The best part of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (besides the sales) is the strategy.
It’s not every 50% off deal or aggressively advertised gift-with-purchase that gets consumer attention at this time of year. Retail holidays mean you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd.
Now that the BFCM chaos is over, here are some of the top tactics we saw this year and, together with Loyalty Lion, we’ll also be sharing some inspiration for keeping up the Q4 momentum in 2018.
Gift With Gamification
Chubbies went the gift-with-purchase route, but they added a layer of excitement by changing the gift each hour.
Their homepage featured a huge banner presenting the offer and featured gift, along with a timer ticking down to the end of the hour.
The timer added an element of pressure to purchase quickly, for shoppers who loved the gift of the hour. At the same time, the constantly changing gifts created a suspenseful game, where customers had to gamble on whether to wait for the next gift or go with the current one.
Another good move was making the barrier to the free gift reasonable. The average pair of Chubbies shorts costs about $44.50, so the $75 minimum meant that shoppers had to purchase only two pairs to qualify.
Cart Abandonment and Convenience
Entertaining your shoppers is one way to stand out, but anticipating their needs and making their lives easier can also shorten the path to purchase.
On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your shoppers are treating your checkout page as their personal wishlist. The result of willy nilly cart-filling is often cart abandonment, and emails and retargeting ads are no longer enough to get those shoppers to seal the deal.
Shopify Plus Content Marketer and eCommerce expert Aaron Orendorff just posted about an experiment he did this year to find the strongest cart abandonment strategies out there.
After filling out 20 carts, Pura Vida Bracelets took the cake for him. As soon as he jumped ship from the checkout page, he got a Facebook message reminding him of the site-wide 50% off markdown (no need for coupons or discount codes), and a second clickable message with the items he left behind.
As Aaron explained, the experience hit all the most important marks:
Brilliant Email Marketing
No matter how much eCommerce has changed, with messenger bots, targeted product recommendations, and more — email marketing is still the bread and butter of online stores.
The challenge when everyone is doing it, is to do it better.
My inbox was inundated from just before Black Friday until the following Wednesday, but there were only two emails that really caught my eye.
Urban Outfitters made me do a double-take, not because of the deal, but because of their clever copy:
Not only does the “RE:” get your attention by seeming like a reply from an existing conversation, talking about a discount as money owed also reframes the entire promotion. You’re not spending money, you’re earning back money owed (at least that’s what I told myself after seeing this).
Another standout subject line was from Anthropologie:
This subject line made me laugh, and that made me want to click. I also forwarded it to my boss. Getting shoppers to forward your promo emails is like free viral advertising. It’s worth the extra effort to create a great email, especially when most stores are sending boring ones and relying on the tempting deal for clicks.
At this time of year, even a 50% off offer can go unnoticed if it doesn’t come with great copy or trendy, interesting visuals.
How to Keep Up the Black Friday Momentum
With all the craziness of BFCM, it can be hard to maintain that peak into the next year. So, in addition to these inspirational tactics, you need the tools to turn your retail holiday shoppers into return customers.
We teamed up with Loyalty Lion to bring you exactly that: Your Black Friday-Cyber Monday Hangover Cure. Flip through this brand new eBook for five key strategies to start 2018 strong.