Catherine Langman:

Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. And this week we are going to be diving into the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales promotion. Do you know about this? If you don’t know about Black Friday yet, I think you might’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere because it is the biggest promotional event in the e-commerce calendar in our marketing calendar. Whether you have an actual marketing calendar or not, this is the biggest event that kind of happens every year. And so I want to tell you a little bit about it and how you can really make the most of this particular event in your business. And I definitely have clients and students who turn over basically a month’s worth of sales in one day and more than that over the whole four-day event. So it is something to learn how to do and to do well. And you will definitely benefit in your business.

Catherine Langman:

So Black Friday Cyber Monday is a promotional event that has kind of become a bit of a… Well, it initially became an American e-commerce tradition beginning back in 2005. And I believe Black Friday is always the Friday directly after Thanksgiving. Of course, I’m in Australia and Thanksgiving is not really a thing here. So that particular detail escapes me, but Black Friday has certainly become an entrenched thing. And over the last few years, it has sort of been adopted here in Australia as well. And to give you some idea of the scope of this event, last year, e-commerce stores processed well over $700 billion in sales just during that four-day sale event. It is enormous.

Catherine Langman:

And Australia definitely plays its part as well. So like I hinted, Black Friday hasn’t historically been a thing here, but Aussie retailers have really been catching on fast as well as shoppers taking advantage of this sort of event. And over the last couple of years, it’s been growing by 50% year on year. And it now represents the start of our typically our busy Christmas sales period. So I guess kind of before Black Friday became a big thing, usually in Australia, we would have our Christmas sales period in the lead up to Christmas and then we’d have a massive Boxing Day sale. People still definitely do Boxing Day sales, but now we’re kind of triggering the Christmas sales period with Black Friday and really kind of front-ending a lot of the revenue there.

Catherine Langman:

Now, typically, like I said earlier or hinted to, e-commerce sales can increase by over 30% just on Black Friday alone and even more. And with the right strategy, this event can really lead into a bumper Christmas promotional period. So my vote is definitely to run a Black Friday promotion and to use it to kickstart your Christmas sales promotion.

Catherine Langman:

But now with all of that said, this year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday promotional event will likely be unlike any other. And that is down to this crazy coronaconomy, this COVID-19 and the way it’s really turned this whole world on its head, and fears around COVID-19 and subsequent retail store closures have really shifted consumer spending online and away from brick and mortar retail stores. And my opinion has been for a while now that this new consumer behavior is pretty well-entrenched now. So I think it’s a shift that I believe will continue well into the Christmas sales period and beyond into the New Year. And I guess there’s some implications of all of this. So as more shoppers rush online to make their Black Friday Cyber Monday purchases and their Christmas purchases, inventory and shipping there’ll be constraints around those. So that’s going to present challenges for retailers of all sizes, but especially for small business.

Catherine Langman:

And I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of my clients have definitely found this year pretty challenging getting hands on enough stock and enough materials for those who actually produce their own products and even to get their hands on enough packaging. And then of course shipping and freight companies have been really under the pump. And here in Australia, of course, Australia Post, they’ve been putting out warnings. You’ve got to get onto your Christmas marketing early because they’re going to be completely under the pump, and they cannot guarantee guarantee delivery timeframes as fast as they might’ve historically managed. So we really need to start getting organized.

Catherine Langman:

But with all of this in mind, if you want to make the most of this year’s biggest shopping event, and I absolutely advise that you do, it is critical that you start planning as early as possible like now. So despite the different climate that we’re now operating in, Black Friday Cyber Monday is still a tremendous opportunity for your business to end the year really strongly, whatever that looks like for you.

Catherine Langman:

So with this unsettled economic climate, the supply, getting stock, your potential supply chain shortages, and this massive shift in consumer behavior to shopping online, I know that navigating this Black Friday Cyber Monday promotional event is probably going to feel particularly stressful this year. So, with that said, that is what this podcast episode is for. I want you to use this as a little bit of a checklist as well as some inspiration to start planning and make sure that you nail this promotional event, make sure that you have all of the resources that you need to take advantage of this huge opportunity and hopefully prevent any glaring issues from cropping up along the way, or just prevent you from missing out.

Catherine Langman:

So hopefully if you can use this as a bit of a checklist, you’ll be able to hit the ground running and hopefully avoid any last minute scrambles, and hopefully help you to really start early and enjoy the best bumper holiday sales that you can possibly achieve. So let’s go through a bit of a checklist of things to get in place and to consider for your Black Friday campaign.

