A quick story.
In my skincare ecommerce brand, we always do promos for almost every holiday and observances – from Christmas to Black Friday, Easter, Independence Day, Mother’s Day, etc.
As usual, we give discounts during these periods for 3 to 5 days. And then, of course, we get an increase in sales for that month.
The pandemic happened, and our business had to come to a halt with the lockdowns.
After the lockdowns in our target cities got eased, we wanted to resume business by clearing our old stock.
Strategy
So I decided to send emails to our list for 5 days, hoping we’d make some sales. This time around, there were no special holidays or events, so there was no price reduction. Nothing special, I was just going to talk about our product.
After thinking about the best way to go about this, I decided to simply tell stories of our brand’s spokesperson and stories of other women that used our product successfully. In the absence of a better name, we announced it as a “FREE 5-day Workshop”.
And then it started. Each story was however carefully crafted to break specific objections that our prospects usually have.
Results
The results were amazing!
Even though our open rate already went bad before that time, and I also made a terrible mistake that made Day #2 bomb (didn’t include a clickable link), we had over 100 orders that week.
The interesting part: most of them were first time buyers!
Some had spent years on our list without buying from us (even when there were promos and deep discounts), and then they finally decided to take action from those emails. During a pandemic!
I broke down each email sent for those 5 days in an article here on my blog (https://www.oludami.com/case-study-new-buyers-via-email/), so I wouldn’t bother here, because that’s not the point of this post.
Irresistible combo
The first post in this series says that one great way to increase the perceived value of your product/service is to transform it into an offer – your product/service + premiums/bonuses (other products or services that will help further solve your prospect’s problems), at the least.
Now this post is saying: another way to increase the perceived value of your product/service is storyselling. That is, selling through stories.
Generally, stories help increase the perceived value of an offer, but when promoting yours this Black Friday, you don’t want to just use one story; you want to use different stories, because everybody won’t relate to the same story.
You want to intentionally choose stories that will break several objections prospects may have about your product/service. Because, again, you know people have different objections and breaking just one wouldn’t cut it.
It would be easier to sell with stories if you already have an email list. But if you don’t, you can tell your stories through other means of communication with your prospect during this period – ads, organic social media, text, WhatsApp broadcasts, blogs, etc.
If you start promoting on Monday, for example, make it one story per day till Friday, the D-day.
Combine these objection-shattering stories with an irresistible offer, then you wouldn’t need to cut off your profits…unless you just want to add a little discount to the offer, in the spirit of Black Friday!
I hope this helps to bring you more Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Cheers!
