Let's prep for Black Friday + Cyber Monday (BFCM)!
A short guide to help your e-comm brand plan for the busiest time of the retail year.
It’s right around the corner: every e-comm brand owner’s most love/hate time of the year. I am, of course, talking about BFCM (otherwise known as Black Friday/Cyber Monday).
Big brands have been preparing for this massive sales weekend for months - but, if your brand is anything like the smaller clients I work with, you may not have the staff or bandwidth to get started so early. Not to worry! This guide is here to help, with a ton of planning and execution ideas to help your brand nail the sales event of the year.
Remember: any preparation and strategy that you put in place now will help you, both for this year’s sales and with learnings for years to come.
Pre-planning for BFCM
You know that everyone is offering massive discounts at this time of year. So how, exactly, does your brand set itself apart in a time of hyper-saturated offers? By being strategic. Let’s start by getting clear on your business goals so that you can create the best offer(s) possible.
What are your goals?
Who is your target audience? Are you hoping to draw in first-time buyers? BFCM is a great time of year to do that. Or, conversely, are you at a stage in your business where you’d like to nurture repeat customers? Get clear on who you’re trying to attract with your offer(s).
How long will your promotion(s) last? This is critical to time and deliver your marketing materials - more on that below.
How much inventory do you need to support your sales efforts? It sounds obvious, but make sure you’re considering what is actually possible when it comes to your sales goals.
What are your product margins and how much room for discounts do you have? Don’t get yourself in a situation where you’re actually losing money. Maybe some products need to stay at their current price point - that’s okay! Do the math now and get clear on your margins.
What conversion rate/AOV are you aiming for? Spend time getting familiar with your analytics from previous sale periods versus the sales year overall. Having a specific, measurable goal in mind is a great motivator.
Deciding on a sale
With all of the above in mind, you’ll want to land on an offer (or offers) that helps you meet your sales needs - yet is realistic for your inventory and margin capacity - and captures the attention of your desired audience.
Here are some sales ideas to help get your creative juices flowing:
Can you consider creative offerings that encourage repeat purchases? For example, a free gift card with purchase if a customer spends over a certain threshold?
Can you preserve margins while moving the right inventory? For example, can you mark down higher-margin products and bundle them with products that you don’t want to discount, so that the total price still seems appealing to customers?
Can you create offers that encourage gifting; IE buy one product - send one to a friend for free?
Can you create additional post-purchase incentives using lower-price or high-margin products?
Can you add an element of surprise to your sale - like extending it for an extra day, or adding a further discount in the final hours?
You and I both know that not everyone visiting your online store will become a buyer.
But what if I could help you to bump up that percentage?
Preparing your website to sell
Now that you’ve landed on your promotion(s) and time frame, it’s time to get your website ready for an onslaught of customers. Your website will see a ton of extra traffic during BFCM, so it’s critical to have it performing at its best. Here are a few ways to ensure optimal conversions.
Optimize your site’s UX:
Is your site speed lightning-fast? Is it mobile-friendly? These are some of the biggest UX factors that can impact sales - for better or worse. (Here’s an article of mine that covers both those topics.)
Have you taken the time to run through your site’s checkout process recently and ensure it’s seamless?
Speaking of checkouts: do you have an upsell widget (or other mechanism) in place at checkout to help capture additional last-minute buyers?
Have you audited your site to make conversions as smooth as possible? (More from me on that here, but if you’re crunched for time, I’d focus on making your homepage copy and main menu as user-friendly as possible.)
Build your landing pages:
It’s in your best interest to make your offer(s) as clear as possible for customers landing on your site. With that in mind, you may want to create special landing pages for BFCM, especially if you’re offering different types of sales or trying to target different segments of customers.
Remember: you want to keep the customer to website flow as simple as possible by directing them immediately to the relevant page on your site. Whether users are landing on your site from an email or a social swipe-up, you want to make sure you’re sending them to the right place. And, spoiler: that place probably shouldn’t be your homepage! Maybe you want them to land on a bestselling product page - and if your product pages are well-optimized, that may not be a bad idea. But the reason I’m such a big fan of landing pages is because they allow you to give more context on your brand, your specific sale and why they should want to buy from you.
Here’s an article of mine that covers when and why to utilize landing pages.
Break down customer hesitation with social proof:
BFCM will likely mean an influx of new eyeballs on your site. Some of those customers may have hesitations about ordering from an unknown-to-them brand. With that in mind, spend some time bulking up social proof on your site: can you take the time to request reviews from recent customers? Do you have any UGC on your social channels that could be cross-posted to the relevant product pages? Social proof can be make-or-break when persuading a new customer to make their first purchase.
