Summer Nguyen | 10-01-2024
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According to Investopedia, online consumers spent $222.1 billion in the 2023 holiday season, a 4.9% jump over last year, according to an Adobe Analytics report. More online shoppers are using “buy now, pay later” options, with their ranks growing 14% over last year, and by 43% on Cyber Monday.
Today we’ll bring you a hand-picked list of amazing marketing ideas for BFCM via the following post.
Let’s start now!
BFCM is short for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They happen every year, starting on the Friday after Thanksgiving and lasting until the following Monday in the United States. People have been rushing to stores during this time since the 1960s to kick off their Christmas and New Year’s shopping.
Black Friday became a big deal in the 1980s when stores noticed they were making a lot of sales during this period. It’s now known as the biggest shopping day in the US. Cyber Monday came along much later, in the 2000s, because online shopping became really popular. Both days are super popular for shopping because stores and online shops give out big discounts.
BFCM typically occurs annually, starting on the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States and lasting through the following Monday. So, Black Friday Cyber Monday usually falls on the last weekend of November, with Black Friday itself falling on the fourth Friday of November and Cyber Monday falling on the Monday immediately after.
The time from Black Friday to Cyber Monday (BFCM) is super important for brands that sell directly to consumers. This is when people do a lot of shopping for presents for their loved ones, because they can get big discounts.
In 2023, online sales during the holiday season in the United States reached nearly $254 billion, with Cyber Monday emerging as the top spender. It marked a milestone as Cyber Monday recorded the highest online shopping revenue in U.S. history, reaching around $12 billion.
Here are the main reasons why focusing on your marketing efforts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) can be beneficial for your business:
1. Increased sales: Lots of people go shopping for deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you advertise your stuff cleverly during this time, you can get their attention and turn them into paying customers, which means you’ll sell a lot more.
2. Customer acquisition: Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring in a lot of new people looking to buy things. By using smart marketing, you can introduce your business to these folks and maybe turn them into regular customers in the long term.
3. Brand awareness: Even if not everyone who sees your marketing converts into a customer during BFCM, your efforts can still help build brand awareness. By getting your name out there and showcasing your offerings, you can stay in people’s minds and increase your chances of future sales.
4. Stand out from the competition: With so many businesses vying for attention during BFCM, having a well-planned marketing strategy can help you differentiate yourself from the crowd. By creating unique and engaging campaigns, you can grab a larger share of the shopping frenzy.
5. Customer engagement: BFCM marketing allows you to connect and engage with your existing customers. By offering them exclusive deals, early access to sales, or loyalty programs, you can show appreciation and encourage repeat business.
Similar to numerous aspects of managing a business, getting ready for your BFCM marketing campaign requires some planning. It’s best to start this preparation several months ahead of the BFCM weekend.
Below are the key steps we will take to assist you in preparing:
You are advised to review past Black Friday and Cyber Monday performances to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. By thoroughly assessing past performance, businesses can gain valuable insights and data-driven recommendations to inform their BFCM preparation strategy and maximize success during this critical sales period. Here’s a more detailed explanation of what this entails:
Sales Data Analysis: Analyze metrics such as total sales revenue, average order value, and product popularity from previous BFCM periods to understand which products or categories performed well and which ones may need improvement.
Customer Behavior: Examine customer behavior data, such as website traffic sources, browsing patterns, and purchase history, to gain insights into how customers interacted with your brand during past BFCM events.
Marketing Campaign Performance: Determine which campaigns drove the most traffic, conversions, and revenue, and assess the return on investment (ROI) for each marketing channel.
Customer Feedback and Reviews: Gather feedback from customers who made purchases during past BFCM events through surveys, reviews, and direct communication channels.
Competitive Analysis: Conduct a competitive analysis to benchmark your performance against key competitors during previous BFCM periods.
A few months before BFCM weekend, spend some time mapping out your whole BFCM marketing plan for the year. Planning early helps your business get ready to make the most out of these busy online shopping days. The more you plan, the better your results will likely be.
Let’s take a look at some most important areas that warrant your attention in the months preceding Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
Strategizing Marketing Campaigns: This includes deciding on promotional offers, creating advertising materials, and scheduling email campaigns to maximize reach and impact.
