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Tip 1: Make sure your sale is easy to discover
By Syra Vlaanderen (Head of Marketing at Code)
Let's start with the most obvious tip: There is little point in investing time in a BFCM campaign if your customers can’t find your deal(s). In the run-up to Black Friday, add a countdown timer to your site to promote your promotion and gather subscribers so you can email them your deals when the big day arrives.
Think carefully about where you can highlight your promotion on your site During Black Friday / Cyber Monday. Add a banner to your homepage and consider adding banners to other (collection/product) pages as well as to your menu, navigation bar and search dropdown.
Tip 2: Start early with your campaign
By Simon Iseringhausen (Customer Success Manager at Code)
Some customers will have their salary by 22 November, and you don't want them to spend it elsewhere. To prevent this, it's crucial to start your BFCM campaign early. Our client Valk at Home set up an email flow with a timer for early BF access. This allowed pre-registered customers to shop as early as Thursday, a day before the official start of Black Friday.
You can also use sales and stock volume counters on your products. When the stock is low, the customers receive a notification by email/SMS/WhatsApp; this increases the urgency to use the special offer while it lasts.
Tip 3: Use Email Marketing segments
By Midge Hazewinkel (Head of Klaviyo at Code)
The key to BFCM success is understanding your audience and delivering them the right message. That’s why segmentation and personalization in your Email flows are so important. Midge shares his tips to do just that.
Consider addressing different personas in your BFCM flows and campaigns:
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Deal Hunters: These shoppers aren't particularly loyal and may not be concerned with high quality. Use short, urgent messages to grab their attention, highlighting the deals on offer.
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Last-Minute Shoppers: These infrequent customers might have shopped with you previously during BFCM and are concerned about delivery times. Emphasize shipping estimates to prevent cart abandonment. Add countdown timers or reminders for the last shipping days.
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VIP Shoppers: Loyal, frequent buyers who are big spenders and need no extra incentive. Offer them early access to sales or include personal touches like handwritten thank-you cards or surprise gifts.
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Window shoppers: These shoppers are considering your brand, often as a gift. They're new to your brand and are looking for information, weighing the pros and cons. Engage them with user-generated content (UGC) and informative material. Target recent browsers through Google and Facebook ads.
How do you segment those personas, you may ask? Defining what different personas look like for your brand is not a one-size-fits-all. However, we're happy to give you two examples in the images below (using Klaviyo as the ESP).
The segment filters (amount of actions, revenue, etc.) depend on your brand. Of course, persona definitions look different for a coffee brand compared to a bike brand. If you need help segmenting, contact us.
Note: Make sure to exclude segments from each other while sending out a campaign.
More tips to enhance your BFCM email campaigns:
- Reduce time delays in abandonment flows (cart, checkout, browse abandonment) to 30 minutes.
- Retarget openers or clickers (exclude buyers) in the last 72 hours. Resend campaigns with different subject lines or preview texts to this segment.
- Make use of countdown timers in banners or attention bars to create a sense of urgency.
- Use a holiday template, highlighting promotions, seasonal banners, countdown timers, more urgency, and highlighting USPs. You can use these in high-engagement flows like Added to cart, Abandoned checkout, Welcome Series, and Browse Abandonment.
Tip 4: Implement Gifting
By Coen Fredriks (E-Commerce Strategist at Code)
Many people use BFCM to stock up on gifts for the holiday season. Help them find great gifts! Here are some thoughtful gifting tips:
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Product recommendation quiz: Make finding the perfect gift easy for your clients by setting up a product recommendation quiz in Product Recommendation Quiz or Octane. Need inspiration? Check out the quizzes we realized for Fascino Coffee and Olcay Gulsen.
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Gift collection page: Create a dedicated gift collection page like BOSKA, simplifying the gift-finding journey for your customers. It's a thoughtful touch that can spark additional purchases.
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Gift wrapping and personal cards: Many gift shoppers prefer to directly send their gift to the receiver or outsource gift wrapping. Add gift wrapping and a personal card service to your checkout to win from your competition.
