Smart marketers are already preparing their online marketing campaigns and websites for the holiday season. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, sales days are only getting bigger every year. These most significant shopping events allow nobody to stay indifferent, forcing even the savviest shoppers to make decisions, purchase impulsively and smart pay.
This holiday season is a great time for marketers and consumers as they look particularly promising. The challenge is that there are so many ways to prepare, and being prepared really depends on the services you offer by knowing your customers’ needs.
And, here we are to help you do just that:
1. Know Your Promotional Goals:
Targeting the right market remains the success key of a marketing campaign. Making use of existing customer’s data will help marketers set goals and strategize better. By understanding your customer’s past purchase preferences, shopping habits, pain points, their behaviors, will help you set your goals in advance.
Effective marketing is a well-informed strategy which defines a business goal, vision, and your mission. This helps increase awareness of your products or services, improve brand value and sell more products to the right audience and at the same time reach new customer segments.
2. Keep Things Simple:
We have all heard the saying ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ (KISS), which is primarily a design principle noted by the US Navy in 1960. This seems to be more relevant in our daily lives and as well as in sales and marketing. Companies all across the world are embracing this idea in building products and also selling them.
Apple’s Steve Jobs once said, “It all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” and this mantra is still seen evident in their products design and the way sell their products.
Also, keeping your home page simple and offering fewer products with relevant text describing it will help navigate your customer’s journey in the right direction.
3. Let Your Clients Know What Is Coming Their Way:
It’s evident that brands offer great sales and customers keep waiting for the holiday season to make the most use of it. But are your existing and potential customers what you have got for them? Here comes the need for email marketing campaigns and other promotional campaigns. How you make the most of it determines the level of your sales success. Sending out emails and letting your customers know about the discount or the offers that you have for the products or maybe equipping them with countdown timers to build suspense can skyrocket your sales.
4. Get Organized & Create A Schedule:
Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday sales can cause a lot of stress for many online marketers, yet more businesses are joining the bandwagon in the hopes of making more profit.
The key remains to start planning weeks ahead to make things bit easier. This may include scheduling Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales section on your website, preparing your email campaigns, creating urgency to encourage purchases or maybe planning your deals and discounts instead of putting them on a sale last minute.
So it’s essential or even crucial to take time to get organized by mapping on offers that you plan for this Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
5. Prepare For Sales/Data Overload:
Be prepared to handle the sudden influx in sales or the traffic that comes into your website. Take your website on a test drive before your big day by load testing to see if your site can handle what you are expecting. With or without the historical data you can expect 10 times or more site traffic on these days compared to your regular days.
If you are an e-commerce site and your business relies on a supplier or if the product/service is manufactured by your own team, consider having enough stock to match the increased demand that you may experience. One of the worst things that can happen is not meeting the needs of your customer or selling out faster than you wanted. So work with your internal team and ensure you are prepared to handle the projected sales and traffic.
6. Be Mobile Ready:
As per the recent study by Internet retailer, 60% of global mobile consumers use mobile devices as their primary internet source.
A web store that works perfectly on mobile devices will always be beneficial the whole year and remains particularly prominent during the holiday season. The mobile share has been increasing at 8% and more every year- which means consumers are more ready to shop over a mobile or on an app.
Also, make sure that your web store is responsive, optimized to display on screens of all sizes. Avoid pop-ups and prioritize on speed loading.
7. Be Sales Ready Website:
As the saying goes, your site is your best salesperson which holds 100% true. A sales websites can transform the traditional web presence into a fully optimized lead generation tool. A well-designed website that offers the best user experience (UX) and the content that appeals your persona will help your business grow and power up your conversions.
In addition to this, you must keep your website secure and SSL certified to be under the ground rules of Google or any other search engines. It protects you from hackers and keeps your data encrypted while you are sending and receiving any information.
8. Keep Transparency In Place:
Transparency is one of the critical aspect that can translate into the holiday sales success. It is upon the marketers to either make it or break it.
Traditionally both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been offering great deals to reach the wallets of the marketers. Hence, all that matters is to bring a matter of trust. It turns out that the product transparency drives trust, builds long-lasting loyalty and also influences consumers purchasing behavior. They are likely to pay more to purchase from transparent brands and remain loyal to it.
According to the reports of Label Insight data, it shows that 94% of the survey responders are likely to remain loyal to the brands that offer transparency, 56% respondents said that they would stay loyal to that brand for life and 73% were willing to pay more for that provides clarity.
More often, transparency is when businesses are ready to share every necessary information and being straightforward (i.e. not misleading). Offering refunds and being transparent about the returns, taking an open approach to share financial data, using negative feedback to feature customer service, and promoting innovative growth strategies are some of the daring tactics of transparency.
Summary:
We all know Black Friday started in US and it is now celebrated across the globe. It is the Friday that comes immediately after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday follows Black Friday, which was initially unconnected to Black Friday. Many deals last from Black Friday all the way through to Cyber Monday. So Thanks Giving this year will be on November 23 in 2018, Black Friday on November 23, 2018 and Cyber Monday 2018 will fall on Monday November 26.
This holiday season, arm yourself up, prepare, pack and scout in order to be successful on these big days. By following some of the above mentioned smart planning tactics, you will be able to maximize deals what promises to be the biggest holiday shopping season ever.
