This Prep Guide is a companion piece for those that have attended my talk at MTL+ECOMMERCE #42 at the Palais des congrès de Montréal in partnership with CQCD. You can view the slides by clicking HERE.
There are so many tactics and strategies we can do in eCommerce for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). What I hope for all of you to get out of this is the nailing the basics. I’m not going to explain how important BFCM is. Only that it’s the time of the year that many companies look forward to, mainly because they hope or expect to make great sales. You can focus on that, sure, but you also need to know that BFCM is a time to build long-term relationships.
I don’t know your background, whether you’re founders or executives, or if you work for a B2B or B2C, or if you’re just starting out in this field and want to learn more about digital marketing and eCommerce. The one thing I want is to bring value to all of you. Below are a few strategies that you can use right now to prepare for BFCM, but what you got to understand is that in order to be ultimately successful during this period, you must know how to grab ATTENTION.
Once you have attention, that’s when all the action starts. Before you make a dollar online, you need to engage with the user in some way. Because that’s all you’re really doing in eCommerce.
For those that are planning to go to business school, and for that have already gone and wasted 2–4 years, the one thing you learn there is; Cash Is King. In contrast for eCommerce, the one thing you need to know is; Content Is King.
BUSINESS SCHOOL: CASH IS KING
ECOMMERCE: CONTENT IS KING
Audio, video, photos, text. There should be no excuses for not being able to create any content. Any smartphone today is the least amount of equipment you need. I still hear people tell me that they’re not able to take pictures or film something because they don’t have a “professional” camera… but I digress.
This BFCM prep guide is separated into 8 parts:
1. Your Campaign
2. Operations
3. Website
4. Email
5. Free Marketing
6. Paid Marketing
7. Amazon
8. Looking into 2018 and beyond.
1. Your Campaign
Before getting all excited about what marketing tactics you’ll be putting together, take a look at your historic BFCM data. See what went good or bad. When did you get the most traffic? Where did that traffic come from? How effective were your emails? How many days did the campaign run for? Also, try to look back at what your competitors have done and ask the same questions you asked yourself about your eCommerce business.
I joined Structube in October of last year. Given that I was new and not super familiar with the product offering or how things worked internally, I had to plan out the sales event as quickly as I could while also managing other parts of the digital marketing.
What I learned from their 2015 campaign was that it was only four days; Black Friday to Cyber Monday. There was a small spike in sales and traffic, but nothing significant. Going back to what I said earlier about attention. The average buying process period for a piece of furniture is four weeks. Having your campaign held for a weekend isn’t enough. Not to mention all the other businesses out there competing for the consumer’s dollar.
As a result, our 2016 campaign was held for 3 weeks; Nov. 14 - Dec 4. It gives the consumer in the purchase cycle enough time to make a decision. We know that some companies are starting their BFCM sales even earlier now, even as early as October, but we didn’t want to overextended ourselves.
This graph illustrated our sales over the BFCM period. What we did not expect at the time was the large sales peak on Sunday the 27th. But we knew why it happened. We had created a sense of urgency by ending the Black Friday Week sale that night. We had sent out newsletters and placed countdown timers on products throughout the website.
The same spike appeared at the end of the Cyber Monday Week sale. The timer expired the night of December 4th.
Our 2016 sales dwarfed our 2015 numbers. And we can only anticipate the same for this year. Sunday the 27th’s sales figures were 4.5x those of an average day in November. While looking at Shopify’s statistics, we saw that Black Friday was the largest sales day for most merchants. This means that depending on your campaign dates and offers, you can yield different results.
Scope your competition:
See what your competitors have been doing in the past years. The simplest way is to do a quick Google search for each one. Don’t forget to filter your search by date and country as results may vary.
Determine Your Offer:
I cannot decide what offer you’re going to have for this event. Just make sure it’s appealing to your customer base, better than any other sale you had earlier in the year, and competitive with your competition. Your offers can take in form as coupon codes, storewide discount, sale on selected products, free shipping, free gift, or a combination of any of these. If you have a tshirt business where you print on demand, then having a storewide sale would work for you. If you’re a larger retailer with a wide range of products such as Best Buy, sales on selected items makes more sense. My recommendation is to stay away from coupon codes for BFCM. From previous personal experience, I found that coupon codes worked the least, and storewide discounts converted the most.
2. Operations
After deciding on your sales promotions, it’s important to have your internal operations aligned. What happened last year was that our warehouse shipping and customer service were not able to handle the huge influx of orders and calls. We were backed up for weeks. If you need to, hire seasonal staff. Sometimes training can be an issue or difficult, so make sure to prep right away.
Here are some tips I have for people running smaller eCommerce businesses.
Customer Service:
One word; Outsource! Try to find someone on Upwork who has minimal experience and is willing to work for less. Search through individuals from overseas with low costs of living that speak and write well in English. Depending on the skills you would need, you can sign them up to take online courses, thus lowering the amount of training you need to provide for them. It’s a win-win situation for both yourself and them. They are willing to take an online course, learn new skills, get paid to do it, and you’re benefiting by helping out this individual, but also not ever extending your expenses if cash is tight. I recently read that William-Sonoma hired seasonal workers to work from home as their customer service representatives.
