Black Week starts on 23 November. If you sell hours rather than products, the usual playbook does not fit. You have no stock to clear, and cutting your rate is a decision you live with all next year.
That is not a reason to sit the week out. Black Week is one of the few weeks when people are actively looking to buy something, and a service business can use that without repricing its hours. Four things, and there is time to build all four.
1. Sell a gift card, not a discount
For a clinic, a salon, a workshop or anyone selling to consumers, the gift card is the Black Week product. It is bought in November and used whenever the customer gets round to booking, so the money arrives in your worst cash-flow month and the work lands in a quieter one.
You can be generous on a gift card without touching your rates, because you are selling a voucher rather than an hour. Two thousand kroner of treatment for eighteen hundred is an offer. Two thousand kroner of your time for eighteen hundred is a new price list.
2. Add something instead of taking money off
If a gift card does not fit what you do, the other way to show up in Black Week is to add rather than subtract. A defined package at a fixed price. An extra service included. A longer warranty, a first session at no cost, a year of support bundled in.
The customer gets more for the same money, which reads as a good deal, and your rate is exactly where it was on 1 December. Write the scope down properly while you are at it. A vague package is how a good offer turns into three months of unpaid extra work.
3. Check that someone can buy it at nine in the evening
Black Week traffic arrives outside office hours, on phones, from people who have decided quickly. If your offer ends in a contact form and a callback on Monday, you do not have a product, you have an enquiry, and the buying mood rarely survives the weekend.
So before you promote anything, check three things. The offer has its own page with a real URL you can put in an ad. It can be bought or booked to the last step on a phone, one-handed. And it is posted on your Google Business Profile, which is where a lot of local searching actually ends.
Then add one email. If somebody starts a booking and stops, send a short note an hour later offering to hold the slot. That single automation is worth more than the discount you decided not to give.
4. Publish something that is not a percentage
Every inbox in late November is a wall of percentages. That makes it a good week to send something that is not one.
So publish the document that helps a buyer decide. We call that documarketing: instead of shouting about a price, you publish the thing the customer needs in order to choose, and you get their email address in return.
An accountant publishes a Q4 budget template. An electrician publishes a checklist for the house before Christmas. A web agency publishes the tender template a business needs in order to brief a website project properly. It takes a weekend to make, it works for the next year, and it keeps working in January when the discounting has stopped.
What to do when
- September: decide what you are actually selling, a gift card, a package or both, and write the scope down.
- October: build the offer page, make sure it can be bought on a phone, and set up the unfinished-booking email.
- Early November: publish the document and start collecting addresses while clicks are still cheap.
- 23 to 30 November: promote the offer, post it on Google Business Profile, and send it to the list you built.
Write the offer down today
Before anything else, write what you are selling in one sentence. Something like "a gift card for 2 000 kroner of treatment, for 1 800, from 23 November". If it takes a paragraph to explain, it will not sell over a phone in the evening, and you have found the first thing to fix. Everything else on this list is built on that one sentence.
Not sure which of the four fits what you sell? Send us the question. It is usually a short answer, and we would rather you asked in September than in week 47.