Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are only a few short weeks away. If you don’t already have a plan for BFCM it’s time to get planning! Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping days of the entire year so it’s important to get it right.
In fact, in 2018 shoppers spent a whopping $717.5 billion; On average, individual shoppers spent $1,007.24. That’s a lot of spending but there’s also a lot of competition which is why you need to prepare.
Here are top tips on how to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Plan unique and specific promotions
It’s important for you to start planning now for your BFCM deals so that you can prepare your customers for the shopping season ahead. You don’t want to do a big sales push right before the biggest shopping events of the year because you could burn out your customers.
Not only should you be planning out your offers and promotions for BFCM you should also be planning your sales and offers leading up to it.
BFCM is your opportunity to pull out all the stops! Doorbusters, free gift incentives, amazing discounts, etc. It’s a time to be intentional about your offers. BFCM is a great time for an offer that only comes around once or maybe twice a year.
Developing a special offer for BFCM (instead of doing a sitewide percent off) allows you to have more control over inventory and margins. It also helps to cut down on any analysis paralysis on the part of the shopper.
Start Promoting Early
Don’t wait until the last minute to start promoting your BFCM deals! There are so many companies competing for attention that it’s important for you to stand out. If you start a major marketing push early you’ll be able to stick in people’s minds before the onslaught.
You don’t need to reveal all of your offers or any of your offers but teasing your audience and posting lots of high quality content leading up to your big sale is important. You want to be everywhere, you want to be (or at least seem like) the hot “it” product of the season.
The cost of running ads will go up right before and during BFCM so attracting attention beforehand will also be a lot of affordable. Email will be super important for notifying buyers and non-buyers about your deals.
You can even set up a special email list for people to get notified when deals go live. You can use this to gather new leads leading up to BFCM. It’s a great way to really take advantage of the weeks and days leading up to the big event. You could even consider offering a special coupon or offer to encourage people to sign up.
Optimize Site Performance
The last thing you want is for your site to perform poorly during BFCM. If you’re not ready for the traffic your whole site could go down which would be the worst possible scenario.
If your site were to go down during your BFCM sales it could mean losing out on thousands in sales let alone wasted marketing dollars time and effort. Many BFCM shoppers are first time buyers too which means you might not get a second chance to win them over.
Another risk to avoid when it comes to site performance is page load time. It’s easy to check page load time to see how your site is performing with free tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If a page takes more than a few seconds to load visitors are likely to leave your site which you definitely don’t want.
There are quite a few steps you can take in order to optimize your site’s performance like
- Enabling compression
- Reducing redirects
- Leverage browser caching
- Improve server response time
- Optimize images
You can learn all about how to execute these and other tactics over at moz.com. Optimizing your site performance can be a lot easier than you might think and it’s definitely not something you want to avoid if you want to ensure a successful BFCM.
Make Sure You Can Deliver… Literally
When the orders come rolling in, are you ready to start sending them out? A lot of e-commerce business owners get so excited about making sales that they forget about what comes next. After you make the sale you have to actually fulfill the order.
While this might seem like the least important part of the process to you, it’s one of the most important parts of the process for your customers. A good shopping experience for your customers means nothing if they don’t receive their order in a timely manner.
Leaving a good impression during BFCM is more important than ever because these holiday shoppers are less likely to become repeat buyers. More than half of online shoppers say that a bad order fulfillment experience means they won’t come back a second time.
If you’re already at capacity or close to it when it comes to fulfilling orders it’s time to start considering partnering with a third party order fulfillment company, like Ship Central. At Ship Central we’re well equipped to help you handle all of your order fulfillment needs from a seasonal bump in sales to scaling your business long term.