How to leverage Black Friday data to set up a bumper Q1 strategy

To build up a bumper Q1, brands need to see Black Friday not as a single touchpoint with consumers but as part of the larger customer journey. This means your job isn’t done with the acquisition of new customers. It’s only the beginning of onboarding them into your business.

With the 2023 holiday season setting new records and Cyber Week spending up 7.8% to reach $38 billion, Black Friday remains one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

However, Black Friday isn’t only a time to increase Q4 sales or get overstocked products out of the door. It’s a unique opportunity to gain a considerable amount of customer data, leveraging it to set up a successful marketing and sales strategy for the next year.

How can brands create this path, turning their Black Friday data into meaningful business success?

Everyone is familiar with the idea that Black Friday is a great opportunity for businesses to expand their customer base. However, successful businesses see Black Friday not only as a time to boost short-term revenue, but also as a chance to engage new customers and turn them into repeat shoppers with high lifetime value. 

And the steps to building that customer relationship should be put in place from the first touchpoint.

Black Friday opens the door of your business to new customers. In order to make their first purchase memorable – and motivate them to make repeat purchases, you need to ensure that:

Once the weekend is over, the question is “how can businesses retain their Black Friday shoppers?” 

A full funnel approach to customer engagement and loyalty is key to break down silos between acquisition and activation stages in the funnel.

The key to success is onboarding the new customers into your loyalty program. This means a cutting-edge loyalty scheme must be an integral part of your Black Friday strategy because once you move from the acquisition to retention phase, you need a reward system to create value for your customers. 

Onboarding Black Friday shoppers into your loyalty scheme increases your customer lifetime value (CLV) significantly. A brand loyalty survey shows that when a business achieves a 7% increase in brand loyalty, the CLV of each customer can rise by 85%.

Reactivation: Email promotions, or push notifications if you’ve built your own app, are an obvious way to let a customer know about a new offer. They may be receiving a lot of these, how do you rise above the noise? Personalization. By using the information you have about them you can tailor promotions to their tastes, only offering rewards for what they're interested in or even offering them special incentives for trying new things.
Engagement: What makes it compelling for a high-value customer to stick with you? Let them know you’ve got the same priorities. Quality outdoor gear is a serious investment. The North Face’s XPLR Pass’ Field Testing perk allows members to test an item for 60 days and return it for a full refund if it doesn’t meet expectations. We recreated the XPLR Pass in Talon.One to demonstrate how to quickly create unique, on-brand loyalty rewards.

Retention: Basic loyalty features give a customer points wherever they make a purchase. But what if, like Starbucks Rewards, they get a free product after purchasing that product a certain number of times? This is gamification, adding game-like elements to a non-game context, and it’s especially powerful for keeping customers engaged with loyalty. 

At any stage in the funnel, a tier-based loyalty program shows your new customers that you’re a business that cares about them throughout the year. 

Black Friday customers tend to disappear more than those who start to engage with your brand in the rest of the year. This means that you need to reactivate them as soon as possible.

Coupons are a great way to reactivate customers that haven’t been active for a while. Sending your inactive customers a promo code with a discount can motivate them to make their next purchase.

In order to make your coupons effective, you need to move from generic to personalized messages. Personalized emails help you get in touch with inactive customers without being too pushy.

Customers love personalized promotions — but are increasingly scared of sharing data with third parties.

Black Friday enables you to collect valuable zero- and first-party customer data, which you can use to tailor your messages to the specific preferences of your target group. Such customer data releases you from the need to rely on third-party cookies, maximizing the efficiency of your business decisions.

Analyzing your Black Friday data enables you to know what age group were mostly interested in your offerings, what products/services were the most popular or what promotions (discounts, bundles, etc.) excelled during your campaign. You can use these insights to empower your business decisions in the future.

When you base your marketing decisions on zero- or first-party data, you

Offering head-turning discounts on Black Friday is a time-honored promotional incentive that nudges customers toward taking action. That is why numerous companies, including industry giants such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target, strive to present irresistible deals to their customers.

However, businesses need a more comprehensive Black Friday strategy if they want to unlock the full potential of it. This means moving beyond short-term profit, focusing on how to leverage Black Friday data to retain the acquired customers and foster loyalty in the long run.