There’s little doubt consumers love bargains. According to the 2019 eCommerce Industry report, mega sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday now surpass Christmas as the peak shopping period. So, how can your business take advantage of this trend in eCommerce to boost your pre-Christmas sales?
To truly benefit from mega sales events, businesses need to have a strategy in place to deal with the expected surge in purchases. Advanced planning will help you ensure your sales event runs smoothly allowing you to capitalise on your customers’ online spending spree. Follow these five tips for a winning Black Friday sale.
Plan and promote
Building anticipation is key to the success of any event. Decide now what products or services you want to discount. Will you slash prices across all the products on your site? Will you have special deals every hour? What about gifts with purchase? Once you’ve decided on the mechanics of your sale, you’ll be able to plan how you will market your Black Friday sale to your customers. According to Australia Post’s eCommerce Market Update, 39% of shoppers heard about a promotion by email. Personalised-addressed physical capturing shopper attention, this channel is gaining popularity, with an increase of 16.6% YOY. So why not consider an email or direct mail as an option to share special deals with loyal customers? Be sure to highlight the benefits: ‘40 per cent off storewide’; Get this product for half price’; ‘Use this code to unlock huge savings’. Keep your subject short and direct, and always include product images and links in your email to simplify the shopping process.
Set up your social for success
Social media is crucial to the success of any Black Friday sales strategy. Decide when you will begin teasing posts for your Black Friday sale, make a schedule and stick to it. Create a campaign specifically for your followers so that they can take advantage of additional savings or get VIP access to your sales’ page. Make sure to include hashtags like #BlackFriday #BlackFriday2019 #BlackFridaySales in all your posts. Provide multiple access points for people to gain entry to your sale. For example, don’t forget to set up shopping in your Instagram so your customers can purchase straight from your posts.
Test and test again
Before the big day, be certain to test your site. There can be nothing more catastrophic for your Black Friday sale than to have consumers unable to access your website due to traffic overload. Check with your hosting provider that your site will be able to cope with all the extra traffic you anticipate. While you’re at it, go through your shopping cart process and confirm it is streamlined and simple, no matter whether you are a guest or a regular customer. You don’t want your sale to fail because the shopping cart experience lets you down.
Make it mobile-friendly
Is your site optimised for mobile? It better be! Did you know in FY19 one in four purchases were made from a mobile device? This figure is only set to grow. Shoppers are demanding a frictionless end to end shopping experience and it starts with them browsing your site on their mobile. If your website is clunky, slow to load and doesn’t view well on a mobile or tablet you could lose customers.
Get your delivery right
Today’s consumers live in an on-demand world, and their desire to get what they want, when they want now extends to their expectations around delivery times. In fact, according to the Inside Online shopping 2019 Industry Report, next day deliveries grew 35 per cent in the second half of 2018. Online shoppers want rapid or time-specific delivery options. It stands to reason, quicker fulfilment and shipment will help to give your business the edge. Get your delivery right and you will likely see less shopping cart abandonment and an uptake in sales.
One of the other most consistent barriers to online sales is a customer’s lack of access to the physical product to gauge its fit and feel. Help your shoppers put this block aside by simplifying the returns process. Consider offering free returns for those who want to exchange an item and provide a ‘returns label’ in every parcel you send to make it easy to exchange should a purchase fail to hit the mark.
And there you have it! We hope these tips will help your business stand out from the crowd as you compete for customers during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Pre-Christmas Sales.
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