Black Friday is not far away, and your eCommerce business will need to do its best to get the most of your marketing strategy. Failure to have logistical and marketing plans in place can lead to lost revenue and customers.
Black Friday is a challenge for retailers, so we’ve put together a list of tips to help you make sure you’re prepared for a chaotic shopping season.
1. Try Holistic Marketing
Your marketing strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday should be holistic. Make sure all of your channels and media are working together to promote your deals. For example, use email, SMS, and social media together to get the most bang for your buck.
Email marketing will allow you to increase brand loyalty and get the word out about your future deals, while SMS can help you increase sign-ups and sales. When it comes to social media, start creating buzz around your offers early. You can begin marketing your Black Friday deals as early as October. As the event gets closer, start creating a sense of urgency so you can tap into buyers’ fear of missing out (FOMO).
You may also choose to incorporate influencers into your strategy to help boost sales.
2. Optimise for Conversions
Your eCommerce website needs to be optimised to make the buying process simple and easy for customers. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a priority for all eCommerce businesses, but you should aim to make sure your website offers a good user experience especially during the holiday season.
To optimise your website for Black Friday conversions:
- Prepare early. Make sure all of your promotions and discounts are prepared as early as possible so you can go live on time.
- Optimise your online shop. Check on your site speed and user journey from a customer’s point of view. During the holiday season, your traffic is sure to spike, so you want to make sure your website quickly loads.
- Test your website. Before Black Friday hits, test your store and all of your promotions. Make sure you test your checkout process and payment method. Testing your website will ensure there are no technical issues to come on Black Friday.
3. Optimise Your Website for Mobile
Most shoppers shop on their phones nowadays, so you need to make sure your website is not only mobile-friendly, but the checkout process is easy and seamless. While your website might look great on a desktop, it needs to look good on a cell phone so people can easily shop on your website wherever they are located.
Check your website on your phone at least two months before Black Friday so you can hire a developer who can fix any issues there might be on the mobile version of your eCommerce website.
4. Start Your Advertising Campaigns Early
Make sure your paid campaigns are ready for Black Friday months in advance. If you’re advertising on social media or Google, you’ll need to make sure you have the final ads and copy ready for the start date.
When using Google ads, ensure you use all of the ad extensions and features available so you can effectively showcase all of your deals.
5. Go Big or Go Home
Make your Black Friday offers better than those of your competitors so you can attract more people to your brand. If you know your cost per acquisition, then you can do the math and offer the best discount. Make sure your discounts are still profitable, though.
If you’re spending more money during this time to get more customers, and you’ve seen a good return on investment, try doubling down by increasing your budget.
6. Turn Black Friday Customers into Long-term Customers
During the holiday season, brands focus on offering discounts so they can compete in a competitive marketplace. However, you should also have a strategy in place that takes these first-time buyers and turns them into lifetime customers. You can do this by adding subscriptions to your website. For example, if you sell birth control online online, you can have your customer set up auto-ship and autopay so they never miss their order.
You can also build customer loyalty by segmenting your email list and sending specific communications to specific groups of customers.
7. Organise Your Warehouse
Making sure you’re ready for Black Friday extends beyond making sure your website is ready. As your business grows, you’ll need to optimise your warehouse. During peaks like Black Friday, put all of your top sellers closer to the packing stations so they can be packed more efficiently.
Organising your warehouse can take a lot of time, so make sure you start early and do it at least a month in advance of Black Friday.
8. Incentivise Your Workers Instead of Hiring More
During the holiday season, many businesses hire temporary staff to deal with the additional workload in warehouses. While this makes a ton of sense because you don’t need this additional help during the rest of the year, hiring and training new people takes time, so it might not be worth it for your company to invest resources in employees who won’t be sticking around.
Instead, ask your current team if they are interested in taking on extra shifts during the holiday season. Your team members already know your products, the warehouse, and your software better than anyone else, and you won’t have to lose hours of work trying to train anyone new.
9. Count Inventory
Make sure you prepare for Black Friday by doing a count of your inventory. Many small businesses don’t always have a full count of the inventory they have on-hand, which can make for frustrated customers come Black Friday because you could be under or overselling.
Black Friday for Ecommerce Businesses
The holiday season can be stressful for any retailer, but if you’re not prepared, you can quickly become overwhelmed and lose out on sales and valuable customers. Make sure everything is in working order wells before you go live with your Black Friday deals so you can increase your profits.