This Black Friday Tutorial is here to remind you about the stakes of the biggest sale season of the year. What you need to think about when preparing to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We have prepared some interesting numbers, checklists and good advice on how to handle abandoned carts!
There are only few days left for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday — biggest e-commerce feast. All of us know how it look like in Ireland and in the world. It is high time to prepare your marketing campaigns. How the campaign should look like? How to prepare you online business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Let me try to tell you.
Black Friday Tutorial – Some numbers to start with
This year Black Friday is on 29th of November and Cyber Monday on 2nd of December. It is incredibly rare to have it divided across two months but still, preparations must be done. Is it worth doing campaigns for Black Friday? The numbers tell a story about it:
- in 2019 people in Ireland are planning to spend an average amount of €300 per person,
- an average of 4 products will bo bought in Ireland;
- comparing to a regular shopping day, Black Friday season will generate over 1231% more revenue (source).
So there is a whole lot of money to fight for!
What can we expect this year – and how to prepare your business?
Black Friday Tutorial – Be 100% sure you can handle it
Before you will start preparing all the discount codes and sending them right away, please make sure that you can handle the load. Take into consideration not only margin calculation but also if you will be able to send all the goods and potential traffic on your website – will your hosting provider be able to handle the load.
Black Friday can be tough not only on your servers but also on your employees. Make sure that they are ready to respond to every pre-sale questions. Do they know how to answer them? Did you instruct all of them on the promos that you will be running on those dates? Did you chose a specific person to handle chat messages (if you have it installed)? Black Friday is all about impuls buying. If a potential customer wants to buy something and wish to ask a quick question – remember that he will not wait forever and you can lose a customer.
Black Friday Tutorial – Inform EVERYONE
Your customers want to know what are you planning for Black Friday. The worst approach you could take is to make them wonder until the very end as they already know what they want to buy and will search for that product across the web – do not lose them.
Making your online business without marketing and ads is like winking to a girl in the dark. No one besides us, know what we are doing.
Stuart Henderson
For many entrepreneurs and business owners idea of spending money on marketing for an ad that will promote lower prices feels absurd.
But I am already offering lower prices. You want me to pay for ads to promote them more?
…someone who will not generate revenue during Black Friday
If you will keep on waiting for the customers to find out about the promotions that you are planning to release, most probably you will wait forever and all the planning and preparations will go to waste. Promote your e-commerce business on social media and through newsletters. The following will target the right audience because all of those customers already know your business and most probably will be interested in visiting it on Black Friday. When it comes down to social media (facebook for example), the bullet proof to target the right users is to create a custom group based on your newsletter email lists. In the moment you will share the list you can ask Facebook to look for potential customers that are similar to your current ones. Smart and easy right?
Also remember to think about your marketing performance – people will not buy from you if they do not trust you – read about High Performing Marketing Campaigns.
Black Friday Tutorial – Make some tests
Do you want to discover a potential issue on your own or maybe you would like your customers to be the ones telling you about it? I thought that you would like to discover an issue before you will start loosing revenue and marketing money before you will notice that something is going wrong.
Before you will start your grand discounts, makes sure everything works. Here is the bullet proof checklist to go through before you start:
- Will your servers manage the load heading your way?
- Does the checkout process works as intended (payment gateways, cart, selecting delivery method, sending information about the sale)?
- Is it easy to find desired products on your website? Does the product category tree is well designed? Is the search engine on your site works well?
- Will your discounts and coupon codes work? Is there an obvious place to place them during the purchase? Is the shop doing the calculations accordingly?
- Have you prepared the mailing templates that will remind your potential customers about the abandoned cart? If not, prepare them,
- Are all of the integrations working well? Is your store management system updated and prepared for heavy duty? Does the store present accurate info on the quantity and will not allow purchasing a product that is no longer in your warehouse?
Create your battle plan on how to fight those abandoned carts
Not all of the potential customers that will add a product into the cart will eventually buy it – it is absolutely normal. But you should not get over it. You can try out something that is helping businesses all around the world for some time – email templates that are reminding customers that they have abandoned their carts. Social media ads for Facebook and Google are also able to display such ads to your customers (magic). Do not be afraid to use them. If you add a abit of humour to it, you can only count on success:
This is worth a hustle as – there are around 68% carts abandoned globally. Ich you will retain some of them, your revenue will increase drastically. Armed with a proper mailing templates you can go out and hunt.
Do not forget about the existing customers
Who told that you should treat all the customers equally? Black Friday is also the season to show love to your most loyal customers – as you might lose them to your competition. If you lost some of them during the year, you can try to retain them using Black Friday as an excuse. Make a hefty discount a grand offer to your churned customers. Bigger discounts, free or faster delivery, gift wraps – those are only few ideas how to honour your customers you want to retain.
Do not stop when Black Friday is over
E-commerce business is almost like your “i want to be fit” plan – you will gain amazing results only if you will focus on the marketing and selling through out the year. It can’t be a one time thing. Focus on your customers the whole year or you will lose newly gained customers as soon as Black Friday will be over.
On quick hint – Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a great opportunity to throw another punch as the Christmas is just around the corner. You can leverage the investment in few ways:
- Gain new e-mail address of your Black Friday customers and use them during Christmas. How to do it well? Offer additional benefits to your customers who will decide to enroll your newsletter – additional discounts, free delivery or a small gift to the last purchase. How you can fail quickly? Offer discounts only after enrolling the newsletter. Usually it is a grate tactics, but in the sale seasons like Black Friday, when on top of everything you ask your customer for more – it is not the right approach.
- Offer a discount for Christmas during the Black Friday purchase. Easy as it sounds, just add new coupon code that they can redeem for Christmas in the purchase confirmation email. If the offer is interesting, they will save it for later and eventually use it.
Recap
This Black Friday Tutorial is here to remind you that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the most intense sales season out there. Hope that my article will help you gain new users and retain existing ones. I wish you all the best, good luck!
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