Driving Black Friday sales with exclusive, time-gated product bundles.
Like many B2C companies, Black Friday is an important event at The Futur. We seldom put our courses and products on sale, so this campaign is a big deal for our community and our business. Black Friday makes up a good chunk of our annual revenue.
For 2022’s marketing campaign we wanted to go beyond sweeping discounts and offer time-gated (and limited edition) product bundles that would give astute customers even greater savings.
The Problem
Announcing a site-wide sale is one thing, but marketing a cadence of new, time-gated product drops leading up to that sale is different kind of challenge. To top it off, and for the first time ever, we also planned to make our library of exclusive workshops available for purchase.
How might we…
Market and build anticipation for time-sensitive product releases leading up to Black Friday, without overwhelming customers and design a visual language that would resonate with their interests?
The Solution
To accomplish this task, we divided our marketing efforts into three phases: product bundle releases, primary sales period, and limited-time workshops. To tie each phase together and appeal to our creative-leaning customer base, we designed a visual language that used a modern take on the classic CMYK 4-color overprint effect. The bold, chunky quality of Champion Gothic helped add a bit of visual flair too.
Phase 1: Mystery bundles
To build excitement leading up to Black Friday, we announced a new “mystery bundle” each week through email marketing and social media posts. Two days later, the mystery was revealed and the bundle was available for purchase for 48 hours.
A dynamic landing for a dynamic campaign
I designed a Black Friday landing page to accommodate our 3-phase marketing campaign. The bundle and color scheme dynamically updated based on a series of countdown timers set for each product, indicating how long they would be available.
Phase 2: Black Friday sale
During the primary sale period, we highlighted our library of courses and products alongside a site-wide 25% off banner. The landing page also updated to emphasize our individual singular product offerings.
We like to avoid blatantly marketing to our 2 million+ YouTube subscribers, but we thought it was worth creating a short video to tell them about the sale. Our products are rarely discounted, so we wanted to let our audience know that this is the perfect opportunity to buy.
Phase 3: Cyber Monday workshops
As a final touch, we announced a special and additional mystery drop that would be exclusively available starting Cyber Monday. This drop included our often-requested library of unreleased workshops from previous campaigns. We also updated the landing page with a new section outlining what each available workshop is.
Retrospective
How my work contributed
I served as Creative Director and lead designer for this campaign, partnering closely with COO/CMO Ben Burns to plan, prep, and deploy everything. I also led the small, but mighty design team responsible for developing and creating all marketing design.
Critical skills needed
Communication and speed. Maintaining a clear line of communication for a marketing campaign of this scale is crucial. We made good use of Notion’s nested database feature. Although we thoroughly plan each step, there are always tasks that need attention and less time than we would like to tend to them.
Biggest challenge
Cross-functional alignment is the name of the game. Black Friday is an all-hands-on-deck event at The Futur. The most difficult challenge was coordinating with the development team to ensure they knew which products were being released and for how long, while synchronizing announcements with social media marketing.
