Chris Christoff October 16, 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two big days that all marketers are excited about. It’s a great time for businesses to attract new customers, boost their sales, and increase their overall conversions.
So, most marketers start preparing for a profitable Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale way before the actual day of the event, just to ensure that the sale is a massive success.
From working on the promotion strategy, preparing their websites for heavy traffic influx, order fulfillment, etc., there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of.
If you haven’t started your Black Friday and Cyber Monday preparation yet, it’s time for you to get started now.
Here’s how to plan your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales to make sure that you get the best out of these two big days.
1. Plan Your Deals Well
Since both Black Friday and Cyber Monday are about offering discounts, the most important thing to do is to plan out the deals that you’re going to offer.
Here are some steps to help you plan your BF and CM deals:
- List out the products that you want to put on sale.
- Now make an estimate of your overall revenue goals and how much traffic you need to meet your goal.
- Determine how much to spend on your advertisements.
- Next, analyze your profit margins. You can add the actual product price against each of your products to make these calculations easier.
Doing these calculations will help you decide how much room is left for you to offer the discounts. When you know that, you can easily set realistic goals that can be fulfilled without disappointment. It’ll also stop you from carelessly overspending on your inventory or advertising.
2. Use Strong Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in which people follow the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behavior.
So, when people land on your website and see that others have already bought your product they are more likely to purchase it. There are different types of social proof that marketers use to attract leads and turn them into sales.
A very effective social proof that most shoppers trust is user-generated content. This can be a simple review or an image of satisfied customers using your product.
You can also display a countdown timer to show the start and the end of the sale to create a sense of urgency. Other than that, you can show real-time notifications of people buying your product on your website.
These notifications can trigger FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, which again is a psychological phenomenon triggered by the thought that others are enjoying something that they are not.
This will encourage people to take quick action so that they can grab the opportunity right away. Plugins like TrustPulse can help you create such notifications on your website without any coding.
3. Create Striking Images
Another step to planning your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is to create some striking images promoting your offers. You can use these images in email marketing, social media, etc. And you don’t really need a graphic design whiz to create them for you.
Just make sure that your images appear colorful and catchy to your visitors.
Highlight the deals that you’re offering and make sure that it looks good across devices including mobile screens.
You can also use free image creation tools that can make the task a lot simpler.
4. Test Your Tech
So your deals are live, you got a great marketing response and your website is attracting crazy traffic on the day of the event. Everything’s going great and the next thing you know is that your site crashed.
Can anything be worse than that?
So, prepare your website for the heavy traffic that’s expected to hit it on the big days. Make sure that there’s no server limitation or performance problem. Monitor your site properly for at least a week before the event.
If you spot any issue try to fix it right away. You can also contact your web hosting service provider if the need arises.
5. Optimize Your Checkout Process
Another very important factor to take care of is to optimize your checkout process. There’s no point offering great discounts if people exit your website because of a broken or faulty checkout process.
This will not only hamper your sales during the offer period but will affect it in the long run too. Firstly, it will result in lower conversions and secondly, it will raise your cart abandonment rates. And because of the bad experience, your visitors might even choose never to return to your website.
So, optimize your checkout process before anything of that sort happens and hampers your business. You can’t take the risk of losing out on your customers due to a bad checkout process, especially on the day when your sales are expected to shoot up.
Over to You
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, most marketers are busy strategizing on how to make the best out of these days. If you’re one of them, then the points discussed above can be a ready-made checklist for you to use and plan out your holiday sale for the best results.
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