How to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

If you have an online store, definitely you are already warming up engines for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In a few weeks, the most important dates of the whole Christmas campaign are coming. They will suppose, for most online vendors and retailers, the Top day sales of the season. 

If in previous years, you ran out of time, or if you never know very well where to start planning, this post is for you. Today, we start from the basis and invite you to think, first of all, in the 3 main concepts you will start drawing your BFCM campaign from. 

Basically, you have to define 3 questions:

First, the most important thing is to know what you will promote. 

Are you going to make a global discount or would you prefer to segment by public or groups of products? Is your offer or offers going to be fixed in time? Or are you going to bet on dynamic promotions, changing throughout the campaign, or even short-lived? 

As you can see, getting a successful BFCM campaign may not be as simple as just applying a simple discount and wait for people to come and buy. Keep in mind that today almost everybody considers Black Friday, so the offers and promotions have become sophisticated over time. 

As you can see, your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign can get complicated and sophisticated as far as you want. 

Also, you have to take into account the relationship between both dates: do you want to combine one date with another? Would you prefer to offer different discounts or promotions on each of those dates? 

Keep in mind that, at first, Black Friday is for all retail stores, while Cyber Monday is for online stores only. This can be a good opportunity to create synergies between your physical and your online stores if you have both channels in your distribution strategy. 

Once you have clear what your promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be, you will have to define how you will communicate them to your audience so that the message arrives successfully. 

To do this, you will have to choose the most appropriate media and channels of spreading, taking into account the habits of your audience. But you also have to think about the cadence of your promotions, the pace of development of your campaign over time and until its completion. 

As for the first one, be aware that in the of the BFCM campaigns email marketing works especially well.

The fact of receiving the current offers by email, as well as their corresponding reminders, seems to be the most effective way of communicating promotions to the audience, at least during these dates. 

In addition, you will have to choose from the media that best fit your business. 

Some media to spread your promotions, in addition to email marketing, can be:

If your logistic partners are integrated into the workflow of your online store, the management of BFCM's work peaks -in which there may be a lot of reverse logistics – will be much easier. Preparing and ordering a shipment or pickup will be as simple as pressing a button. 

In Oleoshop you have first-class logistic  partners with very good rates like Shipius and, soon, Deliverea, totally integrated in the tool. 

If, as it is expected, your BFCM campaign represents an increase in sales, you must cover that forecast by buying more stock since the beginning of the season. So, you avoid breaking stock by your suppliers or running out of product in the middle of the campaign. 

To conclude, bear in mind the capacity of your servers to respond to the predictable increase in traffic you will have during the campaign. If you need it, buy already a higher plan to avoid dying of success and that all your marketing effort is useless. 

In Oleoshop we really care about that, and for that reason, you have unlimited hosting that adapts to your traffic needs at every moment of the year. With us, your online store will not go blank at the time of highest traffic and sales, guaranteed! 

Learn more about Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

Images | Fotolia.