Winning marketing plan for BFCM 2021

The festive season is knocking at our doors. Most of us are on a shopping spree as we want to look (and feel) our best in the holiday season. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday nearing, eCommerce stores are busy doing all the last-minute preps. 

We’re sure you already have a marketing plan in place. How about matching it to our marketing checklist? We bet our marketing plan will work for you if applied correctly. So, let’s get started. 

1. Cutting down the price is not enough! Offer something more… 

If you think online shoppers are looking for a just price reduction, you’re making a mistake! What customers are really looking for are more valuable gifts offers and deals. Basically, customers expect something extra from your eCommerce store during the epic holiday seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  Here is a tip to get started with: 

Focus on increasing your Average Order Value (AOV) this holiday season. Here are some deal ideas that can work for you: 

• Buy 2 shirts and get 1 cap free 

• Spend a minimum of $100, get a gift worth $65 

For every minimum spend offer, you can increase the spending tier of the customers. Try promoting these offers through social media posts, ads, and email marketing. The more they know about your holiday deals, the better are your chances to increase the AOV. 

2. We hope you have started your promotions! 

Starting your promotions early is always the best idea. This will give you sufficient time to perform A/B testing and identify the sure-fire promotional strategies. Since it is November already, we hope you’ve already started your BFCM promotions. Here are some tips for you: 

• Can you start your BFCM promotions or start offering discounts before any of your competitors? That will help you grab some attention from the users. This will give your users more time to make their purchase decisions. 

• Announce the discounts and deals in style. Don’t stick to promoting them only on the website. If you plan to create some hype, promote the deals on every channel available. This should include social media, emails, and any other channel you can think of. 

• How about extending the sale for the entire November? There’s a reason why Black Friday is called “Black November”. The month of November is all about festivities. So, the sooner you can open doors for discounts and deals, the better. 

Starting early always helps. You may have some special, personalized deals kept aside for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But you can always use some generic deals to build the curiosity of the shoppers. That way, there’ll be sufficient demand for the BFCM deals when you finally reveal those. 

3. Create some buzz with word-of-mouth 

Word-of-mouth marketing is still popular among 64% of marketing executives. When promoting your Black Friday deals, make sure that you don’t ignore this aspect. If you can create some buzz around your offers and discounts, there are clear possibilities for success. Here is an example: 

For Black Friday 2020, a beauty and wellness brand called Deciem executed an educational campaign. Apart from offering deals and discounts, this brand provided quick knowledge doses to the customers regarding skincare. This strategy worked for the brand and made the customers feel valued. 

You can also think of something unique that can either entertain the users or make them feel valued. That will be a successful BFCM campaign for your users. 

4. Leverage email marketing to recover abandoned carts 

If you don’t take proper actions to reduce the abandoned carts, they can rise up to the rate of 88%. That’s what the global average eCommerce cart abandonment rate is. But the question is, how can you recover from this critical challenge? This holiday season when you’re aiming at multiplying your AOV, you definitely don’t want half of your revenue getting stuck in shopping carts. 

Apart from the new customers, existing customers can also leave products in their carts. As an eCommerce store, you can never risk losing your old customers. They are more frequent buyers and are a consistent source of purchase. For an epic event like Black Friday, where your only plan should be to grow AOV and sales, you can never risk dissatisfying the existing buyers. 

The best and most feasible way to recover abandoned carts is through email marketing. In fact, cart recovery emails can convert customers twice as fast. However, a boring recovery email won’t work to retarget your customers. Here are some tips to master your cart recovery emails: 

• Keep the subject line short, crisp and engaging. We know that you want the customers to get back to their carts and complete the checkout. But don’t be so direct about it. Try something different and catchy instead. 

• Next comes the email body. It should be as cordial and simple as possible. Avoid any types of spam words. That way your email will not even reach the customers’ primary inbox. 

• An email is not enough! Add a discount with it. Then only the buyer will be enticed to get back to the store. 

Here is an interesting cart recovery email example for you: 

See how this email is a perfect example of cart recovery. It doesn’t push the users to purchase the products left in the cart. Instead, it maintains a thoroughly cordial tone and offers a discount to the users in order to engage them to complete the checkout. 

5. Take care of the post-purchase experience too!  

A winning marketing plan must address the post-purchase experience. As an eCommerce store, your responsibility doesn’t complete after a user places an order. In fact, it is just the beginning. If you want a long-term engagement with the user, make sure that you create a great post-purchase experience too. If it all seems too much for you to manage, you can always use ShippingChimp. Here’s why: 

• It creates live-tracking page for your store that customers can use to monitor the latest status of their shipment package 

• It can improve poor delivery experience by sending personalized delivery notifications to each shopper 

• It creates branded tracking page that included relevant product recommendations 

• It can streamline the return process, by ensuring your brand’s credibility and identity 

An app like ShippingChimp by your side can reduce all the extra efforts spent on communicating with courier companies. It can create perfect communication harmony among your store, the courier company you tie-up with, and the customers. To know more, start the free trial! 

Final Words 

So, did you match your marketing checklist with ours? We hope you execute all the right marketing strategies for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. If you face any challenges, don’t hesitate to inform us. We’ll get back at the earliest.