BFCM Tips for Magento Store Owners to Double Their Sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are two of the most awaited extravaganza for any ecommerce store owner(s). These holidays are important and most store owners are unaware of how to cash them. 

There are a bunch of reasons behind it. They might lack a strategy to market their products or sell inventory in the right way. And that creates an opportunity for reputed online stores to grab profits in millions, where small stores couldn’t get reach to the expected numbers.

Apart from that, this year we all have been through a lot but at the same time, we have seen a great rise in the ecommerce industry. We hope that this BFCM meets the expectation of everyone who’s reading it. 

So we have decided to spread the opportunity to help these store owners by providing BFCM tips from experts. These experts share practical advice based on their experiences that will be helpful for Magento store owners.

Know What Attracts Your Customers 

You have to offer what resonates with your customers. As our customers are Magento 2 stores & merchants, we always try to create offers that solve their problems at its root. For instance, if a store wants to make their special offers more appealing on the storefront, we definitely recommend our Sales Boosting collection including Countdown Timer, Daily Deal & Promo Banner extensions to consistently keep customers curious about the deals and come back to get the offers.   

Provide Useful Tips to Handle the Holiday Shopping Season  

We give values beforehand. Before BFCM, we share a dozen documents including email marketing tips, sales-boosting tips, website optimization, checkout optimization, back-end management, etc. with our audiences. Because the holiday shopping season always requires careful preparation from several months earlier, every store needs to be aware of what they should do to fully take advantage of this chance. For instance, we come up with these topics: 

• Ad Planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• X Amazing Marketing Ideas for BFCM
• Get ready for the early birds in the holiday shopping season
• Get Your Online And Mobile Platforms Ready For Holiday Shopping Seasons  

Focus on Promotions that Encourage Customers to Increase their Order Value 

We encourage our customers to purchase a comprehensive solution for one of the most important events of the year. We focus on bundle purchases that have the ability to accelerate or even revamp customers’ stores. For instance, if the store needs to streamline the checkout process, we motivate it to consider a combo of One Step Checkout and Better Coupon which allows customers to click on the promo link and checkout with the coupon code already applied. 

You can do the same with your store, just look through your customers’ eyes, understand what they need, and apply our tactic to your offer.

Summer – Mageplaza

Care About Your Customers

Reward your customers with a great shopping experience and let them know about the benefits and advantages of purchasing on your website.
Attract your lovely customers all over the world with great deals and discounts.
Use emails, social media, push notifications, targeting advertising, and other marketing channels to capture your audience and provide an omnichannel experience.

Make sure everything in your store is announcing the sale to your visitors.
Decorate your site with sales campaign information, use banners and pop-ups on the main pages of your website, and create a particular category for products that will be on sale.
Adobe Commerce’s Staging Content feature will become an excellent solution to manage your content upfront and release exactly on the date when the sale starts.

Magento Department Manager – vConnect

Boosting your sales can be really challenging, especially during the holiday season when every company offers a great deal. Nevertheless, if you understand your audience’s needs, you can make your offer more personalized. Personalization may be a piece of pie if you are equipped with the right high-quality solutions, like CMS Display Rules for Magento 2. Run targeted promotional campaigns by restricting the display of the promotional banners by customer groups, dates and times. It’s a winning strategy to boost your sales during any holiday season. No need to spend money on paid ads if you can increase the bottom line with your own assets.

Ihor Vansach, Magefan CEO

Use Marketing Automation Tools During BFCM

With the approaching festive season, comes the need to optimize your online business to generate maximum sales. This is the time when you’ll need to create targeted marketing campaigns more than ever. Sure you must be having at your disposal a lot of customer data pertaining to their buying pattern. But are you making the maximum use of it? The holiday season is the time to create these strategies for leveraging the hype around festive buying.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool to utilize the buyers’ behavior data you have and put it to use for detailing profiling. Post profiling, designing personalized campaigns will help send out relevant information at the desired time. Marketing automation will help your business tap most opportunities for generating sales by covering every touchpoint of a customer and analyzing their readiness for generating a sale.

