For the last 3 months my inbox has been flooded with emails for blogs, webinars and tools to help me prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). For the last 3 days it’s been flooded with emails for retail brands’ BFCM sales. I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense, even in the US but I’m particularly perplexed as to why it’s such a big thing here in Australia. Here’s a few reasons why:

It’s based around a US public holiday

There is a logic to having retail sales on black Friday in the USA where many employees have the day off. Some employers give workers both Thanksgiving day and the day after off to form a four day weekend. Thanksgiving is a US specific celebration based on boatloads of European invaders almost starving to death then being rescued by the very people whose land they later steal. It doesn’t have any connection to Australia past or present.

Given this, and the fact that in Australia Black Friday has a very different meaning there’s no reason Australian retailers need to run sales in late November.

In the lead up to Christmas people are going to buy anyway

Christmas, whether you believe in Christ or not, is a big thing in Australia. Everyone is compelled to buy their loved ones thoughtful gifts. Smart retailers prepare in the months leading up to it by stocking their shops and warehouses. With such an increased demand they can sell at full price. People have multiple purchases to make, they just want to get in, get what they want and get out. Few can be bothered to hunt around for who might be selling something a little cheaper. Reliable delivery by 25th December and returnable/exchangeable items are often a higher priority than bargains.

It’s only after Christmas, if retailers haven’t moved the stock they had expected to that they discount. Boxing Day, until BFCM came along, was the most anticipated sales period of the Australian retail calendar.

It’s a race to the bottom

In retail, discounting can make sense in certain circumstances. Doing it when you know all of your competitors are also doing it is problematic though. These days customers can compare prices with a few taps on their phone. You need to be cheaper than all your competitors to get the sale. This turns what should have been an attractive but sustainable discount into a discounting bloodbath.

It causes unnecessary strain on your staff

Sales of any kind means more work. It means more orders need to be picked, packed and dispatched. Customers have questions, returns, exchanges, complaints. This all causes work for your warehouse and customer service teams. Spread evenly over a year this would be manageable, but crammed into a couple of days it means you need to hire more staff or risk lengthy delays and more unhappy customers. Couple the additional staff costs with the reduced margins of the heavy discounts and BFCM doesn’t really make that much business sense.

It causes unnecessary strain on your servers

A bit of a boring techie reason but, much like your staff, your web servers weren’t designed and built to handle all your customers all at once. To allow an ecommerce website to cope with this deluge of clicks it needs to be scaled up, with this comes cost. Don’t scale up and it doesn’t matter how crazy your prices are, no one will be able to checkout as your site grinds to a halt.

The great thing about websites is they can stay open 24/7. They don’t need to sleep, they don’t take religious holidays off annual or long service leave. They’ll keep working through the night and over the weekend year-round.

You could be offering discounts at times of low traffic rather than deliberately trying to crash your site by shoving all the traffic onto it at one single point in time. If you were to have a sale, why not ask customers to sign up to the deal over a month or so. Then you can release the sale items to sensible portions of traffic over another week or two. Your servers, not to mention your staff, will thank you for it.

Technology now allows you to tailor different offers to different people at different times and for different reasons

Sales used to be generic, they used to be boring. The same discount on the same product at the same time of year. It didn’t matter who you were, everyone got the same. This was a symptom of the limitations in marketing technology at the time. Billboards all needed to show the same message, price tags in the shops all needed to display the same price no matter who was looking at it.

These days it's easy enough to tailor pricing down to the individual. We can offer up the right promotion to the right person at the right time. We can do this anytime, not just after a public holiday in a foreign country.

Customer behaviour, AI, business needs, supply and demand data can all be used to optimise both the customer experience and revenue in more sophisticated promotional activities.

If you want to know more, get in touch and find out more about how our team at Digital Mavens can help with your ecommerce challenges.

Retargetting ads, automated emails, SMS, personalised content, live selling, loyalty programs, cashback offers etc, etc. We have so many ways to try and convince users to buy, buy more, buy again, buy more often but what happens when they do? Do we ever just say thank you?

