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Discover How to Make Your Cyber Monday Marketing Strategies More Impactful
It’s that time of the year again – the holiday season. The last two months of the year is a time that we all dread and fiercely love simultaneously. As we cross over into November from Halloween, we start to prepare ourselves for the upcoming holidays, and the subsequent shopping seasons they bring.
First, we are all exposed to thanksgiving promotions, after which come the Black Friday deals, which is immediately followed by Cyber Monday marketing campaigns, and finally, Christmas sales. Incidentally, of these four events, the first three occur within the span of a just five days. That means that to ensure that each of these events is campaigned for successfully, a smart marketer needs to come up with some great strategies.
So what are these strategic ideas that you too can use to boost your sales during the holiday season? And how would an expert marketer or professional branding services provider approach this project? Would they combine the campaign for these three events to build upon each other? Or would they tackle them each distinctly?
Let’s discover the answer to these questions, as well as look at some great marketing ideas for Cyber Monday to include in our strategies.
What is Cyber Monday?
Most of us have heard about Black Friday, with it being the largest shopping event during the year. However, very few know about Cyber Monday.
As we know, Black Friday occurs on the Friday after Thanksgiving Thursday. Well, the subsequent Monday is known as Cyber Monday. It is a massive eCommerce sales event, which is often considered a continuation of the Black Friday sales events.
In recent years, it has become highly popular, as many people are too overwhelmed on Black Friday to shop properly. Cyber Monday allows them a weekend between thanksgiving and the shopping event, which helps boost sales.
Many businesses understand this consumer need, and often continue their Black Friday sales through the weekend, segueing smoothly into Cyber Monday, resulting in a four-day sales event. This allows the brand to space out its consumer load, ensuring they are able to maintain the quality of their services. Moreover, it fosters a sense of loyalty and closeness to the brand, as consumers feel their needs are better met by that business compared to its competitors with distinct sales events.
This makes for the implementation of more effective holiday marketing ideas, as brands can connect consecutive marketing events into a successful chain, rather than implementing each individually.
Key Trends to Know for Your Cyber Monday Marketing Strategies in 2023
Your marketing strategies are entirely dependent on current market trends. That is because consumer behaviors and practices are what drive business demand. And unless your business knows them, they won’t be able to create a strategy that effectively capitalizes on them.
For the last few years, especially in the last year or so, countries around the worlds have seen record-high inflation. This means that this holiday season, the customer pool will be far smaller to choose from, which will result in high competition.
So, what will be some key consumer trends that we need to cater to in our BFCM and Thanksgiving marketing ideas? Especially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Let’s take a look.
- According to KPMG, 55% of consumers have reduced discretionary spending in favor of budgeted spending. That means that consumers will be expecting significant reduction in prices on these holiday sales. Therefore, businesses need to plan their strategy accordingly.
- According to Adobe’s data, 2022 saw the discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday reaching an all-time high of 25%. That means that this year, consumers will be expecting higher, or the same levels of saving at the very least.
- Moreover, Adobe also discovered that businesses received 85% more “Buy Now Pay Later” orders in 2022 compared to the years previously. Therefore, you should look towards featuring these service providers into your holiday marketing plans, as it would allow more people to buy your items during the holiday sales.
- Previously, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were predominantly American events, as the rest of the world didn’t really have them. However, due to the rise of online marketplaces, as well as global consumer bases, Cyber Monday is now being celebrated across different countries in the world. That means that your marketing strategy should also include regional campaigns to target specific consumers in various geographical regions.
Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Holiday Sales
Now that you have seen how lucrative of an event Cyber Monday can be, you might be wondering how to help your business capitalize on it? Well, as you can see from the stats above, there are a few obvious ideas that you need to incorporate into your Cyber Monday marketing strategy.
However, many other brands will be doing the same. So how will you make your brand and its marketing stand out?
Let’s dive in and look at various Cyber Monday marketing ideas to see what can we do to ensure that our marketing strategy is a success for the holidays.
Create a Detailed Plan as Early as Possible
Businesses often end up developing some amazing holiday marketing strategies that are destined to make an impact. However, they fail because they did not factor in a crucial element – time. It takes time for a marketing campaign to achieve critical distribution. And as we get nearer to the holiday event in question, the sheer amount of promotional material around consumers limits the amount of new marketing information they retain.
That is why businesses who manage to start their Cyber Monday marketing early, often end up with a bigger share of the consumer market. The trick here is to ensure that your campaigns are released before your competitors, but not too early as to lose all its impact due to its irrelevancy at the time.
And in order to do that, you need to ensure that your marketing plans and strategies are done at least a month or so before the event. Ideally, you should have your strategy ready by September, so that you can start laying the groundwork for it come November. That way, all you will need to, if needed, is tweak it slightly to account for change.
Harness the Converting Power of Email Campaigns
Many people believe that email marketing is now obsolete, due to the popularity of social media nowadays. However, the BFCM data tells us otherwise. Holiday emailers are a great way for businesses to keep in personal touch with their consumers, both new and old. It allows you to establish a deeper, more meaningful connection with them, thus engendering a feeling of loyalty.
You can even include exclusive discount codes or pre-sale promotions, as a way to honor their loyalty, especially if the items are in high demand yet with low stocks that season. However, your body of the email isn’t the only thing that you need to think about. While its true that the design and content of the email body is critical to the success of your campaign, you also need to address elements like email subject and call-to-action button.
The reason we need to make the subject line catchy is that your brand won’t be the only one sending emails to a consumer. With events like BFCM, many brands utilize holiday email marketing. Therefore, you need to ensure that your title is catchy and has a hook that makes the consumer open you email to satisfy their curiosity.