Preparing BFCM marketing content
If there’s one thing I want you to take away as you begin to plan your BFCM marketing content, it’s this: your messaging must be cohesive across all channels. As a small brand owner, you may be handling many of your marketing communications yourself, but it’s still critical to ensure messaging is coherent and aligned so that your customers have a consistent brand experience whether they’re browsing your socials or opening an email in their inbox.
Next up, remember: you don’t need to start a from-scratch marketing strategy just because it’s an important time of year! Don’t put pressure on yourself to reinvent the wheel, but do use a data-based approach based on what types of marketing have historically worked for your brand.
Lastly, as you plan ahead, take time to think about how you can connect with your customer and provide value now ahead of the super-busy holiday season. You should be laying a super nurturing groundwork all year round that makes customers want to come back. It’s never too late (or too early) to get started on that.
Here are some specific tips per channel to get your creative juices flowing.
Email marketing:
First things first, the technical stuff: you need to ensure your deliverability is on-point ahead of BFCM so that you can ensure the maximum number of eyes possible on your emails. SendGrid has a helpful article on this.
You also want to ensure customers can get order confirmations and updates from you super easily. Are your order confirmation and shipping update emails well-optimized so that the information is super clear and concise?
Once you’ve spent some time there on those technical basics, move on to your flow content: is it up-to-date for this time of the year? If you run an Abandoned Cart flow all year round (which you should), can you shorten the send timing during the length of the promotion and add in copy that reminds customers about the sale ending soon? Can you send a post-purchase upsell email highlighting an easy add-on product? Spend some time making sure your flows will sell for you so that you can sit back and watch the orders roll in over BFCM.
Next up, make sure your email campaigns lay a great groundwork in the weeks leading up to BFCM. Is it super clear from your email messaging what customers can expect during the sale? Are you spending time nurturing them with information on what sets your products apart? Remember, you don’t want to be spammy - it’s a highly saturated time for everyone’s inbox - and that means that the emails you do send need to be on-point.
SMS:
If you use SMS to communicate with customers, ask yourself: are you providing useful info that makes their shopping experience better? Again, to reiterate, you do not want to be spammy at this time of year. I’d suggest using SMS for need-to-know information like order confirmations (especially if you sell high-end products) and sale deadlines.
Collaborations and UGC:
Remember, BFCM is a great time to utilize social proof. If you have any brand collabs or UGC coming down the pipeline, now is the time to utilize that content. (And remember: keep this messaging consistent across channels!)
BFCM is over! What next?
Whew! We did it. You survived. Make sure to take some well-deserved downtime after this, the absolute craziest season of the retail year. But first - you probably have tons of orders to fulfill, which means more customer communication!
Nailing the post-purchase experience:
Spend some time thinking through your post-purchase communications. Take the time to confirm that your shipping and logistics flows are integrated with any post-purchase flows you send out - remember, you don’t want to be emailing people asking for a review if they haven’t even received the package yet due to holiday delays!
Also consider post-purchase support, especially if you are selling products that are high-end or have specialized use cases. How can you ensure customers feel empowered and equipped to use their new purchase? (Depending on the product, SMS can be a great channel for these types of communications.) Spending time on educational or informative content for customers who have made a recent purchase is a great way to encourage brand loyalty - and hopefully repeat sales down the line.
If you get lots of great customer feedback or reviews, you can even consider targeting those customers with messaging about gifting your products around the holidays. This is a great way to encourage repeat buys within a tight timeframe.
Finally - don’t forget to ask for reviews! Once you have the review data, you can use it to either help inform cross-selling (for customers who loved a product and therefore want more), or as an impetus to help problem-solve for customers who had a problem.
What did you learn?
After you’ve taken some well-deserved downtime, it’s time to reflect on how to utilize your BFCM learnings for the rest of the year. Consider: what marketing strategies worked especially well? What - if anything - did you do that didn’t seem to have much effect at all? (Remember, the goal for next year is not to reinvent the wheel.) Did you meet - or even surpass - the goals you set?
The customers you get at BFCM might be a different type of customer from the rest of the year, but you should still consider strategic ways to take advantage of the influx. Can you segment this year’s BFCM customers with news about future sales? Can you build in more personalization to your marketing campaigns so that the content they receive feels relevant for the long haul? Take this time to think through your communications strategy and you’ll reap huge benefits going forward.
Have questions? Get in touch. I answer all messages personally.
