There’s no denying that Black Friday is huge for eCommerce.
Last year, on that one day alone, consumers collectively dropped $6.2 billion dollars on online stores!
And as an entrepreneur and an eCommerce store owner, you’re probably doing all you can to capitalize on the Black Friday frenzy. That’s great, but…
You also don’t want to fall into a post-BFCM slump.
It’s important to be proactive during your Black Friday efforts and leverage all that action into holiday season sales. That means taking advantage of the high traffic to remarket, having promotions ready, and giving customers a reason to come back.
It’s not the time to take it easy for the rest of the year — start planning your post-BFCM promos now to maximize your 2019 sales revenue!
Use the following strategies to make December your most profitable month yet.
1. Extend Cyber Monday sales into a Cyber week
If you’re like the majority of eCommerce store owners, you might be thinking:
Psh, Black Friday is where the money’s at. Consumers don’t get that excited over Cyber Monday.
Wrong.
Black Friday might seem like a bigger event than Cyber Monday, but Cyber Monday actually results in more revenue for online retailers and eCommerce store owners.
American shoppers spent $6.2 billion dollars during Black Friday in 2018, but they spent $7.9 billion during Cyber Monday.
And these days, Cyber Monday can last all week — and even go into the holiday season. According to Yahoo Small Business, there’s a growing trend of Cyber Monday spending “to be more evenly spread across the holiday shopping period.”
That means you need to have promotions and a plan not just for Cyber Monday and Cyber Week, but for all the way through December.
It’ll be a challenge to get people interested in deals when merchants — yourself included — were probably just offering some their best deals of the year for Black Friday. You’re competing with lots of discounts that just happened — including your own.
So you need to be very deliberate about the messaging you use and which products you put on sale. Here’s what you can do to be prepared.
Plan Black Friday so you’re in a good position for Cyber Week
Don’t blow all your chips on the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Make sure you have enough inventory to keep the steam after Black Friday, and some ad dollars left for the Cyber Week and December push.
You might want to drop a new collection the week of Cyber Monday to keep things interesting (more on that next!). So if you have a new collection that you were planning to drop before Black Friday, you might want to hold onto it.
You could even promote new products through a series of daily deals. Basically, if you ran deals leading up to the BFCM weekend, you can try them again but with different products, or even the same products and different promotions.
If you don’t have a new collection, offer a deeper discount on the products you were selling during BFCM and use remarketing techniques to get shoppers back to your store throughout the holiday season.
You won’t have another time to offer deep discounts during a high traffic season for a while after December.
That’s where retargeting comes in, more on that later!
Learn from your Black Friday performance
While you should have your post-BFCM promotions planned, you should also be willing to adapt them based on your store’s Black Friday performance.
If you had a promo that didn’t do as well as you thought it would take that into consideration.
Any similarities between that offer and another promo you had planned post-BFCM? Make sure you change it up or make adjustments to optimize performance!
2. Drop a new collection during Cyber Week or in December
A good way to keep your offerings fresh and exciting for the holidays is to drop a new product or collection right after BFCM weekend.
After giving out some of your best deals of the year, you’ll need to keep your audience’s attention with something other than just discounts.
If you try to discount the same products you just had on sale for Black Friday, customers probably won’t be interested — unless they’re on sale for an even lower price.
Instead, keep their interest in new products to drive traffic and orders. This year, Cyber Week goes into December, so people will probably be on the hunt for Christmas gifts.
You could even offer a moderate discount on the new collection for the month of December (like 10 to 20 percent off), to tempt customers into taking the bait.
Tease your new product launch on social media, email, and other marketing channels. You can even advertise it by putting bounce back coupons inside all your Black Friday packages. More on that later!
3. Start or grow a loyalty program
Since you’ll probably have a lot of shoppers visiting your store over BFCM weekend, it’s a great opportunity to start or grow a loyalty program.
