It’s the end of another Black Friday weekend, the annual event that has transformed the retail calendar and kicks off the festive shopping season for eager shoppers the world over. Below Karen Wheeler, Country Manager and Vice-President, Affinion UK, tells Finance Monthly both traditional and challenger banks could be missing an opportunity and should take inspiration from what retailers are doing during Black Friday.

In the UK alone, £1.4bn was spent on online sales in the UK on Black Friday – an increase of 11.7% on last year, according to online retailers trade body IMRG.

Given the amount of hype and expectation, it’s not surprising to see that banks are slowly waking up to how they too can be inspired by the retail world, and capitalise on this golden window of opportunity. Starling Bank, for example, was offering customers the opportunity to earn 10 per cent cashback on their online shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (up to a total of £25) if they invite one person to join the bank with a referral code.

A missed opportunity

But aside from Starling, there are few examples of other banks experimenting with Black Friday offers, incentives and deals, and I think this is a huge missed opportunity. At a key time for consumers looking for discounts and extra value, could they be doing more to find new ways to make their customers happy, and generate goodwill and loyalty that extends beyond the Christmas period?

Of course, the understandable challenge for banks is that there is less of a natural seasonal spike for them to build momentum towards. Whilst retailers can live or die depending on their performance during the critical Christmas season, banks need to offer a consistent and engaging customer experience all year round. So how can providers give their customers the ‘Black Friday feeling’ every day of the year?

1. Surprise and delight customers – What makes Black Friday a success is the sense of the anticipation and surprise that it brings. Starling’s offer is a good example of capturing the festive zeitgeist, but instead of being a one-off purchase, it’s the start of a relationship with a customer built around meeting an everyday need. For banks, the opportunity is therefore to find moments where they can offer practical, relevant solutions which help customers to manage their lives, delivered in a personalised way which makes them feel special.
2. Personalisation is crucial – With reams of data available, there is no excuse for banks to make generalisations or assumptions about their customers, particularly at a time when life milestones are more fluid than ever. Barclays is doing this right, with its Life Moments proposition that lays out key considerations for events such as going to university, buying a house or having a baby – without any reference to age groups or gender. More channels and touchpoints mean more opportunity to collate data on each customer and build a picture of their lives into a ‘segment of one’, meaning every interaction should be relevant, engaging and valued.
3. Think outside of the box – According to the British Banking Association, there were 19.6 million banking app users across the UK in 2016, with 159 logins occurring every second. This means banks have a huge opportunity to capitalise on this high frequency of interactions and ask themselves: how can we build on this, what more can we offer our customers? We know from our partnerships with some of the UK’s leading banks that in order to build long-term loyalty, it’s essential to provide solutions for other relevant parts of their lives to deepen the engagement.

It will be interesting to see if more banks trial Black Friday offers and promotions in the years to come. However, banks’ relationships with their customers aren’t only important during the last weekend in November.

This is why it’s crucial to find new ways to engage, surprise and delight customers throughout the year; both meeting and predicting their needs and becoming an increasingly important part of their lives to build long-term relationships and encourage loyalty.

LCD wide screen TV at 50% off? Don’t mind if I do. Except I’ll have to make my way through a throng of a thousand punters, get punched in my left eye half a dozen times, and likely trample a few elderly buyers on the way. Black Friday is year on year becoming more about the thrill than the financial savings. Masses of people line up for the best stores to open, and scramble in once the doors open, only to leave the weak behind.

According to official data collected this year by Quantcast, in the US alone in 2014, 23% of 133,700,000 Black Friday shoppers camped outside a store the night before, and in 2015, all in all the nation spent around $67,560,000,000 in store and $2,932,000,000 online, with an average accumulated spend of $403.35 per person. These stats go to prove why Black Friday is crucial for the economy, as around 30% of annual retail sales occur between this celebrated shopping spree and Christmas itself. This in turn means more staff are hired in the busy period; according to NRF statistics, between an estimated 640,000 and 690,000 workers in 2016.

As many take part in Black Friday’s magic race for deals, most are either behind the cashier’s desk, managing teams, counting the numbers, or on the other side of the retail coin, making the most of prices. To shed light of the kind of situations, violence and anarchy you can expect from Black Friday this year, taking place on the 24^th November, Finance Monthly has put together 10 popular videos displaying the worst moments that have taken place on Black Friday over the past decade. Some of these may completely put you off the idea of taking part in this public event, while some will prepare you for what’s to come, if you’re still daring to make the most of it.

10. Black Friday Threats

Screaming profanities and ‘squaring up’ to one another, these two shoppers are consumed by the Black Friday fury as Asda’s security staff and various members of the public keep the two from ripping each other to shreds. The passion for justice is palpable as they stare at each other with shopper’s rage. “I’ll be outside mate!”

9. Black Friday Shopper Horde

Here we see hundreds of shopping mall dwellers longing for the shop’s shutters to rise, so they can engage in the Black Friday rush they’ve been waiting for all morning. As the shutters reach but an inch off the ground, fingers curl round the bottom, some people squirm under the rail, and heads start popping through the bottom. Before you can say Black Friday, the horde of shoppers are through the gap below the shutters and racing for a find. The shutters aren’t even half way up yet, but the rules are there to be broken, right?

8. Black Friday Staff Barricade

Just over eight members of staff form a barricade dam of stopping power as they proceed to open shop on this fine Black Friday morning in 2016. As the shutters are half a meter up the doors, look who comes crawling in, their first customer of the day, along with a whole other mass of shoppers ready to dig their claws in the best bargains. As the staff themselves are pushed out of the way, and fail in their mission to barricade until open, members of the public are infiltrating their way through the employees’ legs and getting on with their hunt. The staff are clearly scared and try to shut it back down, having to stomp it to the ground. One guy quite reasonably just lifts his hands in the air and says nah forget it, not today.

Hit the Next button to see our top 7 Black Friday scraps!

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