#72. The Last-Minute Black Friday Cyber Monday Checklist | Podcast

Alissa: 0:16

The saga continues, continues, continues. We’re going to be talking about a last minute checklist for your Black Friday Cyber Monday emails. 

Alissa: 0:31

Hello. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Email Einstein. Vira and Alissa, here we are, two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. Guys, if you’re not saying this along with me by this point, I question how much you’re actually dedicated to this podcast. Vira and I are super passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium, full service, e commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we’re all about here at Flowium. And we also love sagas because the Black Friday saga continues.

Vira: 1:37

And technically it’s going to be our last Black Friday Friday episode because I just realized that today is like literally a week until the Thanksgiving. So by the time you will be listening to this podcast, you will be like two days or like three days away from Black Friday Cyber Monday. So today we will be talking about like literally the last, last minute checklist for Black Friday Cyber Monday. So here it comes. You guys probably like experience it yourself, but Covid has definitely turned the entire shopping experience on its head over the last years. And I think in like 2020, Americans were expected to spend more money online than in stores for the very first time in history, like, ever. Well, this year online shopping has become the norm. It’s like the necessity for many people is the norm. And I mean, we are not even surprised that more people are shopping online than in physical stores. According to recent Shopify survey, actually 90% of business owners think that people will actually purchase more online than in store. And we are actually one of those people who strongly believe in online. Yeah, we might be biased, but today we will be actually talking about that biggest day of the year, which for most of us it’s Black Friday. Right? And for most of our in E commerce and we’ll discuss like six last minute things that you can check before going into the Black Friday Cyber Monday mode. So Alisa, what’s the number one thing to check before you start sending the campaigns?

Alissa: 3:33

This is a big one. This is like a huge one and I think this one is so obvious it’s overlooked. So everyone pay attention. Number one, check and optimize your website speed. This is so important. So we’ve all heard the saying, slow and steady wins the race. Not the case when it comes to Black Friday and your e commerce store. More users than ever are actually going to be accessing your website from their smartphone and they expect websites to load as soon as they click on the hyperlink. If your webpage is very slow when it comes to loading, it will lead to a high bounce rate, low user engagement, less traffic and will adversely affect your sales. So we talked about this. Gosh, I don’t even remember what episode we talked about this with.

Vira: 4:19

The beginning I think.

Alissa: 4:21

Yeah, it was a long time ago but we had talked about when your website is not loading properly, people actually lose trust in your brand and your website as a whole. And they’ll just leave because it makes people panic thinking like, well if I put input my credit card information and this is slowly, slowly loading, is my credit information going to be stolen? Is my purchase going through? Am I going to get triple, triple charge, double charged? What’s the deal here? So make sure that you really, really focus on your website speed. And I have like a little stat here. So if your website takes one to three seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. If it takes, yeah, right, right. If it goes from 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of your bounce increases by 90%. 1 to 6 seconds, the probability of bounce increases to 106%. And 1 to 10 seconds. If you’re here like you gotta get together 1 to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 123%. So you really don’t want your page load time to be delayed by any means. Like you need to make sure that you’re on that. So there’s actually a site that you can use, page speed insights that will actually help you see how your website is performing based on data from your actual users around the world. That’s super helpful. We’ll link that in the description and things that you can do. If you’re realizing that your website is doing loading pretty slowly, minimize the amount of apps that you’re using. So when you add more and more apps to change the functionality or appearance of your online store, code gets added into the theme. So those apps can run, but sometimes code or parts of the code can actually be removed or reordered. So you can not only improve your online store performance, but also maintain the integrity of the app. The other thing to check is if there’s an app that’s on your site that you’re not using regularly, remove it. There’s no need to have useless apps.

Vira: 6:13

Happens all the time. Yeah, yeah.

