Each November we see that most of our clients see a significant increase in traffic to their online store during Black Friday week, regardless of whether they run a dedicated campaign or not. Therefore, first of all, make sure that your eCom site can handle the extra bargain hunters, which lead to an extra level of abnormal traffic!
Feel free to also check if you can tick off our list below of our clever tips ahead of the year's biggest sales event!
...but these tips do not expire, so feel free to implement these in your marketing strategy throughout the rest of the year, or at any time actually!
Our Black Friday-tips!
-
Upgrade the Server Capacity
One of the absolute most important things is to make sure to upgrade the volume of traffic that your server can handle during the sales period. If you forget this, the website can quickly become unresponsive due to the increased traffic, and you can miss out on important transactions - which your competitors will easily pick up!
-
Prepare Communication & Customers
Prepare the communication and marketing material about the big day well in advance. As for other campaigns during the year, do tease your offers via good and cost-effective conversion channels such as for example your newsletters or SoMe well in advance. When the day eventually comes around, the customers will for sure keep you top of mind!
-
Prepare the Agencies and your Partners
Will you need to upgrade your server capacity? Need help with setting up discounts and price rules in your commerce platform? Will you need to publish more paid ads? Talk to your agencies early so they have time to help you!
-
Have a Backup-plan
What do you do if your hero product sells out quickly, if the offer doesn't get the desired response - or the sales target is miles away? It is diffucult to decide if you should or can take action if it happens, but with good preparations you will avoid panic on the actual day. Are there other campaigns that can easily be pushed out digitally? What will this require in terms of materials, additional budgets, technical setup and agencies? Stay ahead of your potensial problems!
-
Build your Customer Base
Use the days ahead of Black Week to boost your email database. For example, you can tease the big sale that will soon be launched by triggering people to subscribe as they will then receive the offers earlier, or get an extra discount. You can continue to engage these customers in the future.
-
Page Speed
Slow web pages are one of the factors that drive the Conversion Rate down and the Bounce Rate up! Make sure your site is fast enough and use simple SEO optimization tricks to ensure good speed. For example, use web-optimized images. Feel free to talk to our SEO specialist to check how you should take action.
-
Test Functionality & Discounts in Advance
Test discounts, price rules and necessary functionality well in advance. Especially if you are going to run several discounts during the week, or time-limited discounts with and without codes, it can easily get confusing.
-
Logistics & Inventory
Ensure that the inventory matches what you promote in the online store and that the deliveries work as communicated.
-
Staffing
Ensure good staffing in your Customer Center both on the phone, chat and in warehouse. If the customers have questions, can they easily contact you through chat or other channels? You should make sure they can!
-
Reward Loyal Customers
Can you do something extra special for your members or loyal customers? In that case, build customer segments and ensure that these get an extra good offer, or extra points when purchasing.
-
Showