Cyber Monday Strategy Guide: Unify the Shopper Experience
According to Adobe Analytics, shoppers spent $7.9 billion during Cyber Monday 2018 versus $6.59 billion in 2017. 2019 aims to take the cake with early predictions coming in hot at $9 billion in spending this Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday still brings its own wave of unpredictability, keeping Black Friday on its tail. With retailers wanting to maximize their returns on both days, they often do not announce Cyber Monday deals until after Black Friday comes to a close. This creates a frenzy of traffic to sites that often cannot support such high volumes and crash as a result. J.Crew was faced with this tragedy in 2018, losing over $775,000 in sales during its downtime. Other notable retailers who faced this struggle were LuLuLemon, Ulta, and Walmart.
Check out our top tips for ensuring your Cyber Monday is a seamless experience for your customers.
Invest In Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store, or BOPIS
2019 was the year of a growing push for BOPIS retailing. The idea of buying online and picking up in-store was alluring to both retailers and customers alike as it offered the chance for retailers to lower shipping costs while the consumer received the discount of those realized savings. BOPIS allows retailers to stop operating in a silo mentality, treating the shopping experience as one seamless flow from online to in-store.
Rather than treating Black Friday and Cyber Monday as two separate entities, BOPIS unites the two efforts to become one major event in your revenues. In fact, research from Microsoft Advertising showed BOPIS shoppers took less than three days to convert, with 82% of BOPIS shoppers converting in one day. These shorter conversion times mean expedited revenues and an additional chance to upsell when the customer comes to pick up their order. To further enhance your BOPIS strategy, consider digital packing slips, which create a seamless experience for pickups and returns for your customers.
Give Your Website a Face Lift
Brick and Mortar stores take full advantage of making Black Friday a visually pleasing experience with colorful signage, adverts, and decor, your online store should be no different. Leading up to Cyber Monday, utilize your announcement bar as a place to market your upcoming deals with eye popping color schematics. Develop pop ups or banners to further build excitement and reinforce your announcement bar. Your customers will be searching for the best prices online for their desired items, but once they settle on your page they should not have to keep digging to find them. A landing page is a great way to provide extra information and current promotions with easily navigable links to the products they are looking for.
Provide a Must Have Deal to Attract Customers
Coming hot off of a mountain of Black Friday deals, your customers are in discount overload. To cut through the noise you will need to do some research to understand what your customers are looking for and find a means to create Cyber Monday deals that stand out to bring them into the site. If this isn’t feasible, finding an item with extraneous inventory or a lower margin can be a great foot in the door to get customers onto your site. Other notable strategies are free shipping, a deep discount on all items, or running your sales as an advent calendar – releasing new deals each day.
Develop a Strong Communication Strategy
Before customers can come knocking down your (online) doors they must first be aware of the sales. Taking the time to create a well thought out communication plan ensures your customers will see your deals on their favorite mediums leading up to the big day. Going beyond social media blasts, additional considerations should be given to SEO positioning and paid campaigns. By ensuring your landing page mentioned above is optimized as well as giving a once over to your website ranking, your attention to SEO is likely to give a boost to your traffic. Paid campaigns are also a great way to target new and existing customers. Given the ability to target specific geographic regions, specific keywords, and more, you are sure to get your content in front of some fresh eyes.
Ensure Your Site is Ready for High Volumes
Test, test, and test again. Taking the time to run multiple tests with varying geographies and variables in a test environment is key to identifying breakages on the site. These tests should be run with the absolute worst case scenarios without fear of failure, this is how gaps in the customer experience are identified. With the knowledge that websites will see one of the highest number of transactions, hackers are readily plotting to capitalize on vulnerable areas on your site, such as the transaction pages. Make sure to renew your SSL certificates to protect that user data as well as run a test on any unknown pages that may have appeared on your site.
Looking Ahead
Are you ready to unify your customer’s experience with your brand Black Friday weekend? Check out our Black Friday Strategy Guide to aid you in building out a strategy that grabs the green and avoids the red this holiday season.