Ecommerce and Retail • Neto
With just over a month to go, the countdown to Black Friday (27 November) and Cyber Monday (30th November) is well and truly on!
In a follow up to our BFCM strategy guide, we reached out to our Gold Certified Partners to get their tips and insights on how to make the upcoming sale season a success for your business.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are periods during which shopper behaviour ramps up, people are browsing more and specifically, they are looking for items they want at reduced prices. They are also happy to be tempted by things they might not have considered, in particular impulse buys (items under $300).
What does that practically mean for merchants? Our tips include:
Create new CBO campaigns
You need to watch these campaigns during the day and turn off anything that’s not profitable after a few hundred spent.
2020 has been an inflection point for selling online. Whilst parts of our global economy have been devastated by the COVID19 outbreak and the subsequent restrictions on the business sector and community life, ecommerce sales volumes have just about doubled across the board. At ZELLIS, we’ve seen demand for new websites and upgrading existing websites double over the past 6 months too. For merchants already running webstores and trading on marketplaces, it’s been challenging to meet such a sudden surge in demand, especially with the fulfilment and delivery sector struggling to keep up themselves.
There’s little doubt in our mind that we’re in for the Santa of all Christmases this year. The winners in the last quarter of 2020 will be those who have planned ahead and prepared for the retailer gold rush that is the pre-Christmas sales season. Here’s a few tips from our team that will help you sell more and engage more long-term customers and generate repeat business from them:
Add a thank you note or card into every parcel you dispatch. Get something designed professionally and have it printed. Leave a spot where you can hand-write a ‘thank you’ or even just your name. It’s a human touch that takes no time, but enhances brand engagement in the unboxing experience.
Plan your automated customer communications ahead of time (ie: now). Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider every inflection point of their journey into and through your website, and out the other side post-checkout. Consider what hopes, fears and doubts will be running through their mind, and plan your automated email communications to manage expectations realistically, reassure and reaffirm trust in their mind all the way. The most successful online retailers don’t necessarily have cheaper prices or better quality products – they make their customers feel valued and special. That’s what gets customers talking about your brand, and inspires them to come back for more.
We’re living in a truly digital era and potential shoppers are being bombarded with advertising everywhere they look. As a result, we’ve all become a lot more visual in our shopping habits and, with customers now having so many options, differentiation needs to be prioritised to gain the competitive advantage.
We recommend five key areas of focus for the upcoming sale season that will help you make your BFCM 2020 a huge success. Check out our insights and tips for FB & Insta Ads, eBay Promoted Listings, Amazon PPC, Google Shopping and, last but not least, Retargeting.
This is all about putting your products out there! With Facebook and Instagram ads, your buyers don’t necessarily need to be actively looking for your products or typing keywords. Increasingly they stumble upon your products by chance in their feed and you may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
In a crowded marketplace like eBay it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. A great way to boost your visibility and be seen by millions of buyers is to experiment with eBay’s promoted listings.
Amazon PPC (pay per click) is an advertising system within the Amazon marketplace, where sellers sponsor their products to appear at the top of search results. They are charged each time an ad has been clicked and viewed by a customer.
Google Shopping Ads are sponsored listings that showcase the product image, title, price and the brand. These ads appear at the top of most search results page and direct users to specific product landing pages on your website where they can make a purchase.
If you’re investing in your digital marketing strategies in the upcoming BFCM period, a retargeting strategy will ensure that you continue to reap the dividends long after these big shopping events are over.