Alissa: 6:15

And if you haven’t set up a mobile app, I mean, if you’re listening to this three days before Black Friday, it’s a little tight. So bandwidth is probably limited. But something that you definitely want to consider for the remainder of the holiday season is setting up a mobile app. There’s actually a really, really great platform called Tapcart. It’s super, super easy drag and drop option for you to set up your mobile site. It’s like, you think like, you need a developer and all this crazy stuff you don’t. It’s really, really straightforward. Like I mention drag and drop. If you actually go to flowium.com get tapcart, we’ll link that below as well. Tapcart. T A P, C A R T. You can actually start building your own mobile app. From what I understand. There’s also like a special little promo going on that we have with Flowium and Tapcart. So check that out if you don’t have a mobile app yet.

Vira: 7:07

Yeah. And the beauty of that app is that it’s like literally like a Shopify website. It’s like a drag and drop. You don’t need to invest like, I don’t know, hundred thousands of dollars in hiring the team of coders.

Alissa: 7:19

Do that.

Vira: 7:19

Right? You can, you can do it yourself. And technically you can do it in like two to three days. That’s. I mean, that’s their promise anyways. But it might be a bit too late for the Black Friday, but definitely for the holidays. And in general, more and more people are shopping online from their phones. Having an app would help you a lot with the conversion and everything. We sound like we’ve, we’ve been paid, but Tap card we are not. We just love this app. It’s super cool and a lot of our clients are actually working with it. So check it out. It’s mobile commerce is here to stay.

Alissa: 7:50

Yes, it definitely is. Absolutely.

Vira: 7:52

Yeah. The second thing that you can do, and again, this is a very last minute thing, but you can always find that like little things that are really easy to tweak. So assess your checkout process. I mean probably it’s better to do it not necessarily yourself, but maybe you can ask your like mom or your grandma or your friend to do it for you because you might be a bit biased because you know, like you work with that like website all the time and you might not notice some things that are not necessarily like logical or very user friendly. That’s why we always recommend to hear like the third party opinion or how do you call it, like to hear the opinion from, from outside. And like especially now you want that checkout process to be seamless because the competition is high and people have more options to choose from. So yeah, if you have any friends, well, you probably do have friends. But ask someone outside of your team, ideally a friend or family member, to try it and check it out. You can even ask them to record a video of their checkout process, like commenting on how easy or confusing the entire process is for them. And you can even like ask them to record it through this app called Loom. We use it all the time internally. When we start working with different brands, we like experience the customer journey. We like literally have the task in our asana experience, customer journey. And this is my favorite task ever because I get to try those products that I will be working with and it’s fun usually and I get to keep that product. So yeah, experience that. Definitely ask someone to do that for you. And believe me, sometimes you can find those like little teeny tiny things that can be like easily adjusted. But you wouldn’t believe how much of a difference it makes in the overall customer experience. Absolutely.

Alissa: 9:38

Yeah. The experiencing the checkout is a huge one because sometimes you think like, wow, this is so user friendly and then you have someone else go through it and they’re like, what were you thinking? This is miserable. So definitely make sure that you have as and more than one person is ideal to have checkout. And also Loom. I don’t know what we would do without Loom.

Vira: 9:56

Honestly, I don’t know. Honestly, it’s like my favorite app in the entire world.

Alissa: 10:00

Yeah.

Vira: 10:01

Yeah, seriously.

Alissa: 10:02

Okay, so number three, make sure that you have an abandoned cart automation set up. So research actually suggests that between 47 and 72% of consumers experience checkout friction while shopping on mobile and abandon the purchase process. So the stakes are obviously higher during the upcoming holiday season that is predicted to be the the biggest Black Friday in the history of E commerce. So this is one that like you definitely cannot miss out on. During the 2019 holiday season, approximately $8.6 billion were lost in E commerce sales due to checkout card abandonment. That is an astronomical number and you do not want to have any of your revenue included in that number. So make sure that you have a strong abandoned checkout flow to bring the customer’s attention back to your site. And if you already have something in place, that’s awesome. But if you don’t, you really need to make sure that you have at least one email that says, hey, make sure that you come back to your cart. Just a reminder already generates a tremendous amount of revenue. The other thing that you can do is you can make your flow holiday themed. So make it more festive, make it more relevant, make it more effective. When you do that, you will still be using the abandoned cart emails, but you’ll be doing it in style so you can capture their limited attention during the busy holiday period. We’re going to add a link in the description of how to set up a abandoned cart flow, so if you haven’t done that yet yet, please make sure you do it. At least one email is necessary. Three to five emails is optimal. But if you can’t do three to five emails, just get one email would be ideal.

