Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions are huge sources of e-commerce revenue around the world. Companies understand how much money can be made by participating in the Black Friday season, even in countries where Thanksgiving is not celebrated in November.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, millions of shoppers shop for Christmas gifts in the cozy corners of their homes instead of going to crowded malls and stores. They use their computers, tablets, and smartphones to find offers, enter payment and shipping information, and complete transactions. We are of course talking about Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year.
If you want to make the most of the biggest trading event of the year, it’s important to start planning as early in the year as possible. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still great opportunities for your business to end the year successfully, no matter how it has looked so far. You can easily do your research online with a good internet connection. You can opt for Cox, a popular Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the market, due to its feasibly priced packages. Furthermore, they value their clients and their Cox customer service is accessible 24/7, in case of any issues.
Before we get into our top tips for Cyber Monday marketing to get you started, let us first tell you a bit about Cyber Monday.
What is Cyber Monday?
For businesses and customers, shopping and gifts are a central part of the Christmas season.
Thus, Cyber Monday was born. Cyber Monday, originally a shopping holiday that spanned the weekend from Thanksgiving to Black Friday, has become a global event for businesses large and small.
Cyber Monday is mostly online. It started in 2005 when online shopping wasn’t as popular as it is today. Back then, people needed reassurance from retailers to visit and shop on their sites. Times have changed and now small shopping websites and online stores can join the campaign.
How to get your business “Cyber Monday” ready?
Special events like cyber Monday or Black Friday will require a little more effort and unique marketing campaigns if you want to capture the customer’s attention. Your competitors will be lobbying for the same market so it’s time to bring out the big guns. Here is how you can do that:
1. Pick a specific time
To give your company enough time to develop and fine-tune your marketing strategy, we recommend that you start preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday as early as September.
Starting early can help you determine the best way to grow your audience for the campaigns you run in October and November.
One way to focus your efforts is to use drip-marketing tactics. You can expand your emails according to different times and triggers based on what you think is best for your customers.
2. Work on your discounts
You need to plan for your Cyber Monday sale to be a success. Without proper preparation, this can become overwhelming and demanding for you and your employees. You need to decide what types of campaigns you want to run and for what products.
Buyers are looking for offers, so it’s important that you offer them that. If you don’t, your site visitors may not make a purchase. Your company should also list the offers, deals, and coupons you plan to roll out in the coming months. By deciding which offers to put forward, you can strategically plan when to send them to your customers.
3. Check your stock
We recommend having more than one product on sale on these big shopping days and separating your sales from the big days. Get a Black Friday theme separate from Cyber Monday. You can host an additional Saturday Small Business Sale dedicated to the local community you serve.
By looking at various offers and dates, you can disperse the chaos that can ensue over the Black Friday weekend and make sure you have enough inventory to meet demand if you get your calculations right.
4. Ensure your website is ready
So, you know what you offer your customers and how to keep up with them, and you get people to your site and it goes down due to the influx of traffic. Not what you planned? First, create a user-friendly website with a simple and quick navigation system and clear access to customer support.
User-friendly websites provide a seamless experience and keep customers long after Cyber Monday. Secondly, you need to enlist the help of an IT professional to structure your website in order to have a scalable, fault-tolerant, higher bandwidth database capable of increasing traffic and online transaction volume. This ensures that your e-commerce site can handle any amount of traffic in almost any situation.
Conclusion
Effective marketing will bring you more orders, so make sure you have a plan in place to complete those orders in a timely and efficient manner. Let customers track their orders to give them peace of mind and lessen your shipping requests. There is no perfect plan, but this checklist will ensure that you get started on the right foot. Go there, make your plan and be ready to reap the rewards.