Automating Black Friday Sales

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Black Friday sales – you either love them or hate them as a business owner. I had quite a few clients this year tell me they didn’t want to even do anything for Black Friday, because they just wanted to be present and not worry about work. Which I am 100% here for. I feel the same way about just wanting to be present with my husband and family during the holiday which is why I’m suggesting automating Black Fridays Sales as much as you can.

If you don’t run any kind of sale for Black Friday, you’re really missing out on a huge opportunity. As much as we all complain about the consumerism and the greed and the yadda yadda – most of us have been the one to wait to buy something that we wanted specifically to see if it would go on sale for Black Friday. Last year, I waited to purchase a website template from Elizabeth McCravy because I wanted to see if they’d go on sale. We’re primed as buyers to do this. So if you aren’t running ANY kind of sale, you’re missing a huge opportunity in front of you to boost your revenue for the year.

So I really encourage you to think about doing something, even something small. Which is why today I’m going to be sharing 6 different ways I’m automating my Black Friday marketing and sales so that I can be as present as possible with my family. In fact, my goal is to just check in once a day with my email and DM inboxes to answer any questions there. That’s it. 3 of these tips are going to be helpful if you want to keep things really basic, and 3 of them are going to be more advanced ways I’m automating. Please don’t feel like you need to do them all. If you need to, tuck some of them away for next year, okay? Keep it simple.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

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This week’s action step: Get that content created and scheduled. The final three are more advanced strategies and you may not have time for them this year, but having that content created, and choosing sales for items that you can automate delivery on, that you can do this week to prepare.
This week’s book recommendation: House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas (Crescent City #2)
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.

Black Friday sales. You either love them or hate them as a business owner. In fact, I had quite a few clients this year tell me that they didn’t want to even do anything for Black Friday because they just wanted to be present and not worry about work, which I am 100% here for. I feel the same way about just wanting to be present with my husband and family during the holiday. However, If you do not run any kind of sale for Black Friday, you are really missing out on a huge opportunity. As much as we all complain about the consumerism and the greed and the yada yada, most of us have been the one to wait to buy something that we specifically wanted just to see if it would go on sale for Black Friday.

Last year I waited to purchase a website template from Elizabeth McCravy because I wanted to see if they’d go on sale. It was something that I wanted, that I knew I needed for my business. I knew exactly which one I was buying, who I was buying it from, but I also knew that, mmm, Black Friday’s in a month or two, I’ll just wait.

We are primed as buyers to do this. So if you aren’t running any kind of sale, you’re missing a huge opportunity in front of you to boost your revenue for the year. . So I really encourage you to think about doing something, even something small, which is why today I’m going to be sharing six different ways that I’m automating my Black Friday marketing and sales, so that I can be as present as possible with my family.

In fact, my goal with my Black Friday sales is to just check in once a day with my email and my DM inboxes to answer any questions that I have there. That’s it. Just once a day. So three of these tips that I’m sharing today are going to be helpful if you want to keep things really basic, and three of them are going to be more advanced ways that I’m automating.

Please don’t feel like you need to do them all if you need to tuck some of them away for next year. Okay? We wanna keep it simple. You’re listening to Chasing Simple episode 133, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in.

Like I said in the introduction, I have three tips for you for what I’m doing that are more of a basic level. If you are like the kind of person that is just, I’m not really interested in having a Black Friday sale, but I feel like I should. I encourage you to do so, but to automate it as much as possible so you’re able to just step back and be present.

The first three tips are gonna be for you. If you’re someone who is ready to go all in and you are excited about having a Black Friday sale, but you still wanna be present with your family. The final three tips are gonna be more advanced, and those are gonna be for you however. . If you’re that first category where you’re like, You know, I’m not really even interested in doing this, I’m doing the most low key thing possible, keep listening throughout the entire episode so you hear those more advanced ones, so maybe next year you can take advantage of using those to further automate what you’re doing so that you can still have that step back.

But if this is your first ever Black Friday, these first ones are, especially for you. If it’s not your first Black Friday and you’re not doing these things, please start doing them. Okay, So first, Schedule out all of your emails and all of your other content ahead of time. You have heard me talk about batching a thousand times at this point, right?

This is not news to you. This is not news that I encourage you to do this. This is not news that I do this. However, sometimes when I am speaking with students, they are launching something or they’re doing some other kind of promo, and they’re trying to bash their content, but they’re overwhelmed because, let’s face it, when you’re in the middle of a launch or promotion, The promo content can double or even triple your normal amount of content, and it can be a lot when you have a batch week that you typically do X amount on and then all of a sudden you’ve got three times as much to do.

