“The most challenging part for shoppers while shopping online is waiting”.
Pre-Orders for eCommerce are some of the most persuasive ways of selling products before they are available. They completely offer a new way of promoting products online, create a hype, and help anticipating the product demand for restocking and manufacturing.
Many top brands like Amazon, Apple, Nike use pre-ordering strategy for promoting their upcoming products and create engagement with the customers. Businesses can skyrocket their sales, strengthen customer relationship and process orders before the product goes live using pre-orders facility.
A pre-order strategy needs to be implemented effectively. It requires immense research, planning and effective handling of campaigns to be successful.
Excited to offer convenient pre-order facility to your customers? Doing so has now became easier than ever for the stores running on Magento 2 using by Meetanshi’s Magento 2 Pre Order extension.
This article guides you through the benefits of pre-orders, the ways in which they can benefit businesses and best practices to maximize campaigns’ success.
Let’s begin…!
What is a Pre-Order?
A pre-order can be defined as an order placed for an item that is soon to be released or is not currently available in the stock, i.e. out-of-stock products. For pre-ordered items, the payments can be made in advance or as soon as the item is shipped.
Why Offer Pre-Orders?
A powerful pre-order campaign can benefit your online store in the following ways:
Forecast Demand
Pre-order is one of the key driver that aids businesses to authenticate, evaluate and project the demand for the product. It helps make informed decisions about the number of items that needs to be produced or restocked.
With solid marketing strategy, an online business can get better understanding regarding the product variations which will set the most and estimate the number of pre-order sales. As a result, it eliminates the problems of stagnant products!
Minimize Financial Risk
Selling products through pre-orders minimizes the chances of financial risks associated with the product launch. The pre-order payments can easily fund your business for manufacturing and restocking. It is highly advantageous to businesses that are looking for multiple ways to borrow money from the market.
Create Hype in Market
Create enthusiasm for your products amongst the shoppers through pre-orders and offer them for a limited span of time. Limited pre-orders can make customers think that the product is special and can create a market hype. This can be done through content marketing, email marketing or influencers.
6 Best Practices for Pre-Order Marketing
Let’s walk through some of the best practices for pre-order marketing:
Strategize the Plan for Pre-Ordering
Planning is one of the pivotal step of pre-ordering strategy before launching any product. Develop a solid plan before its launch and focus on its awareness amongst your potential customers.
Announce the availability of the product before 3-4 months of the product launch. Ensure choosing the most appropriate time, budget and resources for a powerful launch. There are high chances that a wide range of shoppers book an order on a day prior to its actual release.
Put Combined Team Efforts for Product-Launch
After creating a pre-order plan with your team, launching a pre-order strategy can be much easier. It helps get desired outcomes and guaranteed results when combined team efforts and energy are put forth. Marketing team, support team and IT team needs to be equally involved in planning and executing the strategy.
Make sure that almost every team member is coming up with continuous efforts for the success of pre-launch strategy. For instance, the marketing team leverages best strategies to create the hype and attract the visitors, while the IT & support team ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Create Urgency During Pre-Launch
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is one of the most effective strategies to sell products and services to the customers. This implies to the pre-launch campaigns as well.
You can use similar strategy by creating a sense of urgency for placing the pre-order for the product amongst the customers in multiple ways. Some of the effective ways to do that include opening the pre ordering window only for a limited time or lucrative discounts as a limited time offer. Many of the businesses also cap the number of products during the pre-ordering sessions to create fear of missing out amongst the customers.
Generate Hype Through Influencers
Ensure creating an efficient marketing strategy before launching any product. Marketing through influencers can be fruitful enough and there are high chances that shoppers might consider their opinion. Influencer marketing can help boost your revenue, grow sales and increases awareness.
Currently, many top companies are making huge investments in promoting their products through influencers and can observe significant rise in their sales. The pre-order sales may likely increase if the target audience is much aware about the product.
Maintain Consistency in Providing Content
Maintaining consistency and offering relevant content are the key drivers to create brand awareness, establish brand image and encourage shoppers to return back to your store. You can start up by collecting email address of the ones who has placed an order and prepare a list of them.
There are multiple ways to handle content marketing campaigns effectively which are:
- Make sure that you use email marketing software to provide information and updates about the products.
- Publish press release highlighting new features for your product.
- Ensure writing guest posts for new release.
- Showcase your products with new videos on various social media platforms.
Be Prepared for Sudden Rush in Orders
Once you are planning to launch a pre-launch campaign, the foremost thing is to get prepared for the sudden rush in orders. There are likely more chances that you experience heavy traffic or lack of stock to satisfy the demand.
Ensure that the website bandwidth is appropriate so there are very few chances of website downtime. Manage orders and stocks effectively to avoid such circumstances.
Shoot Up Your Pre-Order Strategy Now
There’s no surprise that pre-order strategy can be successful for your eCommerce business, if implemented rightly. Pre-Orders for eCommerce businesses can be a win-win situation for both merchants and shoppers. It helps maximize sales, boost revenue, minimize risks and get better understanding about the market demand.
Pre-orders are an excellent way to create a sense of urgency for your product and brand, evaluate the demand of your product before making a release.
Guest article written by: Shivbhadrasinh Gohil is the Wizard of Light Bulb Moments at Meetanshi. He is a Digital Marketer and started optimizing Magento stores since 2010. He has founded 2 successful Magento Agencies since 2014. When not working, you can find him reading books or spending time with his children.