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Episode 012: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 1 Episode Summary: As an ecommerce website, you get one chance a year to bring in big revenue numbers on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. In this first of two episodes, Julie walks you through setting up your ecommerce marketing to bring in as many sales as possible during that holiday weekend. Episode Links: https://www.adroll.com/https://savvybusinessmethod.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okghttps://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod Episode Transcript: Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 12 of the Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. How is it already November 1st? I hope you had a fun Halloween last night. I feel so fortunate we live in a great neighborhood for Halloween. Everybody gets really into decorating and handing out candy and it makes it so much fun. But that fun is short-lived, right? Because as website owners, you and I tend to do Halloween maybe a bit differently. It's ushering in a really critical season for most websites. And so, today I wanted to take some time to talk about planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday because that weekend is a big deal for most websites. Unless you happen to have a really odd seasonality to your particular e-commerce company, you're probably looking to make as much revenue that weekend as you possibly can. As a friend of mine likes to say, people are in the mood to hand over their money at that point, and we should be in the best possible position to take it. So, let's talk today about what a solid Black Friday and Cyber Monday plan looks like. Now, I'm going to put a twist on this. This is actually going to be a two part podcast. We'll do the first part today and the second part on Monday. I'm going to also get a lot more specific than I typically do with this podcast. So, we're going to get really into the weeds and flush out how to get ready for this really important weekend. So, the goal today is to talk you through what you need to do from a marketing perspective so you can have the most successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday possible. On Monday, I will be back in your feed with a new episode where I'll focus on what you need to do to get the rest of your company ready. So, what does it look like for customer service to be prepared, your inventory management, your shipping systems? I trust that most of you knew deep down already that you needed to be thinking about marketing to prepare for such a huge potential revenue-generating weekend, but I also realize things like customer service and shipping can be easy to forget. I think we have this tendency as entrepreneurs to just consider that, oh well, things will work themselves out; I'll just get people to my website; they'll buy and I'll figure out how I'm going to get all these packages out the door later. But I can tell you after 10 years of doing this, there are definitely things you can and should do to prepare in advance. That's going to be a long, rough weekend. You're looking at potentially a long, rough following week for both you and your team if you have people working with you, and I would like to see that 10-day period go way more smoothly for you guys by helping you get prepared and having all your systems in place and everything organized in advance. Alright, let's talk about some reality here for a moment. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a constantly evolving situation, right? They change every year. Historically, Black Friday was huge, and of course, Cyber Monday didn't even exist. I was thinking the other day, back when I was a kid I had this really clear memory of my mom dragging us out of bed at 5:00 a.m. so we could be at Fred Meyer in Portland at 6:00 a.m. for the 50% off sock sale. And there were so many people, and I remember, as a kid, just thinking I was going to be trampled. And if you are older than probably 30, you probably have that memory, right? This was when everything got purchased, on Black Friday. Now with e-commerce became more popular, people would shop online the following Monday when they returned to work, and they had internet access, which again, I realize if you're under 30, probably sounds really strange. Let me assure you, most of us did not have internet access for at least part of our adult life outside of work; I mean, that was normal. And so this is where this whole idea came from, but clearly some things are changing. Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday become less concentrated, right? So, there are less people who are really focusing their shopping on that, what is that, four, four, five day period, okay? So, some things are changing and companies, though, have gotten really addicted to this idea of being able to generate a bunch of revenue in a couple day period, and so you often see some really outlandish behavior between Black Friday and Cyber Monday by various companies trying to attract sales that weekend. You know I’ve got to tell you, honestly, this is my favorite day of the year to be online watching the emails and the ads. If you are an e-commerce marketing geek, this is the best because you could get all sorts of ideas for things you can incorporate into your marketing for the rest of the year. So that's another reason to do your planning work now, get your whole situation set up so you've got some bandwidth that weekend to sit and look at what everybody else is doing. Alright, so let's start talking about planning our marketing for what is, ultimately, potentially a big weekend for your company. Sure, in the end, it's gray November and December, and lots of people will spread their purchases out, but for most businesses, you're going to see a significant jump during that weekend so you want to have all your marketing set up and ready to go. Alright, the first thing you've got to do is plan your promotions, okay? These are the sales that you're going to run, and I'm saying sales as in multiple sales. You actually need to run two different sales, one for Black Friday, and generally, I like to run that sale Friday through Sunday, and then one for Cyber Monday, and of course, that starts Monday and I personally recommend you look at running it through Tuesday and possibly Wednesday. And in a few minutes I'll get into why you should do that. Alright, so, with two sales let's talk about why we're running two sales and not just one sale, right, this seems like it's making our lives more complicated, as well as why I think this is the cadence you should be using. Email is going to play a big role in your marketing strategy during these days, and really, the same principles I'm going to talk about with email is going to apply to things like social media, too. Okay, so, step back for a minute and think about other sales that you run during the year. What are your best sale days? So if you send out, let's say emails or social media marketing for a sale for, say, Labor Day, you'll generally see that your biggest days revenue-wise are going to be the day the sale's announced, the day you tell them there's one day left, and the day it ends, you know, last chance, save now, right? Those are your big sale days. If you run one sale over that four, five day period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you get potentially three big revenue days based on that cycle. If you have two sales, you can almost squeeze a big day out of every day by creating that sense of excitement and urgency because you're