Vira: 11:38

Right, right. And something that I learned recently is that the longer it takes for a product to reach Chopper, the higher the cart abandonment rate is. This is like, was very interesting for me. When shipping takes three days or less, 75% of cards are abandoned. But if you offer like eight days delivery plus like additional 40% of cards are abandoned. So basically like 40% of that, like remaining 30% or whatever. So the longer it takes for a product to reach the shopper, the higher the cart abandonment rates are. Which is, which is interesting and the same usually with the price of the product as well.

Alissa: 12:15

So it’s wild because it’s something that you don’t really think is going to have such a huge impact, but oh my gosh, does it?

Vira: 12:21

Yeah, it does. It always does. And I know that some brands are trying not to do like the abandonment cart around the holidays just because they think that they are like sending so many campaigns. But hey guys, this is like probably the only time of the year when we do recommend to be aggressive with your emails. Yes, your customers will be receiving a lot of emails, but you need to Grab their attention.

Alissa: 12:41

You want to be top of mind. Always, always, always, always top of mind.

Vira: 12:45

You do, you do. And if you have the chance to recover even like a small portions of that abandonment card, this is your revenue, this are the money you’re, you’re losing, right? So definitely have something in place. Even if you don’t have time to, to create like a Holly version, that’s totally fine. Just make sure that your cart is working, that it’s like seamlessly working. Very often happen to my clients a lot of times when they change something on the website, especially with a theme code sometimes that like the code, the abandonment card code tracking gets like, it gets, I don’t know, like messed or whatever and it’s not working properly. So make sure that even if you did some big changes on your website recently, test your Black Friday Cyber Monday flows, test your abandonment card flows. Because this is like one of the most important ones.

Alissa: 13:32

Yeah, for sure. And the other thing just to really quickly note, if you do have a Shopify theme store, like if that’s your store shopify, they do have like a templatized abandoned cart. So if that’s not on, at the very least turn that on. For those of you who like don’t have a Klaviyo account, you’re not really in the email world. At least turn on the abandoned cart Shopify emails because those convert to and you’re not totally missing the mark with customers. They’re not the prettiest emails, they’re not the most well written, but it’s something and you want to have something in place so you don’t miss out on the revenue.

Vira: 14:01

That’s a good one. That’s a good one. At least I for sure. Cool. Tip number four. Again, you have three days until Black Friday Cyber Monday. But this tip will be applicable to the entire holiday season. And like in general, this is a good thing to have. Optimize your return policy. On average, 30% of customers will return what they have bought online from you during the holidays. 30%. So pretty much one third of the customers will return at least some portion of what they bought from you. And majority of this returns will be done within the first months of the post holiday holiday season. So usually January and like December and January is when we see the most of the returns, right? And actually approximately one quarter of holiday shoppers already like buy items specifically like with intention of possibly like returning them later. That’s something that I, I’m like guilty of sometimes I order like two sizes when I’m not sure which size would fit me. Just because the website doesn’t have like good like sizing chart or like good FAQ section or something like that. So I’d rather order like two items and like make sure that at least one of them fit and then return it. But obviously returns are not ideal for your business. So there are some things that you can do to prevent them. And like having this process in place and making it easy and hassle free. It’s like one of the most important things the holiday season. But here are some fun numbers I found today when I was like preparing for this episode. Alisa, guess what’s the industry with the highest return rates? Or guess like two industry with the highest return rates during the holiday season.

Alissa: 15:36

For sure. Clothing. Clothing industry. Like fashion. For sure, for sure, for sure.

Vira: 15:40

You’re right. You’re right.

Alissa: 15:41

The other one like for some reason I feel like it’s like food, anything in food because people are weird about. I don’t know why people like return food, but maybe I’m wrong there.

