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The top 5 sales to run on your Shopify store during the holiday season

If shopping was a sport, then Black Friday would be the Superbowl.

You train your hardest all year, optimizing your site and creating the best damn marketing plan out there, all for a crack at making some of the $3.34 billion dollars spent during that one day.

Well, there’s only 24 days left on the clock, your competition is breathing down your neck, and it's time to pull out all the stops. So here are five quick and easy sale ideas you can offer your customers during Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2017.

1. Buy More, Save More

With this type of sale, the more a customer buys, the better price they get. Think buy two, get 20% off, or buy four and get 40%, etc.. The percentages can change, but the idea stays the same: You want to reward your customers for buying more on your site. They get a bigger discount, and your average order value goes through the roof.

You can choose to offer the discount on only one type of item on your store, select collections or brands only, or include your whole store in the deal.

Buy More Save More

You can choose to offer the discount on only one type of item on your store, select collections or brands only, or include your whole store in the deal.

2. Spend This, Get That

What if instead of offering a discount for buying multiples on your store, you gave people a free gift for spending a certain amount. With this sale, every time a customer spends a certain dollar amount, they'll get the option to choose a free gift to be added to their cart. Nice and simple, but with tons of potential.

Free Mystery Gift

What can you offer as your free gift?  Really, it can be anything you want! Maybe you over-ordered a certain item (this is a great way to reduce your stock by offering it as your free gift), sample-sizes of your top selling products, a gift certificate to go towards a future purchase, or you could even offer free shipping as the gift!

3. Buy One, Get One Free sale

In a recent report from AMG, 66% of shoppers said that they like BOGO sales the most out of all other discount promotions, and that 93% said they’ve taken advantage of BOGO promotions at least once.

Bogo

But we didn’t need stats to tell us customers love a BOGO sale (even though they’re pretty convincing). Everyone loves getting something for free! You can offer your entire store as part of the promotion, or if you sell apparel, maybe it’s only a certain clothing item, like all shirts that are included.

4. Gift a subscription

Subscriptions are key in generating recurring revenue on your store, plus, people love them almost as much as a BOGO. I mean, who wouldn’t want a gift delivered to their door month after month (think wine, beer, cheese, sock of the month clubs, or even a surprise box).

subscription-gift

So why not offer your customers the opportunity to share in the fun by giving them the option to purchase your subscription products for their loved ones.  If you’re not currently offering subscriptions on your store, check out this list of 28 Black Friday Subscription Box Deals to get some ideas.

5. The classic storewide sale

If you’re only going to run one type of sale on your store this Black Friday, make it a storewide sale. This could mean putting your entire store on sale for a certain percentage off, or offering a flat dollar amount off all purchases. How much everything goes on sale for is completely up to you, but the better of a deal you can afford, the bigger incentive you'll be giving your customers to buy from you.

Black Friday

The perfect app to help you run a storewide sale on Shopify is Bold’s Product Discount app (which is FREE for 60 days right now!). You can put certain segments of your store on sale, the whole store, or just hand selected products all with only a few clicks.

It goes through your entire store and adjusts the prices for you, and even puts the regular price in a ‘compare at’ price field to show your customers how much they’re saving, increasing your conversion rates. It also adds customizable sales icons to the items on sale, schedules your sale to start and stop at a scheduled time, and if you also have our Bold’s Product Upsell app, you can offer BOGO sales as well!

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Pro tip: Make sure you’re promoting your sales! Don’t waste your time spending weeks preparing for BFCM to drop the ball as you're about to cross the finish line. I won’t get into the details here since other people have already done it for us.


To find out how to use Instagram to promote your brand and drive sales, check out this post. Want to know more about Facebook advertising? Read this great article on Buffer. Don’t be afraid of retargeting ads either: Here’s A Beginner's Guide to Retargeting Ads to get you started.

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Make sure to let us know what type of sale you decide to run!

Melanie Fatouros-Richardson is a Content Marketer at Bold Commerce, where she helps store owners grow their businesses. Follow along to learn more about eCommerce and the best tips & tricks for selling online.

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