📈 Ace these for a record-breaking BFCM
It’s that time again!
Black Friday & Cyber Monday offer much-needed hope to many ecommerce sites who have had a tough couple of years. Particularly those with bricks & mortar shops who need to offset some obviously difficult months during those periods of lockdown in 2020/21.
In what’s predicted to be the biggest to date, this year’s Black Friday should represent a good opportunity to bounce back from any tough Q2/Q3 periods, but overall planning needs to start, well, yesterday.
Running multiple campaigns across all of your marketing channels can make October & November an exhausting time, but get it right now, and your online revenue should look like 📈. Here’s some essential starters:
Nail your inventory & fulfilment
Have your buyers and distribution teams boxed this task off already? Do you have sufficient quantities of stock? Have you considered what’s almost certainly going to sell and doubled down on that? Or would selling out of everything equal success?
However you tackle BFCM, make sure you don’t disappoint your customers, and come prepared. Imagine you had 1,000,000 website visits to a product page and only 12 garments? 😩
Consider:
- Are your best sellers or most heavily promoted items well stocked?
- Can you offer free shipping if you normally don’t?
- Is your returns policy crystal clear and easily accessible to the customer?
- Are any paid ads ready to automatically expire once stock is depleted?
Craft a compelling offer
Are you going to heavily discount? Great! Keep it simple. If a customer needs to do too much mental maths, you’ve already lost.
Consider:
- Understandably, flat rate discounting has become increasingly popular. ~10% off a £10 dress? Meh. Customers are used to seeing huge discounts, but watch your margins.
- Make it easy. Discount code BF20? Go for it! Automatic price reduction across all of your site? Even better. Find the hidden blue squirrel on the site and click on him three times while patting your head and rubbing your tummy for a 5% code? Customers won’t bother.
Use email effectively
Do customers know when your offer is coming? Have a plan to build up some hype and get people mentally purchasing before they’ve even visited your site. Email still returns a fantastic ROI, so use it to best effect before, during, and after BFCM to stay front of mind — easy to do once in a customers inbox.
Consider:
- Making sure your customers are well prepared for your offer. Give them a heads-up or ‘exclusive email subscriber access’ before anyone else.
- It’s never too late! Despite BFCM emails clogging inboxes in late-November, it’s still a powerful tactic. Grow and nurture your list — now!
- Have a plan. Even if it’s a simple ‘Email 1: Monday 27th, Email 2: BF, Email 3: CM’, that’s a start. But more than ever, you can afford to be more aggressive than that.
Get your product feed up to scratch
In a competitive landscape like womenswear or consumer electronics, your feed can make or break your Google Shopping campaigns. When did you last consider yours? If you’re thinking ‘feed 🤔?’ check out our intro on optimising your product feed from last year.
Consider:
- A quick audit of your feed. Is it full of discontinued items? Are all of the taxonomies correct?
- Does your feed need additional optimisation? If you’ve recently launched new ranges and haven’t optimised them, placement in the shopping carousel might be tough.
- Is your feed feeding all of your marketplaces? If you’ve got a tip-top product feed but are only using it for Google Shopping, are there other marketplaces on which it could be used? Facebook Stores are free!
If at first you don’t succeed, retarget
Is this set up? The last week of November might be the busiest time your site ever sees. Don’t miss out! People browsing on Thursday might be prime to buy on Cyber Monday. If they don’t purchase immediately, be there to followup when they’re ready.
Consider:
- Get right back to basics: if a customer has added a product to their basket and not purchased, chase them up with some simple remarketing ads for that product.
- Can you put together some cross-channel remarketing? Try a custom audience in Facebook Ads based upon your site non-converters or strongest category pages.
- Remember to remove customers from remarketing once they’ve converted!
Make it easy to buy
People’s credit cards are hot and primed for spending. But don’t make them work for it. Get an unbiased, technically inept friend to make a test purchase. Is it as easy as it humanly can be? BFCM might put lots of new customers into your sales funnel, it’s your job to pull them out the bottom as a paying customer.
Consider:
- Can you upsell some lower value items? Customers are primed for spending, so increasing their AOV just a slight amount will make a huge cumulative difference to your total revenue.
- Can your online store cope well with increased demand? How about a greater percentage of international orders?
- Are there common stumbling blocks you’ve had on the back burner to fix? Now’s the time to add a guest checkout, or remove that additional step at checkout.
Analyse & optimise!
Unless this is your very first Black Friday (in which case, good luck!), what did you learn from BFCM last year? Did your website performance struggle under increased traffic? That’s easy to fix! Did your social ads do nothing in a saturated market? Pull back the spend.
The benefit of YoY data during a time like BFCM is gold dust. Start by picking apart the data; determine what went well, and what could be better.
Consider:
- A simple analysis of where traffic originated for BF last year. Did your organic social posts resonate? Or was it a big investment into Google Ads? If something stands out, double down this time!
- Spend carefully. If a campaign had a high ROI last year, but hit a budget cap, make sure this time round it has plenty of headroom.
- Stay focussed. If you know what worked last year, don’t be tempted to throw half of your budget at ShopLoop this year, “just because”.
Turn deal-hunters into repeat custom
For many customers, this might be their very first exposure to your brand. If they convert into paying customers, great! But don’t stop there. Think about how you can sell them a second item. And a third. And make them a lifetime customer, and maybe even a brand advocate over time.
Consider:
- Can you run a loss leader? If your customer lifetime value is high, recruit them more cheaply than ever and get your investment back later.
- Can you get some brand story & personality buy-in from your customers? Will a simple post-purchase “Hello and thank you” email from you as a founder/owner help to make a personal connection?
- Ensure your customer service is top-top. The last few years have been stressful enough without having to deal with potential issues with orders – make the customers experience one they won’t forget, and they’ll come back.
- Once a customer has made a purchase, consider remarketing a corresponding product to them in a little while. Wouldn’t this nice scarf go with that hat you’ve just bought…?
Black Friday / Cyber Monday is an exciting but understandably stressful situation for any burgeoning ecommerce retailer. But with a little forward planning, you can (in theory!) sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour, and make it a record sales day.
