Innovative eCommerce from Netcash
September 30, 2021
eCommerce Marketing Tips for the Festive Season
December 1, 2021
For most online traders in South Africa, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the busiest shopping days of the year. Millions of shoppers hit their favourite online stores in search of the best limited-time deals.
Analysts predict that this year is geared to shatter last year’s numbers, with millions in additional sales, boosting Black Friday and Cyber Monday figures.
This year Black Friday is on 26 November 2021 and Cyber Monday falls on Monday 29 November 2021. The countdown has started, 2 days to go. But are you prepared?
If you plan on taking part and running promotions over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, it is vital to plan and prepare well in advance to make sure you capitalise on the occasion. The majority of South African retailers will be running promotions simultaneously, so how do you make sure you offer the best deal and make your campaign stand out in the sea of messages.
Remember, customers are trawling the internet looking for:
- The best deals in the country
- Great prices on brands they already buy into
- Festive gifts for family and friends &
- Bulk discount pricing, to mention a few
These are our top tips to help you optimise your online store and improve sales over Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the general Silly Season.
1. Exclusive Offers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Write this one down! If you drop the ball on your offers you’re not going to see the results you are expecting. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the 2 most prominent shopping days in the year where customers can find the biggest and the best discounts and promotions in South Africa.
Customers expect to see great promotions and deep discounts. Some may say they demand them and if you disappoint customers visiting your online store you are not going to convert them or see them again.
Remember these 2 words and the clear difference in the meaning:
SALE
Sale stock is commonly referred to as stock within the business that is distressed and needs to be cleared. You would put the stock on sale if it was not selling, or selling slowly. In most cases, you would have been unable to sell this stock during the year and the stock could also be near the end of its shelf life. In other cases, your stock could be distressed because it is the end of season or end of the range and you have odd colours and sizes remaining. This stock is distressed and should be marked to clear.
The reality is, if you were unable to sell this stock pre–Black Friday, you are going to struggle to sell it during Black Friday… Unless your discounts are deep. Very deep. Customers do not get excited when they see sale discounts below 40% and expect discounts of 50% and more.
When planning for a sale, you should identify the distressed stock, including stock with high volumes, stock with expiry dates and left-over seasonal stock, all of which needs to be cleared before a specific date.
PROMOTION
Very important, promotion is an in-demand product at a great price. The opposite to a sale, when planning for promotions, you should be looking at your best-selling products and categories. You want to offer customers great value on the items they want and love in the form of gifts with purchase, sitewide promotions and bundled deals. When planning for promotions, instead of trying to clear sale stock you should be forecasting to replenish your core SKUs and negotiating with your suppliers for bulk discount prices to make sure that you do not run out of stock and capitalise on sales over the festive frenzy season.
Make sure that your sale or promotion offers competitive discounts – we’re talking about the busiest shopping day of the year. Give new and existing customers an incentive to choose your online store over your South African competitors!
2. Advertise on Social Media
Billions of people across the globe use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok and Snapchat. Statistics online show that more than half of social media users check their accounts multiple times every single day. So social media has become a part of our everyday lives, and I think it is safe to assume that this will be the case for the foreseeable future.
This is great news for us online traders. Social Media platforms are very powerful marketing channels with many benefits.
Consider running pre-launch social media campaigns in the weeks leading up to Black Friday to raise awareness and get your customers excited. Make sure you are advertising your deals on multiple platforms so that you can reach your customers on their preferred platform and ensure your content is catchy and share-worthy.
You can use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Twitter and other platforms to reach wide, specific audiences and try reaching out to blogs, sites and forums that advertise Black Friday deals and submit yours to increase your reach.
3. Enhance Your Design with a New Landing Page or Banners
Your landing page is the first thing your customers see when they are redirected from your marketing campaigns on social and email. Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate with a clear message so that your customers can understand the promotions on offer, the rules that apply, and the action they need to perform for the promotion to activate. An example of the rules and actions would be a promotion where your customer needs to add multiple items to the cart for the discount to apply or enter a promo code at checkout.
