How to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

19/09/2019
  • Limber up: In a few weeks Black Friday and Cyber Monday start. Are you ready to sell out?

  • If you have an online store, definitely you are already warming up engines for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In a few weeks, the most important dates of the whole Christmas campaign are coming. They will suppose, for most online vendors and retailers, the Top day sales of the season

    If in previous years, you ran out of time, or if you never know very well where to start planning, this post is for you. Today, we start from the basis and invite you to think, first of all, in the 3 main concepts you will start drawing your BFCM campaign from. 
  • How to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

  • Basically, you have to define 3 questions:
    • What will your promotion or promotions consist of? 
    • How will you communicate it to your audience? 
    • What logistical aspects you need to solve before you start? 
  • What are you going to promote?

  • First, the most important thing is to know what you will promote

    Are you going to make a global discount or would you prefer to segment by public or groups of products? Is your offer or offers going to be fixed in time? Or are you going to bet on dynamic promotions, changing throughout the campaign, or even short-lived

    As you can see, getting a successful BFCM campaign may not be as simple as just applying a simple discount and wait for people to come and buy. Keep in mind that today almost everybody considers Black Friday, so the offers and promotions have become sophisticated over time. 
  • So that you can get an idea as to the possibilities that you have in this first section, we suggest some examples of types of offers that you can apply on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

    You can bet on a fixed global discount: a discount applied only during the day or the week of Black Friday. 

    - You may prefer focusing your efforts on certain product groups: a discount only on products that are relevant to a particular group of customers, products that are new to the season or products you are interested in rotating for some reason. 

    - You may want to reward some groups of clients: putting into practice some special offer, exclusive for your best clients, or in clients that for some reason you are interested honor especially. 

    - You can keep your audience in suspense by offering them dynamic offers: offers that are changing every 3-4 days starting a couple of weeks before Black Friday. 
     
    - You can even have your audience get crazy by implementing ephemeral offers, with a temporary limit of 24, 48 or 72h. These offers can be linked to the concept of shortage("few units left") to generate even more urgency

    As everyone offers discounts, you can do something different: How about offering your customers free shipping, promotional gifts in addition to the discount, or vouchers to redeem later? 
  • As you can see, your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign can get complicated and sophisticated as far as you want

    Also, you have to take into account the relationship between both dates: do you want to combine one date with another? Would you prefer to offer different discounts or promotions on each of those dates? 

    Keep in mind that, at first, Black Friday is for all retail stores, while Cyber Monday is for online stores only. This can be a good opportunity to create synergies between your physical and your online stores if you have both channels in your distribution strategy. 
  • How are you going to communicate it?

  • Once you have clear what your promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be, you will have to define how you will communicate them to your audience so that the message arrives successfully. 

    To do this, you will have to choose the most appropriate media and channels of spreading, taking into account the habits of your audience. But you also have to think about the cadence of your promotions, the pace of development of your campaign over time and until its completion. 

    As for the first one, be aware that in the of the BFCM campaigns email marketing works especially well.
    The fact of receiving the current offers by email, as well as their corresponding reminders, seems to be the most effective way of communicating promotions to the audience, at least during these dates. 

    In addition, you will have to choose from the media that best fit your business
  • TIP PRO: Do not just consider what you can afford, but also where your audience is going to be. You may want to give up some media to pay a little more for another that, despite  being more expensive, is more likely to convert because your audience is most present on it. 
  • Some media to spread your promotions, in addition to email marketing, can be:
    • Social Media 
    • Search Engine Advertising 
    • Social Media Marketing 
    • Radio 
    • TV 
    • Specialized Blogs (advertising, affiliation, marketing of influence) 
    • Brand Blog (own) 
  • On the other hand, not only matters where you are going to communicate your message, but how you are going to articulate that to keep your audience interested throughout the campaign. In this sense, you should get acalendar and design the cadence of the campaign in each media you use. 
  • EXAMPLE: Imagine that your BFCM campaign includes email marketing. For each of your promotional actions, you must assign a date to send a newsletter communicating something: First, the launch of the promo; Second, a reminder of it; And finally, a last-hour notice. 

    This planning should be done with each media involved in the communication of your campaign, taking into account also the synergies between them. 

    For example, if you do an action with an influencer that includes a post on your blog and a publication on social networks, make sure that the day you publish those contents you will share them with your own audience planning to send an email and the update of your social networks
  • What logistic aspects you need to solve

  • Finally, the third key point to be solved to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is logistics. Within logistics would we find 3 points
  • #1 Your logistic partners

  • If your logistic partners are integrated into the workflow of your online store, the management of BFCM's work peaks -in which there may be a lot of reverse logistics – will be much easier. Preparing and ordering a shipment or pickup will be as simple as pressing a button. 

    In Oleoshop you have first-class logistic  partners with very good rates like Shipius and, soon, Deliverea, totally integrated in the tool. 
  • #2 – Your stock

  • If, as it is expected, your BFCM campaign represents an increase in sales, you must cover that forecast by buying more stock since the beginning of the season. So, you avoid breaking stock by your suppliers or running out of product in the middle of the campaign. 
  • TIP PRO: Reward early bird purchases or presales among your customers. If you get your customers to book the orders before you buy the product, you can make sure to cover the demand. Thus, you will not act without thinking without nor investing too much
  • #3 – Your servers

  • To conclude, bear in mind the capacity of your servers to respond to the predictable increase in traffic you will have during the campaign. If you need it, buy already a higher plan to avoid dying of success and that all your marketing effort is useless. 

    In Oleoshop we really care about that, and for that reason, you have unlimited hosting that adapts to your traffic needs at every moment of the year. With us, your online store will not go blank at the time of highest traffic and sales, guaranteed! 
  • And that said, you can start preparing your BFCM campaign. As you see, it is not that hard if you know where to start. Define each of these points and you will have a good starting point. Get to work, and sell!

  • Learn more about Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

    • BlackFriday checklist, are you ready? 
    • 8 keys to succeed in Black Friday and Cyber Monday 
    • The best marketing ideas for Black Friday 
    • SEO keys for Black Friday 
    • And much more

    Images | Fotolia. 

Laia Ordoñez


Laia Ordóñez is a copywriting & eCommerce content marketing expert. She is Content & Marketing Manager at DueHome, a copywriting & content independent advisor, and Oleoshop's blog's editor-in-chief.

search posts

Last posts

This website stores data as cookies to enable the necessary functionality of the site, including analytics and personalization. You can change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.

cookies policy

Essentials

Necessary cookies help make a web page usable by activating basic functions such as page navigation and access to secure areas of the web page. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.


Personalization

Personalization cookies allow the website to remember information that changes the way the page behaves or the way it looks, such as your preferred language or the region in which you are located.


Analysis

Statistical cookies help web page owners understand how visitors interact with web pages by collecting and providing information anonymously.


Marketing

Marketing cookies are used to track visitors on web pages. The intention is to show ads relevant and attractive to the individual user, and therefore more valuable to publishers and third-party advertisers.