If you’ve not taken Black Friday and Cyber Monday particularly seriously to date, there are plenty of reasons to do so this year.
According to Businesswire, 99% of consumers are now familiar with the term Black Friday, and this shopping day is becoming a major date on the consumer calendar.
More than £720 million was spent in the UK on Cyber Monday last year too. So if you’re doubting the draw for customers here, think again. There’s every chance people will be looking at sites such as yours in the search for a good deal.
Now is the time for businesses to consider the ways you can capitalise on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Black Friday 2019 falls on Friday 29 November and Cyber Monday is on 2 December. So with time running out to act, what tactics can retailers deploy to ensure they benefit from the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush?
Pushing Promotions
In the run-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as a retailer you need to place the promotions you are running front and centre.
Why not use banners to catch the eye of site visitors looking for some pre-Black Friday deals? Make it clear where money can be saved and your deals can be found once your sale starts.
Push the bargains and price cuts you have on your homepage and all the main, most-frequently visited parts of your ecommerce website. This should spark the interest of site visitors and heighten the chances of them finding a deal they like.
And you don’t have to focus exclusively on products. Gift cards for people to buy and give to loved ones to spend on your site can prove just as effective.
Boosting Conversion Rates
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the typical Black Friday shopper is impatient. This is reflected in statistics from Monetate, who have found that bounce rates increase by around 7% on Black Friday.
As an online retailer, you need to do what you can to make buying from your site as easy and hassle-free as possible around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retailers offering simple purchasing processes stand to win. And throwing something like free shipping or next day delivery into the mix can prove a difference-maker.
Want more visitors to become customers? Williams Commerce offers an excellent conversion rate optimisation service
And it almost goes without saying that on a shopping day such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you have to make the checkout experience as streamlined and easy as possible. The last thing you want is cart abandonment, so be sure your site’s checkout is functioning, smooth and free of unnecessary obstacles and difficulties for your customers ahead of these big retail days.
One tip we’ve seen that may be worth a try is a countdown timer on your site. According to the SaleCycle, they noted conversion rates increasing by as much as 200% when a countdown timer was used. It’s a visual reminder of the purchasing situation a buyer faces, and if it works for other businesses, it can work for yours.
Include User Generated Content
Every shopper not only wants a quality product, but they also want to feel they can trust your brand.
This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, why not experiment with and implement user-generated content? According to the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92% of customers trust this form of content over traditional advertising methods.
Why not encourage customers to share pictures of your products? This is easy to do directly through social media or using banners on your site. This can increase brand awareness and create an online community around your brand.
Additionally, adding customer reviews in appropriate places can make a big difference and help increase conversions. If you can edit your site to include these, then customers can easily see how well these products have been received and decide whether to purchase accordingly.
Savvy Search and Product Recommendations
By adding product recommendations based on search keywords to results pages, you can enable site visitors to discover alternative items that might fit their purchasing requirements.
Equally, you can promote products that might be suited to being bought with the product in question. So for example, if they’re looking at a t-shirt, recommend a possible pair of trousers that can go with them.
This is all about providing customers with additional possibilities when they are already in a position to potentially commit to a purchase.
You can also add in product alternatives to your page. Introducing recommendations along the lines of ‘Not what you’re looking for? How about these?’ can keep a shopper interested in your product range and lower bounce rates.
Other tips and tricks
Your Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday success are dependent on getting visitors to the pages where all your best products and great deals are. If they veer away from these pages, you need to get them back on track as quickly as possible. They won’t have much patience or tolerance for things going wrong.
One way to do this is by adding product recommendations to your 404 page. Naturally, you don’t want customers coming across 404 pages. But if they happen to do so, adding a recommendation or easy navigation to exciting parts of your site can help keep them on your page and potentially complete a purchase.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be here in no time, so consider which of these last minute recommendations you can add to your digital marketing strategy today. Put the customer experience front and centre, and make completing a purchase as straightforward and pain free as possible. This way, you can enable a handy spike in your revenue when these big days arrive.
Looking to boost conversion rates and enhance your ecommerce results? Williams Commerce can help, so get in touch.