Vira: 15:49

Yeah, no, actually you were right. Clothing and accessories are the first one. Then shoes follows it in closing industry. It’s something insane. It’s like 75% of orders are returned which is like more orders are returned than cap which is to me is insane than shoes. Food is also in that category. But only like 8% of food food is returned.

Alissa: 16:10

I don’t understand how someone could ever return food.

Vira: 16:12

Like like why would you do it?

Alissa: 16:14

I can’t.

Vira: 16:15

I can’t. I cannot do it. No. And also you’re like the biggest. We have this guys just like to give you some background. We have like every Friday we have this thing called coffee house where we just like get together and chat together about like different non work related things. And Alissa always have like the craziest haul from trader’s job. She always like presents those like new different like cookies and everything. So she’s the one who knows a lot about food.

Alissa: 16:39

Yeah, I love me.

Vira: 16:40

So you’re definitely not in that like 8% of people for like returning food, right?

Alissa: 16:45

No, no, definitely not. Definitely not.

Vira: 16:48

You’re not, you’re not there. Yeah. Well guys, automating the returns process or at least like portion of the return process means you can actually focus on like other important things like value add tasks. Maybe you can build a more personalized customer experience to prevent those returns as so try automating like at least the portion offer returns and important automation of the process can actually drive future purchases. I somewhere read that in 2018 one study reported that 96% of consumers would shop with retailer again if the retailer offered an easy or a very easy return experience. And that’s actually the factor that I always check before like purchasing something from the brand, especially from like the newer brand or the brand I’m not very familiar with. So streamlining the process is crucial, especially around the holidays. Here’s the one fun thing that I learned also about Shopify. I didn’t realize you can do that, but in Shopify you can actually segment out, I guess in Klaviyo as well, you can actually segment out serial returners.

Alissa: 17:57

No way.

Vira: 17:58

Yeah, there are like a bunch of people who purchase the product and then maybe even like wear it for a while or like use it for a while and then like return it. Right. So you can actually segment them out and whack.

Alissa: 18:10

I had no idea about that. That’s so helpful to know.

Vira: 18:13

Yeah, I don’t think, I don’t think we can do it like directly in Klaviyo because I’m sure it has to something to do with like internal CRM or like with Shopify or something. But you can actually like maybe somehow create the segment and then you can like exclude those people from say promotions or like the free shipping offers or something like that. This is a pretty cool thing. I learned about it today and I actually want to talk to my, to my clients. Maybe that’s something that we can, can like put together some sort of like strategy. So that’d be super cool. But also one thing that you can do, and I know it’s kind of like a long tip, but this is like one of the most important things that you on the holiday, you can put together a holiday specific return policy. You can extend that period for the holiday specifically. I know that a lot of like brick and mortar stores are doing that. Do you guys have winners or like Marshalls in the States? You do, right?

Alissa: 19:04

It’s like those like Marshalls and like TJ Maxx and stuff.

Vira: 19:07

TJ Maxx? Yeah, I think they have like right now something like until January 30th or something.

Alissa: 19:13

Which is like wild. You can return whenever you want.

Vira: 19:16

Right. Because. Because lots of people are shopping for their loved ones, not necessarily for themselves. Right. So. Or some people are like early shoppers or like they buy presents for Christmas early. And that’s not me. I would be totally fine with a 30 days return period because they buy everything literally on the 24th of December. So do something with that. A few years ago we had this like crazy story in My, in my business with my husband where we were selling products on Amazon and some people would purchase the product on Amazon and then they return it and say that it’s like that it’s broken or something. But the product is in perfect shape. They just want to get their money back after the time passed and stuff like that. And that product cannot be sold on Amazon anymore. Even if it’s in like in perfect working condition. Even if it’s packaged, if it’s like even not unpacked, it’s like perfect. You cannot sell it anymore. So they just set those products aside. So what we did, we actually asked Amazon to send all these products directly to us. We like check them all, checked if they are in ideal condition and send them back to Amazon as new products because they were new products. Just some people abused that return policy and it happened like around the holidays and it will happen to you as well. So just make sure to have a good return policy in place so it’s as hassle free for you as it is for your customers as well. And try building that like relationship with the customer as well so they don’t abuse that policy as much, I guess.

