Black Friday, the ultimate shopping extravaganza, is a golden opportunity for businesses to boost sales and engage with customers. In today’s digital age, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a game-changer for marketers looking to make the most out of this high-stakes shopping event. In this post, I’ll explore how AI can help marketers unlock their Black Friday success. Ensuring your marketing strategies stand out and drive unprecedented results.
1. Data-Driven Insights to Predict Consumer Behaviour
One of the key advantages of AI in marketing is its ability to analyse vast amounts of data at incredible speeds, helping marketers to predict customer behaviour.
Understanding customer preferences and purchase history is great if your Black Friday strategy is to increase value from existing customers. If the discount strategy aims to acquire new customers, you will have less first-party data and no zero-party data at your disposal. Therefore, it becomes challenging to identify what resonates with the target audience and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.
Keyword analysis comes into its own here. The sooner you start doing this to impact product range decisions, stocking decisions, as well as campaign decisions, the better. You can use Keyword Research Tools to spot search trends and growth categories. Marketers can achieve Black Friday success by using AI to understand the intent behind keywords. AI can help marketers identify keywords that have a high commercial intent. This identifies which keywords are most likely to lead to conversions.
Tools such as the SEO platform SEMrush offer a variety of tools for understanding the intent behind keywords, such as the Keyword Magic Tool. If you have access to a data science team or you are technically skilled yourself, then you can utilise the power of platforms like the Google Cloud AI Platform. Google Cloud AI Platform provides a variety of AI tools and services, including Natural Language API, Cloud AutoML, and Vertex AI, which can be utilised to understand the intent behind keywords.
2. Personalise Shopping Experiences
One-size-fits-all marketing strategies are a thing of the past. Personalised Marketing connects on a whole different level. AI enables marketers to create personalised shopping experiences, catering to individual preferences. By analysing customer data (yep, customer data again!), AI algorithms can be used to best recommend products, send personalised offers, and even create targeted marketing messages.
Even if you don’t have customer data on your target audience, acquiring new customers using AI is completely possible by tapping into data using models trained on the behaviour of many other consumers. Although Google will transition from third-party cookies to Google Interests in 2024, the Google AI behind Google Interests can understand the intent behind the search. This is based on a combination of Natural language processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Contextual analysis.
AI-driven personalised marketing is a game-changer. It makes customers feel valued, increasing the likelihood of conversions and fostering brand loyalty in the long term. By understanding individual customer preferences and purchase history, marketers can create tailored marketing campaigns. This level of personalisation not only enhances customer satisfaction but can also significantly boost conversion rates during the Black Friday rush, delivering greater Black Friday success.
Data shows that personalised recommendations chosen by AI are uniquely persuasive. A 2013 report from McKinsey found that 35% of what customers purchase on Amazon and 75% of what they watch on Netflix are due to recommendations guided by algorithms. This will have no doubt increased since then.
3. Chatbots and Customer Support for Black Friday Success
During Black Friday, customer enquiries and support requests can overwhelm businesses. AI-powered chatbots offer a scalable solution, providing instant responses to customer queries. Guiding them through the purchasing journey seamlessly, fast, efficiently, and with personalised customer service is a surefire way to stand out from competitors.
These chatbots can handle various tasks, from answering frequently asked questions to processing orders. By incorporating AI-driven chatbots into your website or social media channels, you can enhance customer experience and ensure smooth interactions, even during peak shopping hours. This can be critical for small businesses in the hours and days immediately after Black Friday. If you are overwhelmed with this peak trading time, it can mean all hands on deck in the fulfilment operation. Using Chatbots effectively can avoid customer experience degradation and free up human resources to help get those orders out the door.
4. Predictive Analytics for Inventory Management
If your store runs out of stock for a popular Black Friday item, it can damage your sales, reputation, and Black Friday success. Running out of stock during peak demand after executing a high conversion campaign is a significant setback. AI-driven predictive analytics can forecast demand patterns based on historical data, allowing businesses to optimise their inventory levels. By ensuring the right products are in stock, you can meet customer demands and capitalise on the shopping frenzy, maximising your Black Friday success.
You can also use AI to manage your stock levels in real time with dynamic pricing. Especially useful when your channel to market includes online marketplaces. Dynamic pricing powered by AI algorithms enables marketers to adjust product prices based on real-time market demand and competitors’ pricing strategies.
This agile approach ensures competitive pricing, maximises profits, and captures the attention of price-conscious shoppers. It is incredibly useful when selling products that you are not specifically offering Black Friday deals on. Remaining competitive across your non-Black Friday goods so your sales don’t fall off a cliff is just as important for your Black Friday success. Optimising the price of these products could generate extra revenue during Black Friday that might otherwise disappear.
