Black Friday began in the 1980s, when merchants in Philadelphia started to use the term “Black Friday” and associated it with a boost in brick-and-mortar retail sales. Three decades later, Black Friday has become one of the biggest sale days for retailers. The ecommerce industry later coined Cyber Monday to promote their online sales following Black Friday.
Discounts are massive on both days, resulting in an online shopping frenzy. In 2020, Adobe stated that shoppers spent $6.3 million per minute on Black Friday.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday present annual challenges for businesses. If a business is not prepared to handle the upcoming holiday shopping season, they may face financial losses instead of positive gains. Due to the high competition between businesses and technical obstacles, businesses need to carefully plan out their Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategies.. Here are a few tips to start implementing on your ecommerce website before the holiday season.
8 Ecommerce Tactics to Implement for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Insider Intelligence is predicting that ecommerce holiday season sales will increase 15.5% in 2022. These predictions, along with past trends, are highly motivating for ecommerce retail businesses. However, in order to feel the effects of the holiday sale season, businesses need to analyze their strategies and implement changes before it is too late. Businesses that optimize their site for increased web traffic, enhance their customer experience, and create targeted marketing strategies will be able to win big this holiday season.
1. Market Your Holiday Campaigns
Begin your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing campaigns early. Do not wait until the last minute to run ads and promote your products. Make sure your marketing strategy is in place months in advance.
Here are 2 ideas to enhance your marketing strategy:
A research conducted by Campaign Monitor found that 116.5 million emails were sent by ecommerce businesses on Black Friday and 106 million were delivered on Cyber Monday. The chances of your email reaching the right customers amongst millions of emails reduces significantly.
Get ahead of your competitors so that you can increase your brand’s visibility.
Offer exclusive deals, share information about products that will go on sale, and highlight your brand’s unique traits.
Social media is a big revenue generator when it comes to Black Friday Sales. A HubSpot survey concluded that 54% of the survey participants clicked on a Black Friday discounts ad while scrolling through their social media.
Save room in your organization’s marketing budget to run Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads on social media. Testing ads early will give you time to judge which ads work best. Moreover, this will also bring awareness to your brand and help familiarize potential customers with your products.
2. Harness the Power of Social Media for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Secondly, eMarketer estimates that 96.1 million people in the United States will make a purchase via social commerce in 2022. Social commerce gives ecommerce businesses additional opportunities to capture their target audiences and convert through different platforms.
Here is how you can leverage social commerce for your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- Create an active presence on social media platforms.
- Use stories and posts to showcase countdowns to discounts and highlight products that will be on sale as the holidays approach.
- Create posts containing hidden discount codes. According to a press release published by Matter, a marketing organization, on Business Wire, 61% of social media consumers have purchased something based on the recommendation of an influencer. Identify relevant influencers and work with them to create anticipation around your upcoming promotions.
3. Strategize Your SEO
You can improve your SEO and website performance with these simple tips:
- Bright Edge concluded that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Embedding good keywords throughout your website allows the Google web crawler to find your website easily.
- Optimize images and videos to reduce their load time.
- Test your website on Google pagespeed repeatedly, to identify any potential delays that might arise on Black Friday.
- Gather insights on your website performance on a regular basis to ensure that the website is healthy and functioning optimally.
- Build Domain Authority by including healthy inbound and outbound links.
- Improve and simplify website navigation. Customers should be able to find products and their descriptions in one or two clicks.
Confused about where to start? Use this guide to learn techniques to test your ecommerce platform.
4. Unify Customer Support Processes
Your customers should never feel abandoned at any point during their shopping experience on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Think of all the questions they may have and try your best to answer them.
Here are a few ways to improve customer support:
According to a Tidio study, 62% of customers prefer to chat with a bot instead of waiting for a person to answer their question. Chatbots are the perfect solution when facing an influx of customer questions and concerns. Implementing chatbots increases the number of customers your company can help at any given moment.
- Live Chat with Supporting Teams
It is necessary to keep a live chat option open with supporting teams. Not all customer concerns are answerable by the Chatbot, this is where the live chat team will need to step in. Live support can deliver the complex answers more efficiently as the chatbots handle the initial customer inquiries.
Many times customers do not know what they want to buy or where to find it on your ecommerce site. Utilize your creative team to develop shopping guides that include niche gift suggestions for different audiences. Don’t forget to embed the link of each product on the gift guide to improve the customer’s buying experience.
5. Optimize Your Mobile Website
Oberlo, a dropshipping management app, estimated mobile commerce sales would reach $3.56 trillion in 2021. Mobile commerce sales continue to increase annually. Certainly, it is vital that ecommerce stores run smoothly on desktops, laptops, and especially mobile phones.
Here are key things to optimize your mobile website:
- Ensure fonts load properly and clearly on multiple mobile phone sizes and browsers
- Adjust images and videos to fit standard mobile phone screen sizes
- Monitor page load time and check for speed issues
- Optimize mobile checkout and add to cart processes
- Implement easy checkout methods, like one click checkout options
6. Offer Promo Codes
Everyone loves a discount. Blippr concluded that retailers who offer coupons on their ecommerce stores see a 26% increase in average order values when their customers use promo codes.
Make your customers feel special by offering extra discounts and codes long before the holiday season starts. Promote your promo codes via email campaigns, social media, and your own retail website. Above all, test the promo codes on your website and ensure that they work as intended before promoting them to customers.
Integrate the promotion templates offered by UpStart Commerce on your website to make your life easy. Learn more on our blog.
7. Refine Your Return Policy
A concise and clear return policy is necessary to create trust between your brand and potential consumers. Without trust, buyers may hesitate to complete a transaction on your site and may abandon their cart.
Here are simple ways you can improve your return policy before Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- Clearly state your return timeframe
- State conditions that must be met to qualify for returns
- Offer free returns or exchanges if possible, otherwise be upfront with return fees
- Remove convoluted legal phrases
- Link to your return policy on your website’s footer and other clearly stated areas on your website so that customers can locate it easily
Failure to build trust in your products may deter interested consumers.
8. Set Up Curbside Pick Up
National Retail Foundation (NRF) found that 70% of online shoppers say their shopping experience is enhanced dramatically with the option to buy online and pick it up later. In other words, online shoppers become impatient when they place their online order. Consumers want to receive their purchase immediately. Similarly, some people are not comfortable in crowds during Black Friday shopping rushes. Giving customers the option to pick up their products from a physical location increases customer satisfaction and loyalty
Conclusion
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are rapidly approaching whether brands are ready or not. Techradar predicts that the ecommerce industry will start sales as early as October in 2022. Start working on a Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategy immediately to improve your retail ecommerce store’s success this year. Tracking key retail KPIs can help identify your e-commerce website’s successes this holiday season. Most importantly, implement a combination of the suggestions above to see maximum results. For more ideas, check out our blog post for 13 retail website preparation tips.
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