The official term for this time of year is crunch time for eCommerce retailers, and it stems from the fact that Cyber Monday is a stone’s throw away. You may fee like you’re behind in planning your promotions, building content, and pre-marketing to customers, but there are actually a host of things you can do in the month leading up to November 28th.
In our latest webinar with Magento, we outlined a 30-day marketing plan of action you can use to prepare you’re store’s marketing strategy and begin marketing for Cyber Monday. You’ll learn how to:
- Manage your marketing actions during the busiest time of the year
- Map out your sales and holiday promotions
- Track the success of each marketing channel
Plus, you’ll hear recommendations from Reggie Black of Better Way Health based on their previous holiday success and plans for 2016. Not on Magento? The tips and tricks in this webinar are still relevant to you!
Click here to the webinar on-demand and get the 30-day checklist printable.
After the webinar, we answered several insightful questions from the audience. Because we didn’t have time to answer all of the questions during the webinar, you’ll find the answers to the remaining audience questions below!
1. Is there a good rule for retargeting ad or social ad budget?
Generally speaking, the amount that you increase your retargeting budget depends on your current budget, site traffic, time of year, and more. If you’re using AdRoll for retargeting, they have a budget calculator to help you estimate the amount you should spend to capture the attention of as many of your site visitors as possible (Springbot customers can contact their Customer Success manager to talk about budget strategies for the holidays).
2. Do these guidelines focus only on the US market?
Cyber Monday (November 28, 2016) primarily draws U.S. shoppers since it centers around Thanksgiving in the U.S. However, these planning guidelines can be used as a template for any major holiday or event! In fact, we encourage using a checklist like the one in this webinar or one similar to plan out your promotions well in advance.
3. Are you seeing any conversions with Pinterest?
Yes, we do see stores with conversions from Pinterest. Depending on what you sell, Pinterest can be a great platform for marketing your products during the holidays. Since 55% of Pinterest users visit the site to shop or find products, it’s worth testing the platform to see if the channel performs well for your store. For an idea of what kinds of products performed well last holiday season, take a look at this list on Pinterest’s blog.
4. How many codes should you auto create for discount codes. (i.e. triggered email sent out to get a discount off during the holidays)?
We recommend creating at least 500 unique coupon codes for each triggered email. Luckily, Magento makes it easy to create them. Of course, the more you create, the less often you have to “refill” them. With our Unique Coupon Codes feature, we alert you via email when there are only 200 coupon codes left so that you have enough time to load more into the platform and are not sending emails without coupon codes.
5. How big of a team is required to dedicate to seasonal sales like these?
You can run Cyber Monday promotions with a team of any size; of course, the more people on your team, the more elaborate your marketing strategy can be. If you have a smaller team (or if you’re a lone ranger), consider running simple, yet highly targeted campaigns in order to maximize your time and efforts. This means using email segmentation to your advantage, maximizing your social efforts, and optimizing your triggered emails.
6. How can I create a target audience if we have a new store (6 month old)?
If your store is new and you don’t have a lot of email addresses in your system yet, now is the time to focus on capturing more email addresses through other channels like social, retargeting, and on-site popups. You can host contests or create gated content that requires an email address. If you’re short on time, there are pre-built segments (based on demographics and behavior) in Springbot’s Customer Segmentation feature that you can use right away. Customer segmentation works best with gender to start. With as few as 500 contacts you can create distinct male and female segments and start targeting messaging.
7. Do you have any B2B-specific tips in terms of timing/etc.? Would the timeline be lengthened for any specific part of the 30-day process? When should B2B sites start preparing for Cyber Monday, in your opinion?
This largely depends on what types of B2B products you sell. If you sell supplies or wholesale products for B2C stores, you’ll likely need to market your products for in advance (and even consider running an early Cyber Monday sale) since they may need your products to prepare for their own Cyber Monday sales. If you’d like to chat specifically about your own store’s unique case, feel free to reach out to us at marketing@springbot.com!
8. What kind of order management preparations would you recommend for online stores?
We primarily work with our customers on the marketing side of eCommerce, but we know that it’s important to make sure that you have enough help to fulfill and track orders as possible during the holidays. This sometimes means pulling in team members from other departments to help or even recruiting friends and family if you’re just starting out.
If you’re worried your store may not be optimized to handle an increase in orders, or if you have a brick and mortar store and are afraid of overselling inventory online, explore omnichannel order management tool options online.
We see all sorts of order management configurations, each uniquely tailored to fit the store and its team.
We recommend starting with the default configuration and evolving from there.
Watch the webinar recording and download the checklist printable below! Questions? Reach out to us at marketing@springbot.com to chat about your Cyber Monday marketing strategy.