Alissa: 21:10

Yep, yep. Because there’s always abuse. There’s always abuse.

Vira: 21:13

There is always people who do that. Yeah.

Alissa: 21:17

Okay. Number five, Offer prompt support. This is a really big one. So no matter how clever your marketing campaigns are, how fast your shipping times are, or how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, spectacular your packaging is, if you have weak customer support and a weak strategy in place for customer support, you’re going to have a really, really, really, really hard season. So the things that you want to make sure of on your emails and on your website, make sure your contact info is front and center. Nothing is more frustrating for customers than when they can’t just pick up the phone or send an email to complain about something if they need to, or talk to someone if they need to, make sure that it’s very easy to contact you on your website. Make sure that you include a contact us page and add your info to your FAQ page as well so that customers can find what they are looking for for everywhere, which is your contact information. In this case, if you have the ability to make sure that you have a live chat set up and similar to how a software company might use a customer customer’s input to make product developments and updates, you should be using your customers reviews and their feedback to find repeated problems and address them before they appear. So even though you want to have everything perfect and pristine for the holiday season, especially The Cyber Weekend. This is a great opportunity to make sure that you, you are really taking into consideration all the feedback, all the customer input that you’re getting and actually put it into action for December, if you’re able to action it that quickly or for the new year. So then that way you’re setting yourself up for success moving forward. And there’s actually a list of questions that you want to think about. So for example, things that customers may ask. Is this going to arrive on time for my holiday party?

Vira: 22:52

Oh, that’s a big one. That’s a big one.

Alissa: 22:54

I wear a size 11 in Nike. Will your shoes fit in size 11 for me? Is this mountain bike a good purchase for a beginner? So I so like little questions like this. And even though these are very, very specific questions for specific products, when you think about questions like this, you can start to think about what your customers are going to ask and answer it in, in advance to what they’re going to be asking or have responses ready when they do ask those questions via your live chat or via email. So if you start to see a theme or start to understand like what will make things clearer for your customers, I would definitely take some time before the Black Friday Cyber Monday rush to put some change place and also answer these questions either on your FAQ page or again, have your customer support team ready with these answers so things can be resolved right away for your customers who are asking questions because people see deals and they want to buy and if you can’t answer them right away and address whatever their questions are, then they’re going to be issues and they’re not going to buy. You’re going to lose a sale, you’re going to lose the customer, and then ultimately it’s going to cause issues for Black Friday for you. Right?

Vira: 23:56

I hate when they have this like, leave us an email and we’ll get it back to you within 72 hours. 72 hours feels like forever in online world, right? I want the answer right away. I want them to be available through chat, through phone, through, I don’t know, in person.

Alissa: 24:12

Right. I want to text you and I need you to tell me like, hey, via text. This is good. This is not good. This is the answer. Move on. Because if you can’t give me an answer on Black Friday, I’m going to find someone else who’s going to give me the answer on Black Friday as a consumer anyways.

Vira: 24:26

Exactly. I mean, I’m cool if they have answer on their FAQ page. Right? That’s what the FAQ pages are for. But a lot of brands are ignoring them for some reason or have something like very generic in. I remember one of my clients few, few months ago or like last year actually, they did this thing where they said the customer. If you ask us the question about the product that was not answered on our, on our like FAQ page, we’re going to give you the discount, like 20% off your next purchase or something like that. But the question, there were like some requirements for the questions as well. So it shouldn’t be like a stupid question or. Yeah, but, but it was, it was a cool thing. And they have the most like sophisticated FAQ page ever and you can like literally find the answers like to all questions about the product. Yeah, so that, that was a fun one.

Alissa: 25:12

Important and useful. Very important. Very useful. Yeah.

