Black Friday Marketing Tips: Tiered Promos To Boost AOV | #238 Nathan Ho

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Claus Lauter: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Q4 is on us. And with that black Friday, Cyber Monday are coming very, very soon, at least in the calendars of merchants. So if you have not started to get prepared for black Friday and Cyber Monday, you should do running promotions for these specific sales all the days.

Is a specific topic that we want to dive into today. So how do you do the best promotions? What kind of different marketing strategies can you follow? And with me on the show to discuss this today is Nathan Ho. He is a product manager of EasyGift and in e commerce for one and a half years, Nathan's role has been a product manager and was overseeing the development and marketing of EasyGift.

Nathan interacts with merchants daily, learning from them. Advising them on how to run the best deals in their stores. And that's what we want to talk about. Let's welcome Nathan to the show today. Hey, Nathan, how are you today?

Nathan Ho: Hello. Very good. Thank you. Excited to be here.

Claus Lauter: Nathan, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, everyone thinking about doing the right promotions. And a lot of people do just the same that they did last year. And there is a lot of different options. I want to dive a little bit into that. From your experience. How should a promotion for these days be structured and when should you start thinking about it?

Nathan Ho: Well, straight off the bat as, you should think about Black Friday as early as possible. Really. You want to have the best one each year, always growing from what you've done last year. I'd advise any shop to always check out what their competitors have done recently to try and beat it and excite their customers to get the best gifts and promotions that they can offer and receive by the customer.

Claus Lauter: Give me some ideas on what kind of promotions you can run on these days.

Nathan Ho: I feel like the best ones that I've seen used in previous back Fridays, have been the tiered minimum spend promotions. So this is where you're trying to push the average car or order value up by saying to the customer, say, 0 to 50, you're given a small gift, and then above 50 to 100, you give a better gift, maybe including the first gift.

So staggered in that sort of tiered way. And then a third, To where over orders over 100, you get a really good, deal. In previous years, got a lot of emails from Reebok, where, they give better amounts off per level of spending.

Claus Lauter: Now, not every merchant doesn't really want to go away gifts. But tell me a little bit of why a gift is such a strong trigger to get people to buy more and to basically go through the promotion.

Nathan Ho: gifts, just create a sense of excitement and joy for all for your customers. It's a great way that you can show different products to your customers that they might not be aware of. A common example is samples. , just the other day, I bought some skincare for my mom there's quite a lot of skincare products that I've got, for my mom.

Sun creams, creams and so on, but they gave me mask. She was smiling and I think, yeah she'll buy the mask next time she needs to get some more cream. It's just pushing out different products that people might not be aware of and they could try it for free.

Claus Lauter: Setting up a promotion, there's a lot of things that can go wrong and that might cost you more than you actually gain on a promotion. Give me some examples on how you do the best setup for a promotion like that.

Nathan Ho: some of the best ones I've seen, which is easy and easy gift is what we allow. They're called scheduled rules. So we could set up a rule that's going to run maybe At breakfast time when your customers might not be at work. So that might be deal 1 on Black Friday that will start and stop the promotion where you're either giving a free gift or offering a different assortment of gifts that they can choose from.

That'd be like a breakfast deal, then at lunchtime when they're off work again, you could set another one that ties in a different gift with a different discount or offering, and then that will also stop at certain times and say the end of lunch, and then there could be one after work that you could set an easy gift that will start and stop it for you.

Claus Lauter: Now, within the purchase flow, once people are on the store, what's the best time or the best way to show them this kind of offer?

Nathan Ho: The best thing would be with, , announcements before Black Friday hits. So an email, an email shot out to all your customers to build anticipation and make them aware that a deal is coming on offer. And then the other way is on the actual store, you could just add a banner to say what the offer is and the simplicity of that needs to be quite clear.

I feel like a lot of customers, a lot of merchants try to go overboard with the amount of promos that they offer on Black Friday. You want to try and keep it quite simple so that customers don't get too confused. So easy gift makes that easy as well because we just automatically add the gift whenever the trigger on the car is activated, you're not asking them to add trainers and then add the pair of socks to make it free.

Whereas we will just add the socks as well. So it's almost one smooth movement.

Claus Lauter: When it comes to triggers, and I think that was, we were talking about what kind of different triggers can you use, , to activate that

Nathan Ho: So the classic one is cart values to get a minimum spend, trying to push up the average order value. but you could do it on products. So specific products, like I just said about the trainers, you could do it on a specific variance of the trainers to certain colors that you might want to, sell more of, or you could do it on collections as well.

