5 tips for A Profitable Cyber Monday

The Holidays are looming large on the horizon. Cyber Monday has become almost as ubiquitous as Black Friday. Making sure that your website is prepared to maximize the profits from Cyber Monday is crucial. We’ve put together five tips to help you prepare.

Plan Ahead

If you’re going to partake in a Cyber Monday sale or special offer start planning today (actually start planning yesterday). There are a lot of pieces to put in place and you don’t want to wait until the last minute.

Customers plan ahead and start making lists of where they’re going to shop well ahead of the event so the earlier you can tease information to them the better. If you’re already emailing your current customer base then you should send out a Cyber Monday notice to that list. You may also want to consider running a paid advertising campaign to notify new users.

Another important reason to plan ahead is to give you time to prepare assets for the sale. You’ll want a banner ad, and other on-site notifications ready to go for the big day. If you’ve decided to advertise then you’ll also need to prepare those ads (which should match your on-site materials).

Know Your Best Offer

Determine what your offer is going to be. If you have an item that sells very well all year around it might not be the best candidate for a Cyber Monday sale. You may want to offer your second-best selling item at a discount or offer a combination. Don’t cannibalize existing sales.

Determining what’s going to be the best sale for your store can be difficult so be sure to base your decision-making on data that you’re collecting all year long from your shopping cart. Statistics like the number of sales, number of returns, and even page views may all be relevant to what’s going to be a blockbuster for you. You may also want to see if you can sell your lowest selling item at a deep discount to clear inventory or expand its reach.

Check Your Tech

Let’s start with the basics. You should already have an SSL certificate and have a 100% mobile responsive site. These two items should be standard for every site, not just an e-commerce site. Of course, you need to make sure your shopping cart is configured and in working order. Check for any problems with products, taxes, or shipping (the three key components of the cart).

The area that often catches site owners unprepared is making sure that their server is prepared for a Cyber Monday assault. Make sure that you have some additional hardware resources available to you to handle the additional traffic that you anticipate. If you’re paying for an ad campaign nothing could be worse than having your website crash from too many users. Also, a lot of users checking out at the same time can push your shopping cart’s ability to the breaking point. You can perform some load testing or you can request some additional server resources for duration of your sale.

Cart Abandonment

Things are flying fast and furious on Cyber Monday and if a user encounters any slow down they may click away to the next site. Studies show that any interaction that takes longer than four seconds has a negative impact on your conversions. In terms of cart size, this amounts to a 2.1% decrease in cart size for every second delay over four seconds.

Additionally, a good cart abandonment tool can give quick feedback as to why someone leaves an item in a cart. You can even follow up with a secondary deeper discount to close the transaction. The key for Cyber Monday is fast feedback.

Plan to Profit All Year

While Cyber Monday is the main event, you want to set yourself up to profit from it all year long. Make sure you’re asking for sign ups to your email newsletter. When you’re collecting those emails make sure to segment your list so you know which of your subscribers were holiday shoppers. Then wow them with something special like “Christmas in July” or some other fun promotion. You’ll remind them of the holidays and make them feel like a special audience.

These are just a few of the key considerations for a Cyber Monday sale. If you need any help getting ready for your own Cyber Monday or Black Friday event feel free to reach out to us.