An Action Plan of 6 Steps to Help SaaS companies this Black Friday and Cyber Monday
It's been estimated that each year online shoppers spend more than 11 billion in Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales.
As a SaaS business owner that you would like to be a part of that pie during the season. But, these two occasions have become more competition in the online marketplace and you must prepare a plan. That's why we've put together an easy-to-follow checklist of six steps to prepare you for BFCM:
- Develop your BFCM game program
- Set your discount rate
- Create a personalized communication for every channel
- Design a BFCM landing site
- Make sure you have a site ready
- Create a mobile-friendly website
Let's get planning.
Step 1: Identify the Game Plan
Be careful not to be another SaaS firm that cut the price by 5% on the cost of their subscriptions and then expects the customers to come rolling into.
Be aware that a lot of companies seek to join the BFCM group, therefore creating the right game plan is crucial. Create a detailed plan for you to know:
- Where exactly your intended audience is likely to be looking for bargains
- What channels will help advertise your offers the most effectively (Twitter, PPC, Facebook, etc.)
- Which channels are you planning to use to advertise your BFCM offers. You might prefer not to make use of PPC, but it can help showcase your offers in relation to BFCM
Here's an often overlooked part of BFCM. Black Friday falls the day following Thanksgiving, that is considered a holiday of the public throughout over 20 states in the US. If you're targeting business owners using the use of your SaaS services, you may need to step back and think about whether it's worthwhile to put more of your advertising efforts into Cyber Monday--when everyone will be back at their desks.
2. Set Your Discount Rate
Figuring out your discount rate for BFCM offerings is one of the most important aspects of the strategy. Set it too low so that customers won't be drawn to buy. Make it too high and your profit margins will suffer.
Selecting the best discount rate for your SaaS or software is crucial to how well they'll sell during BFCM. According to the Balance The Balance, the discount rate for BFCM range from 20-30%., with Cyber Monday being responsible for 20% of all holiday shopping revenue.
What you'll need to do is to add a "date condition" to a discount to limit when the discount applies for the period between November 29 - December 2 for this year.
3. Find All Your Channels all on the same page
We're talking about your website along with your email, social networks, and any ads your running to add fuel to the BFCM sales.
Marketing should be about more than sending an email blast on the day before Black Friday. To be noticed, you have to experiment with personalized marketing. In a study of more than 650 multi-channel marketing strategies, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static marketing campaigns when it comes to generating the highest response rates from the recipients. In order to deliver the personalised messages in a manner to get the best outcomes, they must be consistent across all your active channels.
Let's look at the implications of this to one of the most important methods in your BFCM campaign to send out emails.
You can set up an email marketing program in the months preceding BFCM in order that your clients as well as customers and subscribers are well-aware of any deals that are on sale. Based on the email marketing tool and your email marketing software, you may add merge tags into the text and subject lines in your emails in order to give them an element of personalization.
With email, you could also:
- Emails are sent out using segmentation in order to focus on different user types in your email database
- If you're able to compile a list of loyal/VIP customers and you want to offer BFCM discounts a day early to help increase sales
- Offer special "email only" discounts to people on your list
Email automation can also help to follow-up with customers who've abandoned their carts at the time of your BFCM sales, to encourage them into making a purchase.
4. Create a BFCM Page that is a Landing Page
The effort has been put in to drive traffic to your site, but what do the potential clients see when they're on your site?
According to a survey conducted through UnBounce the survey found that of the 34 websites advertising their deals on BFCM, only eight had a dedicated landing page created for their special offers. Now, the survey shows that 16 of those landing pages had a custom design, but 10 of them did not even include Cyber Monday at all. If you don't build your own landing page specifically to showcase your offers and discounts All the effort in promotion is going to not be worth it.
Eric Sloan, who conducted the study, claims that by doing this, brands have left their money to the side.
"I mean, nearly 30% of businesses I studied believed that all they had to do was tweet the occasional tweet or ad to advertise themselves during Black Friday weekend," He declares.
This is a fantastic landing page example by Vimeo that makes no ambiguity on what the Cyber Monday deals are.
This is a great landing page design idea that you can steal to use in BFCM as:
- This creates urgency: prospective customers who arrive on this page are aware that this offer is valid limited to "one time only."
- It's clear: there are no contradictions regarding what's on offer. Members will receive 25% off their Plus as well as Pro members.
- A clear call to action: there are two options that a user can choose from "Get Plus" or "Get Pro". It is clear how to go for conversion, and this can help customers of Vimeo make a a buying decision without having to look for deals.
5. Make the rest of Your Site
Even after you build your own landing page specifically for your BFCM deals, don't neglect the rest of your website. It is likely that, even if a visitor doesn't opt to take advantage of your BFCM deals but they will still be able to take a look around the rest of your website. Any person who visits your site during the BFCM period is a potential customer, so you need to give them an enjoyable shopping experience.
Here are some suggestions:
- Make sure your checkout process simple and clear: Customers want their purchases to be easy. Make sure that you don't require BFCM users create accounts or go through all the hoops required to complete their checkout. Make it as simple as is possible.
- You must be prepared for the extra traffic: We mentioned this in the past, but ensure that your website is able to handle extra customers over the BFCM period. Test your website's speed with a tool like Google Speed Test to see the user experience look like. This tool can provide suggestions for improving your site, such as rendering blocking and cutting down on dimensions of images.
- Make sure you don't have any bugs: If you're setting up custom landing pages and discounts, it could occasionally cause problems with the site's flow. Make sure you give your discounts and landing pages a thorough test before releasing them to the public. An application like PowerMapper will scan your site for broken links and bugs before your pages go live.
6. Design Your Website to be Mobile-Friendly
Finally, prepare your website to allow customers to shop on their mobiles. A growing number of customers are choosing to shop using their phones instead of BFCM. Based on a research from Adobe Adobe, between 46 and 54% of site visitors in BFCM are made using a mobile device that accounts for between 30% and 37% of all sales.
"Shopping and buying on smartphones is becoming the new standard and is due to ongoing optimizations in the retail experience on smartphones and platform," said Mickey Mericle, who heads up Adobe's Marketing and Customer Insights.
"Consumers are also becoming more sophisticated and effective on the internet.
"Millennials were likely another reason to the rapid growth of mobile phones, with 75 percent expecting to shop via their smartphone."
As a result of the Google's "mobile-first" index websites that do not make their websites mobile-friendly visitors will get a lower ranking in the algorithm. This hinders customers to discover your website and even to make purchases.
Here are three tips for making your website mobile-friendly:
- Run it through Google Speed Test and select the "mobile" feature.
- Check that your mobile e-commerce interface is designed to be user-friendly to online buyers. The most efficient way to verify this is to load up your pages on landing pages prior to BFCM using a range of different platforms including iPhones or iPads. Android, to flag any issues.
Are you in need of assistance?
All of this can be an enormous amount of work to prepare in a sales event on the weekend, such as BFCM. But, ignoring to create an efficient, detailed BFCM may are leaving money on the table. A partnership with a complete eCommerce services like this one can manage all aspects for you. will handle assistance for customers as well as handle the fulfillment process, and deal with the billing problems.
If you're looking to figure out ways you can increase the sales during this holiday season, check out our Ecommerce Holiday Playbook for all the information you need!
