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:
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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 something they can glance at and instantly understand. Don't try to get too cute with, well, if you buy this item over here and this item over here, you get this third item free, something like that. I wouldn't get too creative here. Also, whatever you decide to do, needs to work so smoothly in your e-commerce platform. The person either needs to get the discount automatically or there needs to be one coupon code and then it needs to be terribly clear in their cart that that discount that they are expecting was applied. If you get creative, or you start going outside what your e-commerce cart can support, so it's not clear to your customer about the discounts they're getting, people are busy these days, they'll move on to the next store. They'll abandon their cart or maybe, if you're lucky, they'll contact customer service to ask, but then that costs you money, right? You don't want a bunch of people contacting you for questions that were generated because you didn't do a good job of setting up your promotions.
Alright, so, a pro-tip here, something that I had to learn the hard way over the years that I want to share with you and save you some pain and suffering. Since you're going to run two sales back-to-back, I would strongly recommend that you make your Black Friday sale a little bit better or at least have a little bit wider appeal than your Cyber Monday sale.
Okay, and there's a reason for this. Because you're running those sales back-to-back, there is a potential that if someone buys something during your Black Friday sale, and then they get the Cyber Monday email, and the deal is easily perceived to be a little bit better, they're probably not going to be happy, right? They’re going to be mad they should've waited for your next sale, how dare you offer a better sale a couple days after they ordered, right? People get pretty easily offended, and this ends up creating bad will for you company. It can end up being very costly in terms of customer service because, I tell you what they do is, they call and they want the better deal applied to the order they did three days ago, and saying no is going cause you some customer service problems. And so, this is just something you can head off at the pass by being careful to offer maybe a little bit better deal on Friday than Monday while still having two awesome deals you're offering. You can potentially save yourself some headaches.
And so, let me give you an example of what this looks like. In one of my companies, we had this one product line that was super popular. Probably, I'd say about 90% of people who ordered from us ordered something from that product line in addition to whatever other items they ordered. And so, on Black Friday we would run a 25% off sale on that product line, and then on Cyber Monday, we would run a 20% off sale site-wide. They were both great sales; our customers loved those sales, but it kind of headed off the complaints because if you ordered on Friday, you got that little bit higher discount on that particular product line you were ordering from. So, just something to think in mind, structuring, how we structure our promotions can go a long way to keeping people from contacting customer service, and from abandoning their shopping carts.
Alright, next up. I want you to make a list of all your marketing systems that will need to be coordinated because I want you to throw everything you have at this weekend, and do your very best so that you can get the best possible sales numbers. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, if you've never sat down and coordinated all your marketing systems for an event, this is a little bit of work, but this is a good habit to get into because a lot of the strategies I'm going to talk about today, can be applied, not to just Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but any other big sales you have throughout the year.
So, to that end, let's go through the typical marketing systems most of you are probably working with, and the changes I would recommend you make. Alright, first up is email. Email is going to play a very important role in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing efforts, assuming you have an email list ready to go.
Now, quick side note, if you have a large email list, and by large, I would say anything over 50,000 people, certainly if you're over 100,000, list hygiene matters greatly, and what I mean by that, if this is not something that is applying to you yet, is that the number of people who open your emails, report your emails as spam, those sorts of things can make a difference into whether or not you're allowed to send email on any given day, and because we're going to be using email heavily for our Black Friday/Cyber Monday strategy, then it's really important that we clean up our lists and we make sure the people we're sending to are active members of our list because the last thing you can afford to have happen during this really important weekend, or frankly, the whole holiday season, is to have your account get shut down because of too many spam complaints. So, if you have a big list, talk to your email service provider about cleaning your list in preparation for the holidays. They should know what that means.
