Gearing up for the Rush: Preparing Your Ecommerce Platform for Successful Promotions

Imagine if your website unexpectedly went viral during a promotional period - would it stand up to the traffic influx or come crashing down? With Black Friday and other major promotional periods around the corner, now is the time to ensure your ecommerce platform is prepared to handle the rush, and we're going to show you how to do exactly that. 

By the end of this episode, you'll understand why setting revenue goals and tracking conversion rates are crucial steps in gearing up for a promotion. We'll share invaluable tips on utilizing social media effectively, the importance of robust customer service procedures, and the benefits of sending out personalized mail to your top customers. Buckle up for an engaging conversation that navigates the world of ecommerce, and get ready to reap the benefits of a successful promotion!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Preparing Your Website for Promotions
• 13:32 Preparing for a Promotional Period

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today, I want to talk to you about how to make sure that your website is ready for the holidays, black Friday or really any special promotion that you have coming up. It's something that we get asked about a lot and help our clients prepare for, from either the tech to the marketing. We can help you with all of those. We'll be diving into why you want to make sure you are prepared, what you should do to prepare and how you should conclude the promotional period. Each step will help you understand what went well, what didn't, and help you even more be ready for the next promotion.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Welcome to the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, kiri Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-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: 1:06

Welcome back to this week's episode of Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. Today we are talking about promotions, holidays, black Friday, etc. So any time that you and your business want to promote and really push for a large revenue boost so it could be around, like I said, the holidays, it could be your own special promotion that you have at your own special time of the year. So first off, we want to talk about why do we prepare and I'm sure there's some famous quotes out there that I can't think of right now, but preparing helps you be successful. It really helps you make sure that you hit your targets or at least get really close, if not blow them out of the water. So without a plan, you won't know if you hit your target or not. You won't know if you've done well. So the process will go much smoother if you plan ahead and you really you can't plan too far ahead for these, especially for the really big ones like Black Friday, if that's applicable to your business. You want to be preparing for that one months in advance I'm talking three, four, at least months in advance to get ready for it. So you want to look at your previous promotion numbers. So, if you've done this before, look at what happened before. Get those as a starting point for where you want to reach for this one, because we want to make sure that our goals are attainable, but still a reach for us and something a bit bigger to grow towards. So if you don't know where you've ever been before, that's going to be hard to do.

Speaker 1: 2:39

So make sure you go back to some promotional periods and really dig into what was the revenue that you had. How many visitors were on your website? How did they convert? Were there specific parts of your website that worked well or didn't work well? Make note of every single data point that you can that seems relevant. Now, obviously you don't want to get overwhelmed, so don't do too many. I would probably want to limit it to five or seven. You could maybe go up as high as 10 if you're more seasoned at this, but let's make sure we keep this attainable and not overwhelming. Let's look at what happened before.

Speaker 1: 3:19

So, before we really dive into the nitty gritty, I do want to give you an example of something that one of our clients had happened. It was probably about five or six years ago. They accidentally went viral. I mean, they went absolutely viral. And what happened? They had so much traffic to their website. Their web server couldn't handle it. We were actually hosting them and we're like, hey guys, what is going on? You have so much traffic. We could tell it was legitimate traffic and not just hackers or people trying to DOS the system. And we're like, hey, something's going on. What happened? Did you guys promote something, et cetera. They finally figured out that they had, kind of accidentally, went viral. They had some social posts and some newsletter posts that really, like legitimately, went viral.

Speaker 1: 4:14

So one of the things you want to do and we've talked about this in another episode is make sure you have a good hosting provider, because what we did is we helped them pivot, and we helped them pivot fast. We got them up on a much bigger server so that it could handle the traffic, because the server they had handled their normal traffic just fine and it had some room to grow. But this was like I'm talking double, triple, etc. The amount of traffic all of a sudden in one day. So we helped them pivot, we got them on a bigger server and up and running within several hours of realizing what was going on. So make sure that you do have a good web hosting provider, no matter what, because who knows, you might go viral on some of these promotional periods.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Okay, so let's talk about the website conversion goals. Look at what kind of revenue do you want to bring in? Really? Think about that. Think about what you brought in before, and then I want to see you increase that, what you want to bring in this time. We always want to be growing, so try to make sure that you're stretching your goal some. Obviously, don't make it too far out there or you'll be discouraged if you don't hit it. But do make it a stretched goal, see how close you can get to it and if you meet that stretch goal in the middle of your promotion, stretch it again, make it bigger, why not? Who says you can't do that? So?

Speaker 1: 5:38

But when you set that base goal that you want to hit for revenue, you really need to then next look at your typical conversion rate for your website. You can find this out a lot in Google Analytics or any other analytics software you have, but you need to look at the number of visitors versus the sales you have. That gives you the conversion rate. So look at your typical conversion rate and that helps you determine. Then how many visitors do you need to hit your site to reach your revenue goal, because you can't reach your revenue goal out of thin air or out of magic. You need customers to be seeing your products and services to hit that revenue goal and if you don't know what your conversion rate is, you will have no idea how many visitors you need to be able to hit that revenue goal. So make sure you're really looking at conversion rates so you can figure out how many visitors you need, etc. So you can make a plan for how do you get all those visitors to your website.

