Win at Black Friday with AI: Skyrocket your course sales with simple steps

Listen to the Black Friday Podcast!

Black Friday is a prime opportunity for you to capture new learners and boost your online academy’s sales. Leveraging AI tools can make the process efficient and creative, giving you a competitive edge without needing an entire team of graphic designers or marketing experts.

Watch our on-demand webinar to dive even deeper into these AI-driven strategies and learn how to take your campaign to the next level

Or just keep reading to uncover the secrets to a successful Black Friday campaign.

Brainstorm and conceptualize with AI

AI tools such as ChatGPT and MidJourney can make the brainstorming process seamless and creative, allowing you to explore multiple campaign ideas without the hassle.

Here’s how you can utilize AI for this step:

• Ideation with ChatGPT
  Use ChatGPT to generate campaign ideas that resonate with your audience. Simply prompt it with questions like, ‘What Black Friday offers might appeal to my target learners?’ or ‘How can I create urgency in my course promotions?’
• Visual conceptualization with MidJourney
  MidJourney is a great tool for generating visual concepts to accompany your ideas.
  For example, you can create mood boards or generate unique imagery that fits with the theme of your Black Friday campaign. Imagine having a set of visuals tailored to art, technical, or leadership courses—all conceptualized with simple AI prompts.
• Combine ideas
  You can also use AI to synthesize ideas from different campaigns. For instance, ask ChatGPT to combine creative offers and promotion types based on successful past campaigns.
  This will help you develop a holistic Black Friday strategy with a mix of tactics, all curated for maximum impact

Develop your Black Friday assets with AI

You can create high-quality marketing assets like sales pages, graphics, and email templates using AI, making the preparation process faster and more effective.
One of the most effective ways for you to elevate your Black Friday campaigns is by using AI tools to simplify content creation.

At LearnWorlds, we experimented with several AI tools, including MidJourney and ChatGPT, to generate the perfect assets for our Black Friday campaign.

With ChatGPT, our copywriters generated a series of flexible and compelling headlines to convey LearnWorlds’ value. The concept centered on “transformational savings” and the idea that LearnWorlds is “The LMS by e-learning experts for everything experts.”

We used MidJourney to create unique visual assets for our Black Friday theme, exploring prompts that helped us generate personalized graphics for different educational niches. This included creating graphics of the word “Friday” using different creative styles—e.g., using thick oil-based paint for art schools or electronic components for tech courses.

Here’s how you can utilize AI for this step:

• AI-driven copywriting
  Use ChatGPT to generate effective marketing copy that speaks directly to your audience. For example, ChatGPT can help you craft engaging headlines tailored to your target learners, like “Get Up to 50% Off—Take Your Career to New Heights with Our Online Courses!” or “Transform Your Skills and Save Big This Black Friday with Our Best-Selling Courses!” or even “Ready to Learn? Unlock Huge Savings This Black Friday!”
  ChatGPT can also help you create personalized content for different audience segments.
  • For example, for new users: “New to our platform? Get an exclusive 50% off your first course this Black Friday—limited time offer!”
  • For returning students: “Welcome back! This Black Friday, enjoy 40% off on our advanced courses and continue your learning journey.”
• Visual creation with MidJourney
  Use MidJourney to generate creative visuals that align with your course offerings, creating an appealing and consistent theme that makes your Black Friday campaign visually engaging and relatable to your course audience. Here are a few examples:
  • Art Courses: Ask MidJourney to create the word “Friday” using an artistic style, like thick brush strokes or oil-based paint. This resonates well with those interested in painting, drawing, or other visual arts.
  • Tech Courses: For tech-related courses, generate an image of “Friday” made of circuit boards or glowing electronic components to convey a modern, tech-savvy aesthetic.
  • Health & Wellness Courses: Use prompts like “the word ‘Friday’ formed by natural leaves and flowers, emphasizing calmness and growth,” to create visuals that align with well-being and mindfulness topics.
  • Cooking Courses: Generate images of kitchen utensils or dishes with the word “Sale” creatively integrated, adding an inviting, personal touch to your promotional materials.
  • Language Learning Courses: Ask MidJourney to create a collage of famous landmarks from around the world with the text “Unlock New Languages—Special Black Friday Offer!”

Craft your offering

Master the process of calculating and designing the optimal discounts and offers to captivate your audience and maximize your enrollments.

Here’s how you can utilize AI for this step:

• Define your target audience
  Identify who would benefit most from your courses during Black Friday. Are you targeting new learners, existing students, or corporate clients? Use AI to segment your audience effectively.
• Use AI for pricing insights
  Tools like ChatGPT can be used to brainstorm different discount levels and calculate how they could impact your sales. For example, you can ask, ‘What discount will maximize enrollments without sacrificing too much profit?’ AI can provide you with several pricing strategies based on the data you input.
• Create personalized offers
  Personalization is key. AI tools like ChatGPT can help generate personalized messages and offers tailored for different audience segments. This can include varying discounts for new users versus returning students, or creating bundles that are specifically designed based on course popularity.
• Test and iterate
  Leverage AI to create A/B testing strategies for your offers. For example, ChatGPT can help you devise multiple campaign versions, each with a different offer type—like discount percentage, bonus course content, or free trials. You can then test which one resonates the most with your target audience.
• Leverage urgency and scarcity
  Use AI to help craft urgent language that boosts conversions. Terms like ‘limited-time offer,’ ‘exclusive Black Friday discount,’ or ‘only available for 48 hours’ can be refined with AI’s help to match the tone and preferences of your audience.

Build a consistent theme with AI

MidJourney has become our go-to platform for creative visual assets. It provides a user-friendly way to search for images and explore prompts other creators have used.

During our Black Friday campaign, we made creative prompts like “3D render of the letter C made from thick oil paint, photographic quality, white background” to generate niche-specific visuals for schools that focus on painting, flower arranging, and more.

This approach gave us unique campaign visuals that perfectly represented different course offerings, and made each niche feel specifically catered to.

Imagine a flower arranging school using a beautifully rendered image of “Friday” adorned with flowers—it’s a personalized touch that connects instantly with potential learners.

Maintaining a consistent theme across your campaign is key to building recognition for your brand as a course creator. Using both MidJourney and ChatGPT, you can ensure your visuals and messaging align seamlessly.

Here’s how you can utilize AI for this step:

• Use prompts like “act as a graphic designer
  and suggest font pairings and colors for a Black Friday campaign,” you can generate cohesive styles across all touchpoints—from emails to landing pages.
• Use the fonts, colors, and graphic elements
  recommended by AI and apply them throughout your courses to maintain consistency. For example, we used a specific hex code color palette suggested by ChatGPT to ensure visual continuity.

LearnWorlds’ Flavor feature for campaign flexibility

For you as a course creator, the LearnWorlds Flavor feature, built-in the LearnWorlds no-code Website Builder, can be a standout tool during Black Friday. It allows you to clone and customize your school for a specific Black Friday theme without altering the original look of your academy.

Imagine instantly switching your course website to a Black Friday theme with special promotions—and then reverting it back once the campaign ends. With Flavor, this becomes incredibly easy, allowing you to make a high impact while staying efficient.

You can transform your landing pages, update logos, and add specific time-sensitive offers like “Flash Learn Frenzy: 20% off on courses.” This not only gives a festive Black Friday feel but also clearly communicates the limited-time deals.

Promote across channels

Get expert insights on promoting your offers through various channels—like email marketing and paid ads—to ensure your Black Friday campaign reaches the right people at the right time.

AI-driven email marketing can also be a game-changer for you during Black Friday. In the Black Friday webinar we recently hosted, Harmony from MailerLite shared how AI can be used to create and optimize email campaigns:

• Teaser emails
  Send teaser emails a week before Black Friday to build anticipation. These emails hint at upcoming offers and create excitement among your subscribers.
• Countdown and offer emails
  Use countdown timers and interactive elements to remind subscribers of the deals. On the morning of Black Friday, send your main offer email, with AI-generated subject lines to ensure high open rates.
• Reminder and last-chance emails
  Send multiple reminder emails to keep the campaign top of mind, and a final “last chance” email to create urgency as the sale nears its end.

Using AI for personalizing subject lines and content can significantly boost engagement and conversion rates.

Leverage social media and paid advertising

You can also use AI to enhance your social media and paid ad Black Friday campaigns. During our LearnWorlds Black Friday campaign, experts like Mari Smith, shared insights on AI-driven optimization for Meta and Google Ads:

• Meta advantage audience
  Use this AI feature to automatically find your ideal audience for campaigns. This is particularly useful for Instagram and Facebook ads, ensuring you reach your target demographics effectively.
• AI-generated ad copy
  Meta can provide multiple versions of your ad copy, allowing you to test what resonates most with your audience, while Google’s generative AI feature creates tailored images and videos for your campaigns. These capabilities enable course creators to create compelling ads without needing deep expertise in performance marketing.

Conduct post-campaign analysis

Once your Black Friday campaign is over, it’s crucial for you to analyze the results using AI tools. AI can help conduct post-campaign analysis and measure KPIs:

• Google Analytics and LearnWorlds integration
  Extract data from Google Analytics and LearnWorlds and use ChatGPT to combine and analyze these datasets. This can give you insights into metrics like revenue uplift, conversion rates, average revenue per user, and new customer acquisition.
• AI-generated reports
  Ask ChatGPT to act as a data analyst and generate meaningful KPIs from your campaign data. This might include calculating the percentage increase in monthly revenue, new customer rate, and more, providing you with a thorough understanding of your campaign performance.

Ready to make this Black Friday a turning point?

From content creation and visual design to paid ads and email sequences, AI tools can simplify the workflow, save time, and drive impactful results, helping you streamline the Black Friday campaign process.

Now it’s your turn. Leverage these AI tools and techniques to elevate your Black Friday campaign and maximize your course sales.

Want to see these tips in action? Watch our on-demand webinar for a step-by-step walkthrough and even more expert insights.

Rosemary Georgarakou

Rosemary is LearnWorlds’ Content Marketing Manager. She has over 2 decades of experience in omnichannel marketing and content writing for the IT and SaaS industry. Her expertise lies in crafting effective content marketing strategies that attract, engage, and nurture customers, enabling LearnWorlds to reach its target audiences with precision.