Catherine Langman:

Now, of course, getting organized early is key. So let me just make sure you know when Black Friday is happening. So it is the last Friday of November. So this year 2020, Black Friday falls on Friday, the 27th of November. So that generally would be the start date of your promotion. And then Cyber Monday is four days after. So it’s the following Monday. Now, some people do start sneaking out their Black Friday offers the day before. It’s really up to you, what you want to do. But typically that four-day period is your four-day promotional period. And from there, and we can talk about this more a bit later, but you’ll continue sort of leading into your Christmas promotional, marketing and messaging and that sort of thing. So part of getting organized early is listening to this podcast and taking a few notes, but really want you to start planning everything out now.

Catherine Langman:

So the first thing that you want to do really is to pay attention to the shopping trends that are happening at the moment. So I’m sure that you’ve all noticed that ever since COVID-19 kind of hit that certain products have been selling out much faster than others. And people are really focused on making their home more comfortable, treating themselves with small luxuries just to make themselves feel better, activities to do at home when you are spending more time there. So really think about what you sell really well at the moment because predictably you’re going to sell a lot more of it over that sort of a weekend, especially if you can pull together a bit of a promotion.

Catherine Langman:

So at the end of the day, and we are going to talk about offers in a little minute, but at the end of the day, there’s no right or wrong way to pull together your promotion in terms of what you’re going to sell. It’s really up to you. I definitely have clients who get away with pretty small incentives like free express shipping, and then others who pull together much more enticing and bigger incentives as well from discounts on limited products or bringing in particular products that they’re going to sell at this time of the year to bundles and so on and so forth.

Catherine Langman:

So the first thing that in terms of just getting organized is to really think about what is actually selling really well at the moment. So you’re not using Black Friday just to get rid of really old, slow moving stuff. You’ll probably end up being a bit disappointed with your results from the promotion if that’s all you do. Whereas if you sort of think in advance about what customers are really buying and wanting to buy right now, then you’re going to get better results.

Catherine Langman:

The next thing I want you to do is to actually do a bit of a test and check in with your website to make sure it can handle a big surge of traffic. So if you think about the potential to increase your sales 30% or more just over four days, that is a lot of traffic that is coming your way. And I definitely have seen websites crash when they have massive surges of traffic like that. Now, of course, if you’re with Shopify, then that sort of traffic surge protection and the ability to cope with that is already built in. So you don’t need to really worry, but if you’re using other platforms, you definitely need to check with your host and just give them a bit of a heads up that this is going to happen and to expect a lot more traffic and make sure that you’ve got things in place to handle that.

Catherine Langman:

All right on to deciding what your irresistible offers are. I probably should have had my list in a slightly more logical order. But deciding on your offers, like I said, it’s not about just selling off old, slow moving stock. You can save that kind of thing for a Boxing Day type event, but for Black Friday, if you really, really want to do well, you’ve got to choose things that are going to sell well. You’ve got to remember, this is pretty much kick-starting your Christmas sales period. So you’ve got to think about what are people buying for gifts. It could be end of school year gifts, end of work year gifts. It can be family gifts and friends. And you’ll definitely also have people buying for themselves as well. So what is going to be selling really, really well?

Catherine Langman:

And typically people are putting together incentives of some kind to incentivize people to buy and buy hopefully a lot. So not just a normal amount of whatever your average order value is. So we’re hoping to really bump that up and get people buying a lot. And I definitely see customers buying again and again, not just from different retailers, but from the same retailer. If it’s a good enough offer or maybe rotating offers, then you can definitely see people purchase more than once.

Catherine Langman:

So if it’s a discount type situation, I want to see a minimum of 10% off here a minimum, I don’t want you to feel like you have to go totally crazy with 40% offer or anything like that. You definitely don’t need to be doing that. But other ways to really incentivize people to buy would be things like bundles or volume discounts, that sort of thing. Certainly being able to add new products to your lineup at this time of the year. Obviously it really depends on the sort of products that you sell, but if you think about gift buying and gift giving at this time of the year, that that may be an opportunity to add some new things to your range, but definitely think about other things as well free express shipping. So other ways that you can offer incentives that don’t just rely on a discount. Gift with purchase are another one.

Catherine Langman:

Hopefully you guys listening have tested a few different types of incentive or offer over your past in business. So you know what your audience and what your customers responds well to. Personally, I always did really well with discounted bundles or bulk packs or volume discounts, those sorts of things. My customers always responded really well to that. And bundles can often make great gift packs as well. So that can be a good one. But I’ve got other clients who do extremely well with some of those other incentive type offers. So you definitely want to decide what that is in advance.

