If you are focused only on sales volume this BFCM (Black Friday and Cyber Monday), you’ll likely leave too much potential revenue on the table!
Why?
It’s a shopping holiday; shoppers are guaranteed to hit the online stores to buy. The secret to success is directing them to the right products and promotions when they get there. This way, you can make the most revenue and profit from every sale. But you need to do it quickly to outperform your competitors. So, where to start?
Here are five pro online merchandising hacks and strategies that will help you earn the most out of the peak shopping season.
1. Get Personal With Your BFCM Promotional Landing Page Design To Boost AOVs
Creating dedicated landing pages for BFCM promotions doesn’t only help you showcase exclusive deals. It also means you can tailor the shopping experience to both the holiday itself and the holiday shopper.
This is important if you want your customers to feel connected to your brand over the holiday season when they are likely flooded with many other offers. And you do! Connection encourages your shoppers to explore more products while they are actively shopping, which has the potential to increase your AOVs (average order values).
So, how do you do this for BFCM specifically?
First, you want to create BFCM-specific landing page designs. The easiest (and least expensive) way to do this is with landing page tools (like Replo!) that give you what you need to quickly create, optimize, and launch pages that are perfect for your online merchandising strategy.
Next, you want to look at ways to customize your promotional landing pages to individuals or niche customer segments. This could include adding more dynamic content or customized product recommendations to your pages that suggest products, bundles, or promotions a specific viewer is more likely to be on the hunt for.
Actionable Tips:
- Consider using countdown timers to create urgency with your promotional BFCM landing page
- Include customer reviews, UGC, or other social proof to help tempt first-time shoppers
- Test different page layouts to see how they do with different groups before rolling them out over the holidays
2. Focus On High-Margin Products When Planning Online Merchandising Strategies
Every holiday season naturally brings increased sales volume. By looking at how you can squeeze the most profit out of each of these sales, you can make the most revenue out of BFCM as possible. This also means you won’t have to rely solely on volume alone to increase your earnings over previous years.
How? You want to factor in inventory with higher margins into your conversation rate funnels, product sorting, collections, recommendations, and bundling strategies.
The best way to do this is with online merchandising tools like ours—Kimonix. Our advanced AI merchandising strategy engine (AMS) lets you build, sort, automate, A/B test, and optimize smart collections based on your goals, inventory constraints, and shopper demand.
Additionally, you could build a customized landing page design for your high-margin products that include compelling storytelling and different images that put a spotlight on their value, features, or benefits. You could then link these through your homepage collections or off-site marketing campaigns.
Actionable Tips:
- Bundle your high-margin inventory with complementary products you are trying to get rid of to increase AOVs while reducing slow movers
- Take a multi-parameter approach that factors margins into your best-seller lists so that the best-selling products with the highest margin potential are on top of collections
- Display your high-margin products in prime merchandising retail spaces, like your homepage promotion boxes and top navigation menus.
3. Reach High-Value Customers With Clever Inventory Segmentation Strategies
Another way you can get the most out of BFCM is by fine-tuning inventory optimization and management with segmentation. This is because inventory segmentation lets you sort your products by customer profiles, ensuring that high-demand items are available to your most valid shoppers.
It also sets you up to having the right products for the right shoppers, improving your BFCM personalized marketing and off-site merchandising.
For instance, you could use inventory segments based on purchasing history and performances to improve your email marketing. Let’s say you are an online beauty store; this could mean allocating higher stock levels of premium skincare products to loyal customers. You would then send these customers personalized BFCM email campaigns featuring these high-margin items.
Alternatively, you could allocate inventory exclusively to audiences who were very engaged through Instagram or TikTok throughout the year. Then, create promotions for these specific platforms to highlight these product segments over the holiday season.
The bottom line is that you want to ensure that the BFCM products you promote are readily available and appealing to different groups of shoppers.
