It’s Q4 and you know what’s right around the corner. It is of course BFCM21! The years seem to be getting shorter as 2021 has been none stop for both us as Shopify Experts and our clients constantly scaling.
Much like 2020, eCommerce is expected to lead BFCM21’s shopping season. Nodding back to the first paragraph, the years are getting shorter. With all of the COVID-19 hold-ups causing disruption to shipping times and pricing, brands should be focussing on an early start to their seasonal marketing.
Without any further preamble…
Here’s how you can get your Shopify store ready for BFCM21:
Start BFCM21 Early
Yes, mentioned in the first paragraph. You’re going to want to start your BFCM21 marketing fairly early. Around October, November is recommended to truly capitalise on the holiday season.
This means warming your audience up with some email marketing, maybe a few ads and start to think about your gift guides – What products will be included in your gift guides? What’re your hero products? And so on.
Stuck on where to start with BFCM21? We’ve put together some Black Friday Cyber Monday guides for Shopify merchants 👈 Tap it!
Building the foundations for BFCM21
You don’t want to get to October-November and realise you haven’t planted any seeds of warmed your audience up. NOW, yes, now as in September is the optimal time to start putting in the work to get the returns in a few months time.
- Ramp up paid social ads now – You want to be ramping up your ads so you have traffic to retarget when the holiday season is in full swing. It’s much more cost-effective for brands to be going after traffic that’s already familiar with them, rather than chasing your tail and burning ad spend with cold traffic.
- Grow your lists – Start growing your lists, even more, show people why your newsletter/mailing list is great and make sure you have your exit-intent popups working on your store.
BFCM21 Email Marketing TIP: You can grow your list by having exit-intent popups, make sure you offer some form of code or discount for new signups!
- Test, test and TEST! – Now is the time to be testing new things. Hit up your marketing team and get them to take advantage of different platforms, here are some that you can try…
🔥What’s hot? Tiktok. Whilst you may think “It’s just for the kids”, it definitely isn’t, in fact, it should be at the top of your social team’s agenda, especially for the holiday season. The great thing about TikTok is you can pump lots of traffic and conversions just through organic content, get creative! You’ll be surprised.
👻The ghost in the room. Whilst many have cast Snapchat aside and see it now as a dead platform. Some brands have seen this as a great opportunity to run ads and are seeing amazing success. Snapchat still has millions of monthly users. With other brands sticking with what they know like Facebook Ads, PPC and others, the friendly ghost has been ignored. Don’t miss out on what could be a big sales driver!
📌Hmmm, Pinteresting! Pinterest often gets cast aside, but it should definitely be considered if your brand matches the demographic of the platform. Both paid and organic content can work really well on Pinterest, creating guides for your customers is a great way to go about using the platform. Guides, infographics, steps to creating something can be big traffic drivers.
Whilst it may seem like quite some time away, the holiday season will soon be here. Planting the seeds now with ads and other outreach will make it so much easier for you to increase sales and have record sales throughout BFCM21.
Looking to work with a brand that can help you get ready for the holidays and help you scale beyond? Book a quick chat with us!
