Promotional Strategy

With Black Friday signaling the final stretch of holiday shopping, it's more important than ever for retailers to execute their digital marketing strategies with precision. In a noisy marketplace with countless retailers clamoring for consumers’ limited dollars and attention, using the right message to reach the right people in the right channel at the right time of day is critical.

Have retailers’ earlier and earlier deals each holiday season made Black Friday moot? Not quite. Some 87 million Americans still hit stores on Friday, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey released on Sunday. But by ramping up holiday sales events more intensely than ever, and as early as the first week of November, retailers took a big bite of what's long been the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Total spending for the four-day weekend that started on Thanksgiving is expected to reach $50.9 billion, down 11.3 percent from last year's estimated $57.4 billion, according to NRF projections.

Black Friday weekend is the year's biggest promotional event for most major U.S. retailers, and yet there are prominent holdouts ignoring it - or at least being discreet about their specials. Tiffany & Co., Dollar Tree and T.J. Maxx are among the chains that aren't promoting Black Friday on their websites. That's a sharp contrast with the supersized fonts advertising sales at Wal-Mart, Macy's and Best Buy.

During the holidays, small retailers feel like the little kid in a big family, jumping up and down to get attention. They can't match the pre-Black Friday hoopla of the big-box stores, so they're trying new ways to say, "Hey, look at me!" American Express launched the most successful national campaign in 2010, naming the Saturday after Black Friday "Small Business Saturday." It's a win-win-win, with consumers getting discounts at participating small businesses when they use an Amex card, retailers receiving tons of free TV advertising for the event, and American Express adding more retailers that accept its cards.

Sears will provide members of its Shop Your Way loyalty program access to many Black Friday deals one full week before Thanksgiving, on Sears.com from 6 p.m. on Nov. 20 until 11:59 p.m. (CT) on Nov. 21. During this online member-exclusive pre-sale event, members can log on to their Shop Your Way account during the sale to access the deals. On Thanksgiving Day, Sears stores will open at 6 p.m. with more than 1,000 doorbuster deals on the most popular gifts of the season, through 1 p.m. local time on Black Friday.

Super-charged by increased mobile outreach, intensified consumer planning, and raised numbers of retailer mobile apps, traditional retailers will be going to work earlier, and working harder to engage consumers this season if they want their share of a projected individual $855.00 holiday spend, about 4 percent higher than last year. Sixteen-thousand consumers from the nine U.S. Census regions identified these real facts-of-retail-life in Brand Keys’ 20th annual national holiday shopping survey. And many consumers missed Black Friday. That's because it started last Saturday. Surprised? Well, it shouldn't have been a total surprise.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are quickly approaching and more than ever this holiday season, retailers need to cater to shoppers wherever they are as they research and purchase products. A recent survey of 3,000 global, multigenerational consumers found that 90 percent expect their customer experience to be consistent this holiday season regardless of how they shop — online or in-store. While this is no small feat, if retail brands keep the following priorities top of mind, they'll be ready to meet customer demands this Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

J.C. Penney will open its stores at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving in search of an edge over Macy's and Kohl's. J.C. Penney said on Monday it would open its stores for Black Friday shopping at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, an hour earlier than its closest competitors Macy's, Kohl's and Sears, and three hours earlier than it did last year, in the latest upping of the ante in the holiday sales wars. It's easy to see why Penney would want to gain an edge on its rivals in what promises to be a bruising, super-promotional holiday season.

Wal-Mart is doing whatever it takes to rope in holiday shoppers however they want to buy. For the first time, Wal-Mart is offering free shipping on what it considers the season's top 100 hottest gifts, from board games to items related to Disney's hit film "Frozen," starting Saturday. The move comes as rival Target began offering free shipping on all items, a program that started in late October and will last through Dec. 20. Wal-Mart is also planning to offer discounts on more than 20,000 items on a broad range of products, starting Saturday.

Earlier this week, lululemon announced that it would be partnering with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace + Education and contributing $750,000 over the next three years to support the center's initiatives. According to The Globe and Mail, the announcement didn't take long to elicit plenty of complaints from consumers over the fact that a company that pushes $100 yoga pants will be teaming up with the Dalai Lami, a well-known advocate for the poor. "Some people are disgusted by it; some people think it's really bizarre," Jennilyn Carson, founder of YogaDork.com, told The Globe and Mail.