Chronic procrastinator? Do you refuse to acknowledge the holidays until the week of Thanksgiving? Or maybe you just take the phrase “last minute” seriously. Whether or not you’re panicking, this week is primetime for holiday selling. It’s expected that this season will outperform last year’s – many studies on this year’s performance show Cyber Monday raking in a considerable amount of cash, with Thanksgiving looking to be the day with the largest year-over-year growth. For more on those studies, check out our holiday performance prediction post.
Anyways, we’re just a week away, and there’s still some maintenance you can do to prep for those site visitors looking for some Cyber Monday goodness.
Email Away
Some believe you risk irritating and pushing customers away when you shove emails in their inbox, especially around the holiday time. But Cyber Monday (and Black Friday) is all about online deals, so pay no attention to them. If you’re completely unprepared, dig up past email templates, substitute your holiday deals inside, and shoot them out to the customers. You’re late to the party, so generating buzz is exactly what you need to be doing this week, even if some customers want to swat you away.
Let’s look at last year’s email volume during the week of Thanksgiving to get an idea of how to go about planning for a rapid campaign. Vertical Response collected more than 350,000,000 emails within that week from their customers – below is a chart for when they went out:
To sum it up, the day following Cyber Monday ended up being the largest day for email campaigns, with Cyber Monday as the largest day for emails in total. Makes sense, considering you want to reach the most people on the big day, while targeting people to come back the day after. Feel free to use this as a guideline on the best days, or at least the most popular days for sending out those emails.
Social is Always Online
The best thing about social media is that it’s always there, always online. Even if you’re late to the game when it comes to your email marketing, it’s easy to jump on social media and get the word out. Promote your promotions, engage with your customers during the holidays, and brand your brand onto their brains as they begin thinking about the spending frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday is sure to snag the attention of a variety of people, but keep in mind that millennials are most familiar with buying and engaging online. eMarketer reports that more than 25% of Black Friday shoppers under 35 have their wallets at the ready. Combine that with the fact that they’re typically more inclined to use social media, and you can see why tweeting, posting, and sharing are essential moves to make if you want to funnel traffic to your site.
Rev Up Your Upsell and Cross-Sell
Assuming you’ve got customers ready to take advantage of your promotions, deals, and products (which I’m sure you do), the next step is to boost a customer’s order value as much as possible, and that means upselling and cross-selling. Most traditional ecommerce sales channels, whether they’re a marketplace or shopping cart, usually has the tools and apps to do this, so make use of them immediately.
To further jack up that order value, involve your email and social marketing for good measure. Have no shame in targeting customers. Let’s say you have a product that could be bundled with a bunch of accessories, like a camera, lenses, a tripod, etc. If a customer has purchased a camera in the past, send a holiday email highlighting the tripod and lenses as accessories. If you’ve got a deal for the camera on Cyber Monday, include pop ups or notifications highlighting the accessories, and promote the hell out of it on your socials.
A Match Made in Heaven: The Words Free and Shipping
Sometimes customers head to the checkout page and the added shipping costs scare them into clicking that red X at the top right of their computer screen, regardless of whatever deal they’re interested in.
Free shipping can remedy that in a heartbeat, and big brands like Target, Walmart, and Amazon know it. If you just can’t come up with a solid deal or don’t have the time, work out the numbers and see if you can provide free shipping. The last thing you probably want to be doing before the holiday rush is crunching numbers, but it’s definitely worth consideration.
There are a few options to choose from when implementing free shipping. You could apply it to select product categories that tend to underperform, or you can work out a total order value (sometimes called a threshold) that covers the costs of shipping while giving you a delicious chunk of revenue. For more, check out our blog post on putting free shipping to work.
Stock Up
Last but not least, inventory. Considering it’s our bread and butter, it would be shameful if we didn’t highlight its importance. In order to sell and efficiently fulfill a product, you definitely need the product, so be sure that your inventory is spick and span, primed and ready to begin its adventure towards the customer. With the influx in traffic and the abundance of deals, new customers especially need to be impressed by a prompt delivery if you want them to come back after the holiday magic has worn off.
