In the last few years
the UK has begun adopting a few online trends from the US, namely Cyber Monday
and Black Friday.
Love it or loathe it
they are the biggest online shopping days of the year and offers online
consumers the chance to make huge savings in the build up to the festive
period.
With more and more small businesses jumping on board and
offering flash sales, bargains and discounts as part of their Marketing for
these events ensure your business has the tool to run a flash sale smoothly.
To get the most from
these promotions here are a few simple pointers to get you started:
Start planning now: Plan
your promotions in advance, build up suspense with your customer base and let
them know of any upcoming offers and savings in advance whether its in-store,
on Social Media or via an Email Campaign.
Create specific page
copy: Plan the products or services you are going to offer savings on.
Ensure your website is optimised with product pages for these specific items.
Point customers in the right direction and ensure your user experience is
customer focused, they are not afraid to shop around when it comes to huge
savings!
Create eye catching
content: Whether it is for your businesses website, Social Media or to be
distributed to your list of customer contacts creating eye catching content
significantly increases click through rates.
Plan for an upsurge: Ensure
your website can deal with increased volumes of traffic, too many page requests
can slow the site down or crash the site itself. Test your website using tools
like Loadimpact.com to ensure the server that your hosts your businesses
website can take the strain.
Test, test, test: Before
any of your promotions, artwork and copy goes live test your processes and
ensure your site is fully prepared, functioning and operating as you would
expect with the new pages, copy etc. Get another set of eyes from a team member
and gain feedback.
Some businesses go as far as offering loyal customers a first
glance ‘Exclusive’ access to a flash sale. This is used to gain customer
feedback, fine tune and tweak their offering to make sure everything runs as
smoothly as possible in time for the main event.
Whether you love it or hate it, Black Friday and Cyber
Monday are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The chances are if you are
not taking part, your competitors are. If you think it would be something that
would add value to your business dip your toes in, start planning and prepare a
campaign using these few simple pointers.