Here is how automation of your marketing processes workflow can benefit your business:

• Increased revenue- Automated cross-selling and up-selling helps increase the average sale value. Carefully timed follow-ups also go a long way in driving the customers back to your website.
• Reduce cart abandonment- Average cart abandonment rate is just below 70%. A well thought after cart abandonment workflow will help you recover the lost sales opportunity. Targeted follow-ups, sequenced emails, tailor-made discounts will not just help with sales recovery but will also help with understanding the psyche of the customer. 
• Add a festive feel- Festive seasons call for you to add some cheer to your campaigns as well. Personalization is what the customers crave for in the times of experience-driven shopping journeys. Sending holiday-themed greetings, pictures of your back office team hustle to customers will build positive sentiment for your business and add a humane touch

Gain customer loyalty- Give your old customers a little extra. Give them a reason to return to your website for festive purchases. You could send out early-bird offers to your loyal customers and drive sales more effectively. There is a much higher chance of converting your old customer than gaining a new one. Additionally, you will also spend 5x less on the former.

Mudit Shukla – Associate Director, CedCommerce

Make Things Easy & Improve the Checkout Process

2020 has been different. Black Friday 2020 will be different. The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the global economy and slashing revenues from offline retailers businesses and driving the acceleration of the adoption of eCommerce.

As such retailers are changing tactics. For instance, Home depot is canceling Black Friday and will make it a two-month-long sale. The key reason is that the brand wants to reduce the stress its consumers usually experience during that time. Also for sanitary and safety, it’s better to spread out the sale and have fewer customers at the same time in-store.

Other retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Target are even closing down on Thanksgiving so as to give their staff a day off!

Similarly, rumors have it that Amazon will start its Black Friday sales on 26th October 2020. If you’re in eCommerce too, it might be a good idea to jump early on the bandwagon and be ready then.

Now, whether you have a budget to drive additional traffic or just benefit the natural seasonal peak, the smart thing to do is to maximize your online sales conversion by optimizing your checkout process. Studies show that 7 out of 10 visitors who place items into their carts will abandon it during the checkout process.

Let me ask you this: if you could convert not 3 but 4 visitors into customers, what would it mean financially for your business? That’s even more true leading to the Holiday season where the average basket size/order value is higher.

So how do you optimize your checkout process? By addressing the key reasons for cart abandonment. According to a survey on 4,500 online shoppers, the main issues that cause friction are when:

• Customers are forced to create an account
• The checkout process is too long or too complicated
• Customers can’t see upfront the total amount they will have to pay

How Hard Is It to Address Each of These Points? 

If you’re on Magento, it’s super easy. Magento OneStepCheckout is an elegantly coded extension that you can just plug into your store to shape your checkout into one user-friendly page. Registration is made easy and order totals are visible at all times and update dynamically if users change parameters like addresses or shipping methods. 

How Do We Know Is It working? 

OneStepCheckout has acquired over 20,000 Magento customers across business models, industries, and regions since 2010, making it one of the best selling extensions for Magento. Now with Magento 2, they are helping over 1,000 merchants improve their checkout conversions including brands such as Nestlé, Russell Hobbs (joint customer with Cloudways), Maxi-Cosi, Everlast to name the most recognizable brands. 

Join them today so you’re ready to capture a bigger share of the pie on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, even if it starts early. When you’re going the extra mile to boost your online store’s traffic, you want customers to stick and not see your efforts go to waste. Our license is a one-off fee and within a few incremental sales, it’s already paid back. The ROI opportunity is just here for grabs.

Thien Lan Weber – CMO, OneStepCheckout 

Quick Checklist to Keep in Mind

• The server should be able to handle the explosive traffic (better to use optimized dedicated hosting)
• Update your Magento version to the latest (2.4.0 at the time of writing)
• Offer some crazy BFCM deals & offers
• Leverage social media for the promotions
• Last but not least, be prepared for faster fulfillment/delivery (post-sales)

MagePsycho

Beat your Competitors with Creative Messaging

First, lay the proper groundwork for a successful BFCM in terms of technology. Customers have a high awareness and a spike in web traffic is imminent – so make sure your server can handle it and your Magento store is properly integrated with the ERP and other third-party platforms you might be using.

