A ccording to Kath Grannis, a spokeswom- an for the National Retail Federation, a whopping 40% of holiday shoppers start planning their purchases before Hallow- een. That timeline is enough to make any business owner panic about falling behind, but the good news is that it’s not too late to prepare for the holiday shopping rush, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday — especially with Keap’s suite of small-business tools on your side. According to Adobe, Cyber Monday 2020 was the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history. Amer- icans spent $10.8 billion online (up more than 15% from 2019), and that’s on top of the $9 billion (up 22%) they’d already spent on Black Friday. Online sales soared last year, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and will likely remain at record highs this shopping season. Are you ready for them? Start Your Holiday Campaign Strong. Every great holiday campaign starts in house. First, you need to make creating a killer offer a top priority. That means turning the campaign into a project and itemizing all of the necessary tasks so that you and your team can stay on track. Using the Task feature in Keap’s Sales and Marketing Automa- tion software makes this easy. You can use it to or- ganize tasks for yourself and as many team mem- bers as you’d like. Plus, it integrates with Slack and other communication tools so that you and your team can stay on the same page. Once you’ve carved out time to work on your holiday campaign, it’s time to create an irresistible offer. You have four great options here. 1. Discount your product or service. Mark- ing down products by 15%, 20%, or even 50% is the most popular option on Black Friday or Cy- ber Monday, and many business owners gravi- tate toward it. The challenge with this method is that you have to sell enough products or services to offset the loss of the discount. If you’re a small company with slim margins, a discount may not be the best way to go. Fortu- nately, it’s far from your only option! 2. Bundle your products. If you offer multi- ple products or services, bundling them into one lower-cost offer can be an excellent way to drive sales without slashing prices too much. We see cellphone companies like AT&T and Verizon do this a lot with new cellphone sales. For only $60 more, you get a phone
case, car charger, and a package of screen protectors. The phone case alone is $50, so the bundle of everything else makes spend- ing only $10 more! This is a sweet deal for the business because it moves more product out the door. 3. Create a value-add. People love getting things for free, even if that thing isn’t what they set out to buy! You can leverage this and add value to your deal by pairing it with a helpful tool or resource that fits your prod- uct. If you sell a service, maybe you have a tip sheet or e-book about how to get the most out of it. If you sell blenders, you could throw in an online recipe book! When you plan your value add, just make sure it’s a flat cost to you no matter how many products or services you sell. 4. Offer an early-bird giveaway. Anyone who has shopped on Black Friday in person knows early-bird deals work — this strategy creates long lines in front of store doors! You can also offer an early bird giveaway online using Keap’s email marketing feature to seg- ment it for VIP customers only or email it out to your full list. Rewarding the early cus- tomers with an added bonus is a great way to maximize the word-of-mouth marketing. According to Twitter, 62% of shoppers Tweet about purchases they’ve made. Which of these options is right for you depends on your type of product or service and the de- mographics of your customer base. To learn more about the latter, you can rely on past data and reports gathered by Keap. How did your list react to past email marketing campaigns? What language pulled them in during A/B testing? Now is the time to leverage those insights to get results on this holiday season. As we mentioned before, you can make your of- fer(s) even more effective with segmentation! Using Keap’s robust CRM features, you can tailor your mar- keting message to speak to different parts of your customer base (new customers, returning custom- ers, VIPs, etc.) and leverage email and text marketing to target them with deals they’re more likely to buy (more on that later). Last but not least, if you’re planning to funnel buyers to your website, you need to tune up your e-commerce system in advance of the big day. Keap’s Pro and Max editions include a range of e-commerce capabilities that can help you scale
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