2024 Black Friday SMS Marketing Best Practices

Ah, the Black Friday rush...

If you're a businessperson, you already know the opportunities the "Black Friday" frenzy presents - Especially in these times, when people are doing their holiday shopping earlier than ever.

Businesses need to adapt! Now, even before the holidays begin, is the time to start thinking about the opportunity before it passes you by.

So how can you get as much out of Black Friday as possible this year?

Here’s one way: SMS.

Why Black Friday SMS Marketing in 2024?

Sending Black Friday SMS will help drive up your sales, putting you at ease through the pre-holiday storm and leaving you satisfied with your Black Friday marketing efforts this 2024 season.

Don’t believe me? Here are some stats to consider:

• Smartphones account for 74% of retail site traffic and 63% of online orders
• Texts have an open rate as high as 55% and a "view rate" as high as 100%
• SMS can have a response rate as high as 8x that of email

You obviously want to make good use of your time, effort, money, and other resources to get the most out of your 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing. And if SMS is such a popular channel, you’ll want to take advantage of it.

But how exactly can you do that?

Tip #1: Get an SMS Marketing Service Set Up for Black Friday

This first tip may seem obvious, but in order to move forward with Black Friday SMS marketing, you need a service that allows you to send marketing texts.

Unless you have a very small customer base, this isn’t something you can handle from your personal texting app on your phone.

An SMS marketing service will allow you to store and manage contacts and send mass texts to those contacts

When you send out your Black Friday SMS, the mass texts will go out to each recipient individually, so people will receive them as an individual message on their phones. (They can also respond back if they have questions and you’ll be able to monitor and reply back to their responses.)

Tip #2: Collect the Appropriate Consent for Your Black Friday SMS

Once you have a text alert service set up and running, you unfortunately can’t just add in your customer database and send them messages for Black Friday.

You first need to get the appropriate opt-in consent to send your customers marketing texts.

It’s not enough to have simply collected their phone number at some point in the past. People need to clearly understand what they’re signing up for.

SMS marketing services offer some tools to help you get appropriate consent for sending mass texts, including (but not limited to):

• Opt-in keywords (particular words that people can text in to your SMS marketing number - doing this will automatically subscribe them to your texts)
• QR codes
• Online sign-up forms

Once you have one or more of these methods ready to go, you can advertise your opt-in instructions anywhere and everywhere:

• On social media
• In email campaigns
• At any of your business’s physical locations

And make sure people are aware of what exactly they are subscribing to!

Tip #3: Plan Out Your Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign

After you’ve built up your SMS marketing database, you’re ready to start planning your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign. (And don’t forget about Cyber Monday as well!)

You’ll need to decide:

• What kinds of deals you’d like to offer
• How many texts you’d like to send pertaining to those deals
• The copy for the texts you’ll be sending

What Deals to Offer in Your Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign

Every business is different, and you are best equipped to decide what deals you’d like to offer. So we’ll leave that up to you, but here are some examples in case you need ideas:

• Offer a significantly large discount (larger than discounts you would typically offer)
• Offer BOGO (“buy one get one free”) deals, or something similar (such as “buy two get one free” or “buy one get one half off”)
• Offer free upgrades or add-ons

How Many Messages to Send in Your Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign

The number of messages you send for your Black Friday SMS marketing is also up to you. Below is a suggested message flow:

• Send a text once weekly in the weeks leading up to Black Friday with “pre-Black Friday” deals, building anticipation to the Black Friday climax
• Send a text 3 days before Black Friday
• Send a text the day before Black Friday
• Send a text the morning of Black Friday
• Send a text several hours into Black Friday (before the deals expire)
• Send a text the day before Cyber Monday
• Send a text the day of Cyber Monday

You may look at that suggested message flow and think, “That’s way too much for my customers.” Or you may want to send even more messages.

And that’s OK! You know your customers best, so do what works for you and your business.

Examples of Copy to Send in Your Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign

The copy in your texts should have a sense of urgency (for example, “today only!”).

Your texts should also clearly describe the deal you’re offering (or direct customers to a link at which they can view your deals).

