Tips
As hard as it is to believe, Black Friday is just a few weeks away. A few of you reading this have had your deals lined up for weeks with every email template built and ready. If you’re like me, however, you might be playing a bit of catch up and only now starting to dial in these strategies and offers.
Whichever camp you’re in, we’ve been recommending a few key strategies to our resort partners over the last few years and have seen fantastic results. As BFCM 2025 quickly approaches, here are seven tactics to keep in mind as you and your team try to capture this massive spike in consumer spending.
Even people who buy a ton of gadgets on Black Friday feel the fatigue of consumerism. It’s why many retail brands are spending so much time and money on brand activations – experiences – to draw in their audience. You sell experiences, a thing for which demand in increasing and something retail brands can only capitalize on tangentially. Lean into that.
Your customers are probably a unique mix of local guests who come for the day or weekend, destination guests who stay for a while, and at least a couple shades in between. Whatever products you decide to offer up on the altar of Black Friday, make sure you have something for each of your key groups. Then target your campaigns – especially on email – to each individually.
The experiences you offer up to the BFCM crowds may be just that – experiences – but keep in mind that these holiday shoppers may be sizing up these experiences as gifts. Consider including something that they can wrap – a well-designed certificate, a bit of swag, a physical copy of their tickets, etc. – so their gift can be delivered as a smile-inducing surprise.
Value is the relationship between what someone pays for something and what they get in return. While you can absolutely improve that relationship by lowering the price, you can also tip the scales by asking someone to pay full price but offering them more in return. Including things like resort credit ensures that the value they receive has the chance to actually improve the experience of the things they paid (full price) for.
Most resorts will have a pesky week or month where occupancy can be a tough nut to crack. Before making your BFCM deals valid for dates throughout the year, consider limiting those special deals, prices, or packages just to those hard-to-reach places in your availability calendar. This is especially true if you’re planning to add heavy discounts to your game plan.
If you’re worried about dropping rates too low, remember that there are actually two parts of this upcoming sales holiday. You can be conservative on Black Friday to test the waters and then pivot your Cyber Monday offers as needed based on what you learn. If folks bite on a conservative price, hold the course for the following Monday. If they don’t, you can pull a few more levers during round two to drive those bookings.
Inboxes continue to crack down on bad senders. In the last couple weeks alone email marketers are seeing alerts from Gmail about this month being a moment for them start enforcing their requirements around DMARC. So, as you ramp up your sending, don’t abandon the best practices that have kept you in the inbox thus far. No short term gain will be worth long term impacts to deliverability.
Want a few more ideas? Check out the video we recorded a couple years ago about how resorts can make the most of the consumer behavior we see around the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
