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Do you hear that?
It’s the subtle sound of clicking mice and clacking keyboards as people start making their annual shopping lists for this holiday season.
Consumers are coming out of holiday shopping hibernation, which means your store needs to be stocked and loaded for the best season Q4 ever.
The legendary duo of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is arguably the most wonderful time of the year for ecommerce brands and online shoppers alike, and it’s never too early to start strategizing.
A great holiday sales strategy doesn’t necessarily mean ripping down last year’s structure to the studs. Instead, let’s take a look at rehashing some tried and true tactics using new learnings from 2023 and sprinkling in some good ol’ innovation that’ll bubble up your online brand to the top of everyone’s wish list.
Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2023: What the Heck Happened?
The buzz after seemingly every single holiday season is that ecommerce, yet again, broke sales records. Months leading up to the holidays, there’s wild speculation about how much money people are planning to spend during the five days that follow Thanksgiving (lovingly known as Cyber Week or Cyber Five) followed by several more months distilling every detail.
If you’re running an online brand, you’re essentially being blasted with a firehose of unfathomable numbers and dollar amounts every time you open another industry newsletter or scroll through your LinkedIn feed.
We’ll try to spare you from rereading the same stats you’ve been poring over since last December, but there are some interesting tidbits to pull from how the 2023 holiday season went for ecommerce stores.
To kick it off, it turns out that ecommerce growth is still happening year over year. Shopify reported that last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) one-two punch shook out $9.3 billion in sales across Shopify-powered stores alone — an amount that broke 2022’s record year by 24%, or roughly $2 billion. Across all online stores, agnostic of ecommerce platforms, Cyber Week ‘23 saw sales spike nearly 8% with just over 200 million people scrolling, clicking, and shopping online.
Shopify stores also saw new customer revenue rise 14.7% while returning customer revenue went up 16.6% (signaling the importance of priming your past customers now so they return to buy again this year). Seventy-five percent of US adults doled out some dough to shop online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday with significant popularity surrounding buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) checkouts, which saw a usage increase of 42.5%, and shopping from a smartphone.
Heck, even brick-and-mortar retail saw a 1% pop in foot traffic.
Despite the fact that the ecommerce market continues to grow, some brands may find themselves underwhelmed with their own growth. The coronavirus pandemic spurred tremendous new heights in the sector, and if your brand was one that saw massive revenue spikes in 2020 and beyond, you may feel like anything less than 25% year-over-year growth isn’t exciting.
If that’s you, it’s time to realign your expectations. The early years of the pandemic were outliers for most ecommerce brands and the industry at large, and expecting year-round surges of online shopping and growth just isn’t the reality today. (Sorry to be a buzzkill.)
So, while the successes of last year’s holiday shopping season are probably no surprise to anyone who’s peeped an industry headline in the last year, we also learned some more about what not to do if you’re running an online store.
In 2023, not everyone was a satisfied customer.
- 10% of shoppers ended the era feeling sad that a discount code didn't work.
- 17% of online shoppers experienced the unpleasant plight of slowly loading websites.
- Nearly 60% said that the discounts being offered were unattractive to them.
TL;DR:
- Cyber Week continues to grow and grow and grow…
- Modern tools like BNPL and mobile shopping are increasingly popular.
- Shoppers like a smooth experience.
So, with that info freshly seared in your mind, what should you do this year to make a difference for your own bottom line?
BFCM 2024 Strategy #1: Get the Conversation Started ASAP
Similar to how department stores are already swapping out summertime displays for Halloween decor, it’s also time for you to start hyping up the holidays.
August may be a bit early to start advertising your BFCM deal and products to your shoppers, but it’s not too early for your team to start putting together a communication strategy. It’s prime time to consider which channels you’ll be investing in, how you’re going to segment your audience for maximum personalization and impact, and the cadence at which you’ll send your comms.
When it comes to starting the holiday shopping conversations with your audience, remember to look toward some classic marketing tactics.
Drive Urgency
Instilling a sense of urgency with shoppers has always been a practically foolproof tactic in marketing. Clear language around limited-time pricing or product availability can boost conversion rates anywhere from 15% to over 300%.