Here are some examples of some of the types of content you may want to include in your Black Friday SMS marketing campaign:

• “40% off [fill in the blank with an item] and 25% off everything else in the store!”
• “Don’t miss out on half price annual subscriptions!”
• “Buy one [fill in the blank with an item], get another one for FREE!”
• “Last chance to check out all of our amazing Black Friday deals: [link]”
• “Upgrade to [fill in the blank with a service] for free if you purchase by noon!”

Tip #4: Follow Best Practices for Your Black Friday SMS

This is piggybacking off of the previous tip, but here are some “best practice” tips you’ll want to follow when utilizing SMS for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.

Clearly Identify Yourself in Your Messages

People may be subscribed to a lot of different types of texts, so you don’t want to assume that your customers know who the text is coming from.

Perhaps more importantly, you don't want the mobile carriers to flag your messages as potential spam, and a lack of clear identification in your messages is a warning sign to them. In other words, it may lead them to start filtering out your messages

So clearly identifying yourself will help your customers and the mobile carriers know that your message isn't spam.

Include Opt-Out Instructions

Your SMS marketing platform should allow people to automatically opt out of receiving your texts by replying to any of your messages with the word stop.

It is best practice to include “opt-out instructions” in every message that you send. It can be something as simple as, “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” or even “Txt Stop to stop.”

Giving your customers a clear way to opt out also helps you not use up messaging credits unnecessarily on subscribers who don’t truly want to receive your messages. And again, as with the previous point, a failure to include opt-out instructions may lead to the mobile carriers filtering out your messages as spam.

Don’t Send Too Many Messages

Although our suggestion earlier on a workflow of a Black Friday SMS marketing campaign did include a lot of messages, you don’t want to send too many.

If you send too many messages, your customers will start to ignore them when they come in. Or they may simply unsubscribe.

You’ll need to find a balance between sending enough messages to be effective but not too many that it burns your customers out.

Send Relevant Messages

Another way to burn out your customers (leading to unsubscriptions) is to send them messages they don’t care about.

For example, your teenage audience won’t likely care about your sale on denture cream. Or your elderly customers won’t want to be bothered about your BOGO deal on crop tops.

So make sure to send targeted, relevant messages in your Black Friday SMS marketing and subsequent Cyber Monday deals.

Track Link Clicks Within Your Messages

Aside from simply observing the boost in sales that comes from sending out your Black Friday SMS campaigns, you’ll (obviously)want a way to track the success of your messages.

One way to help with this is to send trackable links so that you can see how many people follow the calls-to-action within your campaign.

Your SMS platform will provide you with a link tracking report so that you can do some analysis on your messages.

Your link tracking report will even be able to tell you specifically which recipients clicked the links within your messages.

Tip #5: Schedule Your Black Friday SMS for Strategic Times

Once you've decided how many messages you’ll send and what content you’ll include in those messages, you can schedule your messages.

Your SMS marketing platform will allow you to schedule your messages for specific dates/times, so you can go ahead and schedule out your entire campaign.

And don’t worry - You can always change dates or content later on!

You’ll need to decide what times will work best for your audience. For example, you may want to send your “pre-Black Friday” deals in the evenings when people are home from work, while your first day-of Black Friday text would probably be best sent in the morning.

Once you determine what times you want to send out your campaign messages, you can schedule out all of those messages. Then sit back and watch as they go out automatically.

Tip #6: Utilize Other SMS Marketing Tools for Black Friday

All of the previous tips may take up enough of your time, but if you’re wanting to go deeper into your Black Friday SMS Marketing, there are some other tools you could take advantage of:

• AI SMS Chatbot: Allow AI to respond to replies people may send in to your marketing texts. You could use this option to elicit some engagement with your customers and to automatically answer common questions they may have.
• Two-way Conversations: Manage individual conversations with your customers via an SMS inbox. You could use this option to view and reply back to any responses customers send to your Black Friday SMS, and to keep the conversation going.
• Groups: Segment your customer list into designated “groups.” You could use this option to organize your customer list into targeted segments so that you can send them Black Friday marketing that is relevant to them.

Get the Most Out of Your Black Friday Campaigns

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge opportunities for businesses, and you don’t want to pass them up.

Using SMS marketing to communicate your Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals to your customers will help ensure you get the most out of the start to the holiday season.

And following these tips can help your Black Friday marketing as successful as possible!

Get 50 free messages to try out Black Friday SMS marketing for yourself (no credit card needed).