Everything You Need to Know for Big BFCM Success [2022 Edition]
How your store can take advantage of the biggest sale of the year for huge brand and customer base growth
Introduction
What is BFCM?
Email Marketing Benchmarks
What Should I Aim for?
BFCM Planning Calendar
When Should I Start Preparing for BFCM?
Anatomy of a Winning Email
How Should my Emails Look for BFCM?
Key Lifecycle Marketing Strategies
How do I use Email and SMS marketing strategies for BFCM?
BFCM Best Practices
What are the top-recommended BFCM tactics I Should Know?
INTRODUCTION
What is BFCM?
BFCM is short for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season where stores shower consumers with a myriad of discounts and promos.
Cyber Monday follows up Black Friday as the last major sales event in a year, with more focus on website-exclusive deals.
So, why shouldn’t you miss out on these holiday sales events in particular?
They’re regarded as THE BIGGEST sales events that happen in a year for retail and even eCommerce stores.
This combination of major sales events would see millions upon millions of shoppers with the latest recorded online shopper count reaching more than 186 million in 2021’s BFCM.
Other BFCM stats you should consider:
- Consumers spend an average of $301.27 on gifts during BFCM
- 69% of product discovery and browsing happened on mobile devices
- Mobile devices attributed to 42% of Black Friday revenue
- Average cart value of consumers would reach around the $100 range
- About 47 million shoppers bought from Shopify-powered stores
- Worldwide sales increased by 23% between 2021 and 2020 BFCM sales
Another reason why you should prepare for BFCM? Your competition will be as high, if not higher, as the potential rewards you can reap from this holiday sale.
In fact, BFCM just keeps getting bigger and BIGGER as the years pass.
Is BFCM Celebrated Globally?
BFCM may just be an American sale event, but eCommerce stores from around the world are gaining huge profits for taking part in it. In fact, global sales reached $6.3 billion as of 2021’s BFCM.
Other countries also have their own equivalent of BFCM, here’s a quick list of big sales events that happen around the same season as BFCM:
- The Middle East celebrates White Day, launched by the online retailer souq.com which sold 1.2 million products over the sale weekend in 2016.
- China has Singles Day, which at one point surpassed BFCM sales by 4x in 2017. Even Australian consumers spent an estimated $150 million over the sale weekend.
- UK and Muslim communities would have Ramadan which, aside from its religious significance, is also a hugely celebrated retail event.
- Mexico has El Buen Fin where local stores also highlight big sales and discounts.
- India has the Diwali Festival where shoppers spent $146 billion back in 2016.
Email Marketing Benchmarks:
What Numbers Should I Aim for in Preparation for BFCM?
How do you know when your email marketing systems are ready to take full advantage of the BFCM season? This is when you should start asking yourself questions like—
- Are subscribers opening my emails?
- Are my CTAs getting clicked?
- Do I have the right flows set up?
- Are my flows optimized for BFCM?
To help you answer these questions, we’ve come up with a checklist of benchmarks you should aim for:
Why is open rate important?
This is the main metric that would tell you how often or how less your subscribers open your emails.
If your open rate is low, you can expect it could have something to do with your subject lines, preview text, send times, or even your sender name.
Why is click rate important?
Click rate can help you determine if subscribers are clicking the CTAs in your emails.
If you notice you have low click rates, you’ll need to revisit how to present your CTAs.
Are they clear and visible? Are they just embedded clickable text links or have visual button GFX? Should they be static clickable images or animated CTAs?
BFCM Planning Calendar:
When Should I Start Preparing for BFCM?
As a rule of thumb, you’ll need to start preparations as soon as Q2. You’re main concern, however, would be when to start your BFCM campaigns.
Based on our experience working with our clients, we’ve narrowed the best time to start your BFCM campaigns on as early as late October to mid-November.
Here are some of the highlights from our clients who started their campaigns within that time range:
This means the revenue your campaigns would generate could potentially reach an average of 50% if you were to start your campaigns within this earlier time range.
Based on this recommended launch time, here’s a brief calendar plan breakdown of actionables for your BFCM prep beforehand:
Anatomy of a Winning Email:
How Should my Emails Look?
You should be sending only the best of the best that your email marketing arsenal has to offer.
This is why we recommend you start your BFCM preparations as early as Q2, it’s to give you enough time to A/B test and optimize your emails accordingly.
Here’s a great example of how a winning email should look:
To take your emails further for BFCM, here are some quick tips to make your emails convert:
Key Lifecycle Marketing Strategies:
How do I use Email, SMS, and Push Notification Marketing Strategies for BFCM?
Email and SMS marketing is like a match made in heaven. Email’s high personalization and customizability paired with SMS’ high reach and almost guaranteed deliverability make up for each other’s weaknesses.
Top it all off with push notification marketing and you’ve got a recipe for success.
So, what strategies of each can you use to maximize your BFCM profits?
You can break down your overall BFCM marketing strategy into three major parts:
- Integrate exclusivity to make your customers feel valued and important
- Tease your customers about what’s coming up in your BFCM sale
- Use FOMO to make your customers feel like they’re losing something big by not signing up to your channels
- Lifestyle
For email marketing, the 6-Step Holiday Sales Sequence is something we’ve developed and applied in many of our clients’ email marketing systems—with promising results.
Essentially, this sequence is geared towards hyping up your audience, nurturing them throughout the sales event, and instilling urgency by the near end.
Here’s a brief breakdown of the process:
For SMS marketing, you can leverage these 3 creative strategies:
If your store has an app, push notification marketing is a must-have.
For one, push notifications are permission-based. What this means is that people who allow them are already telling you they are very much interested in your brand’s products and content.
By the way, we observed that our clients with apps for their stores would generate 7% of their overall revenue. This is because apps act as a convenient way to access your store through their mobile devices.
On the other hand, they work effectively as reminders for your customers. Got some abandoned carts? Need to remind your customers that BFCM is almost over? Do some of your customers still have unused discount codes?
Push notifications guarantee that your customers see what you need them to see since they display as these big banners on their mobile device screens.
BFCM Marketing Best Practices:
What are the Top Recommended BFCM Tactics I Should Know?
Key Takeaways
Use only the best strategies and collaterals your marketing can dish out from months of A/B testing. You shouldn't be A/B testing anything in the middle of BFCM.
Hype is key. Give your subscribers a huge headstart so they can start setting aside shopping funds and looking up what to buy from your store.
Prepare early. Nothing throws a wrench in your operations harder than avoidable issues that could have been ironed out earlier. Test your site and optimize your lists for a smoother sailing BFCM.
Launch early. Reward your most loyal customers with early exclusive access to your sale to maintain their strong relationship with your brand. This will also give your store a headstart on making sales BFCM sales—it’s a win-win!
Revisit your existing flows and align them with BFCM. You don’t have to make new flows from scratch. Save time and production by aligning your existing flows with BFCM.
Key Takeaways
Lifecycle marketing is responsible for the long-running and sustainable eCommerce success of many 7 to 8-figure brands.
Customer-centricity is key to future-proofing your DTC store.
Customer retention is more cost-efficient and overall presents a more long-term and sustainable growth solution for eCommerce businesses.
Leverage direct marketing channels to establish direct communication with your customers as well as bring forward products and services that they would be interested in.
Omnichannel marketing is important to help tie all your existing marketing channels together for a seamless and consistent customer experience.