However, urgency is not always as easy as plastering a Cyber Monday countdown timer on your home page and expecting shoppers to leap into spending action.
Urgency marketing enables brands to achieve their goals in a short amount of time through crafting deals and promotions in a way that drives immediate response.
— NEKLO
Urgency is a bit more of an art, and timing needs to be perfect. If you start touting BFCM deals too early, consumers either won’t remember or they simply won’t care since the holidays are still a few more flips of the calendar away.
While preparations should start as soon as your team can muster, hitting send on holiday emails shouldn’t happen until mid-October at the earliest. Tease new product lines or irresistible offers on the weekends, when people are less distracted by work emails or messaging from your competitors, then consider slowly ramping up your comms once November rolls around. The second week of November is when your marketing should really pound the gas pedal across any channel your customers spend time:
- Email marketing
- SMS marketing
- Social media paid ads
- Influencers in your industry
- Website pop-ups and announcement bars
Consider micro-doses of urgency across the entire holiday shopping season. While you might have things like a long-running 10% discount or volume-based free shipping deal running throughout Q4, have short, day-specific sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday, or the final 24 hours before Christmas Eve. Shoppers are primed to spend during this time — they’re waiting for you to tell them when.
Tease Scarcity
Similar to urgency, scarcity compels shoppers to buy sooner than later. For example, if your store is offering 100% free shipping to the first 100 customers on Cyber Monday, the scarcity of the offer will drive people to push “Checkout” sooner.
Implying scarcity of your products is another tactic savvy ecommerce brands employ to signal to shoppers that they shouldn’t hem and haw on a product. Adding inventory counts to product pages, or unspecific warnings about “Low Stock,” are simple ways to encourage a conversion.
Depending on what you sell, you can also market a product as a limited edition or one-off run. Every single one of your customers is a human being, which means we’re all driven by the same innate psychological factors. One of which is the fact that we want to be unique or feel special.
When a product is perceived as scarce, price matters less to consumers. It’s rare, it’s special, and regardless of price, the item is going to be perceived as high-value. Offering a limited product to a segment of your customers will have them feeling like high-rolling VIPs, which is exactly what you want in order to get items off the shelves.
Spin up Some FOMO
Creating the fear of missing out, or FOMO, with shoppers is a tactic drawing on the same psychological factors as urgency and scarcity, but it deserves its own section of the ecommerce playbook thanks to new shopping behaviors.
What’s a premium breeding ground for FOMO? Social media. More than half of social media users report experiencing FOMO as they scroll one glamorous snapshot after another. Interestingly enough, roughly the same number of shoppers learn about BFCM deals from social media ads, influencers, and live streams.
These stats, combined with the fact that shopping from a smartphone accounted for 59% of online purchases on Cyber Monday 2023, all point to one fact: a shoppable social media strategy is amust-do for ecommerce brands looking to sell, sell, sell this holiday season.
Catch FOMO-feeling shoppers at the right time with the right products during Cyber Week, ensure they can make a purchase in just a click, and you have a recipe for near-instant sales.
You can also stir up some FOMO vibes for all your sitegoers by launching tools like (aptly named) Fomo, an automated social proof app that sits right on your website. When you have shoppers on the edge of conversion, there’s nothing quite like seeing a constant popup telling you that 145 people just bought this same item in the past 10 minutes.
BFCM 2024 Strategy #2: Offer Discounts That Are Actually Good
Discounts? Really?
Yes, friends. Offering discounts may be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but there’s a reason it’s making it to this list of three to-dos this holiday season. Coupons and discounts are the second-leading reason why people flock to the world wide web to do their shopping in 2024.
Discounts aren’t unique to ecommerce. However, what is unique is the ability for shoppers to compare discounts across any number of brands without leaving their chaise lounge. Modern consumers are primarily searching for convenience in their shopping experiences, so it makes sense why nabbing an easy deal from their smartphone is a winning tactic.
Similar to your marketing strategy, though, timing is key for your holiday offers. If one of your key strategies is running discounts all year long, consider holding off on promotions before Q4. For example, if you run a truly jaw-dropping 20%-off-everything sale in August, your loyal customers are going to be less impressed if you offer the same discount during Cyber Week.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unofficial shopping holidays in the US. Your customers are primed to spend on these specific days, and they’re also primed to expect your best-of-the-best deals. If you over-deliver on deals early in the year and can’t do even better during the holidays, your shoppers are going to be disappointed and could go looking for better bargains elsewhere.
