How to Prepare Your Store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales? – CG Colors Inc.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday is an opportunity for e-commerce stores to boost their sales and they have got all the reasons to start the preparation well in advance to maximize their profit if you plan on time, and plan it a right success is pretty much guaranteed. So, here we are giving away 16 things you can do to cash on BFCM

1. Planning

It’s always a great plan which can make your marketing plan a success so plan sales and organize products ahead of time to avoid the last-minute rush. For convenience, you can make a detailed sale plan on a spreadsheet and keep track of everything you need to plan out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Your plan should products you want to promote for holidays as all the products can be a good match for holiday buyers so make a good list of products that can be an easy sale and make a solid marketing plan to promote those products.

2. Creative Design

Find ways to advertise holiday sales. A great idea to promote holiday sales is to use banner ads and also to change the header image of the homepage of your website. For designs, either you can hire a freelancer to design a good banner and home page festive theme or an e-commerce web design agency to handle that. Whatever fits in your budget go for that. It’s ok to give your ideas to your designers as you know your audience way better than any designer so don’t hold yourself back but get involved in the process.

3. Surprise

Build buzz and suspense around your upcoming sale to promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. There are many ways to build suspense and a few of them are teaser emails, smart Google AdWords, and Facebook. They can help you a lot as they can help you reach out wider audience and help build a buzz.

Blogs you must read to start holiday marketing with email marketing, Google Adwords, and Facebook marketing

Email marketing
https://blogs.constantcontact.com/holiday-email-examples/

Google AdWords
https://searchengineland.com/3-experts-share-secrets-ppc-success-holidays-232165

Facebook
https://adespresso.com/blog/facebook-ads-examples-for-black-friday-and-holiday-advertising/

4. Abandoned Cart

You would be surprised to know that more than 50% of buyers abandon their carts for many reasons such as they might have changed their mind, the total amount is more than what they expected and shipping cost is the major culprit among all of them. What you can do to draft a compelling cart abandon email to bring the customers that quit after adding products to their carts.

Magento
Follow Up Email – https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/follow-up-email.html Amasty – https://amasty.com/magento-abandoned-cart-email.html

Shopify
Consistent Cart – https://apps.shopify.com/consistent-cart Abandon Cart – https://apps.shopify.com/abandon-app

BigCommerce
It has already inbuilt pretty cool abandoned cart recovery and personalized email functionality but if you want more you can try below app

Mailbot – https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/mailbot/

WooCommerce
WooCommerce recover abandoned cart https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-recover-abandoned-cart/7715167

5. Mobile first

Mobile search has surpassed desktop search and if your website isn’t visible on mobile platforms then it will certainly lag behind others. Make sure your website is fully responsive and works well on every device and web or mobile browser. Think of mobile-first when planning, organizing, marketing, and optimizing your BFCM sales.

You can go to this website and check if your site is fully responsive and works well on every device

If your site is fully responsive and works well on every browser AWESOME and if not, we would love to help. Send us an email at hi@cgcolors.com, or call us at  347-732-2736, or chat with us.

6. Retarget your existing and old customers

Use retargeting pixel to track your visitors and make a list of the people that bought products from your site or at least revealed their interest in buying products. Retargeting old customers could be real help during holiday season. It will make your marketing task a lot easier.

How to set up a retargeting campaign on Google AdWords
https://neilpatel.com/blog/from-a-to-z-how-to-set-up-a-google-remarketing-campaign/

How to set up Facebook pixel
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755

Youtube Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBB1cOCJTIs&feature=youtu.be

7. Approach blogs and gift guide websites

As soon as the festive season is around websites start providing gift guides to help buyers. Also, bloggers start promoting BFCM sales through their posts. Your job is to approach the bloggers and gift guide websites to feature your offers in their posts and guides. Since it won’t be a cakewalk, you need to start early to find sites that are ready to make a business agreement with your website.

This blog post is a must-read  – https://ahrefs.com/blog/outreach/

FYI, we also use ahref and love their tool to do keyword research, rank tracking and much more.

8. One doorbuster sale

The Holiday season is an amazing business season but only when you are prepared for the influx of visitors. BFCM will indeed increase your visitors but at the same time, the visitors will spend little time on your site as they want to make the best purchasing decision. Here you can make an interesting plan to boost your sales. Pick a few products and give the best offer on those products to ensure you get so many visitors on your site to check out that product and buy as you have one of the best offers available in the market. The doorbuster sale will hold visitors on your site for a long time and also give you a chance to showcase other products.

Doorbuster may not give you so much profit as you may be cutting your profit on those products but those products will help you sell other products where you can make a good profit.

9. Reward loyal customers

BFCM is the time to build new relationships and strengthen the existing ones. Make a list of customers that give returning business and plan exciting offers for your loyal customers. Contact those customers with emails and show how you value your customers. Also give better discount offers and freebies to those customers.

10. Push your visitors to sale

Holiday shopping brings frantic visitors that are eager to buy things but they take more than usual time to make decisions on products. It is due to the availability of a wide range of options. You can push the visitors with punchlines like “exclusive”, “limited availability” and “limited time”. These lines will help visitors make quick decisions on your offers. Even better, you can put a timer on the product which are on sale so people gets the urgency of buying that.

11. Become a friendly seller

Shopping time is a busy time when buyers want to shop more but at the same time, they expect support from the sellers. What if a buyer wants to return or exchange a product? You should be ready for such requests but you can set a time limit for return and exchange. In this way, you can look more reliable and make more sales than your competitors.

12. Set up traffic tracking tools

Google Analytics is a reliable free traffic tracking tool that can help in boosting your holiday sales. Similarly, other advanced tools give details on visitors. Know where the visitors are coming from; the pages they are clicking; product views and clicking back of visitors. Every piece of information related to BFCM could prove to be a game-changer for your holiday sales.

13. Become accessible and responsive

The Holiday season is the time when you will receive a maximum number of queries from your customers. If you aren’t prepared to receive queries and give satisfactory answers to those queries, you’re going to lose your share to your competitors. Integrating live chat with customer care executives is great to boost your response time but you should also be available over the phone and by e-mail.

14. Prepare your site to receive an influx of visitors

It is good to have several visitors on your site but is your site ready to respond to the action of a load of visitors. Your answer could be yes but it is better you check the server load capacity of your website and plan your holiday sale accordingly. It is better to have a site running than a website bogged down by the visitors.

15. Think of contingency plans

The Holiday sale isn’t all about pink and roses. Your website is ready to receive visitors and make a profit but what about others like your vendor and shipping company. What if support isn’t available? You should have an alternative arrangement of vendors and shipping companies in advance so that the chain of buying and shipping continues in a hassle-free manner.

Conclusion

Running a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales campaign needs lots of preparations from arranging your shelves to targeting customers. In sales, it is timing that matters most. In addition to starting preparation in advance, you should also keep an eye on the gray areas like server load and support service of your website. You can milk the shopping season only when you are fully prepared.