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Giftnote: Giftnote allows Shopify stores to enable an automated and paperless gift messaging and gift voucher experience that drives new revenue through gifting. Currently, they offer it for free to Code clients until the end of BFCM. After that, they can extend a 20% discount on Giftnote for our clients. Send an email to sales@code.nl if you’d like to try Giftnote.
Tip 5: Increase AOV by implementing Upsell, Cross-sell and Bundles
By Bob Rockland (Co-founder at Code)
Maximizing Average Order Value (AOV) during BFCM is a smart strategy. One of our favorite ways to do this is by offering bundles and other upsell and cross-sell features.
Rebuy’s Up & Cross-sell solution is used by successful brands like namuk, DOUXE & McGregor New York to create bundles and give consumers smart recommendations. Calculate your ROI with Rebuy Engine to see if it’s worth the investment for your brand.
Also, discover their own 10 tips, tricks & strategies for a successful holiday season from the Rebuy BFCM Playbook.
Looking to start using Rebuy? Contact us, and we'll get you 25% off your first 2 monthly bills.
Tip 6: Engage with your customers to gather reviews
By Mark Oosterom (Customer Success Manager at Code)
Reviews are like the glue that cements enduring relationships with your customers. They signal that you genuinely care about what they have to say. Imagine, after the whirlwind of BFCM, you send out review requests in your welcome emails to new customers. It's a subtle yet powerful way to tell the world that your brand takes its customers seriously.
Just think about the influx of shoppers during BFCM. Since 75% of consumers lean on reviews to steer their buying decisions, collecting reviews presents an opportunity too good to pass up.
Tip 7: Drop notifications at wishlists and low stock
By Noah de Bont (Support Engineer at Code)
In a previous blog, we talked about the benefits of having a wishlist. When BF arrives, use price drop notifications (via email or SMS) for items on wishlists. This can be a great way to push sales of slow movers.
While some may not be interested in general newsletters, opting for price drop notifications offers a much lower entry barrier. Offer bundle deals at special prices on BF to keep the AOV level despite discounted pricing. Bargain hunters will love it.
Tip 8: Gather valuable data
Tip 9: Focus on optimization
By Robin Huizing (Customer Success Manager at Code)
During BFCM, acquisition costs are skyrocketing and competition is fiercer than ever. My advice is to stay cool, and focus on optimization. This sounds boring but especially during BFCM, every 0.1% extra conversion counts.
It pays off to perform an audit (well in time, so you can still take action) by going through your complete customer journey and analyzing every step. Look at how many people go from your home page or landing page to a category page. How many people click on one of the products and go to the product detail page, and especially important, how many people click the add to cart button and eventually buy your product. Your check-out page is obviously hugely important. It might surprise you how many people drop off and don’t buy your product because they’re missing certain trust elements or are confused by your navigation or product descriptions.
Looking at your own store objectively and critically is very hard so we gladly help out. Since we’ve built hundreds of stores in many different niches and helped some of the biggest brands grow even bigger, we have a unique perspective and can quickly spot opportunities to improve. Feel free to reach out to us.
Tip 10: Prepare a post-BFCM campaign
By Aina Lobera (Klaviyo Specialist at Code)
Your Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) campaign should not stop in November. Encourage your customers to share reviews and User-Generated Content (UGC), like photos or videos of their new products, in return for a discount or free shipment.
UGC is a proven way to attract new shoppers to your store and increase conversion. The execution is easy: send out your request via email and broadcast it across your social media channels. Reviews.io is a powerful Shopify app that combines reviews and UGC.
53% of consumers wouldn't make a purchase without reading reviews. Plus, 54% of shoppers turn to social media for product research, so a post-BFCM campaign supercharged with UGC is your ticket to soaring sales.
Good luck!
The choice to partake in Black Friday & Cyber Monday is yours, and the road to success begins with your vision and strategy. It's not just about offers and discounts; it's about building relationships, creating value, and propelling your brand to new heights.
Instead of discounting products, you can also consider incentivizing customers through other activities, like donating to good causes that connect with your brand. Some of these tips are also very valuable and useful outside of the holiday season.
If you find yourself in need of some help with any of these tips, don't hesitate to reach out.
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