6 sure-fire ways to increase sales this Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend

Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also known as BFCM or Cyber Weekend are two of the largest online selling days in the year. 2018 was no exception, with the online spend over five days totalling at US $24.2 billion.

2019 is shaping up to be even bigger with BFCM gaining popularity with businesses and consumers globally. Retailers large and small are fighting for a piece of the online buyer pie. With such intense competition, can your small business increase sales this Cyber Weekend? Implement these 6 tips for Black Friday marketing campaign success and we almost guarantee it!

1. Create hype

As with any holiday/ sale season campaign, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are successful because participating businesses employ powerful psychological triggers such as urgency and scarcity to cause a spike in sales.

One way to maximize the impact of urgency and scarcity is to build anticipation around your sales before the weekend. Create teaser videos, build on the notion of exclusivity, use content to fan curiosity around your products but keep from divulging all the details of the sale until the day it begins.

Creating hype is an effective way to make sure you get off to a great start for Black Friday and is also a powerful marketing tool. If your campaigns are eye-catching and interesting enough, word-of-mouth referrals with increase, with the possibility of even going viral- every business owner’s dream.

2. Collect Pre-orders

If you have the contact details of your previous or existing customers or prospects that have expressed interest in your products before, a clever way to make sales before the weekend even begins is to employ a pre-order strategy. 

A pre-order is when you list an item on your website or in your store that hasn’t been manufactured yet, or that isn’t on sale yet, but will be launched at a certain date or time (Black Friday and Cyber Monday). By allowing pre-orders on a product, customers can pay a deposit or pay the full amount for the product in order to reserve it before it’s available, so they know it won’t sell out and also will receive the product as soon as it launches.

Tools such as TradeGecko’s backorder management functionality can help your business place and track pre-orders with suppliers effectively while having visibility into your available stock across multiple locations. A good pre-order strategy can can help you generate buzz and build momentum before your launch, gage the market demand for your product and, most importantly, lock down early sales to fund production or future marketing campaigns.

3. Optimize for mobile

More than half of all orders over Cyber Weekend came from mobile devices (including tablets), amounting to over $10.1 billion dollars in sales. While orders placed on desktops still had a higher average order value (AOV), this consumer behaviour trend is clear. More and more consumers are shopping on the go. Therefore, ensuring that your eCommerce site is not only optimized to handle surges in orders but also optimized for browsing and checkout on mobile devices will impact your sales.

One tip for make your eCommerce store optimized for mobile sales is to not deviate the users from the main (and easiest to navigate) path, but keep them in the “Thumb Zone.” This refers to the area the most commonly interacted with by the average user on a mobile device that meets the following criteria:

• one-handed use
• right thumb on the screen
• thumb anchored in the lower right-hand corner

4. Devise a discount strategy

Promoting Black Friday deals with a well planned out discount strategy will encourage your buyers to buy more products at a collectively lower price, thus increasing your AOV. One way to do this is to bundle groups of products together at a lower combined price than if they were purchased individually. If a customer selects an individual product, suggest the bundle instead, or offer add ons that they could use with the product that is already in the cart.

You could also offer free gifts for purchases over a certain price or offer a higher discount rate if the cart value exceeds a specified amount. Other discount strategies could be to encourage customers to return to your store to make a second purchase at a discounted price before the Cyber Weekend sale ends.

5. A/B Test marketing campaigns