The five-day period consisting of Thanksgiving, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the busiest period for online shoppers and brings in humongous sales for the eCommerce retailers. The busy shopping hours are drawing closer and it is high time to start preparing for BFCM 2020 marketing strategies at the earliest to boost your sales.
First, let’s have a look at a few stats collected by Forbes in this holiday period in 2018.
Thanksgiving captured $4.2 billion in online sales which was nearly 19% growth as compared to its previous year.
Black Friday hit a $7.4billion revenue mark in 2019 in the U.S. which was approximately 6.2 billion in 2018.
Cyber Monday was the highest-selling day, achieving $9.4billion in online sales.
The holiday eCommerce sales recorded an advance 3.4% haul during the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday
That makes it a rough figure of $21 billion in total for all the three holidays combined. With these sky-touching numbers, there does not even raise a question as to why you shouldn’t shift your complete focus towards planning out for these holidays. Here are a few Thanksgiving and BFCM 2020 marketing strategies and ideas to scale-up your revenue.
1. Make the best use of the Home Page
The first in the list of BFCM marketing ideas would be to customize your homepage.
If you receive a significant amount of traffic on your website on a daily basis, it would be wise to catch the user’s attention with a theme-based homepage. Well, even if the traffic volume is low, you should be focused on designing your website’s home page for the Black Friday Cyber Monday Marketing.
For example, you can set a totally dark background on Black Friday with a “Black Friday” text to catch the holiday spirit.
Or if you have a spin and win popup, you can customize it for different occasions. A similar approach can be followed for Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
You can highlight the coupon code and feed it into a user’s mind as soon as they enter your store. The time-saving approach avoids the need to search for the offers section.
2. Do the makeover of your Ecommerce store
The time is now! Give your store a makeover before the eCommerce biggest holiday season sale. Planning for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the ensuing holiday season is overwhelming to drive your business’s main sales in the fourth quarter as well as the rest of the year.
To make it look attractive and engaging, add some decorative elements to your store. Give it a festive look and get ready for the largest holiday season sales.
You can change the look and feel of the store by adding some colors to it,
Wondering how to do this? If you have your store on the PrestaShop platform then Website Decoration Effects can be added to it. To entice your customers, you can show a discount coupon strip on the website pages. It will be effective if you can put some efforts into mobile creative and user experience design.
3. Offer Buy Online In-Store Pickup (BOPIS)
You must be thinking why I am adding the BOPIS model in the top marketing strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales. Here are some numbers from the previous year that highlights 43% growth in BOPIS service providing retailers. If you have a physical store as well as a digital platform then offering BOPIS (buy online, pickup in-store) this year will add new value to your store.
With more competition among retailers than ever, shoppers increasingly looked for full convenience and time saving and BOPIS is the one you can fire with.
Refer to this article if you want to get ready for offering BOPIS services to your customers before the freakiest five-day festive sales.
4. Utilize the Social Media platforms
User engagement on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is at a peak during the holiday season. And there is a flood of posts by Brands to make their audience/followers aware of the enticing offers.
Social media marketing strategy for Thanksgiving and BCFM needs to be planned way in advance as these holidays come one after another. So you need to take quick action.
To start with the least, you can replace your existing brand profile picture and cover image with a holiday-specific image. Thereafter, you can schedule your posts for a suitable time, mostly when the reach is higher. And you can also take the help of Social media advertising to make your posts reach out to a larger number of audiences.
Most importantly, do not forget to use hashtags. Hashtags might not be effective on Facebook but can give you a huge boost on other social media channels like Instagram and Twitter.
Add some reels and allow people to explore your feeds on Instagram.
5. Shout out to your customers via Email
Adding to the list of Black Friday Cyber Monday strategies is sending an email blast to your subscribers and making them aware of your offers for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Or you can segment your customers and target them separately.
Though email marketing, today, is not as effective as it used to be, it is still one of the best practices to perform during the holiday season.
To make sure your emails deliver useful results, try not to follow the conventional approach.
What to do?
Come up with a catchy subject line. When the notification pops up on your user’s mobile or desktop, it should be tempting enough for them to open it and read the inside content.
Secondly, if you have a specific coupon code, highlight it in your email content. Last but not least, set your timing right. Schedule your emails for the time when your users are highly active.
6. Create Urgency by setting up a Countdown Timer
Customers generally like to compare the product’s price with your competitors’. They wait for the prices to drop, and then buy from the one offered at the lowest price.
Let customers not feel that they can claim the offer at any time during the day. Create a sense of urgency by displaying a countdown timer on your product pages so that the customers fear missing out on the sale. This provides you with an excellent opportunity to close the sale at that very moment.
You can also display a countdown timer at the homepage revealing the commencement of the holiday seasonal sale so that customers are very well informed when the sale is going to start. This should be included in your emails too.
7. Introduce Gift Cards
If you can leverage your customers to buy for themselves, it is ideal but even better if you can inspire them to buy for their friends and family as well. The only thing that online shoppers look for during busy shopping days is Gift Cards. Digital Gift Cards have eased the load of searching for a perfect gift.
Now, when people have a shortage of time to purchase gifts, they opt for the Gift Card option. This is why gift cards can be a sales booster for your online business.
Designing a theme-based gift card for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday would make up an ideal way to allow your customers to purchase a gift card and keep the holiday feel. This makes it one of the effective BFCM marketing ideas.
Not having a Gift Card section but want to add it to your website? Turn to Knowband’s Gift Card Manager.
Read: Why Digital Gift Cards are important to your Business?
8. Run a User-generated Content Campaign
A few days prior to this 5-day holiday period, you can announce a user-generated content campaign and ask users to participate in it using specific hashtags related to your brand and obviously the coming event.
For example, for the occasion of Black Friday, you can ask users to share what they purchase along with their experience with your brand, using your brand name and the product name in the hashtag. You can announce some gift vouchers for some lucky winners.
This way, not only you will encourage people to purchase but also grow your brand awareness. This type of marketing beats even paid to advertise.
9. Launch a Referral Program
A Referral program is a great form of word-of-mouth marketing, where you reward people for recommending your Brand/product(s) to others. It is an efficient and cost-effective way to acquire new customers and boost your sales.
You can run a limited-time referral program where you reward both the referrer and the referent when the latter makes a successful registration or makes a purchase. You can shout out this news on your social media pages as well.
Want to start a similar program? Check out
PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program
Magento Affiliate and Referral Program
Magento 2 Affiliate and Referral Program
10. Exclusive Offers For Loyal Customers
Make your loyal customers feel special by introducing exclusive offers for them. Or you can reward them with loyalty points and encourage them to return to your store and purchase. It enhances brand loyalty.
Loyal customers are your regular shoppers and they deserve to be treated special.
Knowband offers the Loyalty points module for PrestaShop, OpenCart, and Magento where you can reward not only the existing customers but also provide new customers with loyalty points when they register. Check out
Final word
You can adopt a few more ideas like Upselling and Cross-selling, triggering abandoned cart emails with a discount offer, etc. Preparing for the biggest online shopping week of the year can be daunting, but this holiday e-commerce season marketing guide will make it as smooth as possible. Utilize these thanksgiving and BFCM marketing ideas and strategies to the fullest. Do not leave this once in a year opportunity to skyrocket your sales.
All the best for the Holiday season!
Have something to ask? Do let me know in the comments below.
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