So, anything in that collection that's added to the car, certain amount or quantity of those. Once that's hit with the car, we'll add the gift.

Claus Lauter: now, obviously you want to run gifts or these promotions on different levels, maybe for different audiences, maybe on a different schedule. Tell me a little bit on the options that I can use there.

Nathan Ho: It needs to get, we have loads of different options on how to target these promotions. straight up, you might on Black Friday, you might want to just offer it to everyone. So that's just a blanket deal, but you might want to offer it to people that have just seen it on a Facebook ad that you've targeted.

And you could do that with magic links. So that means only people who have clicked. The link to visit your site can activate the easy gift rule. So it's quite a neat way to maybe not dishearten your existing customers. We're trying to offer new deals to new ones that you try again. Secondly, on the other side of that, we can also trigger rules based on people that have existing accounts with your shop.

So we could base it off certain customer tags, their IDs, their order history, so how much. If they've ordered over 500 from you before, you can trigger a rule towards them, or if they've ordered over five times from you, you can trigger it on them as well.

Claus Lauter: when it comes to a product alerts, is there anything that you can do that basically people get alerted when there will be a gift available for that? Or how does that work?

Nathan Ho: so I think that could be covered in the anticipation email trail that , you should send before Black Friday to try to tell them, maybe next box is going to be 20 percent off.

Claus Lauter: When it comes to the implementation how does that look on Shopify? Where does it show, when it comes to the different ways on cart pages on the checkout, what's the flow? What can I imagine seeing the gift offer?

Nathan Ho: so when EasyGift adds the gift, you can show a little banner or notification Anywhere on the screen once we've done it, and that should just have like an image and just some text, simple text to tell them that the gift has been added.

Claus Lauter: Are you talking to a lot of merchants? What do you see is the biggest struggle they have when they thinking about, adding gifts to their, flow?

Nathan Ho: the biggest problems I see are maybe running too many promotions at the same time. Where there can be conflicts between, I don't know, social media codes that they're trying to use, as well as making this free gift work. Shopify isn't the best at making these combine. You need to test these promos before you release them.

That's what advise. don't want to look silly in front of your customers when you've got an influencer code and a free gift that isn't working together on Black Friday, which is your busiest day.

Claus Lauter: I agree on that one When it comes to the implementation of, easy gifts, how does that work into a store?

Nathan Ho: So it's a fairly simple, installation process after you've clicked add to your store from the Shopify app store, you need to enable the app embed. That means it will ask script to run in your store. , and then you need to create the rules that you want to use on, Black Friday, for example. So whether it's cart value product or collection triggers, and then the action that you want it to do.

So whether you want us to auto add some gift to the cart, once that's triggered or, show a pop up where your customers can choose the gift that they like. And then finally, you can set a schedule. It's optional or , specific targeting that we've spoken about earlier.

Claus Lauter: Do you see specific products or industries or niches where gifts works very well?

Nathan Ho: I think they work well on cosmetic brand stores, as well as food. I've seen a lot more food shops becoming more aware of their environmental impact. So they're gifting, products that are coming close to expiry date. Seeing this with a coffee shop. So it's something that your customers will still use and enjoy.

And it's saving the planet. not wasting so much.

Claus Lauter: Tell me a little bit about the pricing structure. how much does the app cost?

Nathan Ho: It's free to install, and use for five days on a five day free trial. Then it's. Is 5. 99 a month on the standard plan, which allows you to set up to three rules, then if you want to go above that with more settings, on triggering and targeting, then that goes up to the unlimited plan, which is 14.99 a month.

Claus Lauter: Okay. That's very affordable for what you get. I think. Is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

Nathan Ho: advise merchants to optimize their shipping conditions. So, if you're offering very similar deals to your competitors, you want to stand out from the crowd. So, make your delivery free or faster a good thing that we could roll back to from previous point is to create urgency is say that delivery next day delivery cuts off at 3 PM make it more compelling for your customers to check out sooner.

Claus Lauter: Sounds great. Where can people find out more about the app?

Nathan Ho: they can find out more information from 506. io or from the app store listing.

Claus Lauter: Okay. I will put the links in the show notes as always. They're just one click away. Nathan, thanks so much for giving us an overview today on the advantages of using gifts in a promotion to increase your average order value and to get people to buy more from you. Thanks so much for your time today and talk soon.

Nathan Ho: Thanks.