If you’re a private labeler, then you know your biggest sales days of the year are almost here. Thanksgiving is just two weeks away! Is your website and Amazon store ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Even if you’ve navigated these sales days in the past, there’s always something you can do to improve your marketing and customer service. We’ve got some last-minute tips that you still have time to put into place before the big days arrive.
Encourage and Enable Wish Lists
There’s one big thing to remember during this time of year: Your usual customers aren’t your biggest customers at Christmas. This is the time of year when we all buy something for others, meaning we’re often outside our comfort zone, trying to learn about brands and products we wouldn’t normally buy. In other words, your buyer personas will change.
How can you make things easier for those buyers? By encouraging wish lists. Remember when your parents would hand you the toy catalog and a big marker so you could circle all the things you wanted Santa to bring? These wish lists make it possible for your usual buyers—your target audience—to give insight and even outright suggestions to their family and friends who’ll be making the purchases. You’re giving them the option of circling the toys they want so they can send it to friends and family for a little bit of help on shopping day.
How hard is it to offer a wish list? Not at all. Just add a simple heart or check box option to every product, where your usual shoppers can mark their interest. This can be done with several different apps or plugins, depending on your ecommerce platform. That information can be aggregated into the actual wish list, which can then be delivered by email to their friends and family.
Tidy Up Your Email Marketing
There’s still time to get the word out about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers, especially if you’re planning to use email marketing. There are a few things you can do to every single email to improve your open rates and click-through rates.
Subject Line
Start with a few different subject line options and be ready to change to the next one if you notice your first choice isn’t getting a lot of traction. That subject line should include the offer and even the deadline for that offer, if one applies.
Calls-to-Action
Don’t ever send a single email without at least two CTAs—the first for your main offer and the second for subscription to a newsletter or other information. These CTAs should link directly to the offer’s landing page or product page, so as not to confuse or irritate your buyers.
Countdown Clocks
You can find various countdown clock options for your emails in several places. These serve as a reminder to anyone who opens your email just how much time they have left to make their purchases. You can use these to let people know when an offer is ending, when a sale will begin, or when Christmas arrives.
Even with these things in place, you’ll see buyers slip through the cracks. Put an abandoned cart strategy in place to reach back out to anyone who landed on your site and browsed or placed something in their cart but then left without buying. You’ll be shocked at how many people return to complete the purchase.
Check Your Site Speeds
There are good reasons why “hustle” and “bustle” are two words used often during the holiday season. Everyone is in a hurry to make those last-minute purchases while the deals are still good or while they can still get items shipped before it’s too late. If you slow them down with your website, they’ll leave and not come back. You can choose from several different tools, including YSlow, Google PageSpeed, and SpeedCurve.
You can avoid slowing down your site during this time of year by making sure you compress image files and videos when uploading to your product pages. You’re likely to have many more of those during the holidays, and it won’t take much before load times are affected.
Prep for Extra Shipping
Unless you use FBA, you need to worry about your shipping situation for the holidays. Early projections show that the average buyer will spend over $1000 this season, up to 4.5% higher than last year. Online spending is projected to rise by almost 15%! That means you’re likely to sell more, too.
You have an obligation to meet your shipping promises, whether you offer two-day shipping or the more traditional seven days. You can’t meet those promises if you run out of your shipping materials. Boxes, envelopes, box fillers, bubble wrap, and even labels will all go quickly. If you run out, you may be stuck searching all over town for more. What will that do to your shipping times?
Prepare early and have everything you need on hand. Check your inventory often and be ready to reorder or pick up new supplies well before you reach the end of your stores.
Were there tasks here that you haven’t yet considered while getting ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? There is always room to improve your marketing and increase your sales. If we can help you make the most of the projected $1.1 trillion shopping season, don’t hesitate to reach out.