Inventory & Manufacturing:
If you produce your products yourself, always make sure to order supplies ahead of time, and stock up a bit more than you would normally need. The worst thing to happen would be to sell out, and not be able to fulfill further orders. The same goes for any tools or machinery that you may use for production. For my printing businesses, I would always have a backup machine just in case one would break. And it did happen twice! If you’re running them hours on end, they might need calibration or small repairs after a while. Even if the machinery is expensive, (mine were ~$20k in total), buy them, keep them inside their original packaging in a corner of a room, and only pull them out once you need them. If you ever sell your business, you can sell your equipment at full or near full cost.
BFCM is an excellent time to liquidate old stock or items that are simply not moving as quick as you hoped. Remember the part where I said “Cash is King”? Well that applies to this.
Shipping:
Check with your shipping provider if they have cutoff dates for Black Friday and Christmas. Make sure to provide express shipping options to your customers and be transparent about the shipping times. Halloween and Christmas were some of the busiest times of the year for one of my eCommerce businesses. There were many last minute shoppers and I used Canada Post for shipping. I once drove to five different post offices to buy out all their USA Expresspost packaging because I needed them all, and each location had limited stock left.
Return Policy:
Be transparent. Depending on the type of eCommerce business, return policies are quite important and can set you apart from your competition. On my personal eCommerce businesses, I would not take returns because the items I sold were custom made. For those of you that need it though, check out the different solutions out there. There is a startup in Montreal called Return Magic that might be worth looking into.
Load Testing:
If you’re using Shopify as your eCommerce platform, you may skip this section. As for those using Magento and other platforms where you host on your own servers, you may accustomed to slow load time both in the frontend and backend. It’s good practice to load test your server prior to Black Friday and other campaigns where you expect to have a higher than normal amount of traffic to your website. I won’t go to technical details about this. Contact your hosting provider for assistance.
3. Website
Now we’re getting closer to the fun stuff.
Before you start driving traffic to your website and product pages, there are a few steps you could take to increase your conversion rate.
Some sort of tracking is essential. Google Analytics tied in with Data Studio. FaceBook Pixel for conversion tracking, optimization, and remarketing. Google Tag Manager to implement these and other pixels you would need, such as Pinterest and Bing. This guide will not list out the steps to implement these. All the resources you need are documented elsewhere online. You may outsource these tasks to a freelancer or web agency.
Reward Points & Affiliate Marketing:
Depending on your margins and how frequent people shop at your store, this might be a great opportunity to increase sales. If you want people to promote your business, affiliate marketing could be a good route. There are some good apps and plugins for eCommerce platform now that allow your promoter/influencers/ambassadors to keep track of their sales. On the other hand, if your margins are too low to be appealing for affiliates, you can always offer reward points and have your customers redeem them for gifts or discounts. The screenshot shows how Esther offers points for completing easy to do tasks such as social sharing.
When selecting a program for your own eCommerce, be sure to read reviews and compare the different apps/plugins available. Evaluate what features you want and need, and don’t be shy to ask the developer for a demo or free trial.
Notification Bar & Site-wide Benefits Bar:
Use the notification bar to promote Free Shipping, Free Gifts or just inform your customers about your different offers. It shows transparency and communicates with customers to keep them informed.
Launchpad & Flow for Shopify Plus:
These two new products released for Shopify Plus this year allows merchants to automate certain processing in the backend and frontend. One of the coolest workflows I saw (using Flow) was getting a notification to pause an ad campaign when stock is low or sold out.
Below are two simple, but effective examples of Launchpad. Illest Brand just released their special limited edition Hot Wheels VW Bus. The process was automated from launch time, and at the end once the product ran out. Given the popularity, they had launched a second limited sale a few days later at an predefined time.
Obey Giant also integrates Launchpad to automate their frontend product drops. Every few weeks, they announce a new print release at a given time. If they are signed and numbered, they sell out almost instantly. What’s great about this workflow for BFCM is that you can end your Black Friday weekend campaign at 11:59pm, and launch your Cyber Monday campaign right after automatically.
Countdown Timers:
One great feature that we had implement last year was the countdown timer. Looking back at our sales graph, the sense of urgency of the offers ending soon boosted our sales.
Abandon Cart:
This is a must. It’s automated and drives sales. No reason not to set this up. We had recently gave ours a face-lift in terms of design. Below is a side by side shot of the before and after.
4. Email
There are many tactics for email marketing in general, but the ones listed below are valuable for BFCM.
Make use of emojis 🍑 🙏💯👌🍆:
A simple way to stand out from your competition are emoji. Sure, they may seem played out a bit… like email marketing in general, but they’re still proven to be effective. In our Independence Day newsletters, we did some split testing to see if the number of emojis would affect the open rate. Surprisingly enough, the one with the most, 10 (five flags on each side of the subject line) got the most opens.
