With the countdown in play, there is not much time left for the busiest shopping days of the year. Yes, we are talking about the much anticipated Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021.
Predictions say that 2021 will bring a record-breaking Black Friday for all of us. 2020 saw a massive jump in online sales on Black Friday, where online spending accounted for $14 billion, with over 186 million Americans spending lavishly during the Thanksgiving weekend. And we are not going to underestimate the potential of Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday 2020 brought $10.8 billion in online sales, making a 15.1% jump from 2019, making it the biggest online shopping day in eCommerce history.
These are promising numbers. A lot of customers, a lot of sales, a lot of revenue. But there is a catch. We have already stepped in November, and it is a little late for any significant changes. Still, you can get a lot done in the time left.
That’s why we are here with a list put together to complement your eCommerce holiday planning and help you make the most out of the two busiest shopping days of the eCommerce holiday season 2021.
These are just not any tips, but 25 last-minute tips to act like a mini eCommerce holiday cheat sheet for that last stretch.
So, roll up your sleeves. It is time to bring the trophy home.
Black Friday Cyber Monday has a lot of hype around them. Thus it is a stressful matter for the retailers and campaigners. The critical solution is to run and run fast if you want to cross the finish line. With less than a month to go for the big weekend, you will need all hands on deck. Start mini-campaigns that do not take much time in preparing and do not shy away from bombarding your potential customers with social media posts, adverts, and email. In fact, holiday email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways of capturing shoppers’ attention. Some tactics to use are a buzz-building campaign including countdowns, memorable ads, and emails; a coordinated promotional strategy panning across all channels including websites, emails, and socials; and post-Black Friday Cyber Monday Sales for last-minute shoppers with extended offers.
Being optimistic, you have managed to gather customers for Black Friday; it will only make sense to keep them hooked until Cyber Monday and after that Christmas shopping days. According to an insight, daily first-time buyers volume usually picks up in mid-November compared to the pre-holiday daily number. This increases to 120%. So it only makes sense to engage with new customers while setting reasonable expectations early on and creating a valuable first impression. You can leverage customer engagement tools like personalized emails and product recommendations to encourage the customers to relate to your brand.
According to Statista, shopping cart abandonment is very real and high, with over 88% abandoned carts in March 2020. These abandoned carts hit differently when holiday revenue is affected. With a fiercely competitive market, shoppers have several reasons to leave your brand and look for a better offer or simply wait for you to offer them a discount. The best way to revive an abandoned cart is to establish a personalized conversation with the shopper. You can send them emails with a catchy subject line and personalized offers, which they cannot refuse. There are other ways to capture the attention of abandoned cart owners, including SMS, Messengers, via Mobile App, and even through social media accounts. If manual operations are a bit too troublesome for you, you can always look for numerous automation software to streamline the recovery of abandoned carts leading to conversions.
According to a report by Klaviyo, the highly segmented VIP emails make up for just 3%-5% of your address list but are likely to spend 3x more per recipient than the other customers. So, do not be afraid to leverage this and go all in to impress your top customer base with discounts and content that they cannot ignore.
If you think it is a little late to dive into the deep end of the PPC, all hope is not lost. Pay-per-click advertisements allow you to pay for clicks in real-time. It all depends on your marketing budget. You can leverage PPC campaigns to control your search engine rankings and get leads. Then the ball is in your court. You can convert those clicks into conversions and increase the ROI. But the copy of your advert must be compelling enough for the visitors to click through.
These days social media is being used generously to promote various businesses. Hence, social media, combined with the power of adverts, must not be overlooked. Paid ads in the mix with organic posts can help you achieve optimum reach. So, if you can afford it, we would suggest you go for it. Black Friday Cyber Monday shoppers will probably look for sales, offers, and discounts on Facebook and other social media.
“Sell the sizzle, not the steak!”
Black Friday Cyber Monday are the most important shopping days of the season, and you need to advertise creatively. It is all about creating positive, effective, and engaging content to enhance the advocacy of your products. Create an eye-catching social media page banner, go visual on adverts, develop videos, carousels, and GIFs to showcase the products and great discounts, and decorate your landing page and eCommerce store with some holiday spirit. Your store visitors should know that their needs are cared for, and you have put in efforts. Clear and bold messaging usually creates a great user experience.
In 2020, shopping via social media became popular while seeing an increase of 17%. It would be a missed opportunity if you cannot make use of the world’s most effective promotional tools. Make sturdy relationships with customers using creative imagery and positive testimonials on social media platforms. Bombard the news feed with Facebook discounts, Instagram giveaways, and limited offer countdowns just a couple of days preceding the big weekend. #Hashtags are a powerful thing in influencing the millennials and making a buzz about your products. Then, when Black Friday hits, use holiday email marketing to drive immediate results.
In a survey, 94% of the customers claimed free shipping to be a crucial incentive during seasonal shopping. While free shipping sounds splendid, but for many small businesses, it is inconceivable. You can still offer discounted shipping to entice the customers. Free shipping can work wonders in preventing cart abandonment during the checkout process. So, for the success of shopping days like BFCM, discounted or free shipping sure holds essential stakes.
Old stock taking too much space, out of trend this season, or just not advertised much to create interest among the audience? Perhaps it is time for a clearance sale. You can run exclusive sales on old stocks and make online shoppers happy by offering generous discounts. Take advantage of the existing customers’ loyalty and deliver marketing emails along with social media posts to spread the word.
Up-sell strategy is very ‘in’ nowadays. Recommend relevant smaller products and add-ons to the buyers during their purchase journey. Essentially, the BFCM is one of the best times to see up-selling in action. It also gives a touch of personalization when you recommend related or previously viewed products. You can offer bigger deals to grab the shoppers’ attention and offer more minor add-ons during checkout to make them look appealing and a necessary must-buy.
Research says that customers who redeem loyalty rewards are 62% more likely to spend more on the eCommerce brand, and 59% are more likely to choose their brand over other competitors. Because of the psychology, they have earned the rewards and do not want to lose the points. So, you should focus on creating personalized emails for your loyal customers and offer them post-holiday loyalty rewards. This goes a long way in enhancing customer loyalty and positively impacts customer retention. You can promote rewards in the customers’ carts. Gift cards are another way to encourage return visits. This will eventually help to reduce seasonal lumps post-holiday.
This is inevitable. There will be times when your customers will not love what they bought and would want to return their purchases. During the holiday season of 2020, online retailers saw as much as a 41% increase in returns. But if the customers encounter a positive return experience, 92% of the shoppers will come back to buy again. The first step is to make your return policy easy to find on the eCommerce store, and the second is to mention the shipping costs, deadlines, and policies of return in legible print.
The sales around the BFCM are expected to last for at least a week. We have already talked about how loyalty programs and easy return policies can facilitate return visits. So can mixing different offers and products. Give enough reasons to the shoppers to make that one extra visit to your eCommerce store. Tease them with discounts worth returning for.
69% of US shoppers claimed that customer service is one of the most important criteria for choosing the brand to shop with. And trust us, with the shopping season at its peak, your customers will have millions of questions about product info, shipping, discounts, and whatnot. So, prepare your customer support team to answer the shoppers in real-time and leave them a positive impression and memorable customer experience. Live chats, app messengers, and customer service emails are some of the ways to answer your customers without hassles.
Your eCommerce store’s foundation, your web hosting, holds much importance during the peak season. Talk to your hosting provider and mention your holiday season planning blueprint. Your provider should be helpful and reliable and be able to keep your store running smoothly 24×7. Discuss if your hosting plan can handle traffic surges during the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales. Can they provide safety from virtual vulnerabilities? And if in case your store goes down, what will be the following steps to mitigate and minimize the loss as quickly as possible.
Being an eCommerce business owner, you must understand the importance of SEO. So, we would not go into those lengthy details. But we would point out that good SEO practices are worth millions during the holiday season. The primary step to boost your SEO starts with ensuring a good quality hosting provider. Next, focus on choosing a store theme that is designed with keeping SEO in mind. A well-picked template with quality code works wonders for optimization. Improve your permalink structure. Next, your eCommerce store must be mobile responsive. Google algorithms also reward Long-form content, so focus on blogs with quality and SEO-friendly content that provides value to the readers. Finally, focus on optimizing your eCommerce store to score well on Google Core Web Vitals to boost your ranking on the SERPs.
An effective way to earn the trust of your customers and ensure return visits is to maintain shopping safety. According to a study, more than half of American internet users avoid shopping online due to concerns regarding privacy and security. To instill confidence in your customers’ minds, you should display your signage to prove a safe shopping experience with you prominently on your checkout page. Your hosting provider can hook you up with a free or low-cost SSL/TLS certificate. Another way to put your customers’ minds at ease is by displaying endorsements from other brands.
On a crucial weekend such as BFCM, your eCommerce store navigation plays a pivotal role in making or breaking your customer-brand relationships. Complex navigation often leads to frustration and even lost customers. Make your store easy to navigate. Tidy up your homepage with simple menus and clear pathways to reach desired products.
No BFCM customer would want to stick around a slow eCommerce store. Like it or not! Over 45% of the shoppers have claimed that they are less likely to purchase from a slow eCommerce website. But you can work the case with a good hosting provider. Also, optimizing your images to improve your LCP score ultimately improves load times. Work on minifying resources like JS and CSS. Finally, you can leverage browser caching to make your store load faster.
Reducing checkout barriers has a high impact on boosting purchases. Enable one-click purchases with customers’ payment options stored in a secure mobile wallet. PayPal, Android Pay, and Apple Pay are some of the on-site options. The guest checkout option is another way to expedite the purchase process. Mobile payments are another. Try to offer multiple payment options supporting multiple currencies to accommodate as many customers as possible. Make the checkout process as hassle-free as possible to facilitate the purchase.
We could go into why a mobile responsive eCommerce store is essential. But that is a discussion for another time. To support the fact, last year’s BFCM saw record-breaking smartphone sales reaching $3.6 billion just on Black Friday. With such a large mobile audience, you wouldn’t want to lose a high potential customer base. Also, being mobile responsive is crucial for good SEO as it increases the chances of ranking high in the SERPs.
Here we go. The finale is near, and you are all set for the big opening. But are you ready? Test and retest are the way to identify any potential glitches during the rush hour. Your eCommerce store is all you have as a frontrunner for the busiest shopping battle of the year, and the stakes are high. So, do not shy away from testing your store as many times as you feel like. Test the functionality of your links, check load times, analyze responsiveness across multiple devices and request feedback from your visitors. The more your test, the more you improve, the better your store becomes.
If something that this pandemic has taught us, even our best-laid plans can sometimes go awry. So, while you prepare for the big sales, be prepared for unforeseen circumstances too. There can be emergencies during the holiday shopping rush, like downtime or something else. Keep an eCommerce checklist ready for both holiday marketing and holiday store maintenance and support. Make a contingency plan for situations you think can arise and exercise to mitigate them as quickly as possible. The problems can occur both at the technical and marketing front. Talk to your eCommerce platform tech and digital marketing partner to handle such situations in real-time.
An excellent way to determine the success of your plan is to review the outcomes. You can use either Google Analytics or any other metrics platform to gather the data. Analyze and make informed decisions for the future shopping seasons or even otherwise. These numbers will provide you with valuable insight into customers’ shopping behavior and will help you attract and retain customers in the future. You can start with analyzing last year’s data to understand and prepare for the eCommerce holiday season trends for 2021.
We know it has been a hard couple of years. But guess what, you made it through holiday season 2020, and you will make it through the eCommerce holiday season 2021 as well. Just believe that as you step into the peak season, there are last-minute preps that will help you emerge with flying colors on the other side. You still have time. With an eCommerce store primed to handle massive traffic and a winning marketing plan, you can get through BFCM 2021.
If you need help optimizing your eCommerce store or want to get your hands on the ultimate eCommerce holiday checklist, just contact us. We are here to help.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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