Speaker 1: 6:38

And then, speaking of which, we talked about analytics already a little bit, but you want to make sure your analytics is working before your promotional period and make sure it is tested for a bit of a while. It should already be working on your site, but what if somebody added something to your website, some new feature or something, and your analytics broke and you didn't know it? And then you go into promotion period and you can't measure it. So make sure your analytics are working. That's going to be a pretty quick check, I feel like, for you, so do that first and then make sure your analytics are collecting the data you need. Some of the basic ones are how many visitors, your conversion may and your revenue. But, depending upon your business, you may have some other goals that you may want to be measuring as well. So make sure whatever you're using for analytics you can measure that you might want to be logging how many calls you get, or how many incoming emails you get from customer questions, etc. So really kind of think about what metrics are important to you and your business and make sure those are measurable before you get to your promotion period.

Speaker 1: 7:43

And then, of course, we need to make sure that our websites are functioning well. Before their promotional period, you need to have it thoroughly tested. I highly recommend that you go through your website and check all the basics, check all the even the more advanced pieces that are really important and make sure that they are working. If you have some friends or family, jump in and help and review the website, see if anything's confusing, etc. And in episode eight of our e-commerce made easy podcast, you're going to find a lot more information on how to test your website and really be thinking outside the box on how to test it. So make sure you check that out. If you haven't already listened to that episode and if you have maybe go back and review it one more time so that you're sure and we have a great checklist in there to help you really check the boxes and make sure that you have tested your website thoroughly.

Speaker 1: 8:35

While you're looking over your website, make sure your buy buttons are above the fold, and so above the fold means you see them when you open the site. You don't have to scroll to see them. You see them right away. And you also need to make sure that these buy buttons are very clear and not clever. So if you have an e-commerce system, make them as simple as buy now, add a cart, etc. Being simple like that, if you sell services you could do, or a course you can do, enroll in and then course name. Or you could say you know, click here to get coaching with me. You need to make sure that those are very specific and not a click here to learn more. That's too generic. A confused mind says no. So make sure your buttons are clear, not clever. We've talked about this a few times on our podcast already, but that is super important to be clear and not clever.

Speaker 1: 9:33

Now, if you have the potential to have a lot more traffic than you normally would, based upon past experience, you may want to look into caching for your website so you can get something called a CDN or content delivery network provider. There are several out there, and if you have questions on which ones we have experience with, feel free to drop us an email at podcast at bcsengineeringcom, and we can help you out with that. But you might want some caching. Some software out there provides plugins that help you cash your website as well. And basically what caching means is it kind of creates basically a snapshot or a picture of all the pages of your website, so that your website doesn't have to compute and figure out what to display. It's already got a picture of it and so it can just display the picture rather than processing, say like a video and moving parts, and so caches are generally refreshed once a day or every so often. That way your pictures are up to date, but so a cache can be very helpful if you expect a lot more traffic than what you normally have on your website and, like our client, you might need a bigger server temporarily.

Speaker 1: 10:44

We actually had another client that always has really huge Black Friday deals and with their previous system and their previous developer they were crash on Black Friday. Just think about that. So think about all this work you put into a promotion and then the promotion period comes along and the web server crashes. All that effort and you're losing all these sales because the web server is crashed and bogged down and just can't handle it. It just can't handle all the traffic going to the website. So if you think you might be in a situation like that, you need to make sure that you're readily available to have a bigger server. So make sure you talk to your hosting company. You can also come to us and we're happy to evaluate and help you out there. But just make sure that you have the ability to get a much bigger server if needed during a big promotion like that, if that's something you're potentially tending towards and with this one client that was a few years ago we were able to do some what's called load testing, which is a bit techie term, but basically we simulated a lot of traffic going to their website and made sure that it wasn't going to crash on Black Friday, and we were very successful and they had a very successful Black Friday, so we were very happy for them. So if you're on the bigger type of e-commerce or services. Look into that if you feel like that might be a potential problem for you. All right.

Speaker 1: 12:15

So let's jump a little bit into marketing and promotion. So we want to make sure that we plan ahead for this, because creating the hype and the leading up to the promotion is just as important as what you do during your promotion as well. So, if you've done a special like this before, what did you do in the past? Did it work well? Was there something you wanted to change? Do you want to do something a little bit differently because you kind of liked it, but you think you could do better in a certain area? Do you want to market with email? Do you want to market with social media? Do you even want to market with actual males, like a postcard or something in the mail, like a letter? Do you need to have themed banners on your website? Some people like to do themed banners during special holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day or Christmas or Thanksgiving or any of those special holidays. So think about ahead. Do you want themed banners? So, because you're going to need to make sure that you have those ready and prepared ahead of time and then, if we go back to the email marketing. You're going to want to make sure that you have your emails ready and that they are prepared and ready to go out in a timely manner, that they kind of tease what's coming.

