Do you often worried about understocking or overstocking a new product?
It means you haven't used the Pre Order Strategy yet in your eCommerce business.
Pre-orders are an excellent way to raise hype and generate excitement among customers about your upcoming products. But more importantly, this strategy helps you determine customer interest and intent in a better way.
If you create hype among the audience about your new product launch, then their pre-orders will help you to keep up with the demand before the actual launch.
That's a win-win for both - the customers and merchants; customers can secure their product before it gets sold out, and the merchant can secure a sale even before the inventory comes in!
But how do you set up a Pre-Order Marketing Strategy?
What is pre-order in eCommerce?
A pre-order is an order placed by customers for a product that is not yet launched. One can pre-order a product when a brand allows customers to place an order for a product that isn't available yet but will be available soon or will be released soon.
Pre-orders are used for both products that may have run out of stock, and coming soon products and collections. When you open pre-orders on your online store, your customers get to make the purchase before the product runs out again or get the products they want beforehand. As a business, by doing this you get to secure a sale even before the inventory comes in and also reserve them in advance before they are officially available.
As a result, customers can be notified ASAP once the product gets launched or is available in stock. An effective pre-order strategy works by creating a sense of exclusivity and excitement for customers about a product.
How Do Pre-Orders Work?
Under the pre-order marketing strategy, customers will be provided with two options. One, they can pay the full amount upfront. Or, they can secure the product by making a small payment and paying the remaining amount upon product release.
For example, Amazon allows customers to pre-ordering where they can purchase the products by adding them to their cart and checking out. But till the product, actually, ships from Amazon, customers will be charged nothing. The key benefit of this strategy is that customers can pre-order to avoid the launch day rush to get a new product. There is also an option offered by Amazon to pay later for that product.
The Importance of Pre-Order Marketing Strategy for Your eCommerce Business
Pre-order strategies aren't just for creating hype among customers and getting them excited for new product launches. These strategies are also super useful for internal teams too. Here are some benefits of pre-order strategy:
- Help businesses to understand the level of demand among their target market.
- Secure sales before the product even hit the shelves
- The sales done from these helps in marketing campaigns for promotion, funding the production of the product itself, and follow-up projects.
- Helps to attract more leads and engage your current & new customers as well.
- Increase Sales
- Predict Product Demand
- Improve SEO and helps to increase your search engine traffic
How do you Promote a Pre-Order?
There are a lot of many options to spread awareness and promote a pre-order:
- You can create and share product teasers and posts on social media platforms.
- Partner with influencers on social media and ask them too to build excitement among the audience about your products by creating and sharing authentic content.
- Reach out to your existing customers by sharing information about pre-orders and adding value to your relationship.
- Promote pre-order through paid social media ads
- Make use of your subscriber's list to send out an email to your subscribers and introduce your coming soon products and collections.
- Send web push notifications to catch pre-order subscribers' attention
- Promote your pre-order campaign on SMS/ text
5 Important Pre Order Marketing Strategy
1) Build a Plan For Pre-Ordering based on pre-order lifecycles
Do you that the most important part of a product launch isn't the launch day or the day before launch? In fact, what a brand does in the months and weeks prior to a product launch matters the most to the success of a product launch than the actual launch day itself. It's important to build and work on a strong plan because planning is the most important part of a Pre-Order Marketing Strategy before a product launch. To secure pre-orders, your strategy should be more focused on promoting products and generating awareness among your customers.
According to reports by Scalefast, around 28% of pre-orders are placed on the first day of pre-order availability. And in the next 7 to 10 days, the activity is totally null and acts as a dead zone because the initial marketing buzz goes down. Based on this life cycle, you can start to plan your Pre-Order Marketing Campaign calendar with the following considerations:
- Make sure you announce the pre-order availability 4-6 months prior to your actual launching date of the product.
- Consider what is the best time to announce the product launch.
- What resources or budget do you have to commit for an effective launch.
- How will you reach the maximum number of customers possible and build awareness before you officially take pre-orders
2) Make a Team Effort For the Product Launch
Launching a pre-order strategy is not a difficult task once you have already built a strategic plan for your business and your team. A pre-order strategy works when your entire team puts the effort, energy, hard work, experience, and budget into making it a success.
Ensure that each and every team member in your team is making the effort to build a successful product launch strategy. Be it your IT team, customer service team, or marketing team, everyone in the team should be a part of planning and execution. After all, success is all about team efforts.
3) Drive Awareness Through Marketing Campaigns
Making a strong marketing campaign according to your pre-order strategy is most important before launching your pre-orders. Advertising, CRM, PR, Partnerships, and Content Marketing are some great ways to build awareness of your product before it launches. You can advertise on platforms like Instagram, Google Ads, Facebook, and YouTube, to reach your target audience. To run pre-order campaigns, you can also use social media advertising.
Marketing product launch to your existing database is also of the best avenues. Let your customers know that pre-orders are officially open by scheduling an email blast. Follow up by sending regular emails to your customers and reminding them to pre-order before the pre-order launch date.
Influencer marketing and Press releases can help you to create a buzz around your product release and to send information as well as reach out to your customers. Likewise, build awareness among your customers with previews of your product for an upcoming product launch with the help of content marketing. Drive your upcoming product launch using webinars and interviews with the influencers or product creators who have tested.
4) Generate Buzz Through Digital Influencers
It's no use of launching pre-orders for a product if nobody is aware of it. It is very important to create a strong marketing campaign. One of the best marketing tactics is Word of mouth, and it is incredibly powerful. Make sure you promote your products through digital influencers as it will be more helpful, and you are likely to generate more leads through social media referrals. Send your product for trial to influencers and ask them to promote it during the launching period.
You can also offer discounts & special offers on pre-ordering or a chance to win a prize, and share on social media for your pre-order.
5) Prepare For the Surge in Orders
While planning to launch a pre-order campaign, your main focus must be on preparing for the surge in orders. Or there isn't enough inventory to keep up with the demand, or there may be a spike in traffic on your website.
Check your website bandwidth to ensure this doesn't happen, and it can handle a spike in traffic and visitors. Also, keep a check on your inventory to manage stock availability and orders in real-time. You can also implement a launch team who can assist with orders or any customer inquiries (whether over the phone, on social media, or via email)
Ready to Launch your Pre-Order Sales?
Pre-orders are a fantastic tool to build hype and drive more sales for your next product launch. The main aim of the above Pre-order Sale Marketing strategies is to generate more interest among the audience for your upcoming products. But at the same time, capture the intent of interested shoppers and convince them to actually purchase the product.
Customers love to feel special, and exclusive, and are the first to get their hands on anything new in the market. Your pre-order marketing strategy communication with your audience will only be effective when you understand this psychology!
Ready to launch a pre-order marketing campaign? If you're planning to implement a pre-order strategy or want to install any pre-order extension for your business, Magento 2 Pre Order Extension is here to help you manage your orders, inventory, orders, and sales to make sure your product launch goes smoothly.