Mastering Black Friday/Cyber Monday: How to Create Unforgettable Offers and Boost Customer Loyalty

Are you ready for this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping events? Buckle up as we explore how to stand out during extremely competitive times of the year! From understanding your customer's preferences to crafting clear, easy-to-understand deals, discover how you can draw in more customers with deals you know they will love!

 So tune in - this isn't just about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it's about building customer loyalty and appreciation that lasts year-round! 

Mentioned Resources: 

Boost Your Online Business Profits: The Win-Win Strategy of Product Bundling

This week’s episode is sponsored by our Search Engine Optimization Mini Course.  Our Free online digital course that teaches eCommerce and website owners how to level up their search engine rankings with some simple, doable steps!  Join us at www.ecommercemadeeasypodcast.com/seominicourse/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:35

As a business owner, you may be wondering how to stand out during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With all the special deals going on at this time of year, what can you really do to draw consumers into paying attention to you, in your business and to your offerings? In this episode, we have you covered with ideas on how to stand out in a highly competitive times of the year such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Welcome to the Ecommerce Made Easy Podcast. I'm your host, keri Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a 9-month old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Welcome back to this week's episode of Ecommerce Made Easy Podcast. Today, we're talking about standing out during big shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In episode 28, we covered a lot about how you can stand out in general using product bundles and especially when you're having some specials going on, and you can certainly use the concepts in that episode to help you come up with some great Black Friday deals in addition to the traditional ones we're going to be talking about in this episode. So the first thing you should always be doing with marketing materials and promotion is to really put yourself in your customers shoes. Really get into their minds. What deals would they like to see, what wording on those deals? Help them understand the deal more and make it feel more rewarded, and make it sure it's really really clear.

Speaker 1: 2:30

So, for example, let's say you want to offer some unique offers and discounts on your products. A typical one might be that you might want to offer $20 off a $100 order or more. Or does 20% off on a $100 or more order sound better to your customers? So you really need to think about what is your target market and how does their brain work? So, even though $100, $20 off at the $100 mark is the same, whether you're doing the $20 or the 20%, some people are going to be more related to that $20 off. They're going to relate to that better. They may not be a person that can do quick math in their head and they see the $20 as something tangible versus 20% off. May not be tangible to them, but now, if you also target instead, say, the a bit more mathematical minded people, 20% off might sound better to them because they know that if they spend more than $100, they're going to get more than $20 off. Because SimpleMass says you know, 20% of something above $100 is going to be more than $20, since 20% of $100 is $20, right. So some people will be thinking more along those lines and think, oh, this is a better deal than this person down the street that's giving just $20 off of their products and they have similar products. So you really have to make sure that you are thinking in your customer's shoes here Because, like I said in the beginning of this example, some people may not relate well to the 20% off. They want to a real, tangible number they can really just look at and think about. So let's say you want to do some percentages off or a flat amount off your orders.

Speaker 1: 4:23

What else could you do in addition to that? A lot of retailers do that during Black Friday events, as they will have tiered offerings where you get a certain amount off, depending upon how much you spend. Well, how can you stand out, even a little bit more so, using the previous episode 28,. We can look at product bundling there, or we can do something like a frequent retailer that we shop at here is Lego. My kids love Legos, I love Legos, my husband loves Legos. So what does Lego do for the VIP customers, usually every year?

Speaker 1: 4:58

Well, when you shop and spend a certain amount of money, very likely you're going to get and they have a limited number of these a specific product that is usually holiday themed. Usually you cannot buy it on its own, so it's an exclusive item that you get as a free gift for spending. Usually it's like a hundred, 150, et cetera, at Lego. So how can you work this into your business? Is there something free and exclusive you can give away? When consumers spend a certain amount of money with you? How can you reward them with something like this? And what and it could be even something that entices them to come back later could be a free sample of something you know is an awesome product, but most people don't know about it yet. Maybe it's a new product you have or a new service, so you can offer a teaser product as well as an actual product that you is exclusive to the event. So think about outside the box. How can you really reward your customers this way?

Speaker 1: 5:58

So when you're coming up with your Black Friday deals, let's try not to be too crazy here. You really want to think about a few Black Friday deals, so maybe one to three. If you have too many Black Friday deals, a confused mind says no and you're going to confuse your customers and they're not going to know which deals better, which way should they go, etc. So try to limit it to somewhere around one to three. Again, you know your audience. You know where they can handle another one or two beyond three. But really think about your consumers and who is looking at your products, to make sure that you're creating concise, clear specials for them that's not confusing and is very clear and not overwhelming. Again, like I said, a confused mind says no. We do not want to overwhelm our customers with our Black Friday deals, so make sure it's very, very clear as to what sort of benefit they're going to get by shopping with you.

