Black Friday in recent years has increasingly landed in Italy too. Shopping malls and major international brands offer a day of discounts, which in the United States corresponds to the day after Thanksgiving, and traditionally starts the Christmas shopping season.
How can hotels and accommodations implement a marketing strategy to take advantage of Black Friday?
If you have not already done so, here are some useful tips to prepare a promotion strategy.
Specify terms and conditions of the type of discounts to be offered for Black Friday
Before you understand how to advertise your promotion, think about what to offer and how to offer it.
Some large hotel chains, for example, allow you to book on the Black Friday weekend by offering a 40% discount. The stay is not tied to the Black Friday weekend as many might think: the offer is valid for stays to be made in a specific period, perhaps by placing it in a low season, in order to optimize earnings.
Specify that the offer is valid only by booking on the website and not on the OTA portals, adding that the prepaid rate is not refundable, as changes or cancellations are not allowed.
Choose a target audience
Who is the target audience for your promotion?
The cheerful family with children in tow or the romantic couple who wants to enjoy a weekend of pure relaxation?
Who will be more willing to spend the money in the general Black Friday madness? Think carefully about who should invest money for Adwords and Facebook Ads campaigns.
Once this choice is complete, it’s time to get to the heart of your strategy.
Sharpen your weapons, it’s Black Friday time!
The planning activity, also on the occasion of Black Friday, is useful for tracing a route to follow, a way to go to optimize and plan the steps that will follow in the next hectic days.
What should you prepare best before getting involved on Black Friday?
- Banners and texts to be used containing the type of discount;
- Mailing list of interested contacts to send the newsletters to;
- Budget to invest in campaigns on Google Adwords and Facebook Ads
Trust on a professional email marketing platform
To send your newsletter, rely on a professional sending platform, in order to have a report service on email open rates and clicks for each campaign. The most popular services are Mailup, Contactlab and Mailchimp, which allow us to take advantage of preset templates so as to avoid incurring the anti-spam filter.
Thanks to Slope, hotel management software, professional email marketing campaigns can be created in just a few steps:
build the most suitable template for your email, inserting photos and texts and connecting special offers;
select the customers to whom to send the e-mails, filtering them by date or type of stay, origin or tag;
send the campaign;
monitors results through reports and statistics, analyzing bounces and reading time.
Site optimized for mobile devices
It seems obvious to say it again, but “repetita iuvant”.
Many users use their smartphone to finalize their purchases: therefore, texts and images must be very clear and clean, booking the promotion through the booking engine must be simple and the buttons must be larger than the desktop version, so as to avoid accidental clicks.
The mobile friendly site is a factor not to be underestimated, given that in 2017 about 48% of orders came through these devices.
Reward your loyal customers with exclusive offers
Who said that Black Friday is for everyone?
Your strategy can aim to reward the most loyal customers. Consider the idea of offering a generous discount to those who have been loyal customers for years or to those who have simply left a great review on you and want to reward it in some way.
It may be that these customers will not accept the discount, but they will certainly be pleasantly attracted and pampered by this unexpected surprise.
Choose the right Social to communicate it
There is no perfect social network: however, there are social networks where engagement is greater.
For example, on Instagram you can give space to the visual element (banner), while on Facebook you can give more space to content and sharing. On this aspect, Facebook is still one step ahead of everyone, given that about 27 million Italians are registered on the social network created by Zuckerberg, born with the aim of establishing relationships and creating communication between people.
Do not forget to activate the Facebook Pixel to monitor and re-target those who will view the promotions you are going to offer.
Follow-up and cross-sell activities
If everything went according to plan, some of your customers will have joined your promotion and will be staying at your facility. What better opportunity to offer some cross-sell services through follow-ups?
The customer can be offered the addition of contingent services to the stay, such as a spa package, a horseback ride or a wine tasting, perhaps by applying additional discounts.
We need to structure the sales process so that each phase answers a question or solves a customer problem, or more simply tries to engage emotionally.
