The 4 Biggest Mistakes Shopify Stores Make During BFCM

Alright I need to brag for a second.

Privy has helped over 500,000 customers sell more than $5 billion worth of product.

And just last week I spoke with Kristen Curtiss (our Director of Customer Success) and learned that she alone has helped her clients sell over $224,578,445.83.

She’s pretty good at her job.

So I asked her, “What are you doing to help merchants have a successful Black Friday Cyber Monday?”

And she said it’s really about helping them avoid the 4 mistakes she sees merchants make every single year. Here they are.

Mistake #1: Not collecting email addresses

If you’re running a site-wide sale, you might think you should turn off your email capture popup campaigns.

And while this might seem like the right thing to do, it will actually cost you future sales.

Because the majority of your site traffic will be new shoppers.

So if you don’t capture their information, and they leave without buying (which most shoppers do), it becomes much more difficult to convert them into customers.

During the busy season, we have seen customers collect 2x their signups (or more) just by continuing to collect email addresses.

How can you capture emails and run a site-wide sale?

1. Use an extra discount

Create a popup letting shoppers know about your site-wide 30% off sale (or whatever it is).

But, if they give you their email address, then they can get 40% off with an exclusive discount code.

Using Privy, you can even target this campaign only to shoppers whose email addresses you haven’t captured yet.

2. December Promotion

You can run sweepstakes to encourage customers to give you their email address.

This could include giving away a free product or giving exclusive discounts to your shop for next month like you’ll see in this example.

3. Give away a gift card

The average value of an email address comes out to be $15.98.

Mitu recognized this, and while they were running a site-wide sale, they used a free gift card to capture more emails and promote future purchases.

Mistake #2: Fear that customers will wait until BF to purchase

One of the biggest mistakes we see from customers is not promoting their products before BFCM.

We get it, you don’t want to take away from the biggest sales weekend of the year.

That’s why some of our customers offer an incentive for shoppers in early November.

Buy Now Save Later

Here’s an example that offers a 50% off code for any shoppers who purchase before November 15th.

You can drive sales today by creating a banner on the top of your website that encourages shoppers to buy today and return for BFCM.

Early VIP Week

Another way you can solve for this is by creating an early VIP Sales Week.

This is where you create a display campaign that only shows for customers who have purchased from you in the past.

You can set that up in Privy by targeting either Campaign Sign Up or Order Count:

This way, any email captured or previous customer will see this early VIP sale happening when they return to your site.

Mistake #3: Not getting customers to return

The easiest way to have a blowout Black Friday is to promote it to the customers you’ve been selling to for the past 364 days.

So how do you get your current customers to return?

Promote your early VIP sale over email

You’ll want to promote your early VIP sale over email to your existing customers.

We recommend creating urgency to get customers to buy early.

So, if you have limited stock or might sell out on Black Friday, you can use this to your advantage.

Because the only thing worse than not getting a discount at your favorite brand is not being able to buy anything at all.

Running an early VIP sale for past customers guarantees they get their favorite items on sale before you sell out. And it helps you sell more before Black Friday.

This year, we are seeing these VIP campaigns launch as early as October.😱

Create a cart saver

Black Friday might be a record sales day – but it will also likely be a record-high day for cart abandonment.

Cart saver campaigns can help you reduce abandoned carts and capture more emails.

This campaign triggers whenever a customer has a product in their cart and is about to leave the website. Here’s an example from Kinky Curly Yaki.

You can also use these campaigns to capture an email address or offer an exclusive discount like free shipping to incentivize the shopper to complete their order.

Mistake #4: Overwhelming customers

Above all else, you want to give your customers a good shopping experience.

Nobody wants to go to a website and see this:

So when you’re setting up your Black Friday or Cyber Monday Campaigns, make sure that you pause your existing ones.

And if you want to go one step further, you can even replace your existing abandoned cart emails with BFCM specific emails.

That way, if someone abandons their cart (which 85% of people do on BFCM), then you’re able to automatically remind them to take advantage of the biggest sale of the year before it’s over.

Want more tips?

If you want more tips and real customer examples, join Kristen and I on Wednesday, 11/4 for our Black Friday Blueprint training session.