5. Optimised Ad Campaigns
AI-powered tools can revolutionise your advertising efforts. During Black Friday, demand for key search terms will be intense, pushing up successful bid pricing very quickly. This can either price you out of the market resulting in disappointing sales, or increase your ad spend very quickly and reach your spending limits before you’ve even seen a return on investment. AI algorithms analyse customer responses to digital advertising campaigns in real time. Marketers can fine-tune their ad strategies based on AI insights, ensuring every dollar spent on advertising delivers maximum return on investment.
Machine learning algorithms can also analyse past ad performance and user behaviour. This enables marketers to create highly targeted and optimised ad campaigns. By identifying the most effective keywords, audience segments, and ad formats, marketers can allocate their advertising budget wisely, ensuring their ads reach the right audience at the right time, leading to increased click-through rates and conversions.
How Consumers are Using AI to Get Better Deals
Of course, it isn’t just businesses and marketers who can use AI to create value. Savvy consumers are already doing this to buck the system in their favour. Two ways that clever consumers are now using AI to get the best deals include:
- Using a price tracking bot to track the prices of products across different retailers. There are a number of price tracking bots available online, such as PriceGrabber and CamelCamelCamel. Consumers can use these bots to track product prices across different retailers and notify them when a product’s price drops below a specific threshold.
- Using a coupon aggregator to find coupons and discounts for products and services. There are several coupon aggregators available online, such as RetailMeNot and Vouchercodes. These websites collect coupons and discounts from a variety of sources and make them available to consumers. Black Friday Tip: don’t forget to check what active coupons you are running before you slash those prices. Update your terms and e-commerce shop to not accept coupons against Black Friday deals.
Black Friday Success: Marketing Tips and Tricks
- Start early. AI can help you start planning your Black Friday success strategy early by identifying trends and patterns in your data. This can help you to develop more effective Black Friday marketing campaigns and target the right audience. Start early, and analyse your existing martech stack to identify opportunities where AI can help you achieve greater Black Friday success.
- Personalise your marketing. AI can help you to segment your customers and target them with personalised marketing messages. Analysing customer data, such as purchase history, website browsing behaviour, and social media activity, can accomplish this.
- Focus on mobile. Optimise your website and marketing campaigns for mobile devices. This can be done by analysing mobile traffic data and identifying areas where your website or campaigns can be improved.
- Offer exclusive deals. Develop and offer exclusive deals that are relevant to your target audience. Then use AI to monitor the competitiveness of these offers through the Black Friday sales period using online price tracking tools.
- Create a sense of urgency. Create a sense of urgency by tracking inventory levels and predicting customer demand. This can help you to ensure that your Black Friday deals are only available for a limited time and that you have enough stock on hand to meet customer demand.
- Make it easy to buy. Make your checkout process as easy and seamless as possible by identifying and removing friction points. Use AI-assisted cart abandonment software like CartStack to predict abandonment and take corrective action before it happens, increasing conversions.
- Use email marketing to promote your Black Friday sale. AI can help you promote your Black Friday sale by segmenting your customers and sending them personalised messages. AI can also help you to optimise your email campaigns for better open and click-through rates. If you use a CRM like Hubspot, it has AI marketing tools like this built-in to it (Disclosure: If you make a purchase, I receive a commission).
- Run paid advertising campaigns. AI can help you run paid advertising campaigns more effectively by targeting the right audience and optimising your bids.
- Promote your Black Friday sale on social media. AI can help you create the most relevant content, the best time to post, and identify the right social media platforms to use. Although this is always the case regardless of the time of year, things get a little crazier at Black Friday. Competitors can create random campaigns beyond their usual behaviour. So always use a real-time marketing tool to help you achieve Black Friday success.
What AI was used for this post?
- Chat GPT 3.5 was used to write the body of this article.
- Comments on Google Interests were researched using Google Bard
- A greater understanding of how ‘intent’ can be gained from keyword analysis was researched using Google Bard
- How consumers are using AI to buck the system during Black Friday was researched using Google Bard
AI Gone Wrong!
I tried to research the estimated impact of AI on consumer purchases during Black Friday sales by instructing Google Bard to create the data for a bar chart. The data showed the most popular products purchased on Black Friday, with an overlay indicating the percentage of consumers who bought these products due to AI-powered marketing. The figures produced were uniform such as 40% for TVs, 35% for Smartphones etc.
When cross-checked to Google, this research did not appear. When I asked Bard for the source of the data it was very convincing in its response ‘The figures above are based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted by Black Friday Insights in 2022….I do not have a link to the research, as it is proprietary information from Black Friday Insights’. When Chat GPT (whose data only goes up to January 2022) was asked the same question, the responses it gave were similar uniform numbers against similar categories, however, it clearly stated that this was hypothetical data. From this process, I can only assume the results from Bard were fictitious.