Your 2021 Black Friday Cyber Monday Success Guide

The shop-till-you-drop moment of the year is around the corner. Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the center of discounts, days when most customers are seeking the best deals, and when e-commerce stores hang on the brink of traffic overload. Additionally, running a successful sale at such a time involves more than just planning around profit margins and store traffic.

How you market your offer to potential clients and its creativity level will determine most of your overall performance. You need to do everything you can to make the best of BFCM. Here are some points to focus on:

Preparing for The Upcoming BFCM Season

• Focus on loyalty programs that allow new and existing customers to splurge.
• Offer on-point and seamless digital experiences that emphasize the convenience of e-commerce.
• Implement a smart advertising strategy that considers ad-spend increases and AOV decreases due to discounts.
• Adopt a mobile-centric approach to marketing that targets SMS.

Tips for Making The Most of BFCM

1. Consider Partnering with Influencers

Build widespread trust and brand awareness before BFCM by partnering with influencers to promote your product. When done correctly, an influencer campaign can also lead to a spike in direct sales and site traffic. 

Focus on how your product resonates with an influencer’s audience in advance if you want your promotion to be a success. The most successful campaigns choose influencers based on their audience demographics and NOT the demographic of the influencer themselves.

Additionally, you can personalize the offer by creating an exclusive deal or discount code tailored to an influencer’s followers. A community-focused option worth considering is having an influencer curate a bundle of their favorite products. Doing so builds a more authentic connection to what the influencer is promoting.

2. Offer A Free Gift Card for Each Purchase

One of the incentives you can opt for in a BFCM promotion is offering a gift card. That suggests that customers who make orders above a particular threshold or buy a specific product get a free gift card for future purchases. 

Understand that gift cards are only redeemable when used. That, in turn, creates a win-win situation because you either get a new customer when the gift card is given to a family member or friend or a repeat customer down the road. The implication here is that selling a gift card affords your two clients, making it an opportunity worth seizing.

3. Leverage Free Gifts with Every Purchase

Products that position themselves as luxury or premium market choices often shy away from heavy discounting. When that is the case, offering a gift with a purchase is the perfect alternative to leverage the holiday rush without extending price cuts.

In most cases, a free, low-cost item that comes with every sale is the typical “gift.” Gifting buyers a free limited edition or high-value item with a minimum spend is also something worth considering.

Do not forget to create a sense of urgency to encourage shoppers to take advantage of the deal before it’s over, no matter the bonus or gift you decide to give for each purchase.

4. Bundle Your Products

Increasing your store’s average order value while providing more value to clients is possible by bundling products. That is essential because it allows you to retain a healthy profit margin while presenting new options to your customers. You can even take this idea further with a mystery bundle containing some of your best products!

When you choose this option, your mystery bundle should be offered at a significant discount to those willing to purchase everything. This can be a great way to expose customers to new product lines, or get early feedback on unreleased products.

5. Break Your Offers into Daily Deals

One of the most challenging aspects of an extended BFCM campaign is keeping the excitement and momentum throughout your sale period. So, creating exclusive one-day sales on particular products may be necessary if you want to engage new shoppers successfully during a four, five, or even seven-day sale period.

It is worth mentioning that this type of promotion creates several opportunities to focus on individual segments of a customer base for business owners who sell multiple categories of products. You can also improve email open rates by having a daily or even nightly deal because you will have a new limited-time offer and fresh content each day.

6. Explore The Opportunity to Gamify Your Offers

Gamification allows customers to “play to win” your offers. If you are yet to experiment with this option, BFCM offers an excellent opportunity to try it. You can expect to get more engagement from the new visitors you seek to drive from your BFCM campaign by incorporating gamification into your store. 

Although there are many forms of gamification, you can set up a few approaches easily and try them as well. These include creating a game-like experience where clients “scratch” a card on a product to reveal limited-time discounts, which can be used to promote bundle deals.

Another option is turning email collection into a fun game of chance. That entails your customers spinning a wheel with the hope of landing on a big discount. The idea behind the wheel is re-engaging existing clients by offering a new way to save on their favorite products and increasing email opt-in rates for new visitors.

The Bottom Line

The Black Friday Cyber Monday season is the pinnacle of online shopping and brand sale success. Make your customers feel like a member of your brand’s family, keep them in the loop on discounts and offers they’ve been watching, and encourage them to shop early to beat the Holiday shipping rush.

Need help getting your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign in place? Contact us for a free consultation to see where you can best succeed!