Nailing Black Friday Personalisation: Innovative Campaign Strategies

As marketers gear up for the critical Black Friday period, the pressure mounts to captivate customers and drive holiday purchases. Amidst the noise and competition, delivering personalised, memorable experiences will be the paramount differentiator.

The 2023 holiday season provided a masterclass in personalisation done right. Savvy brands leveraged real-time data, AI decisioning, and dynamic content to tailor their messaging with surgical precision – reaping outsized engagement, conversion, and revenue gains as a result. As you blueprint your 2024 Black Friday strategy, draw inspiration from last year's standout strategies and campaigns:

Get Ahead with Zero-Party Data

Well ahead of Black Friday, footwear retailer schuh tapped into the power of zero-party data by polling customers about their shopping intentions. They then used those insights to dynamically retarget subscribers with tailored product recommendations perfectly aligned with their expressed preferences. This proactive, personal approach primed customers for conversion when the deals actually dropped.

The summer months are the perfect time to optimise your campaigns before peak season hits. Understand what resonates with your customers and capture zero-party data that can be used to personalise their experience when promotions begin.

Adopt a mobile-first mindset

No Black Friday strategy is complete without mobile, and being mobile-first will set you ahead of the pack. UK retailer The Very Group cleverly deployed push notifications tailored to each subscriber's favourite product category. These contextually relevant "nudges'' spotlighted their best selling products, accompanied by messaging showing how many other customers have looked at the item in the past 24 hours, to create a sense of urgency. These ‘nudges’ not only captured customers’ attention, they also facilitated a seamless path-to-purchase, which saw a 229% boost in engagement. Overall, The Very Group contributes 82% of its sales to mobile - it’s clearly an area of huge potential that should not be underestimated.

Use SMS and push notifications to win attention for flash sales and remind customers of abandoned products.

Extend the Hype

Some innovators complemented their digital efforts by creating immersive brand experiences. Despite being an e-comm pure-play, online fashion giant ASOS hosted a physical Friday pop-up shop to give customers a fresh touchpoint. Other brands aimed to boost sales at brick-and-mortar locations by surfacing store locator displays that dynamically updated to each customer's nearest store, effectively bridging the online-offline gap.

Another way in which brands are ‘extending the hype’ is through social influence, as briefly touched on in the above example by The Very Group. This can be done by showcasing product popularity, for instance. By displaying the number of views or purchases for popular items, brands can create a sense of urgency and validate the product's appeal. Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is also a great way to create that sense of urgency - consider integrating social media feeds, particularly from TikTok and Instagram, into your campaigns.

Finally, you can use real-time activity indicators, showing how many customers are currently viewing a product or how many products are remaining at the time of open. This creates a sense of urgency and popularity. Below is an example of how Currys achieved this, by integrating Movable Ink’s technology with their stock API to show in-stock items with social proof views, real-time pricing, calculated saving price, and current inventory.

The 2023 successes reveal that differentiated, data-driven experiences command attention, deepen connections, and keep customers coming back. As this season's planning ramps up, think of how you can show customers what they really want to see - there’s no better place to start than by using the summer months to capture zero-party data. Think of how you can set yourself up to be able to leverage the mobile channel successfully, and how your brand can extend the Black Friday hype.