🧠 Don’t discount this Black Friday

Subscribe | Limited offer: 14-day free trial of Semrush

Join 9,432 top shops

Welcome to the most money-saving, myth-busting, blank-page eradicating and anger-venting issue of the Early Checkout yet. Are you ready? 

This week:

🧠 Tactics - Don’t discount for Black Friday, Do This Instead

✍️ What’s also working - The best (free) place to find messaging ideas

🤬 Community talk - Come vent about Shopify with the rest of us

TACTICS

Don’t discount for Black Friday, Do This Instead

Do you want to make more while discounting less this year on Black Friday? 

Then don’t just discount your products willy-nilly and call it a day, says Ned MacPherson from Power Digital Marketing. 

🎁 Bundling is key. If you’re not doing this already, look at tools like Bundler. This is absolutely necessary for any kind of discount.

3️⃣ Adopt the 3 segments - 3 strategies approach. 

• New customers: show them your hero products but keep the discount low

• Recently acquired customers: use scarcity tactics

• Dormant customers: offer personalized bundles or exclusive product launches

🚀 Launch. Now is the time to announce new product launches, giving customers a reason to shop beyond discounts. 

Tip: align it with the holidays, e.g.: “Make the Perfect Gift This Season - Available Only This Weekend!”

🔑 Unlock Gifts. Let your customers know they’ll unlock free gifts (free shipping, tote bags, whatever you’ve got on hand) for making more purchases in one go. Tools like Monster Cart can do the job.

Tip: adding a progress bar works very well (gamification). 

🏷️ Re-label your existing discounts. This one is a bit cheeky but… do you have a “buy 3 get 20% off” offer year-round? Re-label it a “Black Friday Special”. Most of your customers will be new and won’t notice. 

🎢 It doesn’t stop at Black Friday. And no, we don’t mean Cyber Monday - we mean the 30 to 60 days after. This is a critical time to drive repurchases. Try follow-up offers, e.g. an email with “Exclusive Access to Our Christmas Collection”. 

Tip: use loyalty incentives if you have any, e.g. “Earn double points on your next purchase before New Year!”

Takeaway: don’t fall for the discount trap, there are too many ways around it.

WHAT’S WORKING

Messaging idea hack

Blank page syndrome for your next email, SMS or ad campaign? 

Here’s a quick tip from Jimmy Kim from Sendlane.

• Review your replies

• Review your social ad comments

• Review your product reviews

• Review what people clicked on

Takeaway: People tell you how to sell to them.

CASE STUDY

Low on cash? Here’s how to grow with (nearly) no money.

SmaakGenot, the Netherlands-based food marketplace, was launched by two fellas with a few thousand euro in their pocket in 2020. It was the perfect time to launch, demand for healthy food delivery was at its peak. 

But they had very little to invest in promotion. 

How they figured out the ads

The big question was: which product should they promote? 

To find out, they looked at their competitor’s ads (e.g. HelloFresh and Marley Spoon). Using the Semrush Advertising Research Tool, they got: 

• What keywords similar food marketplaces are paying for

• What keywords are bringing them the most traffic

• What their ad creatives and copy look like

They then selected their keywords based on three factors:

• High buyer intent

• Assurance that they could deliver the best deal due to the shorter food chain

• Seasonality

Seasonality was a big deal. Using Semrush Traffic Analytics, the team looked at years-long traffic trends of bigger food chains, especially for specific product pages. This helped them figure out seasonal patterns in demand and maximize ROI for their ads.

How they won at organic

As the cheapest and most sustainable way to attract clients, this was always the main plan for SmaakGenot.

Here’s how they built their strategy.

They identified competitors. Using the Semrush Keyword Overview tool and setting up the location specs, they unwrapped the key brands they were competing against in the organic search space. Alternatively, you can Google the chosen terms and get a list of competitors without having their key domain metrics.

Found the angle. They found out that most of their competitors were big supermarkets with generic product descriptions. It wasn’t difficult to make more engaging content. 

Generated backlinks. The Semrush Domain Overview showed them which websites were already backlinking to food eCommerce sites like theirs. It was a matter of reaching out to the high traffic ones (easy to find with the Semrush Traffic Analytics tool).

Process: One year of optimizing organic and paid traffic performance (February 2021 - February 2022).

Result: 230% YoY revenue growth.

The Early Checkout Readers get an exclusive, double duration free trial with Semrush.

COMMUNITY TALK

This should be a fun one. 

Here were the top answers: 

Spam. 3rd party vendors harassing shop owners all day. Our latest and favorite: “your Robots.txt file is broken, let us help” (u/zitrof132).

Converting traffic into buyers. A pretty fundamental one - thankfully, some of us find this part fun. 

Needing 20+ apps. Necessary since Shopify is so bare-bones. 

Taxes. More missing features: shopify doesn’t offer an invoicing feature or a VAT validation for small business, complains u/Prinnykin. They did just announce a new tax filing feature, but it is quite expensive compared to options like TaxJar. 

THE BRIGHT SIDE

Did you know Shopify sends you rewards for big milestones? E.g. lifetime orders (10k, 100k, 1M…) find out more here.

Congrats to this guy 🥳 

As you can see, we’re powering up the content. Let us know if we’re doing it right!

With ❤️,

The Early Checkout Team

At The Early Checkout, we are strongly committed to protecting your privacy and providing a safe & high-quality online experience for all visitors. See our Terms & Conditions here. If you have any questions, reply to this email or visit our Website to view our official policies.