Seize every opportunity to animate your customer community

Mother's Day, the Olympic Games, festivals and world days are all opportunities for your e-commerce site. If well organized, they can have a significant impact on your business and your sales. These events provide ideas for digital campaigns and are the key to planning and promoting your communication campaigns. Let's take a look at how you can make the most of your events calendar on your e-commerce site.

Prerequisites

Each event will have its own webmarketing specificities, but first of all, let's go back to the basics to be fully prepared.

  • Website speed : Slow website speed is one of the biggest enemies of conversions. Make sure your site speed is up to scratch in the run-up to Black Friday, whether on mobile or desktop. Improve your site speed!
  • Accommodation : Prepare for heavy traffic. Can your servers handle potential traffic peaks? Make sure you have the necessary bandwidth - talk to your hosting provider. Our accommodation offers
  • The objective of your event : Are you looking to clear your inventory, achieve volume on certain products or suppliers, win customers or simply sell? This objective is key, and closely linked to your positioning. Between B2B sales of heavy equipment products and B2C sales of small consumables, strategies can vary from one thing to the next, even if you're still looking to run events!
  • The amount of your promotional offers : Analyze your margins and define what drop is acceptable for your business. It's not uncommon to see promotions as low as 60% during Black Friday. Rest assured, a reduction of 10 to 20% is enough to encourage consumers to buy. The simplest strategy is to lower the prices of your flagship products as much as possible. You can also offer discounts on high-margin products.
  • Inventory E-commerce: You don't want to wake up the day after your sales event, having used up all your inventory without a backup? Your e-commerce platform's tools should allow you to monitor your inventory levels. Look for seasonal trends in your inventory history to avoid stock-outs. If you're planning a pop-up event over the vacations, or moving your inventory to additional warehouses or space:
    • Track and monitor your inventory across multiple sites
    • Adjust stock levels at the same time, for different products
    • Manage and modify inventory quantities by online or retail store location
    • Save time by combining stock levels with automation tools to replenish products.
  • Mobile, Mobile, Mobile Consumers now spend more time on their cell phones than on television. If your mobile site's experience isn't up to par with your competitors', they'll spend that time elsewhere. Having a responsive design site should be your priority to optimize your chances of conversions.
  • Planning and teasing Teasing: Let your customers know about your upcoming offers well in advance of Black Friday, so they can get ready to buy when the time comes. The teasing schedule is highly variable - it usually starts as soon as the end of the All Saints' vacation), but the one on SEO needs to be much more anticipated, especially in competitive environments. On this subject, read a very good article from the Journal du Net on Boulanger's 2019 SEO campaign: https://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/seo-referencement/1486114-dans-la-course-seo-au-black-friday-boulanger-prend-la-tete/

Now it's time to get to the heart of the matter, and see how you can prepare your e-commerce store for maximum success at every sales event. Here are a few practical examples of how to increase conversions and visitor engagement.

SEO optimization

Advertise your offers on your home page and create dedicated landing pages. Your landing page will be the main point of entry for many buyers, so make sure you impress them. Your event landing pages should be loud and obvious. Leave visitors in no doubt about what's going on and what's in it for them. When you email customers to tell them about your offers, most will click through to your landing page or a dedicated landing page. This is an opportunity to reiterate what's on offer and provide discount codes. Creating a landing page is also a way of improving your SEO. Keep the same page every year, modifying only its content and keeping the url. If you create a new landing page every year to increase sales, your SEO will start from scratch and that means you're less likely to be listed at the top of search results the next time a consumer searches for a product like yours.

Ads campaigns

Ideally, you should prepare your Google Ads campaigns at least 2 months before each event. The sooner you launch your campaigns (before costs skyrocket), the sooner you can create audiences, making it easier to segment and optimize your campaigns.

  • Stay in your prospects' minds by remarketing frequently.
  • Limit your Google Ads to keywords with high purchase intent, such as "buy [product name]" or "best offer on [product name]".
  • Create a campaign with the name of your event and your strategic products as ad groups. Strategic products are those that perform best (in terms of sales volume and margins). These are the products that sell best, or the ones you want to destock first.
  • Use promotion extensions by selecting your event when creating the extension. Thanks to promotion extensions, your promotional offers will be directly visible from search engines.

 

Countdown

Add a countdown timer to your product pages to incite the impulse to buy and play on emotions. Evoking a sense of scarcity is one of the most powerful things you can do in marketing. Indicate low stock and how long it will be before the promotion ends.

Customers can be very indecisive. Most of the time, they like to compare your products with your competitors before clicking that buy button. This is true, as shown by comparative price research which revealed that 94% of online shoppers take time to find the cheapest product, of which 36% spend more than an additional 30 minutes making comparisons before making an actual purchase decision. By including a countdown timer for your promotions, you help your customers make up their minds immediately, closing that sale on the spot.

You can create countdowns on the following elements: Product pages, categories, homepage, website banner, emails or social networks.

order summary

Validating the basket is one of the riskiest steps in the process. shopping tunnel. A quarter of visitors will leave your site after starting the checkout process (after landing on the payment form).

To reduce your payment abandonment rate, repeat discounts. Display the Black Friday discount next to the payment form so that customers have no doubt about the low price they're getting.

That's bot for me!

Contact your customers via messaging applications on social networks. Did you know you could have a conversation with your customers via Instagram or Facebook Messenger? Indeed, Messenger bots now enable e-commerce companies to interact directly with customers and send them personalized offers and suggestions based on a range of data. Send offers to your audience on social networks via a messenger based on their past behavior and interests. There are many online services that allow you to do this quickly and inexpensively.

Emailing

Visit e-mail marketing is a proven strategy for developing both your sales and your customer base. When running e-mail campaigns, personalize the content as much as possible. Send customers alerts about discounts, items they've viewed in the past or added to their wish list. Customers are much more likely to buy when they see that substantial time-limited discounts apply to items that really interest them. In addition, you should cover the bases when sending e-mails: refer to customers by name and segment them according to important factors such as location, gender, age, etc. wherever possible.

For successful campaigns, follow these tips:

  • An eye-catching object The subject line of your e-mail is essential to the success of your campaign, as it's the first thing your target audience will read. If you don't grab your reader's attention with your subject line, they're likely to expect an unopened e-mail.
  • The timing : Plan your e-mails according to time zones or the peak of online messaging users. E-mail marketing is like nurturing a seed to make it grow.
  • Call to action Avoid including several calls to action, because who can do more, can do less. Be direct and add just one CTA. If there's only one action to take, the chances of converting are greater.
  • Segmentation Segmentation: Create separate e-mail campaigns for your recurrent and potential customers, as they both have different needs and desires. Segmentation can also be based on your product categories (shoes, pants, t-shirts, for example). Amazon is the great champion of email marketing, so don't hesitate to take a look at how they work.

If you would like assistance with optimize your SEO for a marketing operation, don't hesitate to contact NodalMedia. Similarly, if your e-commerce site is in need of optimization, do so before your next sales operation by contact the Soledis teams as soon as possible by clicking here.