Catherine Langman:

And then you need to be making your inventory decisions or your purchasing decisions now, if you haven’t already. So you make sure that you have enough product to sell. If you do a really good job with your marketing over this sort of a promotional period, you really can expect to see a big spike in sales. So make sure you’ve got enough inventory on hand to fulfill all of that.

Catherine Langman:

Now, the next thing I want to talk about in this checklist is about the marketing side of things. And what I want to advise here is that you really double down on the marketing channels and the marketing strategies that typically work. So what I typically favor is Facebook Ads and email marketing a lot. And the other thing that I’ll say is usually we try and build up the size of your audience in advance of the Black Friday weekend. So that by the time you were rolling out your marketing for that four day promotional event, it’s going out to warm audiences because that is going to be the best way that your emails are seen in inboxes and that your ads are seen in newsfeeds and that people take action and click on it. Because if you think about just the consumer psychology side of things, it’s going to be a really busy promotional weekend.

Catherine Langman:

So being a consumer in that environment, and you are receiving a lot of marketing messages, you’re much more likely to trust and take action on the offers coming from somebody that you know and that you’re familiar with as opposed to somebody you’ve never bought from before. It feels a lot more risky, right? So this is why we try and run out the marketing in advance of the Black Friday weekend to build up your audience. And then when you come to the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, you are sending that marketing out to the people who are already on your email list and to your warm audiences in your Facebook Ads. So hopefully that makes sense.

Catherine Langman:

Now on the fulfillment side of things, you really want to consider some contingency plans here. So I did sort of mention already just checking in advance if your website can cope with the surge in traffic. But what about your self and your team coping with that surge of orders as well? So you’ve got to think about on the fulfillment side, do you need to get a little bit of help managing customer service? Because those inquiries are probably going to scale up. And also picking and packing orders as well. So that’s another thing to think about in advance.

Catherine Langman:

Really, I guess just thinking about other backup plans like having other freight companies on hand. If you always just use one particular freight company and they just really don’t cope with the influx of orders, you might want to have something else on hand there as well.

Catherine Langman:

What else is on my checklist here? So your back on your website, you want to think about changing out the hero image, the banner image on your website so that you are promoting that. You definitely want to have that clear headline message and invitation to buy on your homepage. But you probably also want to set up a new category or collection and have that in your main menu just so that it’s super, super easy for customers to find where this stuff is. Don’t make them go looking for it and absolutely check all of this works super well on mobile. So remember, these days the vast majority of our website traffic typically is coming from mobile. More and more people checking out actually completing transactions on their mobile as well. So you want to make sure this is super easy for them.

Catherine Langman:

And another thing that can kind of help when it comes to increasing sales, if you are perhaps having some trouble getting as much inventory on hand as you would like, you can add gift cards to your store as well. So that now would be definitely the time to do that.

Catherine Langman:

In terms of getting yourself organized in advance and planning this stuff out, I definitely like to not just think about this stuff in advance and I don’t even just stop at putting a plan together in advance. If you guys have listened to my recent episodes, you know that I love planning and really thinking in advance about what I’m going to do to achieve my goals. But in terms of this sort of a promotion, you actually want to get this implemented in advance as well. So that means getting the images ready for your website, getting all of that organized, ready to go, getting your emails written and scheduled, getting your Facebook ads written and built out and scheduled, really making sure that you are super organized in advanced.

Catherine Langman:

I might even link to the past episode that I recorded on this podcast with Jodi from Swik Home Body. So she came on quite recently and I was interviewing her. And so she was talking about her Christmas last year. So for those of you who haven’t listened to that, so Jodi sells candles and bath bombs and diffusers and other sorts of home fragrance type products. They’re all gifty related things. So for her, Christmas is enormous. And so she knew she was going to be completely snowed under come that kind of Black Friday to Christmas period. And it was enormous for her.

Catherine Langman:

But she didn’t have to worry about any of that marketing stuff because she had written and scheduled all of it beforehand and it just flowed so smoothly. It just was something she didn’t have to really think about at all. So I’m going to link to that episode in the show notes as well for this episode. So you can go and check that one out. It’s a good one to listen to. So getting organized in advance and actually implementing stuff in advance so that it is all scheduled, ready to roll out is definitely the way to go.