Securing Partnerships and Collaborations: Many businesses collaborate with influencers, affiliates, or other brands for joint promotions during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Initiating these partnerships early ensures ample time for negotiation, planning, and coordination.
Preparing Inventory and Stock: Early planning is vital for retailers to maintain adequate inventory levels for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It enables businesses to evaluate inventory requirements, order from suppliers, and tackle supply chain issues ahead of time, ensuring readiness for the high demand.
Preparing for Holiday support: Make sure you have enough people and resources to help customers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There will be lots of shoppers, so you’ll need extra support to deal with questions, complaints, and other things customers need help with.
By growing your audience early, you can generate excitement and anticipation for your upcoming sales events, increasing the likelihood of attracting more customers and driving higher sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Social Media Marketing: Leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with your target audience and expand your reach. Regularly post engaging content, run targeted ads, and interact with your followers to build relationships and increase brand visibility.
Email Marketing: Build an email list of subscribers who are interested in your products or services and regularly send them updates, promotions, and exclusive offers. Use personalized messaging and segmentation to tailor your emails to different audience segments and maximize engagement.
Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers or micro-influencers in your niche to reach a wider audience and gain credibility and trust. Identify influencers whose followers align with your target demographic and work with them to create sponsored content or promotional campaigns.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimize your website and content for relevant keywords related to your products or services to improve your search engine rankings and attract organic traffic. Regularly update your website with fresh, high-quality content to increase visibility and attract more visitors.
Networking and Partnerships: Attend industry events, trade shows, and networking opportunities to connect with potential customers, partners, and collaborators. Building relationships with other businesses or organizations can help you tap into new audiences and expand your reach.
Popular discounts and deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) often include:
Percentage Off Discounts: Stores make discounts ranging from 10% to 50% storewide or on some specific product category.
Cash Discounts: Stores offer cash discounts on select items. For example: $10 off T-shirts, $10 off the second item, or $15 off orders over $60.
Doorbuster Deals: These are limited-time, deeply discounted offers available in-store or online during specific hours of Black Friday. For example: Off $20 for the timeframe from 7 PM to 9 PM.
BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals: Stores offer “buy one, get one free” or “buy one, get one” at discounted price deals on select items.
Free Shipping: Offer free shipping on all orders or orders above a certain threshold during the BFCM period.
Flash Sales: These are short-term, time-limited sales events where products are offered at heavily discounted prices for a limited time, typically lasting only a few hours.
Exclusive Discounts for App Users: Retailers may offer exclusive discounts or deals for customers who shop through their mobile app.
Early Access Deals: Some retailers offer early access to BFCM deals for loyalty program members, email subscribers, or VIP customers.
Bundling products is one of the most effective ways to bring more value to customers while boosting your store’s average order value, which is necessary for maintaining a healthy profit margin for your brand.
Depending on your business, you can develop this idea with a mystery bundle including some of your best-selling items, offered at a generous discount for those willing to purchase everything. This has the additional advantage of helping you deal with your underperforming inventory.
To make the offer more appealing, you can put some of the products in the bundle as a “mystery” and slowly showcase them on each day of the sale. By showing the products one at a time, you can attract a different group of your audience each day and grow consistent traffic and revenue during your entire sale period.
Here’s an easy hack - ensure your holiday marketing campaigns take your shoppers to your e-commerce store’s site. This way, people who are interested in your brand will be prompted to sign up for your email list.
Additionally, you can discover linking your sales emails to landing pages tailored for a specific holiday. If your buyers want to get a discount, newsletter, or premium membership, landing pages are awesome funnels.
You can design your landing pages and create their copies to fit the events. Remind your shoppers they came to your landing page because it’s BFCM, not because you asked them to. That means you can sell yourself without selling yourself for higher-order values.
Social media is a marketing channel that can work overtime throughout the holiday season. Customers spend time browsing their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter feeds, and you want them to pay attention to your products.
Uploading organic posts about the newest trends, new merchandise, and limited-time discounts can help update your current customer base with everything relevant to your brand. Facebook ads are robust enough to increase your appeal to a general audience or particular interest segments.
Holiday e-commerce marketing means more than just an email with a “Happy Holidays” sticker. It’s vital to combine your target holiday’s theme with your email design while still obeying your branding guidelines. Here’s an email example from Starbucks:
Red is a typical color for Christmas-themed marketing. Besides, red is as appealing as it is efficient in regard to psychology. This color also motivates feelings of excitement and stimulates your customers to finish their checkout process.
