BFCM: 20 Ecommerce Tips for Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns

BFCM: 20+ Ecommerce Tips for Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns

16 min read

Oh my, it鈥檚 already November!

You get what it means for ecommerce merchants. The holiday season is coming. Sales. More sales than in the years before. So skipping the curtsey: let鈥檚 get ready.

Here are 20+ ideas for nailing your holiday marketing campaigns. If you have an online store with 黑料门 by Lightspeed, all of them can be easily implemented, so make sure you鈥檙e using your store at full tilt.

Add a Scrolling Message to Your Homepage

Offering a great deal? Declare it immediately as someone comes to your online store.

To grab customers鈥� attention and bring the website to life, add a dynamic block with a scrolling message on the front page. By default, these messages showcase reviews, but you can customize them to highlight any promotion. Here are the step-by-step .

A scrolling message on the New-Gen Instant Site

Keep in mind that this feature is available to New-Gen Instant Site users. To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, .

Add a Special Offer Section to Your Homepage

To make sure your offers grab attention, create a special section to highlight exclusive deals. That way, when customers land on your home page, they can easily find seasonal sales, discount coupons, or even free delivery. This ensures they won鈥檛 miss out on any limited-time deals.

New-Gen Instant Site users can choose from various layouts of special offer sections — here鈥檚 .

If you鈥檙e using the legacy version of Instants Site, to try out the New-Gen Instant Site.

Adding a “Special Offer” section to 黑料门 Instant Site

Add a Slider with Offers to Your Homepage

A slider, or carousel, is like a cool little slideshow. It shows off one big image at a time, and you can make it go automatically or swipe through manually. Plus, there鈥檚 a snippet of text and a fancy call-to-action button. You can use a slider to really show off your special products, brag about all the brands you sell, or convince customers why they should pick your brand.

An example of a slider

贬别谤别鈥檚 in your 黑料门 store.

Adding a slider is available to New-Gen Instant Site users. To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, .

Add Special Offers to Category Pages

You can also add special offers to your category pages if your discount applies to a certain group of products. Go to your , click on your desired category,听and add a description.

Deal description on the category page

Show Sale Prices in Your Store

If you鈥檙e going to offer steep discounts, make sure all the store visitors are aware of them. Show them what the price used to be before the sale and how much they can save now with “Compare to” prices.

Discount prices in 黑料门

Go to 听and set up the manner your “Compare to” price will be displayed.

To set up the discount for each product, take the 听route. Navigate to your product, find the “Pricing” section and set up the “Compare to” price. Save the changes.

By the way, if your store is located in the EU, the EU Omnibus Directive requires you to display the lowest product price within the last 30 days. Such transparency enhances the shopping experience for your customers. If you鈥檙e not sure how to comply, we鈥檝e got you covered! 贬别谤别鈥檚 they are receiving during a sale.

Display a Promo Bar

If you鈥檙e using the New-Gen version of our Instant Site, you can easily add promo bars to its front page via dedicated announcement bar blocks — here鈥檚 .

A promo bar on the New-Gen Instant Site

To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, .

Or, you can use apps like 20+ Promotional Sales Tools or Announcements bar. The apps offer numerous customization options, like colors, texts, fonts, and styles.

Run “Buy One, Get One Free” Promotions

There are many fans of the Buy-One-Get-One(-Free) type of sale. 黑料门 makes it possible with the 听from the 黑料门 App Market. Get the app and set up the rules.

BOGO settings

We鈥檝e talked听about听BOGO sales in detail in another blog post:

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is a bulletproof marketing strategy:

Source:

You can set up free shipping for every order or for specific regions in .

To make the most of your free shipping offer, use it strategically. For example, offer it on orders over $50 and/or on nationwide shipping only.

At 黑料门, you can use apps like AOV Progress Bar or Free Shipping bar to encourage shoppers to add more products to their carts to get free shipping.

Encourage shoppers to buy more with the AOV Progress Bar app

Learn more: 6 Free Shipping Strategies and Their Alternatives

Add Popups and Banners

Imagine a lot of salespeople would work for your online store during the holiday sales. They鈥檇 push your deals right听when听a customer needs it:

welcoming newcomers with a special offer
catching those who are about to leave without a purchase with a nice discount
navigating customers to your bestsellers.

It鈥檚 great that you don鈥檛 need staff to do this job in your online store. Set up pop-ups for听different customer actions: exit intent, scroll, time spent in store,听etc. The 20+ Promotional Sales Tools听will do the sales work for you.

A discount popup made with the 20+ Promotional Sales Tools app

Pop-ups can even hold an engaging contest. Launch the Scratch and Win pop-up to capture leads and grow fans in a fun way.

Offer Discounts听on Order Subtotal

This type of听sale is based on the expectation that people will buy additional stuff to reach a certain threshold to get a discount.

To run this promo successfully, you should have a good portion of repeat customers that already know your product and are open to ordering more of it.

Set up discounts on order subtotal in .

Set Up Bulk Discount Pricing

Give a hint to your customers that they can buy several gifts of the same type for good money.

Bulk discount pricing

To do that, set up . Every next item will be cheaper and 黑料门 will automatically calculate the total discount in percent for even more impressive deals.

