Top 10 strategies for your Shopify Store to win more sales during BFCM
As you may know, Black Friday Cyber Monday is an opportunity you can’t miss for your e-commerce website and it is right at the corner.
It’s a fruitful but exhausting season since on this day it creates a lot of traffic on your website and hopefully a lot of sales, so you need to be prepared for it earlier.
According to Shopify, last year there was \$1.5 Billion in sales and Black Friday and Thanksgiving alone are projected to increase 25% YoY to \$12.3 billion in 2019.
Let’s walk through the following tips to get inspired to build your BFCM strategies.
1. Prepare early
When it comes to Black Friday Cyber Monday preparation, you can never be too early. Black Friday Cyber Monday is no longer a weekend or a four-day event, it’s a whole holiday season. To make your preparation perfect, it absolutely takes some time.
On top of that, shoppers are preparing for holiday shopping early and your competitor may also be preparing for Black Friday campaigns early. If you haven’t started your preparation yet, you may be behind. So no more excuses and start preparing for your largest sale season right off the bat.
2. Offer discounts customers can’t resist
Why do people love Black Friday Cyber Monday so much? Big discounts and great offers! Your customers are looking forward to great deals, so you need to have an irresistible offer to attract them.
If you are afraid that offering discount may decrease your average order value(AOV), here are some ideas you can try:
1) Offer a product bundle
Bundling products together is one of the easiest ways to provide more value to customers while also increasing your store’s AOV.
2) Gamify your offers
BFCM is a great time to allow customers to “play to win” your offers. It makes customers feel special playing a quick game that they find fun for a chance to get a bigger discount. With Proof Factor, you can easily set up spin-to-win discounts. The fun wheel helps you drive sales and eliminate cart abandonment.
3) Offer free shipping above a certain threshold
You can set a free shipping threshold high above your AOV so that it tempts customers to add a couple of more items. As soon as you add an item to the cart, it prompts the eligibility of free shipping, thus nudging most customers to buy another item from the website.
3. Optimize your site for mobile
Mobile shopping has been one of the most important trends in eCommerce. No doubt that it also plays a huge role during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
During BFCM in 2018, according to Shopify, mobile purchases surpassed desktop throughout the entire weekend. On top of that, with 66% of sales from Shopify merchants happening on mobile during BFCM versus 34% on desktop.
We can expect this trend to continue and possibly increase. If you don’t embrace the trend, you may be losing large numbers of sales. Make your site mobile-friendly and improve the mobile shopping experience. Make sure your customers can make purchases simply and intuitively on mobile.
4. Check the inventory and make sure it’s enough to get through the holidays
One of the most frustrating things as a customer is to find the product but notice that it’s out of stock. You need to ensure you have a sufficient inventory of products in stock as you can expect an increase in demand.
You need to start analyzing which are the most popular products so it gives you a better idea of which product your customers are most interested in. The more data from previous periods that you have, the better forecasts you will have.
5. Run Google shopping ads to boost sales
To gain more sales during the holiday season, you can consider running some Google ads. Google ad is a great option to create marketing campaigns, most businesses see a 200% return on their investment when purchasing Google Ads.
That’s where AdNabu comes into play! Their service helps you automatically install the tracking code to all your Shopify web pages and also sets up a conversion pixel in your Google Ads where you can see your shop’s actual conversions.
This app is the perfect option to run an outstanding Google Ad Campaign, advertisers see a 30% increase in performance on their Shopify store, something you want to take into consideration in the high season. Setting up Google campaigns with the app can save you time and help you achieve better ROI since they optimize your campaigns for you.
Also, it automatically creates the retargeting or remarketing tag and embeds it on your Shopify store. You do not have to edit any files or do anything manually. The app will also create audiences in Google Ads account so that any new campaign can take advantage of them.
For more information regarding how to use google ads during the Black Friday season, you can check AdNabu’s blog: Google ads tips for the shopping season.
6. Increase sales and conversion rate with full-funnel retargeting
Retargeting is always an effective way to increase sales and conversion rate. With Ako Retargeting, the top Facebook retargeting app on Shopify app store, you can set up full-funnel retargeting campaigns only with a few clicks.
