How to Get More BFCM Conversions With Smart Cart

• A well-prepared shopping cart is crucial for BFCM success, as cart abandonment is a common issue. The Rebuy Smart Cart™ can assist by anticipating negotiations, offering personalized experiences, and building momentum for completing purchases.

• To boost conversions during BFCM, retailers can implement strategies like showing progress towards rewards, upselling subscriptions, offering Buy More Save More (BMSM) discounts, using SMS lead generation, simplifying gifting options, and displaying product star ratings.

• The Smart Cart supports long-term success by creating lasting relationships with customers and maximizing value beyond the holiday season.

Black Friday 2024 breaking records again 🏆

ICYMI: Shopify merchants raked in $11.5 billion in global sales over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, smashing the 2023 record by 24%.

This marked the third straight year of Black Friday ecommerce growth and the first time U.S. online sales exceeded $10 billion.

AI played a big role in the BFCM action. Caila Schwartz, Salesforce’s consumer insights director, noted that retailers using generative AI in customer service saw a 9% boost in conversion rates.

Rebuy merchants also had a record-breaking weekend, with Cyber Weekend driving millions of dollars and billions of requests through the platform.

What Is BFCM?

BFCM stands for Black Friday Cyber Monday. It covers the shopping holiday season that begins on Thanksgiving and ends the following Monday. This five-day shopping event often marks the turning point for retailers who may not have made a profit yet that year. It’s marked by some of the year's biggest deals and is celebrated by almost every retailer, including in-store and ecommerce brands.

For online retailers, Black Friday Cyber Monday will only be as successful as the tech they use to run their shops. The influx of customers can overwhelm them if they are not prepared. That's why having the right shopping platform and integrations will make all the difference in hitting sales goals for the year — especially shopping carts.

The Truth About Shopping Cart Abandonment

Before you can look at best practices for BFCM, it’s helpful to understand what’s happening when shoppers leave a shopping cart, no matter the time of year.

• If they leave during checkout, they may have gotten scared off by the total price after taxes or shipping.
• If they leave before checking out, it’s possible they weren’t serious about buying to begin with. (Window shopping happens online as much or more than it does in-store.)

Shoppers often go into their online journey with every intention of not finishing their purchase. They want to add items, think about them, and play around to check pricing or availability.

While there are some things you can do to reduce cart abandonment at the checkout stage, BFCM shoppers are easier to engage well before they hit that “checkout” button. Shopify shares that 84% of their shoppers compare prices and availability in advance of the biggest shopping days. The good news is that you can take proactive steps to turn “browsers” into “buyers.”

The BFCM Customer Journey

It’s true that retailers really want to capture as many sales as possible on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the work starts long before the holiday actually occurs. While goals will vary depending on the industry and the individual business, most work hard year-round to get ready for this event.

Pre-BFCM

This lead generation phase is used to increase brand awareness in the months leading up to the holiday. Conversion may not be top of mind (although it’s nice if it happens). The main aim is to get as many potential customers to your website and engage so they formally start their customer journey with you in advance of BFCM.

BFCM

During these “early” Black Friday sales, Black Friday weekend, and the following Cyber Monday, retailers want people to shop. It’s all about conversion, with a goal of getting cart sizes up and purchases completed without abandonment.

Post-BFCM

The holiday is over, but a retailer’s work has just begun. This is when a loyalty loop can be created, prompting shoppers to return to get one more item and increasing that customer lifetime value (LTV). Brands must work hard to make sure their holiday sales aren't a one-off affair.

3 Subtle Ways Rebuy Smart Cart Elevates Your Holiday Shopping Season

Smart Cart is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your holiday shopping season. With its advanced features and capabilities, it can help bring your BFCM marketing ideas to life, optimize your BFCM strategy, and generate maximum revenue during peak sales periods.

Rebuy Smart Cart™: Here's What's New

June 2024 Release: Explore new and improved Smart Cart features that deliver greater usability and even more Rebuy-powered merchandising for your Shopify or Shopify Plus store.

But there are other powerful and more subtler ways Smart Cart can help you achieve your BFCM marketing goals this year:

Makes Negotiations Easier

It’s easy for customers to throw a great Cyber Monday deal into their cart. But when it comes time to purchase, they start negotiating with themselves. “Do I really need two of these? What happens if I take one out of the cart?” Before they know it, they abandon the cart altogether.

Smart Cart helps retailers anticipate the negotiations shoppers are likely to do. You can add a message bar announcing a free shipping promo, give in-cart recommendations for a Buy One, Get One deal, or other can’t-miss BFCM deals. Personalization tools can bring shoppers back to the negotiating table where they can feel they are getting a great bargain for their completed purchase. 

It's Helpful (and Human)

Customers who engage with Smart Cart aren’t being redirected to a shopping cart page, where they may reach a dead end unless they check out. Instead, they are presented with the experience of a personal shopping assistant that gives them recommendations based on what they buy and even offers them unique deals and upsell opportunities.

This is revolutionary for a Black Friday shopper, who may be used to long lines, impersonal recommendations, and fighting for the last of an advertised deal. Instead, they get the experience of their own sales associate to make them feel special. It’s the equivalent of having a brick-and-mortar sales associate offer to grab another item from the back room or knock off a few dollars to sweeten the deal. 

Builds Online Shopping Momentum

Finally, Smart Cart offers another benefit for Black Friday customers, and it’s something that works year-round long after the new year has arrived. It gets customers moving forward.

When customers engage with their cart, they are building momentum that increases their chances of completing the sale. They add another item, choose a color they like, or decide to get two of something to get closer to free shipping.

