Black Friday is coming: Here’s what ecommerce should do to succeed this holiday season.
Here comes the trend of this 2020 shopping season “Getting a fresh Christmas tree delivered to a customer’s doorstep.”
Black Friday is when crowds are taboo but customers still want deals. However, the situation is changing this year.
Due to the spread of the global pandemic, you will less expect to see packed mall parking lots, crowded shops, long lines of people or thick crowds at the mall, which have long been considered the “signature” of the holiday shopping season.
Not only yet the holiday sales days will come with pandemic-related precautions that give shoppers reason to avoid crowds but also because online shopping is taking the dominance.
According to Salesforce’s latest research on billions of users during Cyber week, the first time, the majority of holiday shoppers (64%) browsed and made purchases on mobile devices.
That’s why we should be very thoughtful as we planned this year’s event: focus on sales online, make it possible for shoppers to browse and buy almost everything from their couch or on their smartphones.
If this Black Friday is do-or-die to my business, Here is what I will do…
Pay attention to your website
That’s because your website is your sales page.
And your site’s user experience is one of the most significant factors impacting conversions.
It was rumored that your eCommerce business is only as strong as your website. To back up this theory, Stanford published a research revealing that 75% of internet users will make judgments about a business’s credibility based solely on how their website looks.
That means a good website design will pay the way to your holiday sales success. From your brand represent to your website’s appearance and usability, to your marketing message and product display, they must be smartly designed to maximize the user experience.
So, here are a few tips on how to improve your website for better Black Friday sales holiday:
1. Keep your homepage simple and don’t overwhelm your customers with too much information. List only a few main products with instructions on your landing page and present only a couple of CTA. It will persuade your customers to click on the call-to-action button or click through to the main page for the actual purchase.
2. Try to add tailor-made video explanations for each product or about what you’re offering to better communicate with your potential customers. Let your products & services sell themselves!
3. Don’t forget a very important factor The Speed of Your Website: your website page speed needs to be as fast as you can make it, in less than 3 seconds. Don’t make your customers wait too long. Nobody wants to stick their eyes in the screen waiting for the page to load. They would rather move to another site that is offering the same product and service in a wink of an eye.
4. Simple the checkout & payment process: You have to make it easy for site visitors to buy your products. The longer it takes for a consumer to check out, the more likely they are to abandon the cart. The checkout process needs to be as time-efficient as possible. You can do this by:
- Made the process mobile friendly so people can easily place the order on the phone.
- Reduce the required information customers need to input for checkout.
- Offer the options to pay with various payment types
Because they’ve come to expect this convenience of their online shopping experiences. By making these options available, you can capture every sale you can. Web-based businesses that don’t offer DIY purchase and payment are losing out millions of revenue since people are not willing to wait for your sales rep to call back and confirm the order.
Install Chatbot
Chatbot has been around for a while but it starts to gain greater popularity this year, along with other online meeting tools like Skype or Zoom.
While it’ll take you a lot of time, effort and money to renovate your website, it’ll only take you a few hours plus a few dollars to get one chatbot set up and running for Black Friday coming.
And the power of chatbot for the ecommerce holiday sales season could be endless.
1. Say Hi to your visitors through chatbots — at Any Time of the Day
Perhaps you’re spending a ton of money on ads to drive traffic to your site, but once people get to your site, they end up feeling lost and aren’t sure where to go, how to find what they’re looking for. They’ll bounce and never come back.
At the end of the day, it’s the conversion rate that matters the most.
In this case, you have chatbots that are always on. It will help welcome your customers, catch their attention, provide them with valuable information to keep them on the site longer and even connect them with your sales team.
2. Chatbot can also act as a provider of information.
Simply input your product list, product descriptions, pricing and other information into bots, it will help you do the job of a normal sales staff.
You can customize a chatbot to automatically talk with your visitors, ask them a few questions to understand what they’re looking for, suggest a suitable product or point them to the best place to find it. Don’t just drop them on a page and let them be on their own.
3. Capture Customers Contact for Sales
Not every visitor is ready to make a purchase right away. They want to go and look at other shops to find the best price, or they may realize they don’t really want or need something at that time. However, there’s still a chance to convert them into your customers later using chatbot.
To be specific, you can use chatbot to capture customers email addresses and add them to your newsletter, where you can stay top of mind, automatically keep them updated with your latest products, promotions or upcoming updates until they finally are ready to buy.
4. Offer DIY (Do-it-yourself) purchase and immediate support
Research from IBM shows that 33% of Millennials are only willing to wait 1 to 3 minutes to get a response, 56% of Millennials have switched from one company to another because of underwhelming customer service.
During the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), the situation can get worse.
Delivering a cost-effective and round the clock customer service has always been challenging, but customers are now more demanding than they ever have been. Here comes the solution: Self-service. Deliver by bots.
Chatbot can help automate customer requests as virtual shopping assistants. According to a report carried out by Salesforce in 2018 , 69% of people prefer talking to a chatbot that can provide instant answers, instead of waiting for a human to step in and handle their request.
Today, this tool can perform and carry out many advanced actions/ functions beyond just sending replies with predefined answers. It could let users purchase and process payment during the conversations, and help you capture every sale!
Summing it all up, I’d like to list here just a few usabilities of chatbot.
- Automate conversations to collect all users’ data
- Send marketing or promotion messages on customers’ interest
- Reduce shopping cart abandonment with targeted and timely discounts
- Collect orders and simplify purchase process with direct payment
- Integrate with outside service and systems for data practice
Save time and money with AI-powered chatbots
The cost of hiring more full-time employees to handle the holiday season madness certainly isn’t low. If you want to find out more about how chatbots can help you win on Black Friday while significantly reducing costs, try BotStar.
With BotStar, you can build a bot that performs complex actions besides just offering automatic responses. We offer tools which allow your bot to handle multiple business daily tasks that usually require human touch.