If customers do not immediately understand what kind of promotion you are running you will most likely see a higher than normal bounce rate as customers leave your site feeling let down.
Make your landing page and banners capture your customer’s attention with clear, precise, well-implemented marketing design. Black Friday is the biggest shopping event of the year so make sure your site reflects that and captures your customer’s attention.
4. Start a Countdown to Build Anticipation
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are shopping days that customers look forward to each year. As you prepare to launch your promotions, customers too are preparing to shop. Using banners, subscribe pop-ups and countdown timers are a great way to create anticipation and excitement in the weeks leading up to the festive season.
Make use of some of the marketing apps in the Netcash Shop app market to add banners, pop-ups and countdown timers to keep your customers on the edge of their seats.
Try Zotabox in the Netcash Shop app market for 20+ Promotional Sales Tools: Popups, Banners, Timers, Coupons, Testimonials.
5. Offer Free Shipping
Customers tend to get caught up in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday frenzy and are inclined to spend more online while shopping deep discounts and taking advantage of great value promotions.
If customers are faced with shipping fees at checkout, on top of their already increased order value they might choose to remove items from their cart or abandon their cart at checkout, either to shop in-store or buy from your competition.
If you offer free shipping to your customers they experience immediate gratification and tend to check out faster leaving less time to ponder and compare your deals to your competition. Show your generosity and seal the deal with this simple but effective marketing tactic for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
6. Employ & Maximize Your Marketing Strategy
Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing. Email marketing is an easy and inexpensive way to advertise and market your brand effectively, possibly making it the single greatest channel for reaching wide consumer audiences.
Email users across the globe check their email inboxes multiple times daily during the week and over weekends. In this digital age, our emails are accessible at home, at school, at work and on the go.
Create sign-up or subscribe strategies during the year to build up your email database so you can market directly to your active customers using this mass channel. You can add into your emailers, information about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns and include detailed information in your marketing message.
The email marketing channel is a great way to increase repeat customers on the same day by sending out reminders or follow-up emails to create urgency and let customers know that your deals will be ending soon.
You can also use the email marketing channel to send even better, ridiculous offers to customers that have already placed an order on Black Friday to encourage further spending. Reminder or follow-up emails are a brilliant way to drive more sales during promotional periods.
7. A Smooth Shopping Experience means a Higher Conversion Rate!
I can’t stress this point enough. As a store owner, you must put your customer hat on and spend time shopping on your online store, pretending to be a customer and following all of the steps they would while shopping.
From your landing page, make sure the promotion messaging is clear including launch/end dates, qualifying factors and T&C’s. When you are comfortable that your marketing assets are perfect, add products to your cart and proceed to checkout to make sure that your site is set up and working correctly. If you are promoting bundle deals or using promo codes, test them to ensure they are set up correctly.
If your site is not functioning well or customers experience difficulty taking part in your promotions they will no doubt close their browser window and their business will go to your competition – and especially on the busiest shopping day of the year when the market is flooded with deals-to-die-for and limited time to shop. You can bet they aren’t coming back.
Check, check and check again.
8. Make Sure You’re on the Right Plan!
If you are increasing your catalogue size or adding additional marketing tools like the Netcash Shop Abandoned Cart feature or the Netcash Shop plugin for MailChimp, make sure you are on the right Netcash Shop plan and upgrade in advance if necessary to ensure you can prepare for your official Black Friday campaign launch.
Explore the Netcash Shop app market for reporting and marketing tools to enhance your campaign and sit back and watch your increased traffic convert to sales.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner!
Start your planning and strategising well in advance to ensure your business is properly prepared for the year’s biggest shopping days and reach out to the Netcash Shop support team if you have any questions and make sure you are prepared for a smooth rollout on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Author:
Steven Howard
eCommerce Product Owner
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