A loyalty program is a great way to engage with customers, encourage them to return to your store to spend their points, and collect customer information for remarketing.
With our Bold Loyalty Points app, you can create a custom loyalty program and then set a generous sign-up bonus during the BFCM weekend. This could incentivize new customers to sign up so they can get a discount on their BFCM purchase.
Later, during December, you can send customers who haven’t spent their points a reminder to visit your store and use them.
If most of your customers did use their points, you could add free points to their account and then send them an email letting them know, potentially driving more traffic after BFCM.
The cool thing about customer retention apps like Loyalty Points is that they also incentivize customers to share your store on social media. You can set up your program to reward them with points if they share their purchases on Twitter or Facebook.
Vinyl supplier for crafters, CraftHTV.com, uses bonus points to incentivize loyalty program members to share the store on social media.
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With the high traffic coming at you during the BFCM weekend, a loyalty program can help get some of those customers to buy from you again.
4. Remarket new deals to customers who didn’t convert
There’s a few ways to do this, but the first one I’m going to discuss is pay per click.
Okay, I know that PPC always gets more expensive around Christmas, but hear me out.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s likely that you’ve seen a huge surge in traffic to your website.
Not everyone will have made a purchase — so here’s your chance to hit the non-buyers with remarketing ads so they’ll return to your store and actually buy something.
Image from iMarketSolutions.com.
If you’re new to remarketing ads, here’s a guide to creating remarketing ads on Google.
You could also try Facebook retargeting. If you don’t have a Facebook pixel set up on your store yet, that’s the first step! Check out our guide!
When remarketing, try to convey some sort of urgency, like a limited-time offer, in your messaging.
For instance:
Offer a bundle deal or free expedited shipping (so that the item reaches your shopper in time for Christmas!) in order to increase conversion rates and sales.
For added benefit, spy on your competition to steal their keywords.
You can also use Bold Brain to create segmented email lists. The app automatically segments your customer by who viewed a specific product, already bought from you, or abandoned a cart.
You can then export that list and send highly-targeted emails to each set of customers.
Sending them an exclusive offer for a bigger discount on products they’re interested in could be the incentive they need to actually buy something.
Pro Tip: Make sure to keep an eye on your inventory levels, and pause your PPC ads if your products are out of stock!
5. Put bounce back coupons into every Black Friday package
Chances are you’ll be filling more orders than any other time of the year, so take advantage of that by advertising your holiday season deals right in the orders your sending customers.
They’re called bounce back coupons, Put a small printout, flyer, or coupon you package with every order you ship.
They’ll give your BFCM customers a reminder that you’re running a holiday season sale when they unbox their product.
These people are already your customers, so the chance is they’ll actually be interested in other promotions you’re running.
You can design your own bounce-back coupons for free with sites like Canva, or hire a designer to make you some with services like Fiverr.
You could also use an exclusive discount code that’s only eligible until Christmas or Boxing Day. This will allow you to track how effective the technique is and also encourage the customer to come back to your store during the holiday season before the offer expires.
As we’ve already mentioned, these bounce-back coupons will probably only be effective if you’re promoting a new collection, discounting products you didn’t have on sale for BFCM, or offering an even bigger discount on products you already had on sale.
Final words on overhauling your holiday campaign strategy
Black Friday is super important — there’s no doubt about that.
But rather than thinking about Black Friday as a sprint, picture it as a marathon.
In short: it’s about lasting the distance.
It won’t do you good to burn out too early, and miss out on all the revenue you could’ve made during Cyber Monday and the entire month of December.
(Like I mentioned, Cyber Monday generates more revenue than Black Friday; after that, you can tap into all the last minute shoppers who buy presents a week before Christmas).
So pace yourself, and stock up on plenty of coffee, energy bars, and microwaveable meals.
These last two months will be grueling — but they’ll also be extremely profitable if you play your cards right.
I’ll see you on the other side!
This article was originally published by our friends at Bold Commerce.
