In 2024, UK shoppers spent a reported £7.1 billion over the Black Friday weekend, marking a significant 37% increase from the £5.2 billion spent in 2023.
As Black Friday remains predominantly an online event, ecommerce purchases made up 68% of all purchases.
According to PackingNews the UK saw a sharp rise in delivery issues during the 2024 Black Friday period, with damaged parcels increasing by 37% in comparison to the previous year.
That’s an estimated 85 million damaged deliveries, costing consumers over £2 billion.
Consumers should be reminded that retailers – not couriers – are legally responsible for ensuring deliveries arrive in good condition under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Let’s take a look at the five ways you can still make the most of Black Friday to ensure your business has a bumper year.
1. Clean Up Your Black Friday List
It is essential that your business cleans up its data ahead of any marketing campaigns.
Studies consistently show that consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than different forms of advertising.
92% of people trust word-of-mouth from people they know over other types of marketing.
Personal recommendations feel genuine and emotionally grounded, whereas ads – especially highly targeted ones – can come across as intrusive or self-serving.
Therefore, if you are planning on sending out Black Friday marketing this year, make sure you check your database for any inaccurate data beforehand.
If your business compiles large volumes of data then a bespoke solution will enable you to cleanse, dedupe, and standardise your database.
In turn, this will help you to remain compliant with GDPR and adopt a clearer view of your customer base.
Are you planning an email campaign?
If you are, it is also well worth considering Email Address Validation, as the email addresses in your list may be malformed (data-entry error or spam) or even non-existent.
A large number of inaccurate or invalid emails will increase your email sending costs (based on list size) and may damage your sender reputation.
Email validation by Hopewiser analyses each email address in your list and returns a report. Once your list has been validated, you can be confident that your emails are being sent to active and verified email addresses.
2. Now it is clean – help your customers to keep it that way
Once you have cleaned your customer and prospect data, the next step towards the perfect customer journey is keeping that data clean.
Validating their addresses and emails during the online checkout process is a prime way of doing just that.
About 22% of shoppers abandon their purchase due to a long or complicated checkout process with the average online cart abandonment rate sitting at around 70%.
In an era where customer experience is king, capturing data correctly is the linchpin of the purchasing process.
So how can you do this?
By integrating a sophisticated Address Validation and Email Address Validation solution into your web form that receives regular Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) updates.
This will help to combat and reduce customer frustration and address-related cart abandonment.
3. Verify Payment Details
Last but not least on the road to perfecting your customer journey this Black Friday is verifying their payment details.
Internet scams greatly increase during November and December as consumers up their online spending so you do not want your App or website to be enabling fraud if you want to maximimse sales during the holiday shopping season.
To help safeguard your customers and your business this Black Friday make sure you utilise Hopewiser’s Bank Account Validation software to reduce the risk of fraud and failed payments.
The quick and accurate capture of data at the point of entry within the online shopping cart will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
4. Improve Customer Relations
Customer retention is just as important as procuring new ones for Black Friday, therefore, improving and maintaining your customer relations is a must.
Ensuring you have the correct information about your customers in your database for future communications will help improve relationships.
This can be tricky considering that every day there are around 1,500 deaths and nearly 10,000 household moves.
Marketing to the wrong address or deceased persons could damage customer relations and ultimately your brand image.
After all, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand after one bad experience, and 92% will completely abandon after two or three negative interactions.
Hopewiser’s Bureau team use our state-of-the-art Data Cleansing software to match business data against a series of suppression files to highlight deceased and mover records.
Continuing to clean your data post Black Friday and Cyber Monday will help your marketing campaigns and analysis.
5. Protect Your Brand Image
Further to what we said about improving customer relations, another way to protect your business and brand image is by using a Data Cleansing service.
Over half of consumers in the UK will pay more to shop with a brand that they trust, even if cheaper alternatives exist.
But customer data rarely stays accurate for long due to natural decay – on average, data decays at a rate of around 30% per year, so using a reputable data cleansing solution who receives daily Royal Mail PAF updates will help ensure your data is of the highest quality, thus protecting your brand’s reputation.
The Result
Once you’ve addressed this 5 step process you can sit back and watch your business thrive.
If your company struggles with data, then outsource to the experts today!
Find out how Hopewiser’s innovative address and data solutions can help you create the perfect customer journey this Black Friday.
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