What is BFCM? How can SMEs boost BFCM sales?

Cyber week is right around the corner, and for SMEs, this period is more than just a few days of heavy discounts; it's a golden opportunity to boost sales, attract new customers, and solidify your brand's presence in the market. However, the road to reach there isn’t straightforward. Handling excessive traffic, managing inventory, giving appropriate discounts, and running the right marketing campaigns can be the difference between a winning campaign and a lost opportunity. 

What is BFCM, and when will it be in 2024?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday — collectively known as BFCM — is one of the biggest sales periods of the year. Originally starting as a post-Thanksgiving shopping event in the USA, Black Friday marks the start of the festive season, and has now grown into a global phenomenon. As online shopping became popular, Cyber Monday — which occurs on the Monday following Black Friday — joined the party in 2005 as a digital counterpart to the Black Friday sales, and the 5-day duration between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday has since evolved to be called Cyber Week.

For e-commerce businesses, BFCM sales are crucial. According to a report by Adobe, last year, consumers spent $222.1 billion in online shopping during the festive season, of which a staggering $38 billion was spent during Cyber Week alone. Black Friday and Cyber Monday lead the charts with $9.8 billion and $12.1 billion spent on the two days respectively, highlighting the massive potential BFCM holds for online retailers, especially SMEs looking to make a significant impact.

Why BFCM is a Big Deal for SMEs

While BFCM sales might appear like a great opportunity to improve your quarterly results, it isn't just about one big weekend of generating revenue — it's a huge opportunity to capture new customers and convince them to keep shopping from you through the end of the year and beyond. For SMEs, this can be a game-changer, since it can translate to increased traffic on the website, heightened brand awareness, and a substantial boost in sales. However, the competition during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is fierce, and with limited resources in hand, planning the best BFCM campaign can be daunting for small e-commerce enterprises. With the right approach and preparation though, you can have your best BFCM campaign yet!

How SMEs Can Prepare for BFCM

1. Start Early and Plan Ahead: In order to prepare for a successful BFCM campaign, it is important to start early — especially for SMEs — since your to-do list is only going to keep growing. Start by setting clear goals and timelines. These may include multiple important targets like higher sales, more website traffic, or increased brand awareness, but it is crucial to prioritise these tasks. Define your objectives and create a roadmap to reach each one of them.
2. Decide The Right Discount Amounts: Discounts are the biggest draw during BFCM; higher the discount, higher the sales. But if not curated carefully, they could eat into your profits massively. Find the sweet spot that should be enough to attract plenty of customers, but also not too much for your company to not be able to absorb.
3. Promote Discounts Before & During the Sale: Build anticipation for your upcoming BFCM deals by starting to promote them well in advance. To begin with, use email marketing and social media to announce upcoming deals, and start sending push notifications to keep your audience informed in the final days and hours leading up to the sale. You can use Whatmore’s AI-Powered Ads generation tools to create ads for top social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook!

4. Manage your Inventory: Make sure to stock up in anticipation of increased demand, but be cautiously optimistic. Running out of popular products can lead to missed opportunities, but overstocking can increase inventory holding costs later.
5. Enhance Customer Engagement Using Video Marketing: Catching your customer’s eye is critical, especially during BFCM when customers are flooded with options. Leverage video marketing to draw more attention to your products. And don’t worry about creating the videos! Using Whatmore Studio, you can quickly and easily create engaging and trend-driven videos that capture attention.

6. Optimise Website Performance: Just the way shoppers in the USA used to rush into stores at 4 am on a Black Friday, your website will experience a huge surge in traffic during BFCM; and you need to be prepared for it. Conduct load testing to simulate high traffic scenarios and identify any potential bottlenecks. Make sure that your hosting plan can accommodate increased visitors, and also ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, as a significant portion of the traffic will come from mobile devices. 

7. Use Shoppable Videos on your Website: Content is King, and in today’s fast paced environment, it is much easier to keep someone’s focus if you serve them short video content, instead of just image thumbnails. Using Whatmore, you can integrate shoppable videos right onto your website, and with a direct add-to-cart button within the product videos, you can ensure that there are minimal customer drop offs in the journey.

But more importantly, adding shoppable videos on your website using Whatmore will result in ZERO Page Speed Impact, ensuring that the videos on your website won’t slow it down, significantly reducing customer drop-off rate. Businesses using Whatmore Shoppable Videos on their website saw a 250% increase in conversion and a 4x growth in time spent on website, enabling up to 20x increase in ROI.

8. Use Video Banners To Promote Popular Products: Using Video Banners to showcase your most popular products and the discounts on them on your website will create a lasting impact, and will attract more clicks. Using Whatmore, you can integrate Video Banners onto your website with ZERO Page Speed Impact, ensuring that the customer drop-off rate remains unaffected.

9. Offer Fast Shipping: When competing against e-commerce giants in today’s fast paced world, enabling quick delivery times will be critical to keep audiences shopping from you. Ensure that your shipping processes are streamlined and can handle the additional load of increased sales during BFCM, so you can meet the delivery expectations of your customers.
10. Improve Customer Support: With increased customers will come increased customer queries, and given the spike in traffic, things could go wrong on multiple fronts. Whether it's questions about products, shipping, or returns, your customer service team needs to be prepared to respond quickly and efficiently. Having a clear and responsive customer support plan in place to assist customers promptly — including live chat or a robust FAQ section — will help prevent cart abandonment during peak times, and improve customer retention.

Ready to take your BFCM campaign to the next level? Explore Whatmore Shoppable Videos and Whatmore Studio, stand out from the competition, and drive more conversions! Get started today and make this BFCM your most successful one yet!