It’s the season that e-commerce stores and retailers look forward to all year long: Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM).
Online spending on Black Friday in 2018 was once again up. In fact, 2018 set records as online shoppers spent $6.22 billion, an increase of 23.6% over the previous year. Additionally, 33.5% of Black Friday sales were made on smartphones.
During my time as an e-commerce store owner, I’ve learned a thing or two about creating strategies that resonate. It’s all well and good to create a sales strategy or promotional offer, but if it’s devoid of any deeper strategy or just isn’t enough to entice your visitors through the door and toward purchases, it’s going to fall flat.
For this reason, you need to create promotions that won’t just sound good to your audience, but will be enough to actually motivate them to take action. Sure, Black Friday is fast approaching, but there’s still time. With that said, here’s a look at some tried-and-true tips for setting your shop up for BFCM success:
Create Staggering Discounts
Like I said, it’s not enough to just offer promotions — Ten percent off a toaster, $5 off that luggage. Yawn. If you want big results, you need to increase the perceived value of your discount. One strategy I’ve used to encourage shoppers to spend more is what’s known as tiered discounts. With this strategy, the more they spend, the steeper the discount will be.
If you structure this discount pricing strategy right, you’ll find that your average cart size will increase. They’re also fairly easy to employ. If you’re using WooCommerce or Shopify, there are a number of plugins out there that will automatically apply these discounts for you.
Introduce Loss Leaders
If you haven’t been using loss leaders in your BFCM sales, it’s high time you did! These products are also known as door crashers and are items that are offered at such a steep discount that your shoppers won’t be able to resist them. Sometimes these things are even sold at a loss. Selling products at a loss might sound crazy, but it can be a great way to attract customers and boost your overall sales.
Game systems and expensive games, electric toothbrushes and replaceable toothbrush heads, coffee makers and coffee pods — there are plenty of brands out there that understand the value of loss leaders. While you could go the route of traditional loss leaders, designed to generate ongoing purchases, you might also consider creating your own sales loss leaders by pricing some products low enough to attract attention and draw visitors through the door. You could use a Facebook ad strategy or email campaign to highlight these steep discounts. Not sure which products to use? Consider giving your customers 30% off their first purchase, and let them choose.
Offer Free Shipping
Team your loss leaders up with one-day-only free shipping offers. Customers drawn in with the loss leaders can then be encouraged to add more to their cart to take advantage of the free shipping. Make sure you have a minimum order value that they have to reach if they want to qualify for free shipping.
Run Flash Sales
Flash sales are another way to generate interest. But once again, make sure your offers are actually compelling, or else you’ll be out time and money for a flash sale that falls flat.
Segment Those Lists
I recommend segmenting your email list so that you can get more targeted with your sales emails, increasing their effectiveness. You can segment your list by recent openers (30 days), BFCM shoppers from last year or VIP customers. Or, segment by purchase category so you can send out related products or new products.
Referral Rewards
Here’s a winner! Offering referral rewards can incentivize your best customers to share the word with friends and family. There are tons of referral rewards programs you can use to inspire your customers to spread the word.
While you can use any number of incentives to encourage referrals, including cash, free merchandise or discounts, I’m a big fan of using store credit. It keeps it simple and helps to drive repeat purchases while also keeping your profit margins intact.
Encourage Preorders
Got any large-ticket items that may require a bit more planning and saving for? Consider allowing your customers the opportunity to preorder those items. I sold entire kitchens online, and one of the biggest challenges that I faced during the holiday marketing season was finding a way to effectively capture a small audience of kitchen shoppers in a saturated holiday market.
We were able to overcome the challenges by offering customers the opportunity to preorder their big-ticket purchase, and giving them an incentive of an attractive preorder discount. Customers had the incentive they needed to go through with their purchase during the holidays, rather than putting it off until the new year. In the end, we were able to get a 20% lift in sales by allowing preorders during the holidays.
Negotiate Discounts From Vendors
This one’s a bit late for this year, but it’s never too early to start preparing for next BFCM. Get in touch with your vendors to see if you can negotiate a discount ahead of Black Friday. If you can negotiate a discount — by purchasing more stock or through some other means — then you can pass those savings on to your customers.
Make this Black Friday a spectacular kickoff to the holiday season with the above strategies. Keep in mind, too, that much of your success as an e-commerce store will be contingent on the size and quality of your email list. So, start collecting email addresses for next year. There’s nothing like being able to reach out to your prospects via email to notify them of your BFCM sales. With a great lead magnet and a plugin that collects email addresses, you’ll be able to grow your list and increase your profit when it comes around to sales time again.
