If there’s one thing that the recent Amazon Prime day has shown, it’s that bit sale events now have significant effect on the entire UK ecommerce market. This time around the High Street were ready for Prime Day with John Lewis, Currys, Debenhams, Tesco, Halfords and Argos all holding their own sales or shipping promotions.
Great for the big retailers, but what about small online businesses? How can you benefit from large online sale events?
Getting canny with your marketing is the obvious answer – with Black Friday and Cyber Monday still over three months away it’s not too late to start preparing. The first things to do are to start building your email marketing lists and your social media following. If you don’t have a ready source of customers to contact it doesn’t matter how great any promotions you have may be.
Getting subscribers to opt into your email marketing is something that can be done with each and every sale. Send a compelling reason via email or with a flyer in parcels. Promise discounts, advance news of sales, shipping promotions, coupon codes, invitations to events or a prize draw – pretty much anything that will appeal to your clientèle that you know you’ll be able to deliver.
There are really simple things that you can do, such as including a subscribe link in your and your employees email signatures and making sure that you have a prominent subscribe box on your website. Don’t make people have to look for a way to subscribe to you.
If you have a blog you should be making it easy for people to subscribe to your blog content as well – whether this be through a Facebook page or twitter, on Pinterest or Instagram or through good old RSS.
Start building your marketing lists today and don’t forget to include eBay email marketing if you have an eBay shop. Whilst your own list will be far more valuable in the long term, subscribers to your eBay shop can still be profitable although the content you can send is more limited.
Once you have subscribers, whether they be email, social media or blog, you can then jump on the back of high profile sale events with your own offers. If consumers are happily spending online and the high street giants are cashing in, it’s a sure indicator that you should follow suit and consider running your own promotion no matter how small to entice previous customers to revisit your shop.