Vira: 25:15

Yeah. And that’s something that you can definitely update in like less than a day. So even if you’re listening to this episode on Tuesday, there’s still like three days until Friday for sure, like four days or whatever. So you still have, you still have some time to update it. Take your time and do that. Yeah. And the last one, the last tip of the, of the week for you is pre schedule your campaigns in advance. This sounds like silly one, but that’s something that we do all the time internally just to give ourselves a little bit more time in case something needs to be like changed or adjusted or something. So we write the copy, create designs, set the campaigns up in Klaviyo, all like sometimes weeks in advance. Especially for the Black Friday Cyber Monday, we have this rule internally that we never, never send the campaign immediately. We always preschedule it. I don’t know why necessarily we have this rule. Even if you want to preschedule it for the same hour, it should be rescheduled, not sent right away. But like you, you have to have at least like 15 minutes. So in case you have some issue or like some typo or something, you still have that like little time to adjust everything. Right. So with Black Friday Cyber Monday, it’s super important to have everything pre scheduled to have everything checked multiple times. You ask your colleagues, your friends to check everything because that’s like the biggest show of the year, right? So have everything pre scheduled and enjoy. A lot of people are thinking that Thursday and Friday of that week are the busiest days for us, but not necessarily because we have already done all of the busy work by then. Right. So we just like sit and enjoy usually on like Black Friday.

Alissa: 27:01

So that’s.

Vira: 27:01

That’s what we do internally. Yeah. So that’s super important. Do that and you’ll be happy with the results.

Alissa: 27:07

Get her done. Get her done. That’s what we’re trying to do now for our clients. We want to pre schedule everything. However, it’s difficult when strategy changes last minute, so there’s that too. Yeah. But yeah, that to me is the biggest one because you do want to just chill. And also if you are heading up multiple different facets of the company, you want to pre schedule the campaign so you’re not pre scheduled. So you’re not scheduling the campaigns on the day and then answering customer service questions and then dealing with logistics on your website and then handling this. Handling. If at the very least you can’t do anything, pre schedule your email so you’re not thinking about them during the weekend and you can just sit back, look at the results and enjoy.

Vira: 27:44

Right.

Alissa: 27:45

So guys, as always, thank you so much for listening. This is the end of our saga, but we’ll see you next week for some more holiday fun stuff. So don’t forget to subscribe. Share this podcast with your friends. If you’re liking what we do, make sure you leave us a review. Once you do, go to flowium.com socks if you send us a screen screenshot on that type form. Yeah Questionnaire. You add your screenshot in there. We will make sure that we send over your free pair of Flowium socks. I’m wearing mine right now and they’re amazing. I love them. And as always, if you have any questions at all that you’d like us to feature on our podcast episodes, make sure that you send them in flowium.com/ask they get sent over directly to myself and Vira and we would be more than happy to answer any questions that you may have. So send them in. Send us a review you don’t forget to subscribe. Share this podcast with your friends. All of the things have an amazing, amazing Thanksgiving. If you celebrate. It’s my favorite holiday out of the whole year.

Vira: 28:42

And if you are celebrating a couple days.

Alissa: 28:44

Huh, not even anything. Thanksgiving is like the best day of the year for me. There is a lot, a lot, a lot to be grateful for. Especially after all the chaos that this world has endured in the last couple years. We’re all here, we’re breathing, we’re alive. And there is a lot of to be grateful for. So Happy Thanksgiving to anyone and everyone who celebrates.

Vira: 29:01

Happy Thanksgiving to you guys. I know it’s such a such a big holidays, especially in the States. We did celebrate ours already in October in Canada, but we get to celebrate two different things. Giving because we celebrate Canadian holidays and then American holidays. I love living in Canada. Canada is so fun. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates. And and after, after you’re done with all of your turkey and everything, come back next Tuesday because we will be talking about how to get through the post holiday sales slump because that’s something that happens right after the big sales always happens this little like slowdown. And we’re going to talk about all of the ways and how you can get through the post holiday sales slump. So come back next Tuesday. Thank you for listening. Happy Thanksgiving and have fun during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We’ll talk to you soon.

Alissa: 29:52

Yeah, sounds good.