Ecommerce continues to boom globally as shopping behaviours adapt. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are fast approaching, and now’s the time to prepare your ecommerce store for success. Also known as Cyber Weekend from Friday 27 November to Monday 30 November 2020—one of the biggest shopping events of the year.
Pre-orders create hype, and here’s how you collect them
Set up your coupons and promotions for special offers. Remember to set your start and end dates to match the pre-order period you are offering. You’ll want to make it clear to your customers that the offer is a pre-order and when the items will be dispatched. Collecting pre-orders is a sale and works the same as for in-stock products but you can add descriptions in the heading and/or body text blocks to specify that it’s a pre-order product.
Optimise your online store for mobile screens
The great news is Rocketspark websites are fully mobile responsive but it’s important to understand how your blocks and stacks of content work on mobile so that your design is fully optimised. Always check out the mobile preview to see how the site looks on mobile. It’s important to make sure that your stacks line up on both desktop and mobile.
For example, you add 2 product images across a 2 column stack. You add another 2 column stack below, with the relevant descriptive text aligned under each image. When you check the mobile preview, both images will appear together on mobile, followed by all of the text blocks, the alignment has shifted.
Devise a discount strategy
Consider setting a minimum spend for your coupons so that you increase the average order value rather than just providing a straight discount.
Bundled offers containing a selection of items, for example gift baskets or multi-buys, is another way to increase average order value while providing a nice offer of complementary products to your customers.
Another way to create hype around a sale on your online store is on social media or via a mass email blast using the same discount coupon code, where recipients can only use it once. Read more about Rocketspark's Single use per customer coupon.
A/B testing—take the opportunity to learn more about your customers
A/B testing is where you test different elements of your website to see what changes have the best outcome. For example, you might test different offers, text, pictures, layouts and calls to action to see what generates the best engagement and sales. Set different start and end dates to your coupons and promotions to test different offers at different times. If you want to be more sophisticated you might consider an A/B testing tool such as Google Optimize which provides concurrent tests on your website.
Measure the results to gain good insights:
Customise Cross Sells
Set up related products in your store to make it easy to cross sell complementary products. You can A/B test different offers by trying different related products with unique offers.
If your past customers have opted in to receive email updates you could run a report on past sales and create targeted offer emails based on purchase history, this is a great way to draw people back to your store.
Make sure your website and online store is optimised for Google
A higher ranking in the search results provided by the search engine will give you a greater chance of people visiting your site. Optimising your website to obtain a good search ranking is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and pretty much everything you need to know right now about the subject can be found here.
When you use Rocketspark's built-in SEO tools you'll be guided through the process.
Insights available right from your Rocketspark Ecommerce Pro dashboard
If you’re using Rocketspark Ecommerce Pro you can see at a glance who your best customers are. You may spot some value customers that haven’t made a purchase in a while and create a special discount coupon just for them to draw them back for the Black Friday / Cyber Monday shopping event.
Empower your success with Rocketspark’s latest ecommerce features
At Rocketspark, our primary focus is to find ways to empower you to have a fresh and current looking website with all the bells and whistles that make operating an online store easier. Check out just some of the features available to you on a Rocketspark Ecommerce plan.
Do you need help from a designer to create an ecommerce store?
Check out this page for web design package info, then let us know what you need.
