workload on customer support during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and pre-holiday shopping rush. This technology can also help people with exchanges, returns, various frequently asked questions, and seamlessly hand off the conversation to a human when it needs to. Thus, you’re able to enhance customer service and reduce the expense of human support, which means a lot for big sales events like Black Friday.
The example of a chatbot below offers a list of answers to customers’ most popular questions. Thus, leads and customers will find all the information they need and are more likely to place an order.
Custom Pocket Watches’ chatbot offering answers to popular questions. Source: Chatfuel
Offer the most attractive deals on the right products
Like a virtual personal assistant, sales chatbots can also maximize profits by sending the most beneficial offers and related products that your customer is likely to be interested in. Also, it can feature advanced personal assistance like searching the products from photos and images and analyzing the list of offers from different retailers. So, each of your customers will get the offer they’re looking for at the most attractive price.
Below, you can see Lego’s chatbot, which collects all the necessary information about customers’ preferences to offer them the best-fitting products.
Lego’s chatbot helping someone choose a product according to customers’ needs. Source: Chatfuel
Can be reconfigured for other shopping events
Last but not least, your sales chatbot won’t pack up and leave right after the holiday, which means you’ll get a permanent system for your eCommerce business. Such a technology can be effortlessly used to build a Black Friday marketing strategy, plan pre-holiday sales, and do it all again for other events.
Additionally, it can be reconfigured for daily use to deliver the most effective service to your customers. For example, it can become a powerful sales channel for a customers’ product or service order. Pizza Hut is an excellent example of using a chatbot to streamline the order placement processes and accelerate sales.
Pizza Hut’s chatbot managing the order placement process. Source: Bvblogic
How to prepare a chatbot for your Black Friday campaign
One of the most essential preparations for Black Friday sales is to ensure the chatbot can completely cover all of the customer’s needs. For this purpose, we recommend checking whether or not the chatbot has the most impact on your upcoming sales events. Here are some advanced tips for reviewing your chatbot’s performance:
#1 Define the main goals for your Black Friday campaign
Make sure to specify the goals for your BFCM marketing campaign. They could be reaching a certain amount in revenue, selling all of your old inventory, attracting a certain number of new customers, etc. After your goals are set, you need to define your budget allocation, develop KPIs, and choose communication channels.
#2 Analyze your competitors and develop your marketing plan
By researching your competitors and analyzing their Black Friday chatbot marketing campaigns from the previous year, you can better understand what tactics work in your niche and which are not worth the investment.
After this analysis, you can start preparing your chatbot marketing strategy by following these tips:
- Visualize the customer journey. Analyzing customer activity makes it easier to define the possible problems and issues your visitors face before making a purchase. For instance, common questions clients have during the shopping process include sign-in and registration, product searches, shipping details, transactional issues, and more.
Test all of these scenarios to ensure your chatbot can resolve these questions or transfer the user to your customer support team for further interaction with customers and potential clients. - Enhance interaction with customers. Another important thing to consider is how to encourage your customers to interact with a sales chatbot. For example, you can add Black Friday’s special offers or product recommendations to your chatbot to proactively reach them. Ensure the chatbot provides the most attractive UVPs to drive the customers closer to a conversion or a purchase.
- Include BFCM product recommendations. Including product recommendations in your chatbot marketing strategy is a must for any eCommerce business that wants to improve their sales during Black Friday.
By asking your customers what they really need and providing a variety of product series to them, your chatbots can easily bring clients to the exact product they’re looking for. Needless to say, such an approach for Black Friday sales will easily result in high revenue for the holiday.
#3 Track and improve the performance of your Black Friday chatbot
Customer behavior trends change, so it’s essential to always stay proactive and look for possible ways to enhance your chatbot’s performance.
For this purpose, you should consistently track your chatbot’s impact on sales, customize its design, and add a topic-related set of questions to help your customers better navigate through the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on your site!
Even if you’re new to this marketing approach, the feature-rich chatbot builder by 13Chats provides an intuitive interface with a vast number of tools and templates so you can get started quickly.
Turn your Black Friday into a Gold one with 13Chats!
Create themed pop-ups with 13Chats to bring your offers in no time and improve your sales!
Black Friday chatbot marketing ideas
Once you’ve decided to make a sales chatbot for your eCommerce site, you might lack inspiration for how to create the ideal chatbot that works perfectly for your eCommerce business. Here’s a basic list of activities for improving customer engagement during upcoming sales, that you can easily implement with 13Chats:
Idea #1. Black Friday website pop-up
Diversify the sorts of promos and special discounts you offer with website pop-ups to boost your Black Friday business. For example, you can set up time-limited BFCM offers for the hottest deals in specific categories.
Check out this example of a pop-up offering a 50% off coupon in exchange for an email address. The timer creates urgency and thus increases the number of converted customers.
Black Friday pop-up with a timer. Source: Adoric
Idea #2. Black Friday sales reminders in chatbot
Make sure to send a message to all of your chatbot subscribers about your holiday special offers. The chatbot in the example below redirects subscribers right to the store, which is a great attempt to make the user complete their purchase as soon as possible.
Reminder about Black Friday sales via chatbot. Source: Chatimize
Idea #3. Automated email notifications
This option keeps potential customers informed about the latest updates and pre-holiday offers they’re likely to be interested in, as well as reminders about the start of BFCM sales.
Here’s an example of a Black Friday email from Sephora informing customers about holiday sales and inviting them to benefit from it.
Sephora’s Black Friday email newsletter. Source: Mailjet
Idea #4. Website quizzes and exclusive deals
You can offer customers participation in interactive quizzes to collect more information about their preferences. Make sure to offer your customer a pleasant bonus in exchange for taking the quiz.
Black Friday website quiz. Source: Sixads
Idea #5. Black Friday website decoration
By adding holiday-related elements to your website design and putting sale alerts, you attract visitors’ attention to your Black Friday offers and create the right mood. Make sure to decorate your website at least a month ahead of Black Friday to get more potential customers.
Holiday-related website design. Source: Agentestudio
Utilize all of these marketing approaches together to constantly keep customers informed about your Black Friday sale and significantly boost revenue. By using 13Chats, you can automate your marketing activities to get the most out of the upcoming holiday season.
Bottom line
As you can see, building a strong Black Friday marketing strategy is an essential step to getting your business prepared for the upcoming pre-holiday sales. Moreover, delivering advanced customer service with sales chatbots can significantly enhance your eCommerce performance during the hottest sales periods.
If you want your eCommerce business to stand out from the rest of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday competition, then implementing the chatbots and pop-ups to your marketing is the exact thing you need. These tools can provide 24/7 client assistance, offer the best product recommendations, and promote the best BFCM deals for each of your customers.
Still not certain? Launch your first sales chatbot with 13Chats and check this out yourself!