So what I’ll encourage my students to do is to get their normal content batched and to, with whatever time they have during batch week, get their promo content as far created as they can, but not to feel the pressure to do all of their promo content during batch week. Obviously, in ideal world, you are creating all of your promo content nearing your batch week, but sometimes that takes more advanced batching skills, and that’s okay.

However, I really, really, really, really, really encourage you to get your promo content batched out for a Black Friday because again, what we want is to be present with our families. What we want is to give ourself that ability to take time off. You do not need to be. Totally present and totally on top of things am sucked into your Black Friday sale in order to have a Black Friday sale.

That feels good. Obviously Sometimes when you are more present and you are more available, you’ll see higher sales, but that’s not even always the case. So for me, I like to be kind of present but not really, and mostly just present with my family. So schedule out that promo content so that you don’t have to think about it, and so that it goes out while you’re visiting your family and making you sales.

The next thing similar in that it’s batching, but this is actually something I almost never do when I’m doing my batch week and batching my content, and that is batch creating my Instagram stories. So, . One of the biggest objections people have to not wanting to batch their content is that things feel better when they can do it in the moment, and it feels like a flow, which I totally understand.

This is why I don’t batch create my Instagram stories because that’s where I get that release, that that ability to lean into, okay, here’s how I’m going to show up today and I just decide in the moment and I get in that flow and and I do, it feels. But for Black Friday, specifically for that weekend, I am going to batch create my stories ahead of time, so that alls I need to do is go in and upload.

So, and as I’m recording this, it’s September. And I have not created my November content yet, so I’m not really sure what kind of stories I’ll be doing, whether it’ll just be me talking to camera or I’ll be creating things in Canva or a mixture of both. But you can’t create things in Canva, or you could also go into like you would create a normal story, Record the story, do what you need to do to create the branded story with your text.

Gifs, GIFS whatever. Go ahead and do it. Like you would create the story, but then instead of posting it, just save to your phone and then you can save these different stories individually to your phone within folders by day. So, okay, on Friday, I’m gonna post these on Saturday, I’m gonna post these on Sunday, so on and so forth.

And you can save ’em to your phone so that on Friday you just go in and say, Okay, here’s the however many stories I’m posting. Pop ’em all. Alls you have to do is hit upload for each of them and then you’re good to go to put your phone down and go back to whatever you were doing. So that’s another way that I’m going to be automating my marketing, even though it’s not a way that I normally automate my marketing.

The third. More basic way that I’m automating my marketing is choosing items that I don’t need to be available for in order to sell. So at this point, if you’re on my email list, you’ve already seen my catalog of what I’m selling for Black Friday and what those sales are looking like, and the vast majority of them are digital products.

They’re things that when someone decides, Yes, I wanna purchase this, they go in, they can purchase, get their email. with their information on how to access their purchase and then get started in their onboarding sequence. All without me doing anything, because I have all of that set up in Kartra, which is what I use for the vast majority of the back end of my business.

My email marketing, my products, it hosts my videos. I host everything. Most everything is in Kartra for my business and. , I have it set up so that people are, when they decide they wanna buy, they can go in at any time and immediately get what they need. And I don’t have to lift a finger to do it.

What I would not encourage you to sell, if you’re wanting to keep this really, really basic, is your one-to-one spots, because those need more sales. They need a heavier sales process and they typically need a sales process that is very you involved. Even if you set up a workflow in Honey Book, which we will talk about in a moment. Sometimes you will just need to be available to talk through because it’s a bigger purchase, it’s a harder purchase to make, and the higher ticket of purchase is the more sales process you will need to have, even if that’s just talking to someone in your dms.

So if you’re trying to keep things really basic, choose items that you don’t really need to be available for in order to sell them. . Now three of the more advanced ways that I’m automating my Black Friday marketing and sales. First, I’m going to be creating an abandoned cart sequence. We all know what those are, right?

If you’ve ever put anything in your cart at Target or Bed Bath and Beyond or whatever, and then you didn’t go through with purchasing, you likely got an email saying, Hey, don’t forget you put this in your cart. I know you’re interested in it. The sales ending soon, and I don’t want you to. . Well, if you can automate an abandoned cart sequence inside of the back end of your business, you can send those emails and hopefully convert into more sales for people that just, you know, they thought about it, but, oh, I don’t have my credit card on me right now, so I’ll do this later and forgot about it.