Animate with GIFs:
During my presentation, I gave a few examples of our 2016 BFCM newsletters that featured some flashy animated GIFs.
FOMO:
Create a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out. We don’t have too many promotional sales at Structube simply because our moto is to always have low prices. So when we do have a sale, it’s usually an amazing deal and the items sell out quick. We created urgency by adding a calendar to visually show when the sale was happening.
5 Types of Emails you Should be Sending:
- Welcome Journey
- Newsletters (be sure to segment your emails)
- Abandon Cart
- Post Purchase Program (ask for reviews)
- Re-Enagement
Segmentation:
It’s common knowledge that segmenting your email-marketing lists helps you get better open and click rates. By narrowing your focus and sending messages to targeted groups within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant — and relevant campaigns get better results.
Two easy ways to segment emails are by asking them key questions right after signing up, or later through your welcome journey.
5. Free Marketing
Email is part of the free marketing tactics you may use, but there are a few other ones to take advantage of during BFCM. One important lesson known in the tech scene that is said quite often, quoted by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator. “Do things that don’t scale.”
What does this mean for us on BFCM? It means, engage with your audience. Like and comment on pictures on Instagram. Authentic comments, not automated ones that zip through hashtags. Post on forums and subreddits. Talk to your customers and get their feedback on their experience with your brand. Interactions like this generate word of mouth and gives them a sense of being a part of your brand. BFCM is the time to build long-term relationships.
Flipp & Reebee:
If you’re eCommerce has a brick and motar location. Publish a digital flyer onto Flipp or Reebee (or both!). Flipp is a free service that offers premium placement at a cost. Reebee is a paid service, but you might be able to negotiate a deal.
Using Reddit To Your Advantage:
If you’re not familiar with reddit, explaining how to generate traffic from this source will take a while. Instead, here are a few pointers to take into consideration in terms of advertising.
- Great for start-ups or small businesses.
- Post in relevant subreddits.
- Don’t force feed — blatant ads won’t work.
- Write instead: “I’ve made X that does Y”.
- Understand the reddit culture (hivemind).
- Make it look authentic.
You can read my article about an ad that was put together a few years ago and had a huge impact on the community. (BTW, Alexis Ohanian, the founder of reddit, liked and shared the article.)
Google Customer Reviews:
This is actually something quite recent that has been added by Google. If you have Google Merchant Center setup, you can now collect reviews from customers that have purchased from your website. Previously, this had to be done by 3rd party review website, but is now offered for free from Google.
6. Paid Marketing
Overpriced Attention vs Underpriced Attention:
Underpriced attention is probably where you should be putting your money right now for paid ads. The CPC & CPA are quite low in these mediums today. With merchants everywhere competing for ads and driving the price up, maybe diverting your resources to underpriced attention will be a better strategy.
What is underpriced attention? Instagram influencers. Would you rather spend $1M dollars on a TV commercial, or billboard? Or would you rather create a video and pay a bunch of Instagram influencers to post it? I think the latter would have a bigger, better, and cheaper impact. Thus the term; underpriced attention.
Here is my list of underpriced attention:
Instagram Influencers
Instagram Stories
Instagram Shopping
Podcasts
Messenger Ads (new!)
Facebook Carousel Ads
Facebook Collections
Facebook Canvas
Facebook Leads
Google Shopping
Bing
7. Amazon
Back in 2012, I had built an Amazon store in about two week with over 10k items listed. How I managed that is another story to tell. From day 1 we were making sales, and averaging ~3000 orders a month. What I learned from Amazon back then was that almost no matter what you list, it will sell. With that said, if your goal is to drive sales, and not build long-term relationships, list your items on Amazon today. Black Friday and Amazon Prime Days are their two big main events each year. They’re meant to liquidate stagnant inventory. (Side note, to ensure your products are available for customers in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, make sure your shipments arrive at an Amazon fulfillment center by November 7.)
Reasons why people would rather purchase on Amazon than on your website:
- Convenience
- Price
- Prime
- One-click
Reasons why you should list on Amazon today for Black Friday:
- They have more traffic than you.
8. Looking into 2018 and beyond.
What’s the future of BFCM and eCommerce in general? We’re not sure. One thing that people are betting on is that voice will play a strong role. Think Alexa or Google Home. Remember when people would say: “optimize for mobile”? (They still do actually…) Well now take that concept and imagine: “optimize for voice”.
For this year’s BFCM, think micro. Use the tactics I’ve provided. Look elsewhere for other ones that you might find useful. Speak with other people working in the same field as you and bounce off ideas. But always keep a macro view on eCommerce. See what’s happening around you. ToysRus went bankrupt. Why? They got into the eCommerce game way too late and they never innovated. Other retailers such as WalMart offer the same products for less. So what extra value did ToysRus provide? Always have an eye out for what happening around you, and try to anticipate on what’s coming next. Once Facebook ads and Instagram will no longer be your source of traffic, you should have already been growing your brand on another medium.
I would like to give a special thanks to Structube, Bloom Search Marketing, and Absolunet for helping me put together this prep guide and presentation.
