Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is going to happen in less than a month. This is one of the year's biggest shopping sprees that could remarkably boost your sales and revenues. According to our statistics for the last several years, you should be able to get more than 80% increase in sales. Now, the question is, have you started to plan for it? Although it’s a golden opportunity to earn a big fortune, this extravaganza could also draw the attention of nefarious fraudsters trying to reap your hard earned profits. Is your online store ready for it? In this article, we are going to share with you 5 tips to start planning for this coming shopping spree.
1. Get your email list cleaned
You have been collecting opt-in email addresses through various channels, like account subscriptions, newsletter sign ups, marketing campaigns and so on. But, these email lists may not be as clean as you might think. There could be out-dated emails, disposable emails, invalid emails and so on. If you happen to send an email to one of these, it could jeopardize your email sending reputation and could cause you to be banned from email sending if a lot of spam reports are received by the authorities. To alleviate this risk, you should at least verify the validity of the email addresses before email campaigns or do it on a regular basis before any sending. You may use MailboxValidator that comes with a free plan to help you get started. There are many metrics you can find from this tool, such as whether the email is a disposable email, a role-based email, a greylisted email and so on.
2. Run the marketing campaign, such as email marketing
In order to be successful in the email marketing campaign, the email content plays a vital role. Therefore, the content has to be well written, clearly outline the purpose of this campaign, a catchy banner and presented in a nice responsive template that works in both mobile and desktop browsers. More importantly, it must be deliverable into the inbox, otherwise your email marketing efforts will be in vain. For this, you should avoid spammy content that will get your email classified as junk email. Hence, you should always get your email content checked for any of your email marketing campaigns. If you are using popular ESP services like SendGrid, MailChimp, and so on, they have a tool that allows you to check if the email content looks spammy. There are also articles that talk about the pitfalls that you should avoid. If not, you may also search for tools online, and there are many of them.
3. Get a fraud prevention solution for your online store
You have done a great job in your marketing campaigns, and you are expecting huge crowds to visit your online store during the upcoming BFCM event. But, you may not be ready unless you get a fraud prevention tool to protect your online store, to make sure the buyers who purchase your product are indeed the legitimate buyers they claimed to be. This tool should be able to help you to distinguish a fraudster versus a legitimate buyer in a fraction of a second. For this, you would need FraudLabs Pro, a free fraud detection tool that can help you to screen and block the fraudsters automatically. This fraud prevention tool will perform a comprehensive check on every single element, like IP address, email address, shipping address, device and so on to accurately detect a fraudulent order. It also has a merchant network that will instantly react to the fraud information shared by other merchants around the world. That means, if one merchant discovers a fraud case with a specific email address, this information will be shared instantly to other merchants to prevent others from falling prey to the same bad actor.
4. Optimize the validation rules
Most of the fraud prevention tools out in the market will rely on the fraud score as the main indicator to block a fraud order. In FraudLabs Pro, it allows you to have more flexibility by defining your own validation rules. For example, you can create a rule to approve repeat customers right away to improve the purchase experience. Also, you may create a rule to block the buyers if they are buying too many times within a short period of time. Or, you may block the transaction if the distance between the billing address and the shipping address is too far apart. There are many rules you may create to align with your online business environment.
5. Another layer of protection - SMS Verification
Well, the fraud detection solution should be able to minimize your fraud losses, but if you are digital delivery business, such as digital download, digital license key, and so on, you may want to consider another layer of protection - the SMS verification. The SMS verification will authenticate the buyer’s phone number by using the OTP mechanism (An one-time-passcode will be sent to the buyer’s phone number via the SMS for the verification). This method is proven to be effective in stopping fraudsters’ plots, as fraudsters are not willing to expose their identities with their phone numbers. Furthermore, unlike email addresses, phone numbers are much harder to spoof or intercept.
By following the above tips, you should be more prepared for the BFCM extravaganza. You should start to plan and execute your marketing campaign now, and get the fraud detection solution installed and to familiarize yourself with the operation.