running through that cycle twice, announcing the sale, limited time left, last chance, and you're doing that twice. So you're able to squeeze potentially more revenue out. I have done this both ways over the years, and absolutely, no question, the two sales strategy generates far more revenue. Alright, so let's talk about this idea of timing. Like I said, I tend to run my Black Friday sales Friday through Sunday. That gives me a day to announce the sale, a day to tell them to hurry, that's Saturday, and then a day to tell them they're almost out of time on Sunday, so the sale ends on Sunday. Now I'm just going to interject here that there is a big trend to start sales on Thanksgiving Day. I am sure you have noticed it. I find it so funny that like part of people's Thanksgiving traditions is starting to be to eat dinner and then go to a store, and start their shopping. Now, there is a huge debate over whether this is a good trend; I mean, obviously, there's a social debate going on; there's also debate in marketing and e-commerce circles. Most email experts agree, though, that, at the least, you should be sending an email wishing your American customers a happy holiday. Alright, so, why would you do that? This is generally about goodwill. We're there with you; we're happy you're celebrating. We're happy, you're happy kind of thing, and then maybe a few people will see that email and go, oh, yeah, I wanted to go to that website and buy something, and I really want my aunt to stop talking to me, so I'm going to go hide on my phone over in the corner and shop. So, you'll get a few of those people, too, if you send out an email. Now, the other strategy is to start your sale on Thanksgiving, and it's common to see an email, like a VIP early access type thing. So, you send out maybe Thanksgiving afternoon or Thanksgiving evening saying, hey, for our email subscribers, you're our VIPs; we're going to give you, the sale starts now, and we're going to give you 20% off or whatever it is. So, that's a strategy that a lot of companies are starting to use. Now, whether or not you just send a goodwill email, whether or not you send a sales email, whether you just leave your customers alone that day is entirely up to you, alright? Part of this is your own comfort level. What does your gut tell you about whether this is a right or wrong thing to do, and I'm going to just throw in there, I would suggest you consider how easily offended your market is, okay? If your customer base tends to be older or more conservative, you probably should think twice about sending any marketing emails at all on a holiday that's considered fairly sacred in American culture, okay? If your audience tends to be more of the young, more liberal type, then you might be able to get away with this and actually benefit from it. So that's just something for you to think about. Alright, so, in a normal cadence, you're going to send your big sale email out on Friday. You're going to tell them they only have one day left on Saturday, and then you're going to tell them they're out of time on Sunday. Something else to keep in mind. That Saturday after Thanksgiving is, of course, Small Business Saturday. Honestly, I wish they'd move it to the next weekend, but it is what it is. Now, this is something that you could potentially leverage in your marketing especially if you're easily perceived as being a small business. So, if your customers look at your website and they generally know that you're a small company, you can get out there with your marketing efforts and add in that element of, you know, hey, one more day to shop and support a small business like us, that sort of thing. Now, if you have the kind of website where you may not easily be perceived as a small business, there are some ways you can leverage this, too. Let me give you an example. When I had my health food company, we actually were very much a small business, but most people didn't realize that. We had a pretty slick website, a pretty professional setup in terms of our marketing, and so people didn't necessarily see us as a small business, and so one strategy we could use is to highlight the stores we sold to because we had a wholesale channel where we were working with a lot of small natural food stores. So we could potentially send out an email saying, oh, we're highlighting this company in Cleveland, or this small mom and pop store in Cleveland, so remember it's Small Business Saturday, support small businesses which was a great way to get an email out there to get some goodwill going on, of course, to promote a customer that we cared about. And so, it was a win-win all the way around. So, just don't forget Small Business Saturday, you can kind of work that into your marketing as well. Alright, so moving on to Cyber Monday, you have a couple of options here. It is very common to see businesses have one-day sales, some big blowout, right? I am going to encourage you that you should actually extend that sale beyond Monday, and here's why. On Cyber Monday, you are going to be competing against hundreds and thousands of other companies for someone's business. Now, hopefully your customer aren't subscribed to that many different email lists, but still, they're likely to be getting a lot of email in their in-box. I don't consider myself to be subscribed to a ton of companies. I think I had 150 emails when I woke up on Cyber Monday last year. So, this is just something to think about. It's really hard on Cyber Monday to get through all that noise, but if you run your sale until Tuesday or Wednesday, you can kind of catch those people who are still potentially in shopping mode, but you can be reaching them in their in-box and their social media accounts on days when maybe they're not quite as flooded with promotions. Now, the way to do this is to run your Cyber Monday sale and then on Tuesday morning, send out an email that says, hey, we've extended the sale; you can still get the Cyber Monday deal until tomorrow. And then of course on Wednesday, you're going to run another email that says, this is your absolute last chance to save whatever it is, okay? So, you're kind of milking that sale for a few more days to kind of help you get through the noise of what is normally Cyber Monday. Alright, so if you're taking notes, look back through what I've just said. You've probably noticed I have given you a darn good excuse to send an email every single day, and to be able to actively create that sense of excitement and urgency. You don't have any days in here that aren't exciting and urgent. You just have to be careful about how you present them, right? So, let's move on. We now have talked about the schedule that you're going to use for your sales. Let's just talk, briefly, about the promotions that you're going to run. First off, not surprisingly, it is wise to make sure that your Cyber Monday and Black Friday specials are better than your typical promotion that you would run as a company. So, whatever you ran for Labor Day, you're going to need to kick that up a notch. I'd also recommend that whatever promotion you pick should seem like a big deal, and you want to think about this from your customers' perspective. Can you present this in such a way that it seems like a big sale, that it seems like a big discount? Now, you can get a little creative here, but I'm going to tell you that I really encourage you to remember that noise, right, how much competition you have for your customers' attention during this weekend. So, the sales that you run really do need to be straightforward; it needs to be so…
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