Black Friday stands alone as the strongest revenue-generating day of the year for retailers. Adobe reported that there were $11.3 billion on that day in 2022, and the revenue potential is highest for online merchants. Whether you want to optimise your current strategy or create a new one, this guide will help you make the most out of your Black Friday ecommerce strategy for 2023.
Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023
Black Friday – Cyber Monday is also known as BFCM. These are two consecutive sales days that are known to generate a great deal of revenue for ecommerce retailers. This is a crucial period for online retailers to capture new customers and switch them on to your brand. Despite inflation, the signs say that consumers are ready to spend when the sales hit, and brand familiarity is important in driving buying decisions.
You need to be proactive, making your plans early and crafting a winning marketing campaign. Here are some things to get you started:
- Update Policies: Make these clear-cut and easy to find to enhance the customer experience, so add BFCM-related information to your policies and FAQs.
- Prepare for Returns/Exchanges: Many buy Christmas gifts during this period, so there may be an influx of returns and exchanges. You may want to temporarily expand your return window to encapsulate the festive season.
- Shipping: You are going to be competing with the likes of Amazon, so customers will expect seamless shipping experiences. Use inventory management software to ensure you can meet the increasing demands – ERP software includes advanced data analysis and forecasting tools to help with this.
- Prepare for Lost Packages: There are going to be lots of packages in transit, and some will go astray. Customers need to know what will happen in these instances, so include this information in your FAQs or policies.
Let’s work together on your next project
We would love to hear from you to discuss how we could help you with your current or next E-Commerce project or Search Marketing plans.Have Automations in Place on Your Website
Traffic is likely to spike during BFCM. Put automations in place to enable your customers to take control of their experience and ease the burden on your customer service team. You should also ensure your technology is ready to handle the increased bandwidth and maintain a good performance on your website to avoid customers giving up on their orders.
Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots can help with the vast majority of customer service enquiries, keeping basic and repetitive questions away from your customer service team so they can focus on the more complicated ones. Chatbots can auto-generate answers quickly and even refer users to articles in your Help Centre to streamline the customer experience.
Macros
If you don’t have access to automated chatbots, you can set up Macros for your most commonly-asked questions. This enables you to create pre-made responses that collect key customer information and use Rules that assign priority levels to different requests.
Tap Into Social Commerce with Your Marketing Campaigns
Social media is key to success in ecommerce, and this becomes even more crucial during BFCM. Social media ads can drive people to landing pages or product collections based on their interests and social media browsing, bringing targeted traffic to your Black Friday deals. And there are other ways to leverage social media beyond ads:
- Partner with Influencers: Build relationships with influencers who align with your brand and they can help raise awareness of your products or services.
- Create Black Friday Content: Edit headers and bios on your social media channels to showcase your Black Friday deals. Craft images, videos and more that display your best offers in engaging ways, focusing on hashtag promotion and creating viral content to raise awareness.
Double Down on Your Most Successful Posts: If a post gains traction or goes viral, boost it with a little financial weight to further increase their reach.
Maximise Revenue During BFCM
Two major points of focus once Black Friday arrives must be to increase communications touch points and minimise abandoned carts.
Engage Shoppers with More Touch Points
Shoppers will interact with your brand at different points along their customer journey. If you offer touchpoints via social media, email and landing pages as well as your website, you increase the amount of interaction you will have with them. This helps to keep customers engaged as you provide proactive resources based on the interest they have shown in your brand or products.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
Abandoned carts are very prevalent, and they are losing you sales. When BFCM arrives, you want to keep this to a minimum. Design emails or SMS messages that trigger when a cart is abandoned. You can incorporate copy that creates urgency, driving customers back to their shopping carts to avoid losing out on a deal. The CRM aspect of a good ERP system provides tools and resources to do this.
Aim to Retain New Customers Won During BFCM 2023
Repeat customers are very valuable to ecommerce businesses. As you win new customers over the Black Friday period, you should aim to re-engage with them afterwards to bring them back to your business. Here are some ways to do this:
- Offer unique discounts for their next purchase in confirmation emails.
- Invite them to join a loyalty programme.
- Maintain a strong focus on your customer experience strategy, paying attention to feedback to find opportunities for improvement.
Data is Your Friend
Over the sales period, the increase in traffic will lead to a lot of data being collected. You need the resources to leverage this data, as it could help you understand what worked, what didn’t, and how to better target your customers to drive engagement and sales.
There is no better solution for this than a high-quality ERP system. These platforms centralise all the data your business collects, incorporating advanced analytics and reporting to provide crucial insights. They also unite all the disparate facets of your business to enable you to align all departments and work towards the common goals, observing data and activity in real-time to make informed decisions at every turn.
Boost Your Ecommerce Strategy for Black Friday
The aim of this Black Friday – Cyber Monday is to boost your online sales and, more importantly, prepare your ecommerce site for more success in the build-up to Christmas. Create specific goals, like:
- Reducing returns
- Optimising your inventory levels to accommodate demand
- Increasing sustained engagement on your social channels
If you want to get positive results, focus on your Black Friday marketing strategy now. The tips in this article are a good guideline to follow, and the tools and resources mentioned could make a big difference to your success.
Why choose VOOV for your ecommerce management and digital marketing strategy?
By using VOOV, you are guaranteed to have expert, highly technical services for the most complex elements of building an e-commerce site that integrates with your existing systems. This is vital. Today’s e-commerce requirements mean that only the best coding and development and most reliable systems and platforms can be trusted to create robust, secure and reliable sites that will fulfil your customer expectations and help to safeguard your business.
We also have a proven track record in creating and implementing effective content marketing, paid digital marketing, SEO and social media marketing for a wide range of clients in both B2B and B2C marketplaces. If you would like to discuss a project with us, you can get in touch here.
