How I Made $44,402 in 8 Days During Black Friday

In this article I’ll share my Black Friday marketing strategy.

I just wrapped up a big Black Friday promotion in the music industry.

It generated $44,402 in eight days.

Black Friday is awesome because it’s one of the biggest sales days in the world. Customers expect things to be on sale during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But more importantly, they are prepared and willing to spend money on these days because they don’t want to miss out.

Here’s what makes Black Friday so lucrative:

• Built in urgency
• Built in scarcity
• Extreme discounts

The fact that Black Friday sales usually only last a couple of days, and everyone is trying to snatch the cheapest products off the shelves at the same time, creates a buying frenzy.

Add extreme discounts to this buying frenzy and you have a perfect marketing storm.

Every business should have a Black Friday marketing strategy.

Depending on your business you need to think of a unique strategy that works for you. But below I will share a marketing strategy that almost any business can use for Black Friday sales. It has worked great for me in the past and lots of others are now copying this approach.

The Best Black Friday Marketing Strategy: Combining Tripwire Offers With One Click Upsells

This is what most businesses don’t get.

Black Friday is not just about putting your products on sale.

You have to craft a sales funnel that takes advantage of the buying frenzy that’s already happening during Black Friday. It’s never going to be easier to get customers into your sales funnel.

As I mentioned already, everyone is prepared and ready to buy on Black Friday.

That’s why it’s important to spend a few weeks or months creating a sales funnel with a really good tripwire offer and multiple one-click upsells. A tripwire offer is a low-friction, low-price offer that appears to be such a great deal that customers can’t ignore it. You know you have a good tripwire offer when customers would feel stupid not to buy a product. For example: “All Domains Just $1 Today” or free plus shipping offers in e-commerce.

The trick is to combine a good tripwire offer with multiple relevant one click upsells.

Just selling a tripwire offer won’t make you a lot of money during Black Friday. About 50-80% of the revenue will be generated from the one click upsells in the back-end of your sales funnel.

You’ll also want to add urgency and scarcity.

Black Friday itself will already come with a lot of built-in urgency and scarcity. But you can further capitalize on it by limiting the number of tripwire products in stock or adding a clear deadline to your sale. This type of promotion is called a tripwire launch.

Here’s what you need for a good tripwire launch:

• An irresistible and cheap tripwire offer
• Multiple relevant one click upsells
• A clear deadline when the sale ends (Optional: Use a countdown timer)
• A reason why you’re doing the promotion (i.e. Black Friday)
• Optional: Limited number of products in stock

These are the ingredients for a wildly successful Black Friday marketing strategy.

Most businesses get some of these right but miss out on others. The most overlooked part is one click upsells. Partially, this is because one click upsells can only be used online. But carefully crafted offline upsells could replace one click upsells. For example: “Anyone who buys X for 90% off also gets Y and Z for 50% off”.

Most importantly though, most businesses simply haven’t caught up with upsells. There are a few exceptions of course, such as airlines and booking sites that upsell you a gazillion things.

Now that you know the basics of a tripwire launch, let’s get more specific.

The Sales Funnel that Generated $44,402 In 8 Days During This Year’s Black Friday Buying Frenzy

These numbers might not seem so impressive.

For example, I’ve done other promotions that generated $180,000 in a single week.

But given that these $44,402 were made from a Black Friday promotion in the beat selling industry, which is a tiny market, puts the numbers into perspective. In fact, last year my business partner and I made slightly more than $50,000 in eight days, which was an all-time industry record among music producers.

How much you’ll make from a Black Friday promotion depends on the size of the market and the size of your business. The smaller the market and your business, the less you’ll make.

Anyway – Let’s get really specific.

Here’s what the sales funnel looked like:

I’ll talk more about each step of the sales funnel and why it worked so well. But the above funnel is a great starting point for any Black Friday promotion: Combine a tripwire offer with a bunch of one click upsells. Let’s take a look at how this Black Friday marketing strategy panned out.

The Tripwire Offer

I built the entire sales funnel with Clickfunnels.

The first step of the sales funnel consisted of a headline, a video an order form and some long-form copy. A good tripwire offer doesn’t need a whole lot of selling. Since it’s so cheap and irresistible, it usually sells itself. But I still recommend using video or some good copy.

Here’s what the sales page looked like:

The tripwire offer was simple: People could buy two gigabytes of rap beats for seven dollars. This is an incredibly good deal (Hint: Bundling products together works great).

I also built an order bump into the sales funnel.

Customers could check the yellow checkbox and upgrade their commercial usage license to unlimited distribution units. This charged their credit card an additional seventeen dollars. Adding order bumps to your website is a great way to maximize profit margins.

In terms of payments people could check out with credit card or PayPal.

Here’s the results from front-end credit card sales only:

As you can see the tripwire offer converted at 14.67%. However, in reality the conversion rate was between 20-30% because these stats don’t account for PayPal sales. Around half of all sales came from credit card and the other half from PayPal, which is a common pattern.

The order bump (Unlimited Distribution Units) converted at 46.52% which is very good.

The tripwire offer and order bump generated around $23,586 in total.

(The final accounting for the promotion is still not finished, mainly because it has to be done manually with PayPal – So I arrived at $23,586 by multiplying $5,537 + $6,256 times two).

How did I drive traffic?

Email marketing and Facebook ads.

Once the sales funnel generated around 500 sales, I created a lookalike audience and scaled up the Facebook ads. Daily emails were sent to the existing customer base during the sale. Getting enough traffic is an important part of any Black Friday marketing strategy, so plan for it.

The One Click Upsells

About 50% of the revenue was generated from the tripwire offer and the order bump.

And the other half came from the one click upsells in the back-end of the sales funnel. In total, there were three one click upsells built into the funnel along with some additional upgrades.

Here’s how the three upsells converted:

In case you’re wondering, “OTO” stands for One Time Offer.

As you can see, the first upsell converted at 15.22%, the second one at 10.06% and the third one at 1.40%. All three upsells combined generated $9,741. Just like with the tripwire offer, this is from credit card sales only. So counting PayPal sales the total revenue is approximately $19,482.

Some additional money was made from post-funnel upgrades on the thank you pages.

Here’s what the first upsell page looked like:

The other two upsells looked similar.

They simply consisted of a short video explaining the upsell, a button to add the product to the order, a headline with the discount and a countdown timer that was set to five minutes.

Here’s how the produdcts were priced:

• Tripwire offer: $7
• Order bump: $17
• First upsell: $47
• Second upsell: $37
• Third upsell: $197

Given the beat selling industry is a small market, the promotion went pretty well.

Here’s how each day of the promotion performed:

Keep in mind that only credit card sales are reported here.

As you can see, the biggest spikes in sales happened on the first three days of the sale. On the last few days sales picked up again because of the urgency and scarcity effect of the deadline. The sale ended after eight days, resulting in around $44,402 from selling digital downloads.

That’s pretty much it.

I hope you enjoyed my Black Friday marketing strategy and find it useful.