Roughly 90% of the top online retailers offer Cyber Monday discounts, so shoppers are expecting a discount. And if you’re wondering how much of a discount to offer to draw people through your digital doors, most top retailers offer promos anywhere between 20% and 50% off. We recommend exploring what your competitors have done in the past so you know you’ll be on par, as well as examining the data from how any of your previous promos have performed. Combining your in-house data with standards in your vertical will help you put out the most compelling discount.
With 59% of shoppers reporting being disappointed by unattractive discounts during BFCM 2023, we recommend reserving your best-and-lowest prices for these key dates. Weave mentions of the discounts — whether that’s a percentage discount, volume-based discounts, or free shipping — into your comms leading up to BFCM, and truly build up the hype instead of coming up with a lackluster offer during peak buying season.
BFCM 2024 Strategy #3: Get Innovative With Easy Gifting
The holidays are all about gifts. Sure, people are treating themselves here and there during BFCM, but they’re also looking to check off everyone’s wish list while the deals are dealing.
Despite the surge of gift-buying during Q4, few ecommerce websites are optimized enough to offer a truly enjoyable gifting experience. Historically, gifters have two options during Cyber Week:
- Buy a large quantity of gifts from your store and have them all shipped to their house. From there, the shopper is in charge of gift notes, wrapping, and shipping these gifts far and wide (if need be).
- Hold off on purchasing during the promotional period. This way, they can place orders closer to the holiday they celebrate and ensure delivery to their recipients around that time.
Option 1 forces your shopper to compromise on convenience, and option 2 makes them sacrifice sweet, sweet deals — neither of which is an A-plus experience for your shoppers. Furthermore, take into consideration that the standard checkout process for ordering gifts for others i s a nightmare.
If your store doesn’t have a rock-solid multi-ship checkout in place, you’re forcing your shoppers to go through the checkout again and again and again — one time for each recipient. One in five consumers abandon their cart when checkout is complicated, and a clunky (or nonexistent) gifting process is guaranteed to drive gifters elsewhere.
A streamlined, on-brand gifting experience powered by a tool like Zest is the only way to give your shoppers an experience that doesn’t make them compromise or feel frustrated during an already hectic time of the year.
With Zest, ecommerce brands:
- Have a one-stop gift-specific page, perfect for highlighting curated gift sets or limited-edition products.
- Create an optimized multi-ship checkout experience.
- Garner insights they’ve never had access to before, such as who’s gifting, what they’re gifting, and how often.
- Give shoppers the easiest way to send gifts instantly or schedule for later.
- Let shoppers choose the best gift delivery option for them, e.g., physical delivery or e-gift via text, link, or email.
- Enable shoppers to personalize gifts with thoughtful, custom gift notes or add-ons, like gift wrap, ribbons, and more.
- Automatically apply any type of holiday discount to gift orders, whether that’s a volume-based discount, free shipping, or beyond.
A gifting-optimized storefront helps ecommerce stores eliminate the risk of losing shoppers due to inconvenient checkout experiences, slowly loading gift pages, inflexible delivery options, or discounts that don’t work.
And when it comes to standing out? Shoppers will take notice that your brand is giving them the easiest gifting experience, stoking loyalty for any gifting occasion.
When online brands launch with Zest, they’re not only creating a premium holiday gifting experience for their shoppers, but they’re also helping themselves with insight they hadn’t had before. With distinct data around your store’s gifting performance, you can make more reliable predictions around your holiday sales forecasts as well as target this extremely lucrative audience all year long.
Make The 2024 Holiday Shopping Spree Your Store’s Best With Zest
Cyber Week can make or break ecommerce businesses. By assessing what’s worked well in years past, understanding what makes customers seek out your store, and making simple adjustments to your holiday strategy, you set yourself up for success. Meet your shoppers where they are with compelling and clear messaging, thoughtful promotions, and a gifting experience beyond compare.