Having specific deals in certain hours will work best for high traffic stores. Offering special deals will keep your customers stay and curious then come back your site more frequently to get your offers.
There are many versions of this marketing ideas, it all depends on your creativity. However, remember that you should keep your mystery offers more valuable than usual; for example, you can offer an extra discount of 30% from midnight to 6am as this period seems to experience the lowest traffic in your online store.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that keeping in touch with your customers and have them engage in this campaign will be the key factor. Hence, notice your customers frequently and continuously about what are happening in your online store is a must. Things which can be done include: creating a banner on your homepage and popular pages, sending email reminders, promoting hourly deals on social media (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google ads..)
As Christmas is coming in 1 month after BFCM, most of people will shop to find cool presents to gift. Thus, creating a gift guide will allow your customers (and those who buy gifts for your customers) to find you. As you can see below, about 16.5 million results for gifts for boyfriends this Christmas are found on Google. This shows that the demand of gifting and gift ideas is vast.
And imagine that your blog posts or collections can be found easily on search engines, earning big money this holiday shopping season is no longer big deal.
Along with releasing blog posts or collections about gift ideas, optimizing them for SEO is really important. Also, you can send emails to your subscribers and present those gift guide on your site to attract more customers.
Who doesn’t love free stuff? Human needs and demands are unlimited; furthermore, gifting is kind of tradition over this year-end season. Let’s offer your customers free gifts in their checkout to encourage them to buy more.
Remember that gifts should either come useful with your customers’ purchased products or help promote the items for your online store. For instance, shampoo samples with the similar scent will be the best gift for shoppers who purchase perfume
Retain customers and boost sales easily by offering free gifts
Check it out!It is said that longer shopping time is one of most effective methods used to boost sales for any enterprises. Why can sales time dramatically affects your business?
Black Friday is considered to be the best time in the year for any enterprise to increase revenues. Therefore, many businesses, especially online merchants take advantage of this chance to clear all their inventory.
It is reasonable to extend sales day after Black Friday to encourage customers to purchase more. Especially, when people receive gift cards or money as a gift in Friday, they have more tendency to use the money or vouchers to redeem for wishing items.
Once you decide to prolong the shopping season over Saturday and Sunday, you should remember to plan an appropriate discount strategy. For example, gifting can be used on Saturday, and the discount price can be applied on Sunday.
The development of advanced technology enables people to purchase goods more easily and conveniently. Therefore, beside trying to stay active on social networking sites, you also need to pay attention to attach hashtags in your post.
With the functions to help web browsers easily identify what kinds of stores are selling the products they want to buy. Therefore, beside some normal hashtags as usual, during shopping season try to include hashtags like #blackfriday, #blackfriday2018, and so on. By using these hashtags, customers who are craving to look for some gifts on the occasion of Black Friday only can reach your store without any difficulty.
Gift vouchers have been increasingly popular in the job market. Because buying a gift certificate is beneficial to both sender and recipient, card offer seems to be much more favourable by many people.
Especially, when buyers do not know what gift to present to their beloveds, a gift certificate is the best option. Therefore, you should equip your store with an extension such as Mageplaza Gift Card extension which allows users to generate gift vouchers.
If you still do not know much about how a Gift Card extension functions and how greatly it contributes to the success of your store, visit the webpage Magento 2 Gift Card extension to find more detailed information.
The first impression of a shopper about your brand might be the holiday shopping season, so you need to leave a positive one by interacting with them at every open chance. Leveraging automated transactional emails is a significant part of this strategy. These targeted messages can be generated on certain occasions and reinforce the rapport between you and your buyers.
What is the hot topic on the Internet? We all know the still at-large COVID-19 pandemic, so what does this mean for online customer behaviors?
To make use of this, you can promote products and services that help encourage the stay-at-home lifestyle. A good idea (particularly for beauty brands) is producing DIY content for your audience who cannot go out to get their hair styled, nails, or makeup done. Moreover, you can re-angle this as you stimulate your shoppers to do their holiday shopping in your store.
Along with your sales emails, you can add user-generated content such as tutorials on how your buyers can utilize your products.
Your emails only take effect when your subscribers actually read them. Setting your send times can decide whether it’s a sale or a buried and forgotten email.
