4. Get your marketing up to speed 

You have prepared your supply chain for the sales season and priced your products for success. The next thing you want to do is make sure that people will know about your products. That’s where your marketing plan comes into play.  

All businesses try to sell their products simultaneously and to the same people. The result is an endless bombardment of marketing messages that most people try to ignore. And that’s why your marketing must stand out. 

Before you start bringing your creative marketing ideas to life, there’s one thing you should think about first—the right media channels.

4.1 Choose the right marketing channel 

There are more than a few ways to market a product to people—from paid ads to emails and even influencers. The right choice depends on your customers and how you usually interact with them.  

Do you have an extensive email list? Then email marketing might be the priority. People are already familiar with receiving newsletters and different types of promotions from you via email. You could even inform them about your offers in a creative way in advance and create exclusive offers for people on your email list. Give them more reasons to love being on that list. 

The same applies to your paid advertising. You probably already know the social networks that your typical customers are likely to use. So, marketing your offers on these networks makes more sense.  

No matter your marketing channel, you should focus on creating a message that stands out and is meaningful, especially in these turbulent times. If you don’t do that, you won’t survive the brutal competition of the sales season. Sad but true! 

4.2 Plan and automate your campaigns 

Another thing to remember about the sales season marketing is that situations become hectic. Everything happens fast; just like your offers, you need to prepare your marketing plan in advance. 

By planning, we mean everything from the marketing channels you’ll use to the copy of the ads. Doing so will give you more time to deal with any problems that might arise during the sales season. 

The main point is that having everything planned well will help you quickly negotiate the best deals with your suppliers. And when your terms are right, your profits are right.

4.3 Find free organic traffic for your campaigns

While you can get as much paid traffic to your website as you can afford, nothing beats the good old organic —and free!— traffic. And for that organic traffic to find your website, your SEO needs to be on point.  

Understanding what you are about to offer might open up new category level opportunities. Plan your campaign well, negotiate it with your suppliers and optimize your product SEO early on, to get that high ranking traffic to support your Black Friday campaigns. 

4.4 Your finest friend during sales seasons: Google Shopping 

Google Shopping is a must if you do eCommerce. In many markets, more than 50% of all conversions come from there. But, again, your ads will appear first if your price is the most attempting. Monitoring your competitors for Google Shopping is also vital to optimize your Google Shopping performance. So make sure your price is on the spot when the campaign starts. As you can see now, your early work with your suppliers will make you a winner. 

5. Put your website to the test 

You’ve put much effort into preparing for the upcoming sales season. Your offers, your supply chain, and how you will market your product. Next you should test your website.

Having a reliable website that will work during the holiday season is the foundation for everything we’ve previously mentioned. If your website crashes or doesn’t perform well, everything you’ve done to prepare would boil down to nothing. Also, keep in mind that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many more people will be doing their shopping online.  

Here are the main things you should test before you offers go live: 

5.1 Make a load testing 

Your website could perform well now, but that could change with heavy traffic. To ensure that your website is ready for that sales season traffic surge, you should do some load testing in advance.  

This way, if there is a problem, you’ll be able to fix it before it’s too late. You can either have your developer do this testing for you or, if you have the technical skills, do it yourself using a tool like Loadview.  

5.2 Customer checkout 

A major problem with customer checkout isn’t exactly unheard of in the eCommerce world. The problem is that most eCommerce business underestimate the power of easy checkout in their stores. It doesn’t mean that the checkout isn’t working. Instead, people face problems in the checkout process (added delivery costs, slow and unclear checkout, bad payment terms) makes the process super-annoying. Such issues will cause people to abandon the checkout process, resulting to loss in ad spending and lost sales.

5.3 Mobile optimization 

Nowadays, 34% of all online retail purchases happen on a mobile device. In addition, Almost 52% of all online traffic is from mobile devices. So, if your online shopping experience isn’t optimized for these devices, you’re missing out. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly to give your customers the best possible mobile experience. Keep in mind that mobile payment solutions like MobilePay are becoming increasingly popular.  

Offering a smooth checkout process with these mobile payment methods will result in a better user experience for your customers and, consequently, more sales.  

5.4 Page load time 

Despite sounding like a trivial issue, your page load times can make or break your sales season outcome. According to a study that analyzed the relationship between page load times and bounce rates, pages that load in more than 3 seconds —up to 4 seconds— have a bounce rate of 24%.  

That’s almost a quarter of your visitors lost before seeing your offers. So make sure your page loads as soon as possible to maximize the ROI of your ad spend and your sales revenues. 

5.5 Focus on cross-selling 

Driving traffic to a website or landing page costs money. Unless you’re getting a ton of organic traffic, you’re probably using some form of paid ads to get this traffic. To ensure you get the most out of your marketing spend, you must make every visit count. And the way to do that is with cross-selling. By selling more products to the same clients, you’re boosting your return on marketing investment. If you’re wondering how you can cross-sell to your customers, here are a few tips that’ll help: 

5.6 Understand the difference between cross-selling and upselling 

The first step toward successful cross-selling is understanding what it isn’t. For some reason, many people confuse cross-selling with upselling. So, let’s make these as clear and straightforward as possible.  

Upselling is when you convince customers to buy a better —and more expensive— alternative to the product they originally wanted. So, if you walk into an Apple Store and they convince you to buy the iPhone 11 Pro instead of the iPhone 11, that’s upselling.  

On the other hand, cross-selling is when you sell additional related items to the same customer. So, if you walk into that same Apple Store and they convince you to buy a pair of Airpods with your iPhone, that’s cross-selling. It’s that simple. 

5.7 Make the complementary products clear 

If your eCommerce store wants to cross-sell like crazy, you need to make the complementary items clear for your customers. Of course, that’s something that all eCommerce giants do.  

For example, when you buy something from Amazon, you’ll notice that it’s suggesting items that are “frequently bought together” with whatever it is you’re buying. Sometimes, you’ll even get a discounted price when you buy these products as a bundle.  

Of course, if you have an online store that sells a few items, it’s easy to manually set the relation between them. However, in the case of stores with many items, you’ll need a system that suggests similar products automatically.  

5.8 Watch out for market cannibalization 

Market cannibalization happens when you have multiple products competing for the customer base. This is likely to happen when you change the price of one product, unaware that you’re putting it in direct competition with another product you have.  

While this sounds manageable if you’re selling a few products, it’s not when you have many products in the same campaign. At least when you’re doing it manually. Then, you can use automatic pricing tools to minimize cannibalization and optimize your prices for maximum profit. 

5.9 Follow up with RELEVANT offers 

If a client has already made a purchase, this doesn’t mean that the cross-selling opportunity is over. Following up with an email with relevant products your customer might be interested in buying is a great idea. You can also use these emails as an opportunity to improve your customer relationships. 

This is a great customer experience if your products genuinely improve their experience. Don’t create spam emails that try to sell anything to anyone. Create meaning. Keep things relevant and focus on providing a great customer experience, and the cross-selling opportunities will present themselves. This is a win-win situation for you and your customers when done properly. 

Final words 

After reading this guide, we hope you have a clear view of how you will prepare your business for the sales season and now know the importance of starting early. As we are a pricing automation company, we are here to help you in any way we can. We are happy to share all our knowledge about pricing and how You should use it to maximize your profits. 

If you have any questions or thoughts regarding pricing, please contact us.