7 BFCM Cart Strategies to Boost Conversions

There can be many moving pieces in preparing for Black Friday Cyber Monday, but none of them will come to fruition if a customer can't successfully complete a purchase. A shopping cart has traditionally been an essential part of the process, but it has been a separate step that operates independently of the more dynamic parts of an ecommerce store.

With Smart Cart, the shopping cart plays a role in the entire customer journey at every touchpoint. It generates leads, offers personalized recommendations, and reminds shoppers of additional savings and gifting opportunities before they check out. It can then be used to remind them of loyalty programs and help them sign up for additional savings via subscription-based auto-shipments.

What's most important, however, is that it can help you prepare for the holiday and build a lasting relationship with your customers. It's not a one-and-done marketing effort.

Okay, ready to build a shopping cart that converts?

These trends are changing the way people shop, and they can be as easy as changing up your tech tools with a Rebuy Smart Cart.

1. Show Progress Towards Gifts & Rewards

Black Friday appeals to consumers because there’s a lot of savings to be had, but the most cost-conscious buyers may need a little nudge to complete their purchases. With a multi-tier progress bar within the shopping cart, customers can see how close they are to free shipping, a special discount, or a special gift. As they add items, the bar fills up, and the dopamine kicks in. Shoppers feel a sense of accomplishment as they collect more rewards. You feel a sense of accomplishment for boosting your AOV. It’s a win-win!

Snow Oral Care Smart Cart with Multi-Tier Progress Bar

2. Upsell to a Subscription

If your brand offers subscriptions, and you’re not already offering subscribe-and-save offers in the cart, now is the time to set these up! Just ask Jennifer Peters, the Senior DTC Manager at OLLY. She used in-cart subscription upsells to help boost subscription revenue by a mind-boggling 63%. As she puts it, “After one week we looked at the dashboard and saw the lifetime Rebuy-generated-revenue and we were like, 'OMG, that’s so much money.'” 

OLLY Smart Cart with switch-to-subscription upsells.

3. Build Customer Loyalty

Don’t offer subscriptions? No problem. You can still earn loyal customers on BFCM with Rebuy’s Buy More Save More (BMSM). BMSM is a great way to reward your customers for buying more from your online store by offering tiered discounts directly in the cart. For example, buy 2 and save 10%, buy 3 and save 15%, etc. 

When shoppers buy your product in bulk, they start to form buying habits associated with your product and brand. Make it easy on them by offering incentives to purchase what they need in advance!

TasteSalud Smart Cart featuring Buy More Save More.

And here's the thing: BMSM emphasizes the value of your product first and the discount second. How? Like a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered, the BMSM offer is revealed in the shopping cart only after the customer has reviewed the product and decided to purchase it.

4. Get Their Number

Black Friday may be months away, but you can build excitement about sales with SMS texts. Smart Cart is great for lead generation, especially when used with SMS marketing tools like Attentive. Browsers receive a prompt to enter their cell number in exchange for a discount, which then gets sent directly to their phone as a unique promo code. When they return to their cart and manually enter that promo, it’s a sale for you — no matter when they come back.

Use this lead generation strategy to entice buyers with fun sales promotions and other offers leading up to BFCM and beyond. 

Gfuel Smart Cart featuring Attentive's SMS capture.

5. Make Gifting Simple

Online stores that make gifting simple sell more. And let’s be real, there will be lots of gifting taking place over BFCM. So why not give your customers the option to send gifts to family, friends, and colleagues, right there in your Smart Cart? GiftShip (by Gist) lets your customers send items to different addresses in a single checkout, collect and automatically print gift messages, offer a delivery date option, and more. Get started with the Gist Smart Cart App and make gifting simple for your new BFCM customers.

GiftShip options include changing the shipping date, printed gift messages, and more.

6. Send Gifts with Just an Email

Speaking of easy gifting, the Gipht Smart Cart App lets your customers send gifts with just an email. Oftentimes, we as customers get a jolt of inspiration and want to send a gift but don’t have the shipping address. Now, all your customers have to do is click the “Send Gift With Email” button from their Smart Cart and drop in the name and email. Gipht collects the shipping information so all they have to do is sit back and wait for that Thank You note. Check out the Gipht app for Smart Cart and collect those ecommerce sales that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

7. Convert More Online Sales with Star Ratings

Social proof is a big deal. And when your customers see the star ratings for items in their cart, it can do wonders for your conversion rate. (Not to mention reduce cart abandonment.) It just feels safer to click the buy button when you know most customers give that product 4 and 5 stars. (We can thank the Amazon effect for bringing star ratings into the mainstream.) Consider adding the Okendo or Stamped Smart Cart App to your cart to maximize conversions this holiday season.

Manssion uses the Okendo Smart Cart App to showcase star ratings.

Your Cart Is Part of a Lasting BFCM Campaign

Smart Cart gives you a way to capitalize on the massive opportunity that BFCM offers while investing in the future. It supports sales transactions without seeming overly transactional. It's incredibly versatile, flexible, and personalized (which is exactly what shoppers say they want today).

When gearing up for the BFCM holiday, go ahead and create promo codes, Facebook ads, and custom email mailers. But remember that your shopping cart is a core function of your ecommerce site and will be long after the holiday is over.

Setting up an intelligent shopping cart to handle the influx of BFCM shoppers now can ensure you've got the momentum long after they've moved on to other occasions. You can capture their attention for the long term, boosting LTV and creating brand trust in ways that a standard cart just can't do.

BFCM sales will be here before you know it. Get a demo of Smart Cart today!

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