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Every year at fourth quarter eve, we are bombarded with advice on how to plan and advertise the BFCM season properly. But is it really that easy to get good advice from the right person? Rather, on the contrary, it is rare.
What if we told you that we see thousands of small online stores and hundreds of retailers with over $10 million in annual sales going through the Christmas sales storm every year? And we can share our observations. What would you say? Let's see what we can learn from their experience on how to win this holiday season!
The Black Friday and Christmas sales season creates a lot of anxiety for merchants. For example, does increased demand become a problem? No, it is rather а main expectation for this period. It is an opportunity to make high sales and get rid of warehouse stock before the new year.
The increase in advertising costs worries merchants the most during this period. Due to the growing competition of advertisers during high season, the same amount of traffic has to be attracted with the volume of advertising costs on average one and a half or even 2.5 times more expensive than in the third quarter.
What else is going on? The vast majority follow the path "Go big or go home." It turns into solid site-wide discounts. It's so easy to reduce all prices by 50%. Similarly, free shipping has become, literally, the standard of the online shopping industry, especially around the holiday season. All this catastrophically cuts the profitability of thousands of businesses.
Let's follow this trend further. While sales, orders, conversions, advertising costs, logistics, and customer service soar, the average value of the orders remains the same or (horrible surprise) may decrease because everything has dropped in price.
Observations show that AOV, depending on the industry and the chosen discount strategy, varies on average from a small increase of 4% to a more significant increase of 14%. While the main gross metrics double, triple, grow five times, etc.
When you see this picture, it will not be a surprise to say that it is necessary to provide a more significant increase in AOV to win the war on ROAS. And this is the moment when the MBC Bundles app enters the scene. A marketing tool capable of increasing the AOV by an additional 15 - 37% depending on the industry and bundling strategy.
We have already written here what your bundling strategies can be. For now, let's focus not on the bundles themselves, but on what happens around them. To make any proposal noticeable and significant, it is necessary to ensure several things.
The first is coverage. Whether it is a bundle or any other offer, if it is the only one on the site, it will simply not be noticed by customers. It is necessary to create several or better - many similar offers. Achieve the optimal ratio in the assortment structure between bundles, products with a discount, products with free shipping, similar offers, and products that are sold at full price.
The second is visibility. It is essential to place offers not in the secret corners of the site but as convenient and visible for the client as possible.
When creating bundles, we recommend you not to stop at less than 8 bundles. Then combine all the bundle offers into a single collection. And add the collection to the header navigation menu of the site.
It is a minimum basic set of actions that will ensure the visibility and sales of your bundles.
The third thing is traffic. But what can be done? After all, we found out that during the BFCM period, it will be expensive. To mitigate the impact of the high cost of traffic for yourself, you need to create interest in your offers in advance and build an audience of potential buyers before prices skyrocket.
Buy your traffic early to build audiences on social media. This can be done through engagement ads during the weeks leading up to Black Friday in order to create product-aware audiences. I.e., custom audiences - for your holiday campaigns to target later. It can also be done by running click-through ads to build retargeting audiences.
And last but not least. Remember that direct client communication channels remain the most effective and less expensive. For example, sending emails to your own former customers is an easy and cheap way to deliver your offer to them. And they are already loyal to your brand.
Alexander, our seasoned Project Manager at MakeBeCool since 2021, with four years of eCommerce growth expertise. A planning pro and team wizard, he's our go-to strategist. Outside work, Alexander's an AI fan, language lover (currently at B1 in German), and an adventurous traveler exploring places like Costa Rica. With a passion for coffee, he kicks off his mornings in style!
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