If you are selling on Etsy, you should look for any opportunity to ramp up those numbers. Any occasion, any promotions, any discounts—you better make the most of them all. Speaking of discounts, do you realize what it means when November is around the corner? 

Black Friday is one of the most lucrative months of the year, for both buyers and sellers alike. If you don’t trust plain semantics, have a look at these numbers. As a seller, therefore, it is imperative for you to know how to run a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale on Etsy. How do you do it efficiently? Keep reading!

Run Discounts

This goes without saying. While there might be a slight decrease in the show-price of the product, the volume of sales compensates for it. If you know how to throw discounts on products, your Black Friday sales are going to propel your sales figures. 

There are several advantages to running discounts. First, it gets you attracted to a wide base of new customers. As you may have understood, customers are seeking a healthy balance of high-quality products and hefty discounts. Irrespective of whether they are aware of your brand, this balance should drive your sales ahead. 

Second, these discounts would also increase your brand awareness. If you are a new or upcoming seller, there are a lot of loopholes that you have to cross in order to make yourself recognizable. That way, running discounts on an occasion like Black Friday will get you all over the web. 

Speaking of brand awareness, discounts would also make your reputation a lot healthier. Not only will your high-quality items become more reputable, but considering the high-volume sales, you will be doing—expect a lot of folks to spread your name in turn. 

Discounts exist in different flavors. Here are two different ways in which you can run your discounts. Irrespective of the kind of discount, know that your aim is to keep profit margins as healthy as you can (more on it later).

Site Wide Discounts

This is a more conservative approach to making great sales during Black Friday month. Providing site-wide discounts is helpful in its own way. After all, the customers may not know exactly what they’re looking for. 

Having a site-wide discount would also be less risky from your point of view, as you too may not be sure what your customer needs at that very moment—especially if you have quite a repertoire of products in your line. 

Specific Product Discounts

You can also choose to take the riskier approach. After all, the greater the risk, the sweeter the reward. When it comes to this kind of discount, what you can do is look at the hottest products that your shop sells. You can then put hefty discounts on those. 

As an alternative, you could also place discounts on items that are more expensive than the rest. That way, the customer too feels like they’ve won the Black Friday game. 

Run Promotions Leading Up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Sure, your store will get wider recognition once the Black Friday sales go as expected. However, in order to reach that state, you need a solid buildup too. This is where the aspect of promos comes into play. If you can run promotions that lead up to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday month, you’re bound to hit the jackpot. 

You can start by making the most of social media. Launch your campaign, and announce to the world that you will be running massive discounts in the coming months. You can also use referrals and emails in order to make sure that your word spreads further. With more emails to greater circles, you can also offer the said customer more voluminous discounts. 

Sticking to the social media aspect, why not launch mystery campaigns too? For instance, make it known that with every x purchase, the said customer would be getting a mystery gift. Will it be a gift card? Or perhaps some more cashback? Or any other associated item? Keep them guessing to boost sales!

You can also create promotions for more loyal customers. For instance, you can announce that you are keeping separate discounts for customers who have been regular at your store. In order to spice up things, you can also mention how the newer customers have the opportunity to be a part of the esoteric few!

Know Your Profit Margins

Irrespective of the kind of discounts you’re running, your aim is to know and maximize your profit margins. Irrespective of the discount percentages you are offering, sales figures are still the biggest pillar on Etsy. Before you go all-out guns blazing with those discounts, keep this idea in check. 

You will find Etsy’s own fee calculator on their website. Once you add all the extra costs that Etsy will be taking latently, then you can start doing the profit math. After this, you may choose to reduce your profit margins as long as it doesn’t cut you a big worry. 

Keep in mind that reducing profit margins doesn’t mean that you will be running at a loss. It simply means that you will be making less profit from each customer. In the grander scheme of things, if you can keep high volumes of sales, these numbers even themselves out a great deal. 

Bundle Products

In case you wish to provide discounts and at the same time, make healthy profits, bundling products is indeed the need of the hour. The idea here is to sell more than one item at a combined discount. 

On one hand, it would appear that the discounts are heftier owing to the discrepancy in combined prices. On the other hand, you would ideally be making more profit compared to what it would have been, had you sold these items separately. You can also prompt the customer into buying more than one item by suggesting bundling right in the store itself. 

Enhance Visibility by Buying Ads

You’ve set the environment for massive sales. Now all you have to do is enhance greater visibility. In this day and age where you’re required to have a competitive edge, how do you do so? You buy ads. Social media ads aren’t particularly expensive if you are expecting good sales in return. In fact, if anything, it is priceless. 

You can either choose to buy social media ads like those of Facebook, or you can go pro and get tools to increase visibility when folks are browsing on their regular web. In this day and age of surveillance capitalism, you can choose to buy ads in such a way that your customers get to know about your Black Friday sales even if they aren’t looking for it!

Give Your Customers a Reason to Come Back

And finally—discounts and sales are no match to great customer service and product quality. You can provide as many discounts as you want, but if your product isn’t up to the mark, or if your customer/after-sales service is not great, your customers will seldom come back for more. 

As an Etsy seller, it is important for you to live up to the name of both your store and to some degree, Etsy itself. Before you chalk out the sales figures and profit margins, make sure that there are no holes in your product itself. Once you create a solid product, and once you build that friendly and approachable customer network, word will spread. 

That being said, make the most of this year’s Black Friday!