Especially in the next BFCM season, there will be a large number of holiday marketing emails your target audience might be getting from other e-commerce sites. You will need to step up your email sending game, so you can stand out from the crowd.
Learn more about timing your emails: What is The Best Time to Send Marketing Emails?
Teaming influencers to endorse your product can be an efficient strategy for spreading brand awareness and trust. If executed correctly, influencer marketing can boost sales directly, especially during seasonal campaigns.
To make your influencer promotion successful, it’s crucial to understand how your product connects with its audience beforehand. Consider influencers you’ve worked well with before and select the best-performing ones to promote your sales.
Countdown timers instill urgency, which is ideal for time-sensitive events such as a Black Friday sale. This urgency can prompt impulse buying and push undecided shoppers to complete their purchase. For example, Hint, a flavored water retailer, incorporated a countdown timer into its promotion for Cyber Monday. This effectively communicated to customers: Act now to seize the discounts we’re offering, or risk missing out.
Learn more:
To analyze if your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns are doing well, you need more than just sales figures. You need to figure out what’s going right and what’s not, so you can plan better for the future.
Here are our recommendations for you:
Establish Clear KPIs: Before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, decide what success means. Is it about how much you sell, gaining new customers, or getting old ones to buy again? For instance, aim to increase new customer sign-ups by 20% compared to last year.
Harness the Power of Analytics Tools: Tools like Google Analytics or Friendbuy’s referral tracking are your best friends during this period. They allow you to monitor your KPIs in real time, providing insights into visitor behavior, engagement, and conversion rates. For example, you can use them to track the bounce rate on your landing pages and make necessary improvements.
Monitor Email Campaign Performance: Track the number of people who open your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails, click on links, and make a purchase. For example, if one email subject line gets way more people to open it, consider using similar wording in the future.
Assess Social Media Engagement: Look at how many likes, shares, and comments your Black Friday and Cyber Monday posts get, and especially pay attention to how many people click through to your website from those posts. For example, if a post on Instagram showcasing a product gets a lot of interaction, think about promoting it more.
Listen to Your Customers: After the sales rush, take the time to ask your customers how they discovered your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Their feedback is a goldmine of information that can help you identify the most effective marketing channels. For instance, if many customers mention seeing a post from a specific influencer, it’s a clear sign to consider collaborating with them again in the future.
Calculate Return on Investment (ROI): Compare the amount you spent on marketing to the amount you made to see if it was worth it. For instance, if you paid $1,000 on ads and made $5,000 in sales from those ads, your ROI is 400%.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Nike presents discounted prices on sports clothing, shoes, and accessories, available both online and at Nike stores. They provide exclusive offers to Nike members, along with free shipping deals and time-limited discounts on specific items, attracting both sports enthusiasts and fashion-conscious customers.
Walmart is known for its competitive BFCM sales, with discounts on electronics, toys, home goods, and more. They offer doorbusters, online-only deals, and price rollbacks, catering to both in-store and online shoppers.
Best Buy’s BFCM sales focus on electronics, appliances, and gadgets, with discounts on popular brands and products. They offer doorbusters, bundle deals, and exclusive promotions for My Best Buy members, creating excitement among tech enthusiasts.
Bed Threads provides various Black Friday offers tailored to its best-selling categories. The email also features a countdown timer, although it has already elapsed, aimed at instilling a sense of urgency during the shopping rush.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon consistently provides a wide selection of discounted products spanning different categories. They showcase time-limited Lightning Deals, exclusive discounts for Prime members, and special promotions on popular items, drawing in millions of shoppers globally.
Here are some examples of attractive and successful BFCM emails from famous brands all over the world:
Apple
Petplan
In conclusion, there are many ways that you can apply to your store. Depending on what kinds of goods you are selling, you will find appropriate strategies for your system.
When the development of advanced technology is much more available, you also need to invest more about online marketing to support for your online merchant. To find more information about some helpful extensions, you can visit Mageplaza to experience various amazing Magento 2 modules.
Looking for more Marketing Solutions for Magento 2 stores? Take it here!
A data-driven marketing leader with over 10 years of experience in the ecommerce industry. Summer leverages her deep understanding of customer behavior and market trends to develop strategic marketing campaigns that drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, and ultimately, sales growth for our company.
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