Maximise success in upcoming busy periods

Planning ahead is key

As Autumn arrives, retailers will be gearing up for likely one of the busiest periods of the year:

Black Friday

Christmas

January Sales

It's not too late to start planning your online strategy for these events, read on to find out more about ideas & tools to make the most of this season!

Note: the studio is increasingly busy at this time of year, please get your ticket requests in ASAP! Larger project works will need to be reviewed on a case by case basis.

Promotions

Your first port of call for Black Friday and subsequent seasonal periods is likely your Promotions on the site. You can set up various offers, for example, buy 1 get 1 free, free delivery and % off qualifying products.

The most effective marketing is often the simplest and the science is clear: conversions are really driven by fear. The fear of missing out!

Top tip: have a practice run of your chosen promotion ahead of Black Friday to ensure it's working the way you want it to! Reach out to your Account Manager if you need any help to ensure the promo runs smoothly ahead of the big day itself.

Learn more about the Principles of Urgency

Product Overlays

If you've got great deals on your website, let your customers know! Product overlays are a great way to showcase your offers on specific products at a glance.

For Black Friday, consider leaning into the theme and using black overlay graphics to really make it clear this is a special seasonal promotion.

IXO Commerce gives you the tools to easily manage your overlay library and automate their assignment to your products.

Dedicated Deals Area

Consider grouping your unmissable offers into a dedicated landing page or category for easy access. Not only will all your promotional products be in the same place but this can also then be linked to in your email and social media marketing.

Landing pages or new categories are a great manual approach to group eligible items together. If you're looking for automation, IXO Commerce offers Dynamic Categories that can do most of the heavy lifting for you - find out more here!

View a Demo Clearance category

Promo Banners

Get creative with banners to highlight the promotion of the moment! There's a lot of flexibility with banners in terms of design but also placement.

Specific graphics for Black Friday, Christmas and January Sales will help to make it really clear what's on offer and drive home how long customers can expect the deals to stick around for.

With IXO, you can attach banners to nearly every page on the site including Categories, Collections, Brands, Products and Landing Pages. Don't miss an opportunity to make your users aware!

On-Site Messaging

Now you have promotions created and products assigned, utilise the rest of the website to make sure your customers don't miss out!

Hero Banners

The site's hero banner is the flagship for promotion on your homepage as it's usually the first visual customers are greeted with when landing on the website.

Consider using an impactful hero banner to showcase your best offers and theme this according to the seasonal promotion period.

IXO includes features such as 'Get the Look' where products shown in your hero banner imagery are then displayed in a corresponding carousel beneath - giving customers easy access to shop the items being promoted.

See Demo hero banners in action

Homepage

Expanding on the hero banner, there's also scope to utilise the rest of your homepage to promote your seasonal promotions. It's good practice to keep the imagery and content fresh here - showcase the arrival of a new range or brand.

A website's homepage is almost like a shop window, giving customers an insight into what is available should they browse further.

Make use of feature boxes, videos, temporary message bars, countdown timers to get your message across effectively.

Popups

Popups are an excellent way to capture a user's attention and present them with something specific. Perhaps there's an incentive of a discount code if they sign up to your newsletter - make them aware using a popup!

IXO Commerce has a custom popup builder feature where you can tailor how long before a popup appears, what triggers its activation and even which specific customers are targeted.

Customer appears to be heading to close the tab? Trigger a popup asking if they need help, with a link to your Contact page!

Social Proof

Why should shoppers buy from your site? Offer them service and product specific reviews from real happy customers to encourage a conversion.

Displaying recent and real reviews from actual customers is an effective way to persuade users to take the plunge and check out with one of your amazing seasonal offers!

As a Trustpilot Pro Partner, our clients can benefit from a close working relationship with Trustpilot to achieve this. Not only can you display your reviews across the site but once the promotional rush is over you can automate review chasers to keep those fresh reviews coming in.

Find out more about Trustpilot

Email Marketing

What if your customers aren't looking at the website? Draw them in with effective email marketing that utilises incentives and audience segmentation.

There are a number of email marketing services out there with excellent tools to create eye-catching emails designed invite users to browse the site and ideally convert into a paying customer.

Let your customers know straight to their inbox about the offers you have available by sending a newsletter that links through to your dedicated landing page or category.

Top tip: reward your loyal customers by giving your subscribers an early access promo code and generate return custom.

Find out more about email marketing

If your subscriber list could do with a boost, is your website equipped to easily gather those email addresses:

Is there an email sign up field on your homepage?

Are customers invited to subscribe when submitting a query or placing an order?

What is the incentive for users to sign up for your mailing list?

From here, consider segmenting your audience into targetable groups. Most email marketing services have tools to achieve this. In addition, IXO Commerce can create Dynamic Customer Groups based on rules such as: average spend, last order date, brands/collections/categories purchased and account type.

Social Media

Reach your loyal and potential customers on other channels whilst also gathering valuable social proof from real people.

Initially, get the word out and inform your followers of the latest when it comes to Black Friday and Christmas by posting on your social media accounts. Rather than trying to have a low impact presence across every single platform, decide which socials are most effective for your business and invest the energy into those.

Even better, consider maximising the features certain platforms have to offer - such as Meta.

By connecting your website catalogue with your Meta Business account, you can set up a Facebook Shop and implement Instagram Product Tagging on your posts. Both of these help you to tie in your social posts with direct links back to the website.

In addition, the Meta Product Feed is dynamic so any changes you make to your products on the website automatically update on your social accounts too!

Posted by Georgia Caird
27th October 2023