PLAN B FOR GETTING YOUR BLACK FRIDAY PROMOTION APPROVED BY RETAILERS

August 19, 2022 | Amanda Green
Orca Communications invited Retailbound, ​one of our​ strategic partners​ in the retail space, to write a guest blog post​ sharing its expertise with our clients and followers on the topic of retail marketing. For any start-up or seasoned business owner with products on store shelves, you’ll want to read this!​​

Black Friday used to be the key event retailers spent months before planning.  Over the past several years, Black Friday and even Cyber Monday (BFCM) events have been starting much sooner.  In fact, BFCM are no longer shopping “days”; they’ve turned into month-long consumer events. In 2021, most major retailers had hot BFCM deals start as early as late October and are extended in most cases into December. 

Retailers will start their BFCM planning in the Spring, finalize their plans by the late Summer, and place purchase orders with their key vendors by early Fall. If you are a product brand and you want to be part of a retailer’s BFCM event, you need to plan ahead. Hopefully, you are already an established brand with proven sales history. If you are, offer your retail buyer a great promotion that will drive people to their stores or their website.  As an established brand with retailers, both their sales associates and their customers are familiar with your products’ quality and performance.  Many retailers are willing to lower their margin threshold for only BFCM events since you are also taking a margin hit on your side by offering a great promotion.

If you are a new or unestablished brand, there are options of getting your Black Friday promotion approved by retailers.  Here are our key 5 tips;

  1. Develop a great promotion on your best-selling products that customers would actually purchase.
  2. Determine the financial impact to both your P&L and a retailer’s P&L.
  3. Offer exclusivity of the promotion to select retailers, preferably one retailer if you can. Retailers like exclusive promotions that they can market to their customers.
  4. If the promotion is an in-store BFCM event, offer incentives for the retailer in order to close the deal between you and them. Examples of incentives would be consignment, longer payment terms, or a guaranteed sale (meaning that you would take back any unsold inventory after the BFCM event ends).
  5. Create your digital marketing strategy around driving traffic to the retailer in order to help increase the sell-through of your product.

Whether your hot promotion is for the entire month of November or just Black Friday/Cyber Monday, hopefully, these 5 tips will help you get in good with your key retail partners and help with getting your Black Friday promotion approved by retailers.

This guest blog post was provided by Yohan Jacob at Retailbound, a retail solutions agency that helps innovative product brands scale in retail. Interested in getting your product launched in retail? Visit www.retailbound.com or email info@retailbound.com for more information.