I don't mean inserting the words 'thanks for your purchase' into a order confirmation. I mean a real, genuine thank you for taking the time to purchase from us. Not even a 'here's 10% off your next purchase as a way of saying thank you'. Just a simple plain text email from a real person to a real person saying thanks and that's all.

Give this a try and make sure you don't send it from 'no-reply@'. No one likes being talked at. You might be surprised with the response you get. After I started sending thank you emails to customers I was surprised, not just that they responded but that they were appreciative that I had sent the email. It started to open up some really valuable one-on-one dialog. Customers were volunteering all sorts of information about their shopping experience, about the products they bought, what they were looking to buy next, wanting to know when certain products were back in stock and even promising to tell their friends to try out my site.

You can sift through Google Analytics reports, Hotjar recordings, run countless A/B and multivariate tests to try and find out what your customers are thinking, or you can just say 'thank you'. Sometimes the oldest and simplest approaches are still the best.

If you do need any help with your ecommerce, please reach out. At the Digital Mavens, we are a full-service digital agency. We’re not just another web development company that can build your web store; we’re the experts who can guide you through the entire journey from strategy through to implementation, helping you get more out of your marketing channels (paid media, social media, email campaigns etc) and your online store. Resulting in more sales, more revenue and more customers!

At the Digital Mavens, we will help you to DEVELOP YOUR EDGE.

Please reach out and contact us.

The digital age has made it easier than ever to start an ecommerce business. Whether you've built your own web store, have an enterprise solution or are selling on sites like Amazon or eBay, you have to be able to compete at a high level in order for your business to thrive. In this blog post, I share 5 ways that will help you increase your performance based on my experience helping to run multi-million dollar ecommerce stores!

1. Create a 'reason to shop' at your ecommerce store.

When your customers are online, you have to expect that they are visiting an endless number of ecommerce sites, at the same time. Often they have multiple tabs open as they compare products, services, prices, offers, features, expertise, availability or value. Each website they visit, helps them to narrow down further the product or service they want to purchase.

So you need to ask yourself: What is so good about my web store that will convert a visitor into a customer? How will I make the sale versus the next tab that's open?

Make sure that when visitors land on your site, they can easily find something that appeals to them. You don't always need to be the best online, but you need to be offering a reason for your prospective customers to buy something from you. Do you sell anything unique or exclusive? Are you a local business? Do you have great prices? Do you have a unique range? Do you deliver quickly? Do you have a great loyalty program? Do you have a great returns policy? Do you have great customer service? Do you have relevant or educational content? Do you have a great online shopping experience?

Focussing on these points will help you to stand out from the crowd and give users a reason to choose your ecommerce site.

2. Implement a conversion funnel and optimise for better performance.

Do you know where your best customers are coming from? From which channel? From which campaign? Are you able to track a prospect from the top of the funnel to the middle to the bottom and then onto conversion? With today's software and platforms, it's becoming easier to do.

Use the conversion funnel in Google Analytics to track ecommerce performance and improve retention rates on your site. You can use different funnels for each user segment eg: new users or returning visitors etc., so that you know where most conversions are coming from, which then means you can focus your efforts, campaigns and media spend on the funnels that are delivering you better results.

Make use of heat mapping software, like Hotjar, on every page to help identify where most people click or tap; and then optimise your onsite experience and design for better ecommerce performance.

Don't forget to connect your Facebook with your web store using the Facebook pixel to track your campaign performance. This will help you track and identify your engaged ecommerce customers who have clicked through to your website from your Facebook campaigns. If they don't purchased straightaway, you can advertise to them again them with a retargeting campaign.

3. Grow your contacts database and offer them incentives to purchase.

A healthy contacts database is vital to ecommerce success as it provides you with a list of potential customers who are already familiar with your brand or have expressed interest in hearing more from your brand. Offering incentives such as discounts, vouchers and free gifts can encourage ecommerce customers to return and purchase from the site again or for the first time. Focus on frequency of purchase, how much your customers purchase each time, or any customers who haven't purchased in a while.