Actionable Tips:
- Use predictive analytics tools to forecast which inventory segments will be most popular with your high-value customers and adjust stock accordingly
- Set up automated alerts within each inventory segment to avoid missed BFCM sales and conversion rate optimization opportunities
- Create a segment-specific landing page design that show off the most relevant products to each high-value customer group
4. Combine Modern Analytics With Traditional Storytelling
Data and automation technology are essential tools for BFCM success and conversion rate optimization. But it’s the emotion generated from your brand or product story that is likely to get your shopper to interact. The secret to holiday success is marrying the two!
To do this, you first need to invest in professional ecommerce analytics tools like Google Analytics, CRM systems, or AI-powered platforms that give you deep insights into customer behavior and preferences. Then use these insights to improve your storytelling—speaking to your audiences, tapping into their wants, needs, passions, pains, etc.
Let’s say you have positioned your brand as an eco-friendly apparel line, and your social media data shows that your audience is super responsive to your sustainability content.
You could then use this knowledge to create brand stories around the sustainable materials you use, your ethical manufacturing processes, or the positive environmental impact each sale has on sustainability. Then, integrate these stories into your Black Friday Cyber Monday product promotions, your store’s homepage, or in your holiday eco-friendly apparel collections.
A great example of this is Sephora’s "Beauty Uncomplicated" campaign. By analyzing past BFCM data, they forecasted which products would likely be the most popular and then optimized their inventory accordingly. They then combined the power of storytelling with this data by using this campaign to highlight authentic customer stories and real-life testimonials. This turned their storytelling into a high-performing conversion rate funnel.
Actionable Tips:
- Use data insights to figure out which stories engage your audience the most and spotlight those in your BFCM marketing
- Opt for images or videos that connect with your audience’s preferences, reflected in the data, to enhance your brand story
- Place your product stories in high-traffic areas of your website and BFCM landing pages
5. Integrating Consumer Trends And Feedback Into Your Strategies
Last but not least, let's talk trends and feedback.
You can drive conversion rates by embracing some of the biggest shopping trends in your BFCM. These could include:
- A need for flexible payment options and plans
- The growing demand for eco-friendly and/or sustainable practices and products
- An increased preference for live shopping events and social media shopping
Listening to your customers is crucial. Their feedback will give you many actionable insights into their preferences and pain points that you can use for anything from choosing which products go into your BFCM promotional displays to defining your marketing messaging for off-site merchandising.
But don’t stop there! You also want to set your brand up (with tools like Sprout Social or Brandwatch) to follow comments and discussions about your brand and products across social media platforms in real-time during the BFCM period.
Actionable Tips:
- Review top shopping trends and see which elements you can still cost-effectively test and implement in time for the holiday season
- Dig into your customer feedback to spot those products that appeal most to your shoppers, highlighting them in your BFCM website merchandising displays and off-site marketing
- Offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday discounts or bundles that align with the products and features your shoppers have expressed the most interest in during the year
- Upgrade your product descriptions to include storytelling elements that answer customer feedback and trending interests
Closing Thoughts: Use Replo And Kimonix To Upgrade Your Online Merchandising This BFCM
We know that as BFCM approaches, the competition will heat up at a dramatic pace. But by implementing these online merchandising hacks, you will be ready to stand out from the crowd to attract the right shoppers and maximize profitability and customer satisfaction during these peak shopping days. Not to mention setting yourself up for Black Friday Cyber Monday conversion rate optimization.
The easiest, most cost-effective way to implement these strategies is by investing in tools like Replo and Kimonix. Replo allows you to quickly build, optimize, and launch high-converting Shopify pages tailored for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. At the same time, Kimonix’s advanced AI merchandising strategy engine helps you automate and fine-tune your product collections based on real-time data and shopper demand.
Both tools will help you improve your merchandising workflow, optimize your BFCM strategies, and ensure that you can make the most out of every shopper engagement and sale. This means you not only rack up Black Friday and Cyber Monday revenue but build long-term customer retention and loyalty.