Cyber Monday Madness – Is Your eStore Ready?

It seems like the retail world has a laser focus on Black Friday. But the shift to online shopping gives eStores the perfect opportunity to grab their portion of the holiday shopping madness: the once-a-year sale that every savvy shopper awaits.

But is your eStore really ready to dominate on Cyber Monday?

Because it’s not enough to be open on Cyber Monday. The online stores that grab the most profits are the ones who plan ahead. They create a strategy to stand out from the crowd.  Here are a few easy tricks to help you increase your Cyber Monday sales and capture your own piece of the holiday action.

Do You Have a Holiday Gift Guide?

Amazon is the master of holiday gift guides. Take a lesson from their playbook, and create a holiday gift guide that will wow your customers and showcase your best products.

Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for any shopper to make a sale. This includes guiding them to the perfect gift. By creating a holiday gift guide, you highlight the best gift for everyone on their list. A gift guide lets them do their shopping fast, and with a lot less stress. Plus, it’s extremely easy to create a guide that steers them to your best products, or the ones that are the most profitable.

You can create your guide based on the:

• price point (prices for every budget)
• activity or area of interest (great for hobbyists)
• by type of gift (based on your inventory)
• or by relationship (think boys between 6-10 or men over 60).

With the right guide, any potential shopper will find exactly what they’re looking for quickly, and your customers will feel confident that they choose a great gift.

Don’t Give Up on Abandoned Cart Shoppers

According to the Baynard Institute:

While we can’t understand why every single shopper chose to halt a sale, we can try to convert a portion of those customers. That’s why it’s essential to have an abandoned cart strategy.

Ecommerce platforms (the systems that host your eStore), are now giving their store owners the tools to easily handle shopping cart abandonment. For example, Selz has an Abandoned Cart app that allows sellers to contact recent visitors with gentle reminders. This gives you the potential to gain back any customer who wanted your product but didn’t finish the sale. It’s the smartest move, as these customers are already interested in your product on some level.

Do You Offer Doorbuster Specials?

Most shopper identify doorbuster specials with Black Friday fliers, and doorbusters are one reason for the mad rush at 2 a.m. But just because it’s a brick-and-mortar tradition doesn’t mean that doorbusters won’t entice your shoppers to fill up their carts.

Overstock already has it’s Cyber Monday deals online, plus customers can see this year’s doorbusters if they download the Overstock app. But you don’t have to have a special app or exclusive email list (although that’s not a bad idea). Just create doorbusters that will knock the socks off your customers and give them the sales they’re craving.

Do You Have #cybermonday Pictures Ready?

#CyberMonday is huge during the Thanksgiving holiday, but it’s not enough to just add the hashtag to any tweet or status update. There are 350,000 tweets sent per minute, so your simple #cybermonday hashtag probably won’t be seen by your intended audience.

According to the Social Media Examiner:

After you choose doorbusters sales for your eStore, use Canva to design your social media pictures. It has the correct picture dimensions for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. Canva has a ton of templates and incredibly easy to customize pictures. Vineyard Vines Cyber Monday tweet from 2014 shared the promo code, promotion and picture all in one simple graphic:

Dominate Cyber Monday

One of the greatest things about Cyber Monday is that it’s open to every industry and every type of eStore. It doesn’t matter what kind of store you have – your customers will be looking for a deal. So give the people what they want! Use these tips to create a strategy that will let you grab a piece of the action on the biggest online shopping day of the year.

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Liesha Petrovich

Liesha's a freelance strategist by day and Kyokushin Black Belt by night. She's the author of Killing Rapunzel: Learning How to Save Yourself Through Determination, Grit, and Self-Employment (her mother hates the title - but it's a metaphor mom!). She talks freelancing adventures at Microbusiness Essentials.

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