Originating in America, Black Friday has slowly crept into UK culture over the past few years. With shoppers all searching for bargains, as an ecommerce store you can’t afford to get your Black Friday marketing wrong. Chances are, your store is selling similar products to others, so how do you convince customers to spend their hard-earned cash on your products? As a team of ecommerce experts, we’ve teamed together to give you our most effective practices in boosting sales! From emails to upselling, keep reading to find out how we get quality results for our ecommerce clients!
Social Media and Ecommerce – A Match Made in Heaven
Social media is the perfect complement to your ecommerce store. The sheer amount of people using social media gives you the ideal platform to share your products. Overlooking this will cause your sales to take a serious hit. Social media gives users the ability to share posts, meaning that it’s a constant cycle of your store and products being in front of a potential customer. In 2017, American shoppers spent over $5 billion online, with UK shoppers not far behind.
Social media gives you the opportunity to post instantly, adjust your posts / shares and monitor the results of your actions. Whether you’re posting memes or a direct Call to Action, these are all part of building your online presence and introducing your store to potential customers. Social platforms allow you to share your latest deals with those that follow you, those who could potentially follow you and through paid ads, those who fit into your target audience.
Facebook paid ads are a powerful tool for promoting your latest deals and key products. They allow you to direct posts to your target audience with the opportunity to also hit potential customers who haven’t heard about your store. In all of your social posts, don’t forget to add a Call to Action. They can be the determining factor in whether that impression turns into a link click. We find that terms like ‘find out more’, ‘get in touch’ and ‘click for exclusive offers’ work well.
It’s always worth researching the peak hours that your audience spend time online. Schedule your posts for these times to gain maximum results from them. Knowing when your posts are active allows you to interact with users. This makes them feel that you care and that you want them to buy from you. Your customer service is as important as anything.
The Power of an Email Blast
We’re already being bombarded with Black Friday emails. It happens every year and your customers are expecting them. They want to know what their favourite stores are offering over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Shoppers are hunting for the best deals. You’d be silly not to put them right under their nose. We’re spending more and more time on our phones now so put your deals where you customers are focusing their attention.
It’s not the most recent digital marketing technique and it’s certainly not the most complex, but it works. Email marketing has a great ROI, often matching that of social media marketing. However, yours will in no way be the only Black Friday email that your customers receive. Think about your imagery, the wording of your content and the offers you put on them. All of these factors count and will help to set your email campaign apart from the rest.
We suggest taking a look at your email list and ensuring that it’s segmented into past and potential buyers. Slightly altering your email to suit these two groups will make a huge difference. The first thing that you see in your inbox is the subject line. Ensure that yours is enticing, witty and encourages the reader to open your email. Use strong colours, customers pay no attention to insipid colours that don’t catch their eye.
Pay Attention to Your Upselling
Look online for a minute around Black Friday / Cyber Monday and you’ll be hit with companies everywhere upselling. If you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on a lot of business. Think of it like this: If you were searching for a particular product and you could choose from a company giving you an added extra and one that gave you just the product, which would you choose? When somebody is buying a product from you, they’ve chosen your store for a reason. Take advantage of that moment and give them something extra that they weren’t expecting and boost their satisfaction levels. This increases the potential of them buying from you again.
Our advice is to create product bundles of around 3-4 products to offer quality selling experience. When writing your promotional copy, do so in a way that won’t allow your customer to second guess their decision. Add elements such as countdown timers and words such as ‘limited time’ and ‘exclusive’ to create a sense of urgency.
Love Your Landing Page
While you’re paying attention to your website to ensure it’s Black Friday ready, have you considered your landing page? If you don’t have the time to completely change it for the occasion, that’s fine. However, adding a few factors that enable you to make tweaks for Black Friday is sensible. Over 60% of Christmas shoppers search for Black Friday deals for an extensive period before the actual event. Take advantage of these early birds and put your store in front of them as they search.
The Final Countdown
Black Friday is all about quick actions from your customer encouraged by a sense of urgency created by you. Delivering constant reminders that time and stock is running out instils urgency and panic in your customers, causing them to make purchases without hesitation. Countdown timers are a visual tool that the customer can’t ignore.
We advise programming your landing page, email campaigns and your social posts to include countdowns. Reinforce products in high demand and limited time on deals.
Create Urgency with a Flash Sale
We’ve previously mentioned countdown timers as a way to encourage potential customers. Another way of doing this is through flash sales. Customers are raring to go so that they don’t miss out on the Black Friday deals, they’re expecting short-lived deals that are Black Friday exclusive! Reports have shown 50% increases in conversion rates purely through flash sales. That’s a huge increase for any ecommerce store.
We recommend putting your higher priced products as featured products. As well as time being limited, we often emphasise that the product is also limited. Using terms such as ‘limited stock’ are effective in encouraging customers to buy.
If you run, or are thinking of opening, an ecommerce store and would like to work with a team of experts don’t hesitate to get in touch today!
Web: www.drumbeatmarketing.co.uk/
Phone: 01427 808870
Email: [email protected]