It’s a reminder of, Hey, if you did want this, This is on sale right now. Here you go. So I’m gonna be creating an abandoned cart sequence to hopefully regain the interest of people who were interested, but for whatever reason, weren’t able to check out at the moment they were interested. , the next thing you can do, which at this point, kind of getting close on time, so maybe stick this in your hat for next year especially.

But if you have the time, go for it would be sending out a catalog ahead of time. And this is great because it, it builds that hype and it builds that momentum and it lets people know what’s to come and it kind of helps them decide ahead of time whether or not they’re gonna buy. . What you also wanna do here is you want to encourage your people when you send out the catalog to ask all of their questions.

Now send the catalog and be like, Hey, if you any questions at all, I am here for you. I wanna make sure that you are informed and know what your plans are for Black Friday, before Black Friday even happens. And this is great because you’re really there to talk to them and talk through them. But it’s also great because when you get those questions, you can take those questions because if one person has a question, someone else has that same question.

You can take those questions and create an FAQ spot on each of your sales pages with relevant questions. So if someone says, Hey, I am interested in this, but I’m not sure if it’s for me because I X, Y, Z. , Well, you can say on your FAQ page, if I’m X, Y, Z is this for me? And then you can answer that question because again, if one person has a question, someone else does too.

And it’s going to minimize how many questions you’re asked during your Black Friday sale because again, you’re probably gonna wanna check your inbox at least once a day to answer any questions that you may have to. Make sure things are going out as they should to make sure links are working. There is gonna be some general customer service, unless you have someone that you’ve hired to do that during your Black Friday sale, but you’re gonna have to be semi available at least once a day in order to do that.

And this will help cut down on how many emails you’re gonna get with questions. And then the final more advanced thing that I will be doing is setting up a workflow in Honey Book, which is my CRM tool specifically for Black Friday. So, , if you have a CRM tool, you know that you create workflows for inquiries that walk them through the process of booking with you, one to one y, yada, yada.

Well, I’m going to be setting up a workflow that is Black Friday specific, so I will turn it on right before Black Friday, or I will create, I’ll probably create a separate contact form for Black Friday. Whichever way, I will turn it on right before Black Friday, turn it off right when the Black Friday deal ends, and during that time, if anyone inquires about my V IP days, because that’s gonna be one of the things on sale, which again, if you’ve seen the catalog, you already know that.

But if anyone inquires about my VIP days, it’s going to walk them through how they can make sure that they lock that Black Friday price in for themselves during that sale. and it’s gonna give them everything they need to do to do that. Will they maybe still have questions that I have to answer? Yes, absolutely.

Again, higher ticket item. There’s more customer service that you have to do, more sales processes that you have to do. It’s just the nature of it, and that’s fine because I’ve chosen that specifically for myself because that’s what I’m allowing myself. But this will help automate it as much as possible to really take a ton of that sales process off of my plate.

So three basic ways you can automate your Black Friday marketing sales. Schedule out all your content batch, create your Instagram stories even ahead of time so that all you have to do is upload and choose items that you don’t need to be available for to sell.

But if you wanna do a more advanced Black Friday, or if you wanna put these aside for next year’s Black Friday sales. Create an abandoned cart sequence. Send out a catalog ahead of time and add your FAQs to your sales page, and then set up a workflow in your CRM tool specifically for Black Friday. Don’t use your typical workflow because you’re gonna need to do something different for Black Friday sales, but set up a whole new workflow specifically for Black Friday in your CRM tool if you are going to be selling any of your one-to-one.

now, your action step for this week is to get that content created and scheduled. No matter what you’re doing, what kind of sale you’re doing, however, basic or advanced, Get that content created and scheduled again. The final three are more advanced strategies, and you may not have time for them this year, but having that content created and choosing sales for items that you can automate delivery on, that you can do this week to prepare to really take a ton of the Black Friday work off of your lap during the actual sale so that you can be present with your family.

Now this week’s book recommendation is House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J Mass, which is the Crescent City Number two book. And I surprisingly think I liked this one better than the first one. Now, for all of my Sarah J Mass people, I know that a lot of people have a hard time getting into Cresent City.

It took me a really long time to get into the first one, a really long time, but. I really like the second one, so if you’ve tried it and you didn’t get into it, but you loved her other stuff, I’d recommend trying it again because the second one definitely made it worth it. I have not read the third one. I don’t even think it’s out yet, or, and I don’t know when it’ll come out, but the ending of book two

Was worth every single minute that I spent wondering should I keep going in book one? And that’s what I’m gonna leave that as. But I highly recommend that you go check it out. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your life in biz.

Episode 133: How I’m Automating My Black Friday Marketing and Sales to Take Time Off

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