Create Discount Coupons

Ecommerce merchants love coupons for their flexibility. With their help, you can run a promo on many different terms:

Give a discount to repeat customers only
Give a discount depending on order subtotal
Offer free shipping on specific conditions and more.

It works听like this: you set the rules when听the听coupon can be applied, 黑料门 generates the coupon code (or you can create it yourself, for example, BLACKFRIDAY). Then you share the听code on your website, on social media, personally via email, by chanting it in the streets, by dropping听a bottle听in the 辞肠别补苍听鈥� the distribution really is up to you, depending on who you want to reach.

rockabilly-bowling-shirts.com

You can limit coupons in time (e.g.听active for 24 hours only) to run flash sales and last-minute deals.

Tip:听It鈥檚 so handy to create, enable,听and stop your discounts on the go with the 黑料门 Mobile app.

Offer Gift Wrapping

For free or for sale, gift wrapping offered together with a product is a time-saver. You can sell it as a separate product, or include it in .

Wrapping in Product Options

Push Your Deals at Checkout

Share offers and gift ideas at checkout with the Checkout Notices app. Use it also听to notify customers about important shipping terms or holiday business hours.

Promo at the checkout

Offer Flexible Discounts Based on Cart Contents

Depending on what you sell and your holiday campaign goals, you may need to create more sophisticated discounts than just “50% off on everything”. For example, you probably want to offer a special price on shoe care products if they are bought with shoes in your store.

To make your discount apply only to certain products or product combinations, categories, cart amount, local customers, date, customer groups etc., check out the Advanced Discount Rules app.

Create flexible offers with the Advanced Discount Rules app

Highlight Items for Sale with Labels

With Product Ribbons, you can add labels to the products on sale and customize them as you want. Use “Hot”, “New”, “Sale”, “Sold Out”, or other custom labels to draw your holiday shoppers鈥� attention.

Learn more and set up: Get More Eyes on Your Store with Product Ribbons

Show Related Products

Showing related products on product pages or at checkout can increase听the听time customers spend听in your store and result in a higher order value. If you sell supplementary products (e.g. razors and shaving cream), a听鈥榊ou May Also Like鈥� section is your sales machine.

Remind Visitors of Recently Viewed Products

The holiday sales frenzy can make customers distracted easily. There are so many deals out there, so many products to choose from. Follow them with the reminder of what products they just checked out as they are browsing your online store.

The Recently Viewed Products听app is a free extension that听helps听you do just that. Choose where to show this section and the number of products you want to display.

Enable Social Selling Tools

Use social media to spread the word and drum up more people. Open a storefront on your Facebook page, sell on Instagram or TikTok to allow customers to buy without leaving their favorite social media.

To quickly share your product pics on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest,听and Twitter, turn to 黑料门 Mobile.

Add a Linkup to Your Social Media Bio

Linkup is a free user-friendly link-in-bio tool. It allows you to create a mobile-friendly page with links to all your social profiles, work, content, and products. The latter is especially useful during the holiday season so that your followers can quickly find the products they need.

An example of a Linkup page

If you already have an 黑料门 store, you can easily add any product from your catalog to your Linkup page — no need to create it again.

Plus, Linkup comes in handy if features like Facebook Shop or Instagram Shop are not supported in your country. This way, you can still sell on social media!

Create Urgency and Scarcity

There is a number of ways to cheer up your customers while they are browsing.

Add a countdown timer — because no one wants to miss a great deal. The 黑料门 App Market offers the Countdown Timer Popup app. You can display such popup immediately, after a set period of time, on a page鈥檚 scroll down or upon site exit.

To create additional scarcity, show customers how much (or not so much) you have听left听in stock. Go to 听and enable to show stock to customers in the “Sidebar” section.

Last, choose not to hide products that are out of stock; seeing that some products are sold out creates additional Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO). To show out of stock products, turn off the “Hide out of stock products” in your 黑料门 admin, in the page.

By the way, you can also for sold-out items. To start accepting pre-orders for a product, you need to indicate its stock in your 黑料门 admin and set pre-orders as the out-of-stock behavior for this product. Once the stock hits “0”, the product automatically becomes available for pre-orders.

Advertise

If your marketing budget allows you to run paid ads, here鈥檙e some tools to help you out:

Remarketing and dynamic ads on Facebook, Instagram,听and Audience Network with the Facebook Pixel听(蹿谤别别!)
Automated Google Shopping Ads

Offer Gift Cards

A gift card is the single . Plus, 59% of gift card recipients will actually spend more than the amount on their gift card.

You can set up gift cards in your . You can customize your gift card by changing its name, amounts, or image that will be used in the storefront.

Use Product Subtitles

With Product Subtitles, you can describe a product鈥檚 advantages right on the product list, for example, a special offer or services available (say, free shipping or free gift wrapping.)

Free offer in product subtitles 黑料门

With subtitles, a product鈥檚 benefits are visible right on your storefront, so that customers don鈥檛 have to open a product page for details. That helps your customers find the right product faster and brings attention to items with special offers.

Learn more and set up: Highlight the Value of Your Products With Product Subtitles