In 2018 in the US, sales figures hit $7.9billion of online sales on Cyber Monday, while spending in the UK on the last day of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend took sales figures over £7billion, with the rest of Europe increasingly buying into the shopping trend at this time of year.
Black Friday has been notorious for in-store mayhem with Cyber Monday being known as the only place to find the best deals online. So how do we think this will change this year? Well with a near 75% increase in online shopping as a result of the pandemic we know focusing on a robust online presence to mitigate risks of in-store challenges is going to be the winning strategy.
For the brands that prepare in advance and get their digital advertising strategies right up to the event and on the day, the opportunity to win big is certainly there.
When Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes around, you’ll need to make sure your website is responsive, mobile compatible and able to cope with the sudden upsurge in traffic. With a growing year-on-year trend of articles detailing the websites that couldn’t fulfill the upsurge.
Check the following:
Site speed: Run speed tests to understand what might be causing issues with load times.
Uptime: It’s essential to be using tools to continually monitor your site for downtime.
Mobile compatibility: Last year on Cyber Monday, $2.2billion was spent via mobile purchases. That means it’s never been more important to ensure that your website is optimised for mobile and that it can handle the increase in mobile traffic. Make sure you run mobile compatibility tests to guarantee it can cope when Cyber Monday hits and that you can diagnose any slow-loading pages well in advance.
Infrastructure: Stress-test infrastructure to address any issues with capacity limitations and stability. If infrastructure is on premises, consider cloud solutions to assist with high volumes of traffic.
Making sure your website is functioning, planning your deals, and ensuring you have enough stock to cope with the influx of orders are all essential jobs in the run up to the day, but they’ll be wasted if you don’t drive that all-important traffic to your website. Here’s what you should be doing:
Build out your email campaigns
Email will be one of your key channels for driving traffic and converting website visitors on and around Cyber Monday. Your approach may consist of the following:
Engage with your users on social media
Your social media channels will be where much of the conversation around Cyber Monday will be happening. Not only should you be joining in to build the hype, you also need to be there offering your followers incentives to spend their money with you. This includes exclusive deals, one-time offers and time-limited deals that are too good to turn down.
Use products in your brand awareness campaigns
Shopping around Cyber Monday, as well as Black Friday, is all about products, offers and deals. Consumers know what they want and they’re willing to part with their money if the offer is right.
Whilst that may suggest that your brand awareness campaigns should take a back seat, this isn’t necessarily the case. What it does mean is that you need to build your products into your brand awareness campaigns, whether through engaging with users through contextual targeting or geotargeting for example.
Central to this is the use of In-Feed ads and Dynamic Creative to get an up-to-date message out to the right users at the right time.
Retarget existing website visitors
Retargeting must work in tandem with your brand awareness campaigns. Once users have landed on your website and viewed a certain product, it’s critical to re-engage with them immediately when they leave your website with a tailored and relevant retargeted ad.
That means using product remarketing to showcase the exact product they viewed in the ad.
Central to your approach to Cyber Monday must be to keep your potential customers engaged and interested in the lead up to the event. When done well, Retargeting at a product level could be the key to driving conversions around this important date.
Learn more about how Fluid Ads can improve advertising performance and get you ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.