Second, in terms of marketing, think of the Black Friday deals as your chance to stand out from the competition. You will notice that basically, all retailers offer some kind of a Black Friday special deal, but all too often, these offers come down to boring percentage-based discounts.

The advice here is to be creative with your messaging. Try articulating your special offer in a way that customers can easily visualize. Make it a “special” special deal.

If everyone offers a “35% discount”, why don’t you try “buy 2, get 3” or something similar that is applicable to your business model.

Also, consider boosting your special deal with a value-adding perk like free shipping. Funny, but true: our brain is less impressed with a large-percentage discount than with benefits like “free shipping”, which often present less of a financial burden for the business. That’s a win-win situation in which you give the customers what they want and put less strain on your revenues.

Ask yourself if your business model provides an opportunity for creativity in crafting your Black Friday offer? If yes, make use of that opportunity because it might be crucial to your success on the highly saturated market of Black Friday special deals.

Antonio Gotovac, Marketing Manager at Inchoo

Banners on the Homepage to Promote Offers

With regards to advertising your holiday season offer, your website’s homepage is the central place. The homepage is where all the users will first land. So take advantage of it and promote your deals. 

Create an attractive banner for the homepage and go for rotating banners for more than one deal.

The banner will disappear when the scrolling is done. So, go for sticky bars at the top of the page that will grab the user’s attention quickly. Banners and sticky bars help to increase the shopping experience of your Magento store and drive more traffic to your promotional pages. Show urgency and FOMO (Fear of missing out)

The holiday season is for a specific period, so it is the best opportunity to offer sales for a limited period. When the customers find out that the sale ends soon, they purchase the product immediately and experience a fear of missing out (FOMO).

 Use words like “Few hours left”, “Ends tonight”, “Limited stock” to show urgency and fear of missing out. Let your customer know they are missing a big deal.

Gaurav Jain – Co-Founder@MageComp

Sale Extension/Time Period

The holiday season is not only about buying presents. Many consumers wait for this time of the year to buy something for a reduced price. Thus, they might need more time to make a purchasing decision, especially when it comes to expensive products.

In fact, 54% of consumers prefer to shop after Black Friday and Cyber Monday week. Around 21% of all sales fall for the week of Christmas and the week after Christmas. Thus, you need to extend your special offers to this time and even further if you want to convert last-minute shoppers.

Go Mage

Send Holiday Special Emails and Encourage to Shop More

Being a Magento store owner, Black Friday & Cyber Monday might be the biggest festivals for your store, isn’t it? Well, if that is so, you might also have planned robust marketing campaigns for your store, right? Do not miss out on email marketing from the same. According to a research, “the email conversion rate in November increased to 8.66%, a 143% YoY increase, compared to the month of October.

In the era of personalization, personalized emails and discount offers can surely help you encourage them to shop more. Notifying the customers about the price drop in the product they have been searching for a while on your store will be like offering them what they need, resulting in a quick conversion.

Kuldeep Sharma, COO, MageDelight

Well Managed Promotions

Well-managed promotions lead to increase conversions and hence AOV (Average Order Value)!

Direct customers with hassle-free processes. Show an announcement bar for the best deals for all the shoppers, and make the homepage banners that help you create different campaigns for your BFCM. It can be the best of your products, discounts, BOGO, or a Free-delivery or COD! Utilize the storefronts with the best wings that lead the customers to the desired actions.

Priyal Trivedi, Client Acquisition Specialist, Navigate Commerce

In a Nutshell

If you’re willing to double your Black Friday sales, you need to follow the advice given by the experts. If you want us to help you with Magento hosting then let us know in the comment section. We would love to help you out and try to make your BFCM memorable. Additionally, for even more expert insights and strategies to boost your sales, attend BFCM Prepathon. It’s a golden opportunity you won’t want to miss!

Abdur Rahman

Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]

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