Black Friday: How big will it be in 2022, and how to prepare for it

It’s hard to make predictions (cliche alert), especially about the future. 

But if you’re thinking about Black Friday this year, and you want to see some data and hear some educated speculation, you’ve come to the right place. 

And if you are set to run a Black Friday promotion, why not skip to our tips? 

Black Friday will be roughly as big as last year (hence, big!)

Let’s start with feelings: British consumer confidence is at an all-time low. 

This translates into many signs indicating we’re heading towards a recession, with ecommerce demand and conversion data trending down.   

However, when consumer confidence is low, consumers don’t just curb their spending, they also reframe their needs and care more about price and value. This is (one of the reasons) why Aldi has now become the fourth-largest supermarket in the UK. And the reason why discount retailers either grow or withstand their positions during recessions much better than mid-market retailers

So in the sense that Black Friday brings discounts to cost-conscious customers, it becomes appealing. 

Now, we also know that conversion data on ecommerce data is lower this year, according to paywalled data from IMRG. Essentially, fewer people are putting items in their baskets and checking out with them. 

What this tells us is that consumers are watching but not buying. This means their consideration items and wishlists are growing bigger, probably holding off to the right occasion, whether it’s things improving, or items becoming more affordable: enter Black Friday. 

And If we look at sales volume data, we know that 2021 was the biggest Black Friday weekend in history. 

In addition, a recent survey this year showed that as many customers were willing to spend more this year as those who were looking to spend less. 

So if 2021 was the biggest Black Friday and people are holding off their purchases to November to save money (or make a more cost-efficient Christmas shopping), then the intuition tells us that people will be looking for deals this year too. 

A word from IMRG? 

They revealed an estimate of a 5% decline during the Ecommerce Expo. 

Black Friday is changing: not a destination event anymore. 

Black Friday is also evolving as a format. 

For once, it’s less of a “destination event”. Previously consumers were eager to mark these in their diaries, plan what they were going to try to buy and generally jump into it head first. 

But in the last years, proactive interest in Black Friday has decreased, as we can see in Google Trends data.  

Generally speaking, consumers have gone from thinking of Black Friday as a day-long or weekend-long discount event to thinking of “November sales” or “Winter sales”. They increasingly think they don’t have to mark it in their diaries and seek it, as they will stumble on it either way. 

Of course, this is because retailers have expanded their horizons and made the sales period longer, which incidentally is a great help operationally. 

Consumers therefore will make a point to visit their favourite retailers, search for the products they’ve been wanting to buy for a while and certainly peek an eye on emails and social media alerting of discounts. But they won’t lose their s*** over it.

Tips to prepare for Black Friday in 2022

Are you currently working on a set of promotions for this Black Friday? 

We’ve gathered our best tips from our experience – including some battle scars. 

1. Create a schedule of all the promotions and share that across the teams and agencies involved. This will help you think through all the activations, campaigns and operations for the period. Because it will get busy, the more you prep the better. 

2. Create a Black Friday landing page, and consider data-capture calls to action. For example “Join our VIP list and be the first to know”. This will generate leads ahead of the event that you can activate later. 

3. Consider different discounts on different products. This allows you to be more tactical in your discounting for more profits, whilst allowing more options for personalisation (for more profits too!). Retailers with line-specific discounts outperform retailers with blanket discounts. 

4. Use data to create personalised offers, for example for VIP customers, or no-opening-emails-and-no-purchase-yet customers. Start planning your CRM activation now to achieve the best campaign architecture and avoid too many overlaps. 

5. While on the subject of email, keep your subject lines simple and straightforward. Research from Dot Digital shows that Email CTR increases by 64% when the subject line includes “Black Friday”. Of course, A/B testing can still help you refine the best subject line, so experiment away! 

6. Implement abandoned cart rules. Cart abandonment spiked to 76% during the Black Friday period last year. 

7. Create urgency by publishing deadlines. Customers react to deadlines. 

8. Test any new promotions. Then test them again. 

9. Request an increase in server capacity with your agency or hosting provider. Don’t leave it to the last minute. Start the conversation now before the mad rush. 

10. Consider a code freeze. This will mitigate the risk of a deployment gone wrong during the period. Even if you think it’s a small, low-risk deployment, it could still pose a risk at a crucial time