7 steps to help you increase online sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday

7 steps to help you increase online sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday

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1. Improve your checkout process and thank you page. Your checkout is the final piece of the puzzle. Your thank you page is your opportunity to get more out of customers. Unlike emails, it has 100% open rate. ReConvert is a Shopify app that allows you to: display pop-ups with time sensitive offers, which is great to create urgency in your customers, capture customers birthdays, enable customers to reorder with an incentive, enable customers to share their order on social media, and more. All this tools will increase sales and drive revenue. 
2. Create abandoned cart emails and email marketing campaigns. There are different types of email marketing campaigns you should consider. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2017, emails had the highest conversion rate surpassing search, direct and social, so this is a great tool you can't overlook. Our advice is to start your email marketing campaigns 2 to even 4 weeks in advance in order to create expectation among your future customers. Also, make sure to create reminder emails one day before this dates and during the main event. Make sure you also create a follow up campaign, inviting people to revisit your store. Finally, not everyone who adds a product to their cart completes the checkout. Shopify includes abandoned cart recovery as standard. We recommend you connect Mailchimp to your store in order to improve your email marketing campaigns; it is a great tool to scale your communications. 
3. Spread the word. Use social media to drive traffic to your store. It is not enough to create ads, but you also have to make sure those ads are seen by the right audience. Make sure you post those ads a few days or weeks in a advance. Also, consider that last year mobile shopping took over desktop, so you might want to focus your ads on mobile. Using social media will also allow you to keep an eye on your competition and if you keep your customers  engaged by being active all-year round and retargeting, those seasonal customers could turn into loyal all-year round customers. As we said before, retargeting past visitors will increase your chances of selling. Retargeting is a paid ads strategy and it will show your ads to people who have visited your website before. Consider this strategy when setting up your ads. 
4. Apply discounts, upsells, cross-sells and consider free shipping. Once visitors are in your store, you should consider an incentive in order to increase sales or improve the chances of them buying. Shopify allows you to create shareable discount links that will take customers directly to your homepage, and the discount will be automatically applied to the right products at checkout. Product Discount   is a Shopify app that will allow you to set discounts to your products, collections or your entire store; you can also create Daily Deals and Flash Sales and create a special collection for Black Friday Sale. Another strategy you can use is offer an Upsell as well as cross-sell products.  With this app you can make more on every sale by offering upsell & cross-sell products. This upsell products can be offered on a product page, cart page and after checkout.
5. Add a countdown banner and pop-ups.  Countdown timers on your homepage until Black Friday are a great way to create expectation. There are a lot of apps that can help you create your own countdown and place it on your home page. Another way you can use a countdown timer is on specific product pages to create urgency and make people know they have limited time to buy the product they want until sale ends. Another way to increase your sales and margin profits is to put pop-ups in your store. Pop-ups are used in a lot of webpages because they are extremely effective. Just make sure any pop-ups you add to your website are as unobtrusive and relevant as possible. You can use Privy to set up pop-ups that will help you grow your email list and increase your sales. 
6. Optimize products and images.  During this dates you are competing with hundreds of other stores. Imagine someone wants to buy from you but they can't because your store is too slow and it takes a lot of time to load. Of course big images look good in your homepage, but they can make your page really slow. If you don't optimize your images and compress them, then you will be losing sales. Shopify has its own tool to help store owners resize and optimize images. You should also optimize product descriptions to make clear to your customers what they will buy and make the shopping process as easy as possible. 
7. Have a quick response time. It is important that you provide an excellent response time in order to stand out from your competition. This means being available for your visitors during this dates and answering their questions as soon as possible. This will make a big difference and influence who they will buy from. Crisp is an excellent tool that will allow you to chat with your visitors. 
   
   

Be prepared for this important shopping days and make sure you have a strategy to stand out from the other online stores.