Speaker 1: 6:56

So once you get your Black Friday or Cyber Monday or both offers decided upon, your next step is to plan out ahead for the marketing. So, while you want to leave the details on what you're going to give away at the special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday until it actually really happens, you could tease what's coming. You could create some hints. You want to create some anticipation with these posts and the marketing around this, because we tend to get really excited when one of our favorite brands is giving a deal and we know it's coming up and we want to see what's going to happen and we're super excited. So you want to create that anticipation and you also get like I said, you can give hints under what's coming. You could even maybe give a sneak peek to your very special VIP customers if you have a list of those and don't think you're too late if you're just jumping on this bandwagon whenever this episode release, which is the Tuesday before Black Friday, you can plan this just a few days ahead of time if needed to.

Speaker 1: 8:07

Obviously, planning a little bit longer is many times better. Sometimes it's also not. Sometimes we overthink when we plan too far ahead too. So you know yourself at best as well. So make sure that you're balancing your time and your efforts and your energy also with what your consumers are expecting. So start teasing that content and planning that content in advance, as far as you feel like you need to do Us here at B2C. I kind of like to do this like a week or two in advance, because we never know quite what's going to land on our plate each day. We obviously have planned projects as we go along with. Sometimes customer emergencies come up, so we need a little bit of that gutter to make sure that we have our events planned ahead of time Now. You, for example, you could be able to just wing it together in a couple days. So again, do what you can and you know. Plan as far as ahead as you can, but don't feel like you're too behind the ball if you're just getting started on this too, I don't want you to be discouraged if you're not planning well ahead for something like this. Do what you can learn from it, and if you feel like you need to plan a little bit farther ahead next year, then do that. Just keep note of it and write what's worked well and what didn't work well.

Speaker 1: 9:23

So while you're creating this content marketing material you're going to want to create some that is worded more like countdown marketing material. So two days left are a big Black Friday event, or an hour left, etc. So you want to create these gentle reminders that are also fun and exciting and engaging. We are all so busy I know that I am and I know I've missed some great deals sometimes because time simply got away from me and if I had that key email reminder or text reminder we're not going to go into texting as a business on this episode, but that is definitely out there if it's appropriate for your group but you definitely want to have the email and social media reminders that are counting down to when the Black Friday deals are going to happen and also, as the deals are going along, when they're about to close. Your consumers don't miss the deadline for those deals.

Speaker 1: 10:22

So in general, we talk a lot about this and that typically in your marketing efforts, you want to be engaging, entertaining or educating your audience. 80% of the time, about 20% of the time is when you're gonna be offering things and selling things. You don't want to have your consumers feel like they're just being talked at, and they tend to be more loyal with brands that educate, entertain and engage in their audience as well. Now we can shift this a little bit during these big shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because consumers are kind of expecting to get sold to a bit more. Make sure you keep this balanced, though. You want to make sure it is within what fits your company culture and also your consumers' expectations. So don't shift too far from that 80-20 rule If you don't feel like your consumers can handle that. You do want to create a balance here. Again, we don't want to expect to be perfect every time we do things like this, but we do want to learn from what went well and what didn't go well. So make note of whether you know the, how far out you need to market, how often you need to remind people and how much you can put in those sales posts.

Speaker 1: 11:41

During things like this, you need to try to get a good feel from your audience on this. So once you have your deal set and your marketing outlined, how should you promote this? So we've talked a lot about email marketing in this podcast, and that will be key here too. Especially, refer back to episode 23 if you're new to email marketing, and we will link to that in the show notes to make it easy for you to get to so when you're planning out your email marketing for back Friday, you want to make sure you're not only sending teaser messages out early again. Early is going to be relative to you, and when you feel like you know whether that's a couple days or a couple weeks, you know, keep the early in mind, as it depends upon you and your target audience.

Speaker 1: 12:26

But you also want to make sure that you're tagging your subscribers based upon the links that they click in your email. You can segment your email based upon who's opened it, but that sort of information isn't nearly as reliable as it used to be several years ago, as well as you're not really getting the details that you want. As far as what your consumers are really interested in, your best bet is to create engaging content. That is, a teaser that your consumers can click on to learn more, which allows you to tag them and know that they are interested in learning more on that particular product or service or category products or services. You can then create segmented emails based upon the links that they clicked.

Speaker 1: 13:11

For example, if you sell toys and you have links to different types of toys in your teaser email, you can then later target those customers with marketing directly related to the categories of toys that they clicked on. So, for example, maybe you sell logic based toys and creative based toys. You know those are two totally different target audiences there. So if you have consumers that are clicking on the logic based toys let's say, lego and puzzles and logic type based games you're going to want to tag those people and target them with products that are related to that, versus if they clicked on the creative type of toys category so maybe creative type games or drawing type toys or things like that you're going to want to target again those emails to them based upon that category and the products that you have in that category. This really helps your consumers feel like you're listening and you understand them more.