Email marketing is one of the best ecommerce strategies to grow and nurture your contacts database. It's much cheaper than social advertising or Google Ads and can deliver great results if you know what subject lines, content and offers will grab their attention. If you're starting off, you can try MailChimp or the native email marketing software on your ecommerce platform. Or if you want a powerful tool, I would recommend you consider Klaviyo.

To grow your contacts database:

• Make sure you have sign-up forms at multiple points across your website;
• Offer additional incentives if visitors sign-up to your database;
• Run a lead generation campaign through social media and capture their details natively through the platforms; and
• Introduce a referral incentive to your existing customers for any new customers they bring to your website.

4. Use your Customer Service team to improve customer satisfaction and to sell more.

One of the most valuable assets in your ebusiness should be your customer service team. They are on the frontline and can have a big impact in converting happy customers into raving fans for life.

This doesn't just mean answering e-mails or calls, but rather turning disgruntled emailers into satisfied customers with tailored solutions to their queries.

To unlock their potential, make sure that your customer service team has access to as much information as possible so they can give the best possible service and experience to your customers. This means giving them access to:

• Social media channels, so they can reply to customers posts and comments more quickly or take them into another communication channel to resolve their problems;
• Your ecommerce platform, so they can see the customer's order history, customer lifetime value (CLV) and communication history, allowing them to resolve the orders or issues right away in the platform;
• Promotional offers, discounts, specials or decision making remit, so they have the ability to resolve a customer issue or upsell a customer based on their particular needs at the time.
• Training and product information, so they can speak about your products or services with expertise.

Consider a unified customer service platform like Gorgias, which is built for ecommerce and will bring all the above together into one screen for your team. If you do this then you will find that your ecommerce store performance and customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, as well as sales improve.

5. Make sure you are on the right ecommerce platform to help you grow.

Choosing the right ecommerce platform is critical to your ability to perform. Sometimes an enterprise solution is not better. Sometimes cheaper is not better. Being able to deploy things faster is definitely better. However, it does depend on your business requirements, your internal ecommerce capabilities and the skills of your team. Just don't buy the Ferrari, if you are still learning to drive. Buy it when you are ready to appreciate it and can really drive it.

Platforms like Shopify (Canadian) and BigCommerce (Australian) have been successful at offering the best of both worlds. They offer ecommerce platforms that are more affordable and simpler to manage, but can still give you access to enterprise level features. Many of the world's businesses are moving towards these two platforms because of this. However, if you're looking for an all-in-one ecommerce solution to help you manage more complex digital and ecommerce challenges, then take a look at UltraCommerce (Australian). Whichever one you choose, the ecommerce platform should match the needs of your business and be able to scalable with your goals in the short to medium term.

Once you have the right ecommerce platform, ensure that:

• Your mobile experience is amazing;
• Your site speed is as fast as it can be;
• Your ecommerce site has a clear and intuitive navigation;
• You have enough content on your ecommerce site and on each of your product pages;
• You have a clear call-to-action on each page of the website to guide customers on what you want them to do;
• You are meeting customer expectations and their ecommerce journey is seamless, simple and enjoyable with good quality products they can trust; and
• You are aware of what’s trending in ecommerce marketing today, making changes quickly on your site or campaigns to adjust to changing requirements.

As 2021 continues to be a disrupted year, online sales will only continue to grow to be a larger share of the pie. So whether you are a selling online to a business customer site or selling direct to a consumer, make sure you keep trying and keep improving.

If you do need any help with your ecommerce, please reach out. At the Digital Mavens, we are a full-service digital agency. We're not just another web development company that can build your web store; we're the experts who can guide you through the entire journey from strategy through to implementation, helping you get more out of your marketing channels (paid media, social media, email campaigns etc) and your online store. Resulting in more sales, more revenue and more customers!

At the Digital Mavens, we will help you to DEVELOP YOUR EDGE.

Please reach out and contact us. Or book in some time directly with me for a chat.