The crazy busy season isn’t far away and it’s time to make sure you have your marketing ducks in a row, because in just a few weeks time EVERY marketer will be jumping in to use paid social Ads in every way for the Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Holiday sales (#fact) so you need a solid strategy to get ahead of the game to ensure that this season is your most profitable yet.

No matter how simple or complex your strategy is, e-comm success boils down to nailing 3 key things

1. Audience

2. The Offer

3. Conversion rate

Nailing these will deliver you your best sales season yet!

AUDIENCE

Building trust and familiarity is the aim of the game here. We all know that Ad costs will climb and climb as we get closer to the key days, so running campaigns that get people to visit your website or engage with your brand on social at least 3 – 5 weeks in advance is the smart move. This will help build that familiarity and affinity and warm up the audiences pre sale – and a warm audience is one that is much cheaper and easier to convert! (Get a note in the diary now – w/c 12th or 19th Oct!)

But REMEMBER you are starting early in to put the foundations in place for the key sales period… you’re gathering data and warming up the audience. Your customers are savvy…they know that the sales are around the corner and they will wait, so frustrating as it may be expect a low conversion rate at this point – the good times are a’coming! Use this opportunity to send customers to your catalogue, give them previews, run pre-sale event, promo videos or even articles giving insight into what your products will do for them.

Don’t forget to check your Facebook pixel is set up and firing!

THE OFFER

Remember I said your customers are savvy? 10% isn’t going to cut it – Black Friday/Cyber Monday is the time to go bold with the offer – 20% plus is a better range to start working in.

Think of the volume, and most of all think of the average order value.

So how can you increase that all important Average Order Value?

Here are a few ideas to think about

• Bundle goods to offer more value to the customer – buy 3 get 4th free or free gift when you buy 3 etc

• Show cross sell and upsell items when they add to cart

• Link min spend to delivery options

• Show savings with bulk orders

CONVERSION RATE

For Ads this is the number of sales conversions divided by the number of interactions with your Ad…in other words its the rate at which you are turning lookers into buyers!

Knowing the conversion rate from your organic website sales is a start point to know what to look for. Remember – we said above that your initial conversion rates will be low as you are firstly  looking to acquire and warm up audiences, but as BF/CM come closer, you’ll want to watch and optimise these rates like a hawk.

Testing is key! Testing creative, content, Call to actions, Ad placements, landing page styles will all give insight into what resonates best with your customer.

Checking the load speed, landing pages, customer experience and user experience of your website are the best they can be – you want to make it as clear and easy for them to purchase from your website as possible.

Retargeting is probably the most effective way of increasing your conversion rate. Most people seeing your offer or visiting your site will leave without making a purchase, but you can revisit them, continually warm them up and keep your brand front of mind with clever retargeting Ads.

IN SUMMARY

Not much to say other than…

WARM AUDIENCE + GREAT OFFER + OPTIMISED CONVERSION RATE

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YOUR BEST SALES SEASON YET!

Create an eye-catching offer, Plan to start Ads early to warm up your audiences and get the ball rolling, tweak and refine to build that conversion rate and you’ll reap the rewards of the peak of the e-comm season.

Nutshell manage paid social media advertising for businesses of varying size, in multiple sectors. Get in touch today to arrange a call to discuss how we can crack your next social advertising project, or support you through bespoke training.