Next month sees the return of Black Friday, the frenzied shopping period where savvy consumers are on the hunt for the best deals and slashed prices. This year, Black Friday takes place on Friday 29 November 2024, followed by Cyber Monday on 2 December 2024. In this month’s blog, we’re going to take a look at the numbers behind the event, what furniture retailers are doing already and why text marketing is a useful tool across the promotional period.
The numbers
According to Mintel research, total sales during Black Friday 2023 reached an estimated £13.3bn, up 7.3% year-on-year. Around 84% of consumers agreed that a positive experience with a retailer during Black Friday would encourage them to shop there again, while 44% of consumers purchased a Black Friday deal in-store.
For furniture, November 2023 data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) saw furniture and lighting retail sales rise 10.6% to £1.46bn from £1.32bn in October. Floorcovering retail sales also rose month-on-month, up by 14.3% to £267.1m from £233.6m. At the time of the report, the ONS said that household goods store sales volumes rose by 3.5% in November 2023 following a fall of 2.6% in October 2023. The increase over the month was mainly because of strong growth in furniture and lighting stores as retailers reported discounts during the month – largely linked to Black Friday promotions.
Keywords
Shoppers are expected to spend big once again and for furniture and beds retailers, this could be a great opportunity to ramp up sales ahead of the Christmas period. Competition will be tough, as ever, with the bigger players likely to spend big on Google Ads, targeting keywords incorporating ‘Black Friday’. For the smaller, independent retailers in the furnishing space, here’s a look at some of the popular keywords that are already being searched.
‘2024 black Friday’ – up 3,150%
‘black Friday 2024 deals’ – up 2,850%
‘when is black Friday 2024’ – up 2,750%
‘when black Friday 2024’ – up 2,550%
‘when is black Friday 2024 UK’ – up 2,500%
‘black Friday sales 2024’ – up 1,800%
‘cyber Monday 2024’ – up 850%
As for specific terms relating to furniture, ‘black Friday bedroom furniture sale’ searches were up 70%, while ‘black Friday furniture sales’ searches were also up 70%. When honing in the search criteria to the last 30 days, notable, the term ‘Furniture Village Black Friday’ was a breakout search.
When jumping on Google and searching ‘black Friday 2024 furniture’, Furniture Village were ranked in sixth position with their own dedicated Black Friday landing page with information on how to get early access.
Other results for this particular search term presented Hayes Garden World, Nordic Nest, Woods Furniture, John Lewis, Feather & Black and Wayfair that all ranked on the first page. The point here is to spend some time searching Black Friday specific keywords in relation to your business and offers to see what other brands land. Check out the competition and formulate your own Black Friday page on your website to tap into the traffic.
Black Friday tactics
This brings us nicely onto finding out more about what tactics retailers are employing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These include launching earlier deals, providing early sale access, partnering with other brands, giving loyal customers a VIP discount, price matching, extended store opening hours and offering specific promotions on products.
The streams to take advantage of promoting Black Friday include social media, website and in-store as well as email campaigns. Pretty standard, right? However, one marketing stream that can be utilised – and can be extremely effective – is text marketing. As consumers rely heavily on their smartphones for shopping, texting is a valuable channel. Use geo-targeting to display your Black Friday ads to mobile users within a certain radius of your store. This allows you to reach potential customers in your area with dedicated SMS personalised Black Friday offers.
Why text marketing?
Text marketing can be an effective complement to social marketing, allowing you to engage in real-time with targeted and effective messaging. For the furnishings trade, this can prove to be a vital channel to help drive sales. Text message marketing is so effective due to the fact that us humans are hardly ever without our phones. Globally, today’s consumers are more addicted to their mobile phones than ever. According to research on the topic, around 74% of those asked ‘felt uneasy’ about going out without their phone, and 53% never go more than 24 hours without it – even these figures are probably changing in an upward direction.
Did you know…
• 91% are interested in signing up for text message marketing
• Average click-through rate of 35%
• Over 70% of consumers use phones for shopping
• Over 7 billion people are expected to own a mobile phone by 2025
• 95% of texts will be read in less than three minutes after being sent
• Globally, five billion send and receive text messages every day
More numbers
As a final thought, here’s another slice of data for you to consume. According to the Trusted Shops, the motivations behind UK shoppers who shop on Black Friday include 71% shop for ‘Better deals for buying gifts’, while 40% say it ‘helps spread out spending’, with 34% seeing the sales period as ‘fun shopping’.
Another note to consider is promoting your finance options available. Again, when surfing some of the big nationals in the furniture space, when talking about Black Friday, finance options were always mentioned, which is most likely geared to help alleviate any concerns over big ticket item spend a consumer might have.
Finally, back to text marketing, there are a number of different ways to take advantage of this channel, which includes targeted promotions, discounts, remarketing, follow ups and general information (order/delivery tracking).
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what’s next and how to get texting. Well, RetailSystem has the answer.
To setup a Text Campaign only takes a few moments with the RetailSystem ‘step by step’ guide. You can filter targeted customers and schedule the campaign to send at a chosen time, to suit your customers time zones. What’s more, setting up a promotion is completely free. You will only be charged once a promotion is sent out.
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