Black Friday and Cyber Monday isn’t a sales event reserved for the big-box retailers. Everyone gets a shot at the massive pile of money spent in online stores during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which rose to over $5 billion last year. Amazon will get its share, and so will Wal-Mart and Target. But there’s still plenty of money left over for you and your eCommerce store to capitalize on. So why not set a goal to make this Black Friday your best yet? Why not try and absolutely shatter your sales records from a year ago? With these 4 tips you can do just that.
Create scarcity
This has been the huge economic driver of in-store sales, which now plays into online retail sales. It’s one of the most effective ways to generate quick sales at high margins, and it works year in and year out during Black Friday. At its simplest definition, scarcity simply means that you leverage the threat of a shortage to sell more now. What you have to figure out is the type of shortage that’ll resonate best with your shoppers. Examples of scarcity include:- Time: The best example of this is Prime Day when Amazon has thousands of products on sale — for a limited time only. The sale lasts all day, but that laptop you’ve had your eye on won’t. Its sale window might be 30 minutes or 3 hours. But the amount of time doesn’t matter as much as the fact that, by leveraging a shopper’s time, you’re essentially telling them, “If you leave this site and forget to come back, you’re not getting this product.” By creating a time scarcity you set off a sense of urgency in a shopper’s mind.
Tip: Utilize a countdown clock to give customers that visual cue that the product and discount won’t be around forever.- Quantity: Maybe you want to give a limited number of items away at the discounted price. Many stores do this with “be one of the first 100 people to get X product.” You can do it as well with your online store. Nintendo’s Classic NES and SNES consoles are excellent recent examples of quantity scarcity. Demand outpaced supply so much for the Classic NES that the $80 console was available for resale on eBay for up to $300. The Classic SNES faced similar quantity issues in its rollout, and a lot of folks think Nintendo creates this scarcity on purpose. Whether or not the company does, their sales tactic is working. The SNES Classic is currently sold-out everywhere.
- Delivery: Some stores use this method, and it works if you have the resources for it. Essentially, you establish a cut-off time during your day when a certain premium delivery option is no longer available. Whether it’s free shipping, next-day delivery, or flat-rate shipping, you can leverage the delivery of a product to sell more in a short amount of time.
- Price and Quantity: Price scarcity doesn’t work effectively unless you can pair it with a good reason to buy. Quantity scarcity is that good reason. If you tell shoppers that you only have 50 TVs left at 60% off, they’ll literally run to be the first in line with their discounted TV. While customers don’t have to run when shopping your online store, advertising the fact that you only have a certain number of products left at your sale price creates the same sense of urgency that time scarcity does.
Create killer product pages
Regardless of how your customers get to a product page, this is the place where shoppers convert to customers. If your product pages aren’t optimized to advertise scarcity, quality, price savings, and product features in the easiest, most user-friendly way possible, you’ll lose a lot of sales. Shoppers don’t want to spend their time on clunky pages. Product pages are still the most valuable pages on your site. As Jason Amunwa states, “Your product pages are the moment of truth for your business. Either they convert your visitor into a customer or they don’t.” When viewed from that perspective, how do your product pages measure up? Are you making the customers do the hard work and heavy lifting? The product page should answer their questions and make them want to click the “Add to Cart” button. So how do you create a product page that works that effectively? Try these four easy ways to improve your product pages- Build out trust signals. This means answering the customer’s questions right on the page.
- Include several product images. Use all angles and make sure to include some lifestyle photos for users to recognize size. If you have a video of the product, this is a good spot to include it.
- Integrate live chat. Your product page is the last page that a customer hits before they make a sale. Don’t let them walk away without some way for them to talk to you. You might be able to convince them to make the purchase.
- Offer a money back guarantee. If you can guarantee something, then do it and make it known on the product page.
Highlight reviews
Highlighting product reviews is part of creating a killer product page, but it’s important enough to merit its own section. Today’s customers depend on reviews to tell them what products to buy. Just look at some of these statistics:- 95% of consumers read product reviews
- 86% of shoppers use them to help make purchasing decisions
- 79% of shoppers trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation
- 63% of consumers will buy from a site with reviews versus one without
Remove checkout friction
Checkout friction refers to anything within your checkout process that makes it harder than it needs to be to complete a purchase. For example, mandatory account registration creates friction. 51.8% of customers won’t make it past a registration form if it’s a requirement to purchase something from your store. A complicated checkout process is the third most-common reason for cart abandonment. Your checkout process should require just the basics:- Email address for payment/shipping notifications
- Shipping address
- Payment information
- Delivery options
TJ has worked in the digital marketing space since 2006. He has worked at a number of agencies and and helped hundreds of clients grow their business through SEO, PPC, Social Media and Content Marketing. He currently lives in Lehi , UT and enjoys spending time with his family.
TJ Welsh
TJ has worked in the digital marketing space since 2006. He has worked at a number of agencies and and helped hundreds of clients grow their business through SEO, PPC, Social Media and Content Marketing. He currently lives in Lehi , UT and enjoys spending time with his family.