Speaker 1: 14:15

Obviously, we don't want to do this in a creepy way. Of course, I know I've gotten some creepy stuff before as far as like, oh, they really paid attention to me clicking on on this random thing. Sometimes you accidentally just click on an email, right, but you don't want to do it in a creepy way. Is that I saw you watching and clicking on the specific Lego products that you want, right, but you want to present them like items that are like what they clicked on and we're interested in, because that's really what they're looking for, or they probably wouldn't have clicked on it. Similarly, when you're doing social media marketing around big events like Black Friday, you want to tease and create excitement there, so you want to tie your social media and your email marketing together here. Keep in mind your consumers are likely not consuming both types of content at the same time, and it just reinforces and gives them a gentle reminder when they see a similar thing in one place or the other. I know I don't mind if I see something similar on social media, that I got an email, say, earlier in the day or the previous day, so don't be worrying about that. And so, while we want to tease this information on social media, you can also do fun contests or giveaways or games during this time on social media as well. Doing things like that are really going to boost your posts. It's going to have them be shown to more people, especially when you get them really engaged and talking about themselves. Consumers love to talk about themselves on social media and I can go more into detail on a social media marketing podcast later, but they really love talking about themselves on social media.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Now, do keep in mind with all the marketing that you do on social. Think of how you can bring those engaged customers back to your website and especially back to your email list. Social media space, as we talked about in this podcast before, is rented space. You don't own it. You don't know who's going to receive your content when you put it out there. You just you're just kind of it's kind of like a shotgun. You're just shooting out. You know information and you're not quite sure where it's going to land and who's going to see it. So but your social media is not like your email list. Your email list, you can email those consumers at any point in time and it's going to land in their inbox most likely, unless you have some email deliverability problems which we can help you with if you ever do have that. But they're going to get your email and you're going to be sending it to the same specific people that you have in your email list. You know all those consumers are going to have the opportunity to open and read your email if you've done a good job and created some engagement and created some curiosity that they want to open your email. But you know it's going to go to them where social media is not. So whatever you can do on your social media marketing efforts and this is not only during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but during all times you want to be bringing them back to your website and back to your email list. So here's a bonus idea you can do too.

Speaker 1: 17:26

During something big like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you could offer a future discount when buying during a big shopping event like this, for example. This is a great way to get people to come back to your website and purchase later. Many times, consumers get cash for Christmas and maybe they didn't get that one Christmas item they really wanted, but you've shopped on their website. Or they shopped on your website to purchase a gift for somebody else, but they didn't get the gift they wanted back on your website, while giving them future coupon to use after the holidays is a great way to bring them back to the website. Or maybe that person they bought for is birthday is coming up in the next month or two and they want to save on their birthday present that's coming up too. So giving them a future discount in addition to the already great deals, or giving them for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is a bonus way, once you've got things settled down, and you're doing this, these type of big shopping events, really well. It's a great way to bring them back to you and have them purchase again from you and also just create some great customer loyalty and they feel like they appreciate it. I know I feel appreciated whenever I get a coupon to use in the future on a place that I really love to shop at anyway.

Speaker 1: 18:48

Okay, so, in addition to that, this last one, this last point, is really important and I think it's really. I mentioned something like this before on the episodes before. It's just something I don't see happen very often. So you want to make them feel special and follow up with them with a thank you after their purchase. And I'm not just talking about the typical thank you for your order email that they're going to get immediately after purchase. I'm talking a follow up email, maybe a week or two later again thanking them for their purchase, seeing if everything arrived fine. Again, since this is the holiday season that we're generally focusing on on this episode, it might be a bit awkward to see it has some if they really like the product, because it's probably a gift, but you can make sure that it was received on time and that they're happy with what they received, et cetera. And then you might want to consider if you definitely are a company that tailors more towards the gifting arena. You may want to consider sending an email after the holidays and making sure that they're loved one love the gift too. You know your customers best, so see if that one is appropriate. But doing a follow up and a thank you, that's outside the normal. Just thank you for your order type of standard email is a really great way to stand out during the crowd and really great way to help your consumers feel appreciated.

Speaker 1: 20:15

All right, so let's recap this week's episode. So first, figure out what your deals are going to be for Cyber Monday and our Black Friday and how can you make them really clear. Again, we want to be super clear. We don't want to have any complicated deals. We do want to have exciting deals, but we don't want to make them complicated because a confused mind says no. And second, work with your marketing materials ahead of time. Have them planned out as early as you can. Create teasers, day of materials as well as reminder materials as to when things are ending, and use both email and social media marketing for this, but leaning back towards your email marketing when possible and drawing them from social media back into your email marketing. And third, make them feel special. This is going to create customer loyalty and repeat customers. If you really go that extra mile, think of a simple way that you can really just go that extra mile and make them feel really special.

Speaker 1: 21:16

All right, thank you for joining for me for this week's episode of eCommerce Made Easy Podcast. Be sure to visit our show notes for this episode and others on eCommerceMadeEasyPodcastcom and if you're watching on the YouTube channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Or if you're listening on a podcast, please hit that follow button wherever you're listening so you don't miss up on any future episodes. If you're listening to this and you found value in today's episode or any of the other episodes of the eCommerce Made Easy Podcast, I want to hear from you. What other content do you want to hear on the show? Drop us an email at podcast at bcsengineeringcom Again, that's podcast at bcsengineeringcom or leave us a review. Thank you again for listening and we will see you next week.