The majority of email marketers and retailers are aware of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These are the 2 days of the year when retailers pull out all the stops to get customers on their websites or through their doors to buy, buy and buy some more! Explore our Black Friday Fever infographic here.

Black Friday is traditionally a US thing and is normally the 1^st Friday after Thanksgiving, and for millions of individuals Black Friday is the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, where retailers open early and offer promotions at discounts.

“Black Friday refers to stores moving from the ‘red’ to the ‘black,’ back when accounting records were kept by hand and red ink indicated a loss and black a profit”, according to Black Friday history.

According to Techrader, analysts in 2015 predicted that British shoppers alone would spend up to £1billion on tech, clothes, games etc. in 24 hours. They expected that £3.5billion would be spent that weekend, which ends with Cyber Monday.

Although we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in SA, more and more retailers are jumping on the bandwagon to increase traffic to websites and stores and ultimately sales.

In 2014 Checkers was the first food retailer to bring Black Friday to our shores and in 2015 companies such as Pick n Pay, DionWired, Spree, Spec-Savers etc. joined in. Consumers get caught up in the excitement, big displays, frenzy etc. and with more retailers joining and participating in Black Friday, there are great deals on offer for consumers at huge savings.

Besides going instore sales, ‘online Black Friday’ is also gaining momentum, with many retailers offering similar deals online and instore.

According to Black Firday.com, the total online sales of Black Friday last year were $2.74 billion dollars and it is bound to grow again this year.

Yesmail says that “its enterprise clients upped their email sends by 31 percent on Black Friday and 87 percent on Cyber Monday, a record-setting day with nearly 200 million email sends.”

They also found brands experienced sizable growth in email-driven revenue on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

“Email-driven revenue for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday has more than doubled from 2014 to 2015,” says Yesmail, “Specifically, the number of email-driven Cyber Monday purchases grew by 129 percent and the number of email-driven Black Friday purchases grew by 162 percent.”

The concept of Black Friday is still relatively unknown in SA, therefore retailers that are planning on participating should be pro-active, start planning and communicating their advertising messages and as mentioned above, email is a great way of doing this.

The SA market often looks to the UK and USA markets for ideas and inspiration and from these sales figures it makes sense to try and ‘re-create’ Black Friday in the SA market as a way to increase sales and profits.

It is a big trading day globally and with more and more retailers and consumers getting on board with this in SA, sales are bound to happen. As a business you just need to be aware and participate!