Tips for boosting performance around BFCM and peak shopping events
Vaishali Ravi
·February 3, 2025
In our recent blog series, we’ve showcased our proprietary data insights from sales and returns during the BFCM shopping period, Boxing Day, and the two-week post-holiday period. Take a peek, if you haven’t already—it will give you a lot of great benchmarks for understanding your own store’s performance in context.
If you’ve found that your store performance is falling short of where you’d like to be, don’t worry. In this article, we’ll showcase some key tactics you can use to improve your brand’s performance—both for BFCM 2025, and for all the other peak sales events throughout the year to come.
Optimizing your performance for peak sales events
You don’t need to wait until next Cyber Week to improve your metrics—put these tactics into place any time you’re preparing for a big sales event, and you’ll see an immediate payoff.
- Optimize the entire shopper’s journey
Take a holistic approach to your sales strategy by mapping out all of the touchpoints where you can build a deeper connection with your customers. Use your order tracking pages and email communications to provide personalized content and offers to your shoppers, helping you drive incremental sales through product recommendations, upselling, and cross-selling. - Promote your sales campaign with omnichannel marketing
Whether you’re prepping for BFCM promotions, a big Labor Day sale, or a clearance special, you’ll be able to maximize your reach by embracing an omnichannel marketing strategy. That means using all of your available marketing channels, including email, SMS, digital advertising, direct mail, and in-store promotions to engage with your customers. They’ll be able to connect with you through their preferred medium, ensuring high-quality brand interactions. - Enhance the customer experience with automation
Automation technologies can streamline customer interactions and help them complete transactions more quickly, delivering a great customer experience while saving your operations team time and money. For instance, you can implement chatbots to provide immediate assistance with shopping and customer support inquiries. And when a shopper wants to make a return, they can use Loop’s self-service returns portal to instantly initiate a product return without asking a CX agent for support. - Reward your loyal shoppers
Our data shows us that returning customers spend more than first time customers—so make sure that you’re keeping them engaged after the initial purchase! Incentivize your returning customers with special offers and perks, such as special promotions, free shipping, or free returns. Consider setting up a customer loyalty program or VIP rewards program that offers different perks based on your shoppers’ total lifetime value with your brand. - Build a generous returns policy
Our data shows that merchants are changing their returns policies in both directions, with some tightening the returns window and others extending it. Our recommendation? Maintain a generous window for returns, setting you apart from competitors and helping shoppers gain peace of mind. We suggest a return window of at least 30 days, but encourage you to extend the returns period for purchases made during BCFM and the holiday season. - Encourage exchanges
Finally, don’t neglect the importance of revenue retention during the returns process. By encouraging shoppers to choose exchanges over refunds, you can keep your customer retention rates high and preserve profits that you’d otherwise lose to a refund request.
Using Loop to boost performance during peak shopping season
Major sales events are a great tactic for winning over new customers—but the crucial part is retaining them for the long term. After all, it costs five to seven times more to acquire a customer than to retain them. That means you need to invest in building each new customer relationship—whether or not their first purchase works out.
After all, when sales numbers go up, return rates do, too: In fact, the average return rate during Cyber Week is significantly higher than average, with approximately one in three purchases ending in a return, as many shoppers make impulse purchases that they later regret.
Without a robust returns management strategy in place, these shoppers are likely to slip away without a trace. But by using a best-in-class ecommerce operations platform like Loop to enhance the post-purchase experience, you’ll be able to boost your customer loyalty and retention rates and preserve higher margins after any peak sales event.
Learn more about Loop’s standout features that can help you deliver a superior customer experience and preserve your profit margins during big sales events.
- Our self-service returns portal helps shoppers initiate returns faster, with automated enforcement of your return policies. That helps customers resolve issues faster, and preserves CX agent time for high-priority concerns.
- Use Workflows to build customized return policies for the holiday period, with extended return windows, or to segment customers based on loyalty, providing special benefits like free return shipping for your loyal customers
- Shop Now & Later and Instant Exchanges incentivize shoppers to choose an exchange or store credit over a refund, helping you boost revenue retention. In fact, 57% of returns are converted into exchange requests.
- Recoup your return label costs with Offset, by encouraging shoppers to pay upfront for guaranteed free returns later.
- Protect your profit margins by using Loop’s fraud tools to identify and block high-risk transactions that show common markers of fraud
- Optimize your operations with the most cost-effective shipping carriers, routes, and rates, helping you reduce your reverse logistics costs and get items back in inventory faster.
With the right technology solutions at hand to help you optimize your peak sales events, you’ll be able to recapture lost revenue and deliver an effortless customer experience that will keep your shoppers coming back time and again. Loop’s proprietary features help you transform shopper behavior around BFCM and other major sales, empowering your brand to convert one-time shoppers into loyal customers that drive recurring revenue and higher profit margins.
Ready to elevate the post-purchase experience and drive higher profit margins? Book a demo of Loop today ↓
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With Loop, your brand can offer everything from refunds to direct exchanges to shopper incentives and more. Even better? These exchanges build your business.