Alright, more specifically, and applying to everyone, we want to make sure that we have clear strategies for both our batch- and-blast emails, so those are the emails that we specifically send to our list, as well as our trigger emails, the emails that go out based on people's behavior. Okay, so, let's talk first about just our general emails that we blast out to our list. You want to be sure that that hero image at the top of the email is sale focused. So when you're sending out these emails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the only goal is to get people to come to the site and shop the sale. This is not the time to give them an article about the best camera to buy. This is not the time to give them a recipe for how to use some specialized flour. All that you want them to do is see the sale and be incentivized to come to your website.
You want to make sure, then, that all of your links in your email are going to your very best landing pages. Now, you can potentially use some product recommendations, very clear, simple ones in this email further down. So that hero image needs to be all about the sale; you can get some product recommendations further down in the email. Those tend to not distract, and may, in some cases, help, probably not in too many, but they might help you a little bit.
The other thing I want you to keep in mind, and just, brace yourself. You're going to be emailing sales promotions every single day, right? From Friday through Tuesday or Wednesday. You might even send an email on Thanksgiving Day, like we talked about. You're going to need to decided if that works for you personally and your market, and then I know this is going to give so many of you heartburn, please know it did for me as well the first time I had to do it. It is really important that you send two emails on Black Friday and two emails on Cyber Monday. I know, I know, that sounds horrible, right? You're going to email your list twice in one day, what am I thinking? Like I said before, the amount of noise that you're going to have to get through to get to your customers is overwhelming. And, if you watch, I promise you, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, watch the big companies, they're sending at least two emails each. So this means you're going to send one really early in the morning, and you're going to send one mid to late afternoon, okay?
Alright, so, moving on to your triggered email. So these would be things like your shopping cart abandonment campaigns. If you're running a browse and abandon campaign, where people are getting an email just because they came to your site and browsed, if you have their email address. I would recommend that you change up those emails, potentially, to focus on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales if this is going to be a big sales day for you.
You could also potentially alter your welcome series. So, if you have, hopefully you have a series of emails that's going out when someone's first signing up, if they sign up during those days, it might be worth considering altering the graphics for that series to promote your sale as well. Something to check here is whether your email service provider is limiting the number of campaigns a person can be in. Here's what I'm trying to say, if you have someone come to your site and browse on, let's say Thursday or Friday, and they end up in a shopping cart abandonment email series, if your email service provider is then saying, well, they can only get emails from one series at a time, they may not be getting your big blast-outs about your sale. So this is just something to think about. By reinforcing that information, that way you're catching everyone regardless of whether they're getting an automated series, or whether they're getting the ones you're sending manually.
Alright, next up, you need to get your re-marketing ads coordinated with your emails. And so this means that you're re-marketing ads need to reflect your Black Friday sale during the days that it's running and your Cyber Monday sale during the days that that sale is running. If you're using a large system like AdRoll or Facebook, you can probably set up a schedule so that those sales switch automatically and they turn off automatically. And I would recommend you do that. As someone who has stayed up until late at night one night to turn on and off ads, use the automated systems if you can.
Now, if you're not sure what I'm talking about, or if you don't have re-marketing set up on your website, you don't have the pixels set up, you don't have your ads set up yet, you need to do that today. There is lead time here; you have to collect data before you can run ads, and so, remember that re-marketing is a really effective way to advertise and it's a very affordable way to advertise in terms of bang for your buck. So, go back to episode three of this podcast. That's a really great episode, diving deep into what is re-marketing and how you get those campaigns set up. If you want just a quick pitch on why this is important, I also have a video on YouTube, a short, two minute video on re-marketing, as well, that you could check out. Alright, next up, social media ads.
If you are running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, they all need to be coordinated, again, with your email. So you're going to need to be switching out any paid campaigns you're running. Now, quick note, Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be more expensive times to run ads, right? You're probably already, in the last couple weeks, starting to see your ad rates, both for re-marketing as well as social media advertising, going up because there's more and more competition entering the market, but thankfully, once Christmas Day hits, that'll die off, and your ads will become affordable again. So, you really need to make the most of your budget, and you do that by ensuring that on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you are running ads focused on warm audiences. So, a warm audience are people who already know your business, have already interacted with your business or your ads. So, just something to be thoughtful about. These are not the days to run out and try to recruit the general public to shop on your website. You really need to be focused on people who already know who you are.
