With Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around this corner, I hope you’re ready to rip! If you don’t have the utmost confidence in reaching your BFCM goals this year, this is for you.

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Be honest... How are you feeling coming into BFCM?

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Excited?

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Nervous?

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Unsure?

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The holiday season, aka the Superbowl of eCommerce, is the scariest and most exciting time of the year.

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If you’re anything like me, this is the time of year that I refresh my Shopify dashboard constantly just to see the sales coming in. 

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But for some people, constantly refreshing your store analytics can be frustrating if you aren’t seeing as many sales coming in as you wanted or expected.

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Don’t let this happen to you!

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To help you keep that smile on your face all holiday season, here are five things you can do to get the most out of your store this year.

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Is Your Offer Enticing Enough?

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During holiday shopping, everybody is looking for a deal!

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But that doesn’t always mean offering a pure discount like 25% off.

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Sure, discounts can work well and they are straightforward to offer, but they can hurt your margins and even devalue your products for future sales.

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Instead of a pure discount, here are a few of my favorite promos to run for the holidays.

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1. BOGO 50% off
2. High AOV pre-made bundles
3. Higher discount on pre-paid subscriptions 
4. Tiered free gift with high AOV order
5. VIP customer early access deals while inventory is still in stock

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These kinds of promos can be a great win-win for your shoppers because they can still be profitable for you while your customers feel like they are getting a deal. 

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When putting together your promos, always think about creating a win-win so you and your customers feel good about the purchase.

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Synchronized Messaging

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Want to really drive your cost per acquisition (CAC) down on BFCM? Make sure your pre and post-click messaging is aligned.

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Every year, I see brands make ads or emails for an offer but then send people to one of their evergreen pages.

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This is a huge problem because people click and expect to easily be able to take advantage of the offer that made them click. When they don’t see the offer, they are going to get confused on click off. It happens all the time!

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Instead, create a landing page that immediately shares the same offer that you’re running so people know exactly what to do when they land on your site.

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At the bare minimum, you can duplicate your product page and add some copy and imagery around your offer for the holidays.

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Clear Post-Click Experience

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No matter what your offer is, having a clear post-click experience with your offer is crucial. For many brands, having a separate landing page for the holidays can go a long way in driving a higher than usual AOV.

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If you are running a special offer like a BOGO or a “Buy More, Save More” then having a specific landing page that makes it easy for people to buy more can help with an easy to use shopping experience.

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With a landing page, you can get much more offer specific, because you can guide people to a specific offer without having to give up the ability to buy like normal on your regular product page.

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PRO TIP: Get Your Cart Dialed In

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Although your cart is one of the most important aspects of your store, it’s one of the most overlooked parts of stores. Unfortunately, most Shopify themes don’t have great native carts so most brands don’t have a cart that drives performance.

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Here are a few things that you can do to get the most out of your cart.

1. Slide out cart, not a cart page.
2. In-cart upsells with popular products
3. Shipping threshold
4. Free gift threshold
5. Discount code field in cart

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I’ve used a LOT of Shopify themes, and I still haven’t seen a single one that can do all of this natively. To get your cart dialed in without code, I recommend UpCart by AfterSell. 

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It’s pretty easy to set up and works incredibly well! In fact, we just ran a test with Upcart vs. stock and we increased revenue per visitor by a massive 94%!