Develop a Landing Page for That Holiday
Whether it’s Halloween or Christmas marketing ideas, one element is common to all – having a custom landing page in order to consolidate the traffic being diverted to your website. That traffic may be coming in from different campaigns, whether its social media, email marketing, direct marketing, and even direct web traffic.
The landing page allows you to optimize the first impact of your website on the visitors, ensuring the continuation of a consumer’s holiday marketing journey. Let’s say they clicked on a link or a social media post promoting your Christmas sale. The first thing they would want to see is a Christmas-themed page that has more details about that sale.
Now if they arrive on your homepage itself, it would not have the same impact in this instance, as the reality would be different from what the consumer assumed. Moreover, as the holiday would see unprecedented traffic on your website, no consumer would have the patience to go through the entire catalogue looking for your on-sale items. A dedicated landing page, however, would limit the frustration and the distractions, thus ensuring your campaign’s success.
Add and Promote Multiple “Buy Now Pay Later” Methods
Holiday seasons bring with them an unprecedented amount of spending, and not just for gifts. There are often many big purchases, for which many people wait until the holiday sales. The aim to save as much as possible, on an already expensive but necessary purchase.
Now, let’s say that the purchase is too large to pay off in one instance. The consumers can use credit cards, slowly paying off the balance each month. However, that would result in a sizable interest that the consumer would have to pay alongside the actual bill, which would defeat the purpose of waiting for the sale.
Another option is platforms offering BNPL, or “Buy Now Pay Later”. These sites allow people to buy items on installments, at no interest. Considering the high global inflation, it would be a great idea to partner with a number of these platforms, and promote this option to your consumers. Not only would it increase your sales for that event, but will also open up a new demographic for your business.
Create Bundles for Better Consumer Value and Increased Business Revenue
While bundles may not perform as well during the regular season, holidays see consumers opting for bundles instead of individual items, as way to save time and more money. Think about it. Let’s say that a winter coat costs $120 and the matching pair of gloves cost $40, both after a 20% discount. If the consumer buys them both individually, they would have to spend $160, after spending some time and effort looking for the matching item.
However, if you were to bundle these two items together, and price it at $140, what do you think would be the response? The data shows that the average order value would increase, as people who were thinking of buying the winter coat on its own would be happy to spend a little more to get the gloves bundled. Incidentally, this technique is one of the best Halloween marketing ideas as well.
Nintendo put this Cyber Monday marketing idea into play in 2022. The company a Nintendo Switch bundle deal for its consumers, by offering the console, a carrying case, 2 games, and three months of internet service. Many consumers were ecstatic to avail this deal, considering that the original price was $370.
Create Distribute Gift Guides
Massive sales events like BFCM often have businesses offering deals on a large catalogues of items. While this may not be a problem for consumers who visit small businesses, with a limited variety of items. However, for businesses with large catalogues, it can get confusing for consumers quite quickly.
Therefore, it’s a great Cyber Monday marketing idea to create gift guides for your consumers. Considering that by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, most people are looking for presents and gifts, it is going to be a hit with consumers, especially those who are less tech-savvy.
What you can do is create lists of items that would be great idea as gifts, and either mail it to your consumers, or display it prominently on your landing page. Moreover, you can also add this feature as a filter on your eCommerce website, where people can look for highly popular gift items within certain price ranges.
Go Old School for Direct Marketing via SMS
With social media becoming more popular as a marketing medium in recent years, marketers have started ignoring tried-and-true techniques of the years past, such as email marketing. One of these old-school techniques is direct marketing via SMS.
This is a great way to stand out, as well as to persuade consumers to take action. This form of one-on-one marketing is a great strategy to drive conversions, as consumers would be more likely to remember your brand for it.
While most brands now prefer social media as it is cheaper and more graphically captivating, there is still something to say for the persuasive power of text messages.
Ensure Dedicated Customer Service Personnel Are Available Throughout the Sales Event
No matter how well planned your BFCM strategy; issues will hamper it the day of the sale. The more successful your Cyber Monday marketing, the more traffic your website is going to receive. And the greater the number of consumers visiting your website, the higher the chance that issues like slow loading and website crashes will occur.
Moreover, there may be issues with shipping and order placements, as the amount of orders being placed increases. In that case, people will look for help, usually in the form of your company’s customer support. These problems have a tendency to occur with more frequency as we get nearer to the holiday in question, which is why this is one of the popular New Year marketing ideas.
You need to make sure that your website’s customer support team is ready and prepared to deal with these issues. You may need to arrange shifts and play around with business hours accordingly, and inform your customers about these changes via social media, emails, and even website banners.
Black Friday x Cyber Monday – Connecting Two Events into Sales Galore
Considering that Thanksgiving weekend consists of thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, its often counterproductive to market all three events individually. Rather, brands find that by extending their promotions and sales from Black Friday all the way to the Cyber Monday week, they are able to serve a larger set of consumers.
That is often because while Black Friday is the most well-known sales event of the year, the advent of Christmas draws in a lot of consumers towards Cyber Monday. Therefore, as a brand, its better to connect the two events into a BFCM event.
Conclusion
To sum it up, its important to properly plan out your Cyber Monday marketing strategy. Often, businesses who haven’t planned it well overlap it with their Black Friday marketing strategies, which results in the failure of both events.
So if you have planned to promote your Cyber Monday marketing strategies individually, then you need to consider the various ideas and strategies described above. It will help you get a leg up on your competition, and help you establish a distinct identity.
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