Want to get a piece of the $3.45 billion Black Friday pie? Here’s how to get ready.
In 2016, US consumers spent $3.45 billion on Black Friday. Is your retail business set up to make the most out of this year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday sale period?
With more eCommerce retailers competing for shoppers’ attention, you can’t afford to cook up a last-minute promotion and hope for the best.
It’s more important than ever to plan ahead and get your retail business ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Here are a few things you can’t afford to ignore:
Start early
The National Retail Federation (NRF) has found that 40% of shoppers start doing their research for holiday shopping as early as October.
Plan to start promoting holiday shopping related content and products, such as holiday gift guides, during that time. Set up website personalization strategies that leverage data from your customer profiles to ensure that you’re displaying the most relevant content and offers to your visitors.
In addition, make sure that you have contingency plans in place. For instance, figure out what your options are if your shipping company is delayed by a higher volume.
Not only should you be planning for things that may go wrong, you must also plan for when things go well. For instance, can your website handle a surge in traffic? Is your fulfillment system set up well enough to handle a large number of orders?
Last but not least, forecast your sales and communicate with your suppliers to ensure that you’ll have the right products in stock to fulfill your orders.
Plan your marketing efforts
Decide on the products you want to highlight, plan out your sales schedule, and coordinate all the promotional efforts to maximize your sales:
- Schedule email marketing campaigns ahead of time and don’t forget to include personalized content and offers that are most relevant to each recipient.
- Set up your social media promotions and use strategies such as email retargeting to deliver a personalized omnichannel shopping experience.
- Connect with influencers early on so they can work any mention of your products or promotions into their schedule.
- Do some social listening to find out what’s trending this holiday season and identify which products to promote.
- Design a holiday-themed giveaway or contest with a viral component to help increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Be mobile-ready
During the 2016 holiday season, half of the web traffic and 30% of retail sales came from mobile sites.
If your eCommerce platform isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be missing out on sales and losing revenue this holiday season.
Image sourceMobile devices offer great opportunities to deliver personalized shopping experiences that will help you increase conversion rate.
Other than website personalization, you can deliver an omnichannel experience by using technologies such as geofencing (if you have a physical store) or mobile apps and leveraging data from your customer profiles.
You can also facilitate the mobile purchasing process with features such as tap-to-call or auto-fill by using location services to deliver a seamless customer experience.
Don’t get left behind this holiday season
An omnichannel personalized shopping experience will be the key to success for retailers this holiday season as well as for the ones in the coming years.
Thankfully, implementing these strategies are getting much easier with sophisticated technologies that will help manage customer data, personalization automation, and omnichannel personalization so that you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself.