Also, in terms of social media, if you have an organic social media presence, so, you have an Instagram page, a Facebook page, a Twitter page, this is a good time to make sure that, to at least some extent, those organic posts are well-coordinated as well. You don't have to show the exact same ads. You could maybe put a little more fun twist on it, but you still wanna be getting that information out to your customers that you're having a big sale, and this is a great time to shop with you.
Alright, you also need to look at your paid ads through the search engines that you're running. So, if you're running Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, Bing Ads, make sure you get in there and switch out the messaging so that it's advertising the sale. Make sure you double check that you are being clear if there's a coupon code, or that the coupon code will be readily available when they land on your site. If you don't do those things, you probably already know that your ads will get kicked and then you'll have a problem trying to get your ads back on there; it's no fun. So, just be careful, but make sure you get that ad text switched out as well.
Alright, so let's talk about your website last. You want to be sure that your website graphics are all coordinated, right? So, the hero images with a slider on your homepage needs to be reflecting these holiday sales. If you have a top banner where you typically maybe advertise your shipping rates or something like that, that's a great place to stick the information about the sale. If someone happens to wander onto your page and hasn't seen your advertising, they can see the sale, and hopefully, you'll have a higher checkout rate with them.
Along with the graphics on the website, you also maybe want to think about switching out the graphics on your email opt-in. If you have pop-ups on entry and exit, this might be a good time to help remind people about the sale. So, that one's up to you, I tend to like to have those coordinated. I think it looks nice. I think it helps people notice what it is you're putting on sale, and it's just one more opportunity to kind of get in their face so that they remember that they have a way to save money, and that they should shop with you now.
Alright, so we could talk about, all day about these promos you're running, but make sure you don't forget your coupon codes. Your coupon codes need to be set up correctly, and I would recommend that you use some wording that is festive, and that is easy to remember. So, your Black Friday coupon code could literally be Black Friday and that's great. Having something like that that people will see and recognize and can quickly type in will save you a bunch of problems with customer service down the road. And I'll also talk on Monday, we're going to talk really extensively about how to get your customer service department ready. Coupon codes are a way that you can either cause a lot of problems for your customer service department or make things go smoothly. So, we'll get into that more Monday when we talk about setting up the rest of the operations in your business.
Alright, last but not least, actually really important, Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be tiring, right? You're going to get through this weekend. Hopefully, you will have made a lot of revenue. Hopefully your staff or if you have a team, they're not completely burned out. It is a good idea to have whatever promotions you're going to run right after Black Friday and Cyber Monday set up so that all of your marketing systems switch over to that once your sales are over. The last thing you want to be doing in the middle of trying to ship an unusually large amount of orders is sitting in your system at one in the morning trying to go through and upload new banner graphics, new sales graphics, whatever it's going to be. So, just have all of that set up in advance so that it switches as seamlessly as possible, and hopefully saves you some headaches or saves people coming to your site and assuming that your sale is still going on. Let's just keep everybody sane and happy.
Alright, so, that's it for today. Like I said, I'll be back in your feed on Monday with a new episode, and I'll be talking about how to get the rest of your business ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Trust me, you are going to want to make some tweaks to how you normally operate so you can help people more efficiently and get those orders shipped out smoothly.
Now, don't forget in the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is kind of an odd topic since we only experience it once a year. So, even after 10 years of doing this, I've only done 10 Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays. So it can sometimes be hard to be ready for because we don't get to experience it very often.
Also, if you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And, as always, I would really appreciate it if you could hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher. That'll make sure that you receive the Monday episode so you don't miss that, and also, subscribing, rating and reviewing this podcast helps other people find it.
Alright, go work on your marketing systems, and I'll see you Monday to talk about operations. Bye for now.
Announcer:
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.
Episode 012: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 1
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