Speaker 1: 13:32

You want to create some mystery and some excitement around your promotion. That's coming up and but you don't want to maybe give it all the way away. Right, you want to make a reason for them to come to your website when the promotion hits, and similar for social media marketing. You're going to want to make sure that you're showing up on social media very consistently for weeks and weeks before your promotional period, because social platforms like to promote and really raise up those people in the algorithms that are continually using their site consistently. And you not only want to be posting things yourself as your business, but you also want to be interacting with their platform as well. That's going to boost the algorithm a lot more if you're interacting with the platform. I'm talking Facebook, instagram, all the standard social media platforms. You want to be interacting with other companies and people as well as posting your own things on there. That was going to help your post get seen more.

Speaker 1: 14:34

And then let's talk about the mail that I touched on too. Who doesn't like to get something in the mail? That is not a bill. So if you can swing it and if you want to send it, say to your top so many customers that you've had in the past to let them know this promotion is coming up, why not give it a try? It doesn't take a whole lot of time or money just to stamp to send a little bit of promotion, say, hey, you know, we've been thinking about you, we, you know, have missed you, or whatever words you want to use. Or we're so excited about this promotion coming up. So really think about how your person out in your brand. You want them to come through on the promotion in mail. So you might want, you might want to give it a try. It's it's definitely not completely dead for sure.

Speaker 1: 15:20

Okay, so let's say that you have your promotion going and ready to go. What else you really need to think about? Well, you need to make sure that you don't fall flat on the execution parts. You really need to be looking at your customer service and relationship processes that you have in place. Make sure you have standard operating procedures for your customer service. How do you handle exchanges or returns? How do you handle product or service questions. What are the most common questions that you get asked? Make sure you have those with the answers readily available so that your service people can more easily and more effectively answer questions of consumers who are considering buying.

Speaker 1: 16:02

So really look at you and your company and how you manage and process customers before the promotional period and make sure if you need to upstaff and increase your staff and temporarily because of it being a holiday period and something a lot bigger make sure that you're ready for that and everybody's ready and trained well for that, because Nobody wants to do a great promotion, get a whole bunch of people to your website and then you get these questions and returns and and you just kind of fall flat on the customer service part. You don't want to do that because once you've already got the sale, you want to make sure that that customer is very happy. You also want to make sure that you can process orders in a timely manner. So let's say you actually sell physical goods. Are you ready and equipped to ship those physical goods out quickly and in a timely manner? Do you have enough staff that can do that for you? Do you have the processes in place? Say you don't ship them yourself and you have a drop shipper, you have the processes in place and as that drop shipper going to be able to ship your stuff for you Nice and quickly, so that your customers are happy it's a post-sale happiness. We need to make sure that that is there.

Speaker 1: 17:14

And Then I think this is something that's super missed by a lot of companies and I've talked about this on the podcast before is Customer follow-up and check-in. I don't find very many companies do this at all and In they just, they really just kind of don't do this at all. But for those that do do this, I always feel super special. If I have ordered something and I get a simple email or a Text message. If I sign up for text messages in like a week or two, just making sure that I'm satisfied with my purchase, see if I have any questions or need any help, that really really sets that company apart. So I challenge you if you can do this Really, look at your post follow-up for your customers, because once you have a customer, it is much easier to bring them back as a repeat customer than to bring on a new customer.

Speaker 1: 18:15

Plus, we want to make sure that our reputation is good and you want to make sure that you're really servicing your customers appropriately and are really going the extra mile for them and Checking in with them, make sure that they love your product or service, see if they have any feedback and then listen to that feedback and see what you could do better for the next time. Right, alright. And then, finally, we want to look at our post promotion evaluation. So, before you even start your promotion, I want you to set a date on your calendar, whether it's with yourself if you're a solarpreneur or a solar business operator or with your team. Set a date that you go over the promotion, what went well, what didn't go well, your revenue numbers, your visitor numbers, your conversion rate numbers, anything that you determined that was super important for you to measure in this process, because you want to make sure that you do it when it's really fresh in your mind and you can then be able to really determine what do we want to do differently next time? And you can have it all documented so that the next time you do a promotion you don't have to do as much work, because you've already done the pre-work at the end of this promotion, so that you're ready for that next promotion. Just think about the time and money that will save you if you evaluate it right after the promotional period and have this all digested in a great document that you put in a safe place where you know where you're going to keep the promotional stuff so that you can review it the next time you do a promotion. And then you can even challenge yourself to do even more Every time you do these promotions. Challenge yourself to do a bit more on the revenue, like we talked about in the beginning.

Speaker 1: 20:05

So we want to hear from you what do you like to do to prepare for a promotional period? Drop us an email at podcast at bcsengineeringcom. What are the things that you like to do that you think helps you stand out and or helps you be more successful? So make sure you drop us an email, because we do want to hear from you, and I read all those emails, all right. So thank you for joining us for this week's episode. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening so you don't miss out on any upcoming episodes, and we would be forever grateful if you would leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. As always, you can visit our show notes at ecommercemadeeasypodcastcom, and we will see you next week.