Black Friday is coming up and that means this is a great opportunity to generate a little end of the year income. People are already in the mindset to buy gifts for their loved ones, so why not give them some options for your business?

While this is a great opportunity to offer a deal, you also want to keep in mind how this will affect your business and be aware of how what you’re promoting can also hurt your business. It can easily begin to eat eat into your profits and have you working for free if you don’t outline it correctly. Here are a few ideas of how to promote your business effectively this holiday season:

1. Print Sale. Open up your expired galleries for your clients and send out an email offering a percentage off if they order before Cyber Monday. (Offer these to past clients only who are already complete and placed orders before.) Keep in mind what your profit margin is and make sure not to exceed that amount. If you use a gallery service like ShootProof, you can easily send out an email to those people to let them know about the deal! Any purchases would be completed through your connected print lab.
2. Bundles. Create bundles and encourage visitors to book online for a special price. You could include a print credit or free product for every session purchased.
3. Gift certificates. These have a great convenience factor for someone looking to get a gift. You could even offer buy one get one free gift cards and phrase it as “give one to a friend and get one free for yourself.” They can buy online during Black Friday, and have the PDF of their gift certificate emailed for them to print at home. (Make sure you check with your state laws about expiration dates on gift certificates.)
4. New product. Offer a product you don”t normally sell that would be perfect for gifts such as these easel back canvases or canvas ornaments from CGProPrints. Holiday cards can sometimes turn into a lot of extra work. But if you limit your client’s choices to one or two templates and one paper type/size, it will make the ordering process simpler for you. You can even add predesigned ones into your current galleries for clients if you open them back up for print sales. Don’t have any templates? Check out these Christmas Card templates from Paper Lark Designs!

Once you’ve chosen what you want to offer, it’s time to come up with a plan to get the word out! Yes, you’ll want to do more than put up a post on Facebook the day of Black Friday. It’s all about giving people time to preplan, and I can guarantee that they are already looking out for what they want to buy that weekend.

If you are offering gift cards or bundles, start teasing these promos at least a week leading up to Black Friday. Gather up your client list and send them an email blast. You can easily do this through a service like Mailchimp. Then put together your specials in well designed images for Facebook and Instagram. You can use a program like Canva for this if you don’t want to mess with Photoshop. Make one that’s a teaser to post up on Wednesday and then one to on Black Friday. Make sure you have emails going out the day of and on the last day of the offering to remind people. Since Black Friday is also the time when everyone is out shopping, we encourage you to run your offer through Cyber Monday to give people a chance to buy.

Are you planning on running a Black Friday sale? Do you have any tips from successful sales that you’ve done in the past?

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