Catherine Langman:

A couple of other things that I definitely want to mention here is anytime you see a big increase in your sales, you are going to see an increase in other things like customer service inquiries as well as people wanting returns and exchanges. So rather than feeling sorry for yourself when that happens, because quite frankly you just need to expect that it’s going to happen as your business grows, but what you want to do is just make it really easy for customers. Don’t make them feel frustrated or angry or disappointed. Just make it really easy for them. And by doing it that way, you’re likely to keep them as a customer longterm. So even if they weren’t necessarily happy with that one thing that they got, if you make it really easy for them and stress-free, then they’ll come back and you’re more likely to keep that customer long-term.

Catherine Langman:

So things like just making that returns and exchanges process really easy and also making it easy for people to find that information on your website. So make sure you’ve got that returns and exchanges information in the footer of your website. And if it’s possible for you, if you can afford to offer free returns, especially on a first purchase, then do that. You’ll find that it makes a world of difference at this sort of time of year especially when people are giving gifts. Like I said, you just want to make it easy for them.

Catherine Langman:

And same with the customer service inquiries. So a really great strategy that I can’t claim. I didn’t come up with this. This was a brilliant idea from Lisa Munro of Happy Tummies, another client of ours. And she has her Frequently Asked Questions above the Contact Us form on her website. So if you go to her website, you will see in the footer menu, there’s FAQ’s and Contact Us. So, any time sales go up, obviously customer service inquiries should be expected to go up, but often they’re just the same questions over and over again. So if you put that information in a very easy to access format right above your Contact Us form, then that’s going to really help manage that influx of customer service inquiries. So that’s another good tip there as well.

Catherine Langman:

And the last thing that I definitely want to really kind of mention here as a checklist item is tracking your results. And whether you have time to do this as you go through the promotion, or you need to tally it up afterwards, either way, you’d need to do a bit of a debrief at the end of the promotional period and work out what the results were like. It’s too much to expect that you will remember what happened the same time next year when you come around to doing this again. It is just so important. Anytime you run a promotion or product launch or anything like that, you need to keep track of your performance metrics as you go so that you can look back and see, okay, which incentives worked, which offers worked, which products sold really well, as well as the usual of metrics that we would keep for a website, traffic, visitor numbers, conversion rate, average order value, revenue made, all of that kind of stuff.

Catherine Langman:

If you’re on Shopify, obviously it’s really easy to get that information on your dashboard, but I really encourage you not to just look at it on your dashboard, but actually get into the habit of documenting this somewhere so that you can easily at a glance see the trends and have that information at your fingertips for future campaign planning purposes.

Catherine Langman:

All right. And I guess just another kind of plug for using Black Friday Cyber Monday to kickstart off your Christmas marketing planning. Now I’m not going to dive into some super details about that on this episode. I am going to do a separate episode all about planning your Christmas campaign. I think it deserves its own particular episode. Why not? But before we do finish, I do have one extra resource that I want to mention to you. If you are reasonably new to running a Black Friday Cyber Monday promotional campaign, and you’re not really sure how to do a good job of it, and you just want a little bit more detailed help, I am going to be offering a discount on my record-breaking Black Friday blueprint training bundle. So this is a short course. It has 14 training videos teaching you step-by-step how to plan and execute a highly successful Black Friday sale event. It goes through how to quickly attract and engage with an audience.

Catherine Langman:

So you’re really building up that audience in advance, making sure that they fall in love with your products and the stuff that you sell and are ready to buy when the time comes. And then I teach you how to write a four-day fast cash email sequence that converts like absolute crazy. And this is actually a email campaign technique that you can use and reuse any time you need to generate sales fast. You can use it for other promotional events as well. It does not just have to be for Black Friday Cyber Monday promotional event. And then to round out this training bundle, I also show you how to set up a high converting Facebook ad campaign to promote your Black Friday sale event. Gosh, it’s a tongue twister. I tell you.

Catherine Langman:

Anyway, so if that sounds good to you, normally it’s $197 short course, but it’s going to be 50% off. So if you want to grab that, then head over to our podcast episode show notes. And the link for that is going to be catherinelangman.com/episode-37, because this is episode 37. How about that? So I’m going to link to that discount offer on my record-breaking Black Friday blueprint course over on that podcast show notes page, and you can go grab your hands on it. If you are keen to get stuck into it, don’t leave it to the last minute because you really want to be planning pretty soon and getting things underway.

Catherine Langman:

All right, guys. That is it for today’s episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. And I hope that you find that checklist useful and that you guys can start planning out your own amazing successful Black Friday promotion for this year. All right, guys. I look forward to coming through into your earbuds next week on the show. Bye for now.