The competition for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is stiff. Online sellers – from the smallest Amazon-based start-up to Amazon – send e-mails, buy pay-per-click ads and publish banners. But there are still things your business can do to stand out or at least follow.
If the last few years are an indication, something like 150 million Americans will shop on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Collectively, they will spend billions of dollars on gifts for friends, family members and even themselves.
To promote your e-commerce business, start with proven online fundamentals, such as pay-per-click ads, good search engine optimization, and email.
If your business has these marketing basics all right, consider doing something a little outside the e-commerce marketing box. The following are five e-commerce marketing tactics Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you may not have thought about it.
1. Put Products on Amazon
If your retail business is not already selling in the Amazon Marketplace, you must start. Spend an afternoon compiling a list of your top 20 products so that they are ready and ready for Thanksgiving weekend sales.
If you need to be more convincing, in September 2016, Recode reported that 54% of the nearly 2,000 respondents to a shopping behavior survey started to search Amazon rather than search engines like Google.
If this is true for online shoppers in general, Amazon may be more important than Google and Bing combined to make e-commerce sales.
There are certainly challenges to finding successful sales in the Amazon market. Your business will have to compete on Amazon's prices and fees, so the margins can be relatively thin. But the market is also an important opportunity, especially around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
2. Buy live readings on the radio
In broadcasting, live reading is where a disc jockey (radio personality) reads the message of an advertiser live on the airwaves.
Live readings can be relatively inexpensive compared to some broadcast media. I recently purchased five days of live readings, totaling 180 spots on half a dozen radio stations in Boise, Idaho, a medium-sized market. The total cost of the campaign was about $ 4,000, or about $ 23 per seat.
Choose a market with an abundance of potential customers that is in a shipping area of your e-commerce management warehouse. Focusing e-commerce promotions on a specific geographic area may seem counterintuitive to some online retailers because one of the benefits of ecommerce is that you can sell to customers just about anywhere.
Nevertheless, when you sell locally, you sell to customers that you can easily serve. In addition, it will be cheaper to send orders to destinations near your warehouse. So, you might be able to save some money on shipping. This could be helpful if your company plans to offer free shipping as an incentive to Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Shipments to nearby customers are likely to arrive sooner than orders sent across the country. Your local vacation guests will receive packages in a day or two, which they will interpret as a good service.
To purchase your live readings, contact local radio stations whose formats are likely to be listened to by your target customers.
3. Send a Direct Mail
Direct mail marketing is one of the most effective promotional tactics that retailers can use. For example, PetFlow has relied heavily on shared mail marketing to attract new customers before Phillips Pet Food & Supplies buys it.
Similarly, major e-commerce companies such as Hayneedle, Wayfair and Blue Apron use direct mail marketing to reach new customers.
As with live radio readings, focus your company's direct mail efforts on markets that you can easily serve from your fulfillment warehouse.
4. Advertise in a local newspaper
Newspaper readership is down sharply, with only 17% of Americans aged 25 to 34 reading a newspaper every day, according to a report from the Pew Research Center in March 2016.
Although this figure is very low compared to, say, a decade or two ago, it still represents many potential buyers. Something like 38 million Americans are in this age group (25-34). Thus, 17 percent represent about 6.5 million people. And there are times when your potential customers are likely to take a paper, that is around Black Friday, when they are looking for offers.
Do not be disappointed. Remember to place ads at the beginning of the Black Friday campaign.
Your ad might offer you a way to avoid Black Friday's lines or explain how a $ 99 TV might sound like a great Christmas present until you get it. Send to, say, an aunt in Minnesota. With your online store, customers can shop at home and (if you offer them) free shipping to Minnesota too.
5. Publish your best offers on Reddit
Reddit is the social media network that your e-commerce business probably does not use. But maybe that should be it. According to Statista, Reddit had more than 1.5 billion visits in September 2017.
This certainly puts behind Facebook, but still represents a lot of use. Reddit can be a good way to reach the Black Friday and Cyber Monday searchers. In fact, there are several dedicated Subreddits races.
You could try these three elements to get started.