1) Seize every potential customer
Suppose you’ve already spent money for getting traffic to your website, make sure you’ve fully prepared to convert those visitors into customers. Don’t let go of any of them. It’s easier to convert those who have visited your site but haven’t purchased into customers by delivering dynamic product ads. The customer journey is a long way. 98% of visitors don’t place an order while first visiting your website. The retargeting ad is your last step to win conversions.
2) Avoid ad fatigue with sequential retargeting
Ad fatigue happens when your audience becomes overly familiar with your ads and stops paying attention. Your ads will then be ignored, which harms your ad performance. To avoid this, you can segment your audience into groups according to how long ago they have visited your website and deliver tailored different ad creatives and messages. With sequential retargeting, you can overcome ad fatigue and better engage with your audience, which leads to a better ad result.
3) Win back old customers
Create a retargeting campaign that targets those people who have bought something from your store before and get them back to your site. Even they have only purchased once from your site, they are a lot more likely to purchase again from you than those who have only visited your site. According to research, after one purchase, a customer has a 27% chance of returning to your store, which is 10X higher than that of a visitor.
Besides, old customers tend to spend more on your online store than new customers. During holiday shopping, first-time customers spend only 17% more per transaction, but repeat customers spend 25% more. Therefore, winning back old customers is a more valuable way to increase sales.
7. Start your email marketing campaigns
If you want to stand out from the rest of the websites, you can give your email campaign a unique look. Make sure to add some urgency and make your email responsive. Email is still a major tool to generate sales. According to Shopify, email has the highest conversion rate at 4.38% during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2018, even higher than social media.
You can utilize different email campaigns before and during Black Friday:
Pre-Black Friday preparation
1) Ask users to sign up to your email list
Start asking users to sign up to your email list one or two months before Black Friday so that they can stay up to date with your special Black Friday sales.
2) Black Friday countdown
Start sending out emails to promote your Black Friday special offers, such as discounts or free shipping, several weeks before Black Friday to hype your subscribers and get them excited in anticipation of the sale.
During Black Friday
1) Send out special offers
You can segment your email list into new subscribers who never purchase on your site, customers who have purchased once or two, and high-value customers. Offer different subscribers to different offers.
2) Abandoned cart emails
If customers abandon their carts, send abandoned cart emails to them right away. 72% of customers buy from abandoned cart emails convert in the first 24 hours.
8. Rescue your abandoned carts
Since advertising costs increase during peak seasons, you need to be sure that every penny you spent on marketing and retargeting has its value. All this while recovering your large number of abandoned carts. Besides sending out marketing messages using emails and SMS, abandoned cart emails and retargeting ads, there’s one more thing you can try — web push notification.
Web push notifications are rich content messages that you can send to your subscribers, even when they aren’t on the site. Since they are highly visible and short, subscribers are sure to click through to your store. PushOwl is the top web push notification app for Shopify stores. Use this marketing channel to send notifications about your store or set up automated abandoned cart reminders to successfully bring back shoppers who have left their cart.
When setting up abandoned cart reminders on PushOwl, you can customize the message, set the time delay based on your preference, and even add extra discounts to entice them. A well-timed reminder about the items in the cart can lead customers to return to your site and complete orders.
Do you want to know more about it? Check out: Guide to Planning BFCM with Web Push Notifications
9. Make sure your customer service is ready
During holiday seasons, where you’re expecting a significant increase in website traffic, it’s a must to have fast customer support. People will be browsing from site to site, and if they can’t get their questions answered fast, they’ll buy from your competitor instead. I bet that’s the last thing you expect to happen.
You should start training your customer support team several weeks before Black Friday to make sure they can handle all kinds of situation during peak seasons. Or else you can utilize a chatbot to help yours. Chatbots don’t need to rest and they can reply to many customers simultaneously. They are undoubtedly your best helper when you don’t have enough time to deal with customer support issues.
10. Use scarcity to urge sales
Scarcity and the fear that you might miss it will urge customers to purchase immediately. Especially during Black Friday Cyber Monday, users all know that the deals aren’t going to last forever, so the scarcity you claim will be more believable.
You can add a countdown timer on your page to show the users how time is running out on the promotions you’re running and remind them to purchase as soon as possible. A countdown timer will increase users’ tension and impulse them to buy.
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