Boost Sales & Stand Out! | 5 Ways to Maximize Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sales

Can you believe the holiday season is already here? That also means the biggest shopping weekend of the year is right around the corner! Black Friday and Cyber Monday are famous for the huge deals and discounts, so it may seem like these events are ideal for big retailers. The truth is, small businesses and online stores can use these events to their benefit as well. If you play your cards right, you too can use Black Friday and Cyber Monday to your advantage.

Cyber Monday — which takes place entirely online — will obviously be a huge deal for eCommerce. But did you know that Black Friday gets a significant amount of online traffic as well? This is true now more than ever, as more and more shoppers go online to get great deals.

That’s why this year, optimizing your online presence will be incredibly important to boost holiday sales. To get ready to take advantage of the shopping rush, here are the top five ways to help boost sales on these consumer holidays. 

1. Get Customers Excited Beforehand

Generating buzz and excitement beforehand will be a crucial first step. Don’t wait another day! Start advertising and promoting your offers now. The earlier you notify your shoppers, the more prepared they will be to shop. Posting Black Friday and Cyber Monday teasers online using social media is a great way to accomplish this. Customers will want to get a sneak peek of your offers, new products or huge deals.There are seriously a ton of ways to generate hype among your customers.

• Post countdowns on Instagram — Use a countdown timer to help promote your sales and create a sense of urgency!  
• Create a Facebook Event — A lot of stores will create a Facebook event and invite their customers. It’s a great way to get people interested, promote your offers and it will send them a reminder right before the sale too.
• Start an email campaign — Get customers excited with an email teasing some new products, huge deals, or even offer a freebie! This is also a great way to be more exclusive with your initiatives by reaching out to your top customers and organizing a private sale or event just for them.
• Create a Gift Guide — Gift Guides allow customers, especially first-time customers, to find you during the holiday season. A Gift Guide not only highlights your products and special deals, but it also gives a sense of direction for those specifically  shopping for gifts.
• Team Up with Influencers — use Instagram influencers to promote your brand and even offer a giveaway (like gift cards they can use for the sale!)
• Post Frequently — Don’t be afraid to email your shoppers and post to social media frequently this time of year. This is one of the main times in the year where they are most likely to shop and want to hear about your promotions and sales.

2. Ensure Your Site is Error-Free & Ready-for-Traffic on Both Desktop & Mobile

This is a big one — and something a lot of online store owners overlook. Have you looked at your website from your customers point-of-view lately? With the busy holiday shopping season quickly approaching, it’s never been more important to make sure your website is in tip-top shape to give your customers the best experience possible.

Looking at your website from a customer’s view can be overwhelming, though, especially since you run the store day-after-day and are used to looking at your site. You might not even know where to start to make sure your customers are having a good experience - but we know you want them to because good experience will usually = higher revenue!

The good news is, we just launched The Complete Checklist: Polishing Your Online Store to Perfection. The checklist is 20 pages and will walk you through the key areas to “check off” to make sure your site is polished to perfection. From your homepage, to collection and product pages, to checkout, and more, it’s the best $19 you’ll spend to make sure you don’t lose customers for any reason that’s under your control this Holiday season!

3. Be Strategic with Sales

Every single business will be using Black Friday and Cyber Monday to offer their best promotions of the year. To stand out from your competitors, try creating extremely unique and very specific promotions that are relevant to your business. Think out of the box and offer promotions that you normally wouldn’t make. 

However, trying to compete with the steep discounts of big box stores have will just eat up your margins. Remember your strengths as an online retailer. Convenience is a great potential strength that you can emphasize on Black Friday. Major retailers may offer big deals, but shoppers often have to endure long lines to get them. If you can provide a fast and easy shopping experience on Black Friday, you’ll be sure to attract some shoppers.

You can also offer a ton of great promotions like:

• Free shipping
• BOGO Deals
• Giveaways or freebies (e.g. “Free tote bag for every $75 purchase.)
• Buy More, Save More or Bundle Deals
• VIP Deals
• Mystery Deals (make it interactive!)

4. Increase Your Customer Base

These holidays will result in a major increase in site traffic - so make the most of it! Remember, these sales only represent the beginning of the holiday season, so you really want satisfied and consistent customers who will order again from your website, even when there are no special discounts. Try some of these ways to increase your customer base.

• Pop-Up Windows — Use these throughout the shopping experiences prompting the customer for their email for future offers, newsletters or more info. 
• Surveys —Include a quick survey question or two at checkout about their experience, your offers, or anything else you’d want to know.
• Thank You Page — When shoppers find a good deal, they feel proud of it and want to share it with friends. Use a  “Thank You” after an order to to ask for referrals or reviews.
• Confirmation Email — Use a confirmation email to offer future discounts, or even offer an incentive for recommending a friend.

5. Engage Customers Afterwards

Don’t let the sale end there! Black Friday and Cyber Monday will attract a lot of new customers, so you’ll want to turn them into year-long customers. Have an engagement plan to turn your shoppers into loyal customers — especially if they’re first-timers .To do this, you can leverage continued email marketing, engage on social media, and send abandoned cart notifications.

A week or so after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, schedule a follow up email and include a gift certificate or coupon code for their next order. This will allow you to effectively thank the customer for their purchase and openly invite them to come back to your site. 

Go a step further by creating a future incentive - Make a rewards program part of your online store and give shoppers points for each order. Customers will likely come back to your store knowing they already earned points. This might be something hard to implement prior to Black Friday so consider making it a Q1 goal and inviting those who shopped during the Holidays to join and offer them points to start out!

Don’t Wait Another Minute!

As an online store owner, these shopping holidays simply cannot be ignored. BlackFriday.com predicts that 2019 Black Friday online spending will surpass $12 billion this year. Of the shoppers they surveyed, 61% plan to do most of their holiday shopping online. This is huge for us! Get started as soon as you can planning your offers, promoting them and executing the perfect sale.

Don't feel like you have to take on too much at once. Take a few hours to nail down the sales and offers you want to do, but don't take on a project that will overwhelm you right before Black Friday (like a rewards program). Instead, focus your time and energy on deciding on those sales and on improving your current store. 

If you want a guide to help you ensure your store is at its best before the Holiday traffic, definitely be sure to take a look at our Complete Checklist: Polishing Your Online Store to Perfection. The checklist is 20 pages and, since it's an instant download, you can get access to it right away to start polishing up your store.

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