Make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday by prepping your online store for the busiest shopping days of the year. Businesses in the eCommerce industry collectively saw 6.3 billion dollars in global sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2020, with an average cart price of 100 USD. Doesn’t an influx of eCommerce revenue sound divine, especially in time for the holiday season? Get in on the sales by preparing your website ahead of the holiday season rush.
Read on to learn how you can fortify your online business and enjoy an influx in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Promote Your Business Early
Supply chain issues, shipping delays, and price spikes lingered on everyone’s minds since the beginning of the pandemic. These factors led to holiday shopping beginning earlier, with 31% of consumers shopping for holiday gifts before the end of October! The COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to a boom in eCommerce transactions; in 2020, the eCommerce industry witnessed an increase in sales of about 244.2 billion or 43%. This trend is likely here to stay, which means that you must update your standard operating procedures to meet this behavioral shift.
If you haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon, start immediately or you will keep missing tons of outreach opportunities. While many platforms can supercharge your digital presence, try starting on popular social media sites like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. Next, figure out your target audience’s main platforms and post related content to arrest their attention. Once you start issuing sales promotions, remember to implement a cross-platform social strategy. By launching strong messaging on multiple platforms, you’ll pretty much guarantee that fans won’t miss out on your great offerings.
Earlier promotions and deals can also help generate more excitement about your business. When consumers recognize that you have good deals before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they might keep an eye out and watch what else you have planned.
Revitalize Your Email Marketing Strategy
The months leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday are key times to breathe new life into your email campaigns. Despite the intense focus on social media platforms, email remains the best channel to reach your consumers. Therefore, having a phenomenal email marketing strategy can drive more customers to your website. For instance, consider sending a series of browse abandonment or cart abandonment emails that will persuade customers to complete another sale.
Browse Abandonment Emails
Emails in the Browse abandonment series will target potential customers that visited your website and looked at products but did not add anything to their cart before exiting. Browse abandonment emails have an 80.9% higher open rate and a 50.5% higher click-through rate than regular promotional emails. Only existing customers on your mailing list can receive browse abandonment emails; sometimes they just need an extra push to return to your website. You can distribute browse abandonment emails anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days after the consumer leaves your website.
Cart Abandonment Emails
Meanwhile, Cart abandonment emails close in on customers that added items to their cart but did not begin the checkout process. Since these customers are much closer to the point of conversion than customers receiving browse abandonment emails, the chance of a sale becomes more likely. Moreover, including a small discount in your emails, like 10-15% off, can further encourage recipients to transact.
Cross-Sell Emails
Don’t forget to include Cross-sell emails in your Black Friday & Cyber Monday strategy. Once a consumer purchases a product, cross-sell emails recommend other products that would pair well with the one they bought. Sales specialists call this practice “upselling.” For example, a customer purchasing a curling iron might also need heat protectants; however, the thought probably never crossed the customer’s mind! By offering products that complement one another, you satisfy the customer’s needs on a deeper level. You do not need to make cross-sell emails for every product; that requires way too many emails. Instead, test this strategy with your best-selling products, see how it performs, and include a mix of new products in the future.
Test Your Website’s Functionality
Few annoyances compare to a slow-loading website, especially during the year’s busiest shopping days. Visitors will leave your store and never return if they find the checkout process too sluggish and tedious. Thus, you can avoid customer dissatisfaction by testing website performance. As you audit your eCommerce website, remember to assess load times, check for broken links, and simply your website’s navigational structure.
Load testing measures how much traffic your site can handle. Given the change in search behavior, you will probably experience an unprecedented amount of traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Luckily, you can use a whole host of services, like Google Page Speed Insights, to further test your website’s functionality. These services identify the resources that take the longest to load and show you TTFB (time to first byte) and other important metrics. TTFP, for example, measures how long the first response (byte) from a webpage takes after making a request. Metrics like these are crucial to understanding if you want to create the optimal user experience on your website.
Go Mobile This Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Do not forget about optimization for mobile shoppers! Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the No.1 days for mobile shopping, and mobile searches now outrank desktop searches, with nearly 60% of all search volume coming from mobile devices worldwide. You do not want to miss out on any mobile traffic, so give your visitors a positive experience by implementing a responsive design. From Apple’s mini-iPhones to the large iPad Pro, a responsive design allows resolution, image sizes, and scripting ability to fit into a device’s screen. Google’s very own Mobile-Friendly Test is one free option to quickly test your website’s mobile accessibility.
Make the Consumer Experience Enjoyable
Aside from page speed, brands dedicate countless hours to delivering a seamless website experience. For one, make sure you place your shop’s details front and center. You should clearly display your return policies, shipping prices, and times. Revise the copy of your policies as well to avoid any confusion on the big days.
Excellent Web Copy
Create descriptions that make your products irresistible. Each product description should have compelling sales copy and contain critical information like price, sizing, ingredients/materials, etc. Furthermore, try drumming up excitement with phrases like “selling out fast” and “limited time only” to tap into your customers’ FOMO (fear of missing out).
Chat Services
When customers have questions, a live chat service allows your team to assist them in real-time. Support teams take hours, even days, to send an acknowledgment email. But live-chat services will send an answer in just a few minutes. More importantly, offering superior customer service will build respect between you and your customers and will keep them coming back.
Apply the Right Deals
When people shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they want the best prices! Take advantage of these quintessential shopping days by offering generous deals for your top products. People are most often looking for deals of at least 20% off.
So, what kinds of exclusive deals will you create for Black Friday & Cyber Monday?
- Will you offer a BOGO (Buy One, Get One) deal?
- What about a certain percentage discount off an item or the entire bill?
- Will you create a bundle of products sold at a discount?
- How about including free shipping after a certain amount is spent?
Finding the right discount to make your store irresistible is key to a successful Black Friday / Cyber Monday experience.
For existing customers, you can send exclusive deals through emails, first access to sales, or priority shipping to encourage activity on your eCommerce website. But don’t forget about enticing newer customers either. Moreover, sending a coupon for signing up for your newsletter will attract more potential shoppers to your email lists, allowing you to send messages for future campaigns.
Whatever you decide to do with your discounts, you must make them accessible without any hassle. You can achieve this by creating a banner image at the top of your website explaining the main deals and directing them to a specific sale page. The more seamless you make the experience, the more eCommerce sales you will generate.
Start Preparing for Black Friday & Cyber Monday Today!
At Premiere Creative, helping DTC businesses grow and designing websites that customers enjoy is our job. If you need help optimizing your eCommerce store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday or need an experienced team to assist with your marketing, Premiere Creative is on your side. To get in contact with our team of eCommerce specialists, dial (973) 346-8100.
