Organizations need to show off, signal and focus on the invested incentives and potential outcomes during this sale season. As COVID-19 begets social distancing this year, Black Friday is going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. With social distancing rules still in effect for many countries around the world, every retailer needs to have a strong e-commerce presence in order to survive. As an agency servicing e-commerce client base, organization and planning are paramount to ensuring all clients get the best possible performance from the sales period while avoiding any Black Friday disasters. In process of prepping up for the upcoming Black Friday, We’re Covering 12 Tips Here That Will Help You Scale You’re Business during This Holiday Season:
Get all things that you require in place. You must have proper signage if you are at some physical location, prepare all product categories that you wish to display online, what kind of online tour you’re going to provide to your clients.
Just by offering discounts is not a great way to grow your business. You need to have the products with great attach rates like an accessory that you can attach to a larger product. If you are selling some accessory that goes really well with the product that you’re trying to sell then that’s where a lot of value comes from. You can discount that particular accessory and discount it further than you would normally because you are going to make up your margins and make up your sales from the larger product that they would generally purchase.
This is going to help you out in understanding the types of ads that you are going to post, where you’re going to add your shopping feed, where the money needs to go and what’s going to fetch you money through this season.
There is nothing worse than finding out that Black Friday is in two weeks and you’re not up with your product line or marketing strategies or online store setup or there are loopholes in the payment gateway or if you think that you’re not even remotely prepared, or you’re not running any ads or you don’t have my shopping feet setup or you don’t have any local, digital billboards, or you don’t have anything set up to drive people into your store. A business needs to set this up prior to the actual launching of the business because then you can go around and test if you need a different design, or maybe I need some different messaging or different wording, this is why the ad campaigns are required to prepare in advance.
You need to consider that your competitors are also going to take advantage of the increased customers and increased sales during this holiday season. By having an understanding of what kind of products you need to offer, predicting the volume of sales will help you identify how much you need to spend. If you invest $100 and generate a sale of $1000 that is way better than spending $10 and generate a sale of $50 or $100. Spending a $10 to sell an item of $1000 doesn’t mean that it will succeed every time. It is important to pay attention to your budget and margins while preparing this to succeed.
Having an understanding of your prospective target audience is important to start getting people interested in the products or services that you offer by planning in advance. It is not necessary that every ad that you make is to be optimized for conversion. Brand awareness and reach must be considered equally as much. You need to be reaching out to people in affinity audiences and then in-market audiences, people who are actually searching to purchase and not just searching to research but can’t let the researchers go either. Now if you want to ensure that if they are researching a product, researching a solution that you sell, that’s when they are ready to buy, they have already interacted with you.
The budget allocation is directly proportional to what you’re trying to accomplish. A lot of times one of the best rules of thumbs would be 40% dedicated towards that reach, audience building and some brand awareness and the rest 60% into the ads. Initially, you may put 60% or even 80% into this reach or brand awareness kind of campaign, so people know who you are. Try and figure out the budget allocation in a way so that when people are actually in a mood to buy, you are the first business people think about.
Now, if you say that my sale time is going to come in a couple of weeks and I do not have time to build an email campaign. You might be right to an extent as you don’t have a list of 10-20-30 thousand people that you have to reach, but if you don’t start now, you’re still not going to get started. So you need to build an email campaign so that customers you build now may become your lifetime customers because you have already started this whole communication with them.
This is where your ads are going to direct back to you, this is where your emails are going to direct back to you, if you are doing digital billboards or maybe even doing print, radio or something like that, Pandora or Spotify, these are different places that you can direct your customers back to.
Instead of sending them to www.yourwebsite.com, you should send them to www.yourwebsite.com/blackfriday or www.yourwebsite.com/cybermonday, something like that, based on your holiday, and the offers and specials that you are offering.
That way they don’t have to go to their website and then try to find the offer that drew them there in the first place. This helps draw messaging on ads, this helps to ensure when customers get to your websites, they find what they need as soon as they can. Customers move very quickly, especially during holiday purchasing. They don’t have time to hunt through your website and try to find exactly what drew them there. So make it easy, create some landing pages, put all your offerings and your products there, so that way they are able to purchase at the exact moment when they are ready to.
Product titles, product prices, various categories, and subcategories must be showing up correctly. You’ve got a great looking image or even multiple images of the product with descriptions. Optimize your images, titles, descriptions and make sure your other products are also been recommended on your website. That way if they are really buying widget A, they can also really benefit from widget B, they can identify them, you can educate them and increase your sales.
You definitely don’t want to wait till the last minute and find out that your payment process can’t keep up or that your shopping cart is not fully utilized and implemented correctly, even worse you don’t want to know that you are getting a lot of traffic but your web host is not able to handle it. So these are all things that you need to verify before you start your marketing before it’s your go time. So make sure that each link on each individual page is functional and nothing is broken, make sure everything in the menu is working, make sure that people can process their credit cards and pay you and you can get money for what you ship. Make sure that your taxes are set up correctly – you got to know the states in which the tax is applicable, what amount of tax is being submitted to intend state authorities and is the tax being collected effectively. If you are running ads outside of your website, make sure that your merchant centre is running effectively, make sure that your product is there-image is there-shipping and tax settings are also set correctly.
If people are into comparison shopping, it will show them what price combines with the deductible tax amount. If your tax and shipping settings aren’t correct, you shouldn’t be the victim of that paying switch. If that item costs $10 everywhere, but you happen to charge $25 as the shipping fee, the customers won’t think a bit and switch away to your competitors. Check everything, check it twice, and then you’re ready for sales.
It’s better to be proactive here. What you would least expect is that your competitor is selling something at a lesser price than yours or they are variating their offerings within a similar price bracket? It can be like, if you offer free shipping, your competitor might come up with free overnight shipping. Only battling for the price is the race to the bottom because there are definitely people out there who can afford to make a dollar a sale. And they may not be you, you might have your own margins to 50-60-70 percent, or you may choose to lower your margins, which can eventually help you in selling lower-priced products first. The bigger guys out there can afford to take a loss on just about everything. There are other folks out there who don’t have any overheads, so you need to have a thorough competitor analysis to find out what they are doing, what they are doing better than you and how you can compete that.
The last thing you want to hear is that you have enough orders such that you are not able to ship them on time or maybe you run out of suppliers, maybe you are fulfilling an order from overseas and it’s going to take six weeks to get here or maybe there is a big long lead time for you to actually get these products. You need to fix the occurrence of any such issues, otherwise, you might expect bad reviews, angry customers, lost sales, refunds on discounts and coupons, and it could destroy your holiday season.
Also read: How Much Does It Cost to Develop an eCommerce Website
There is no reason to curb your shopping instincts now…Looking for some jaw-dropping deals? The world will have their Black Friday 2020 on November 27, but it’s never too early to prepare for the biggest shopping day of the year. Here is your chance to dive straight in and have an e-commerce app or a website of your own. This will not only help your business to scale up, bring into the public eye and but will also help to increase the sales manifold. You got to know that your staff are trained so they know what kinds of sales to offer. Let our experts guide you through Q4, sharing tips, best practices, and key insights.
Neeti Kotia is a technology journalist who seeks to analyze the advancements and developments in technology that affect our everyday lives. Her articles primarily focus upon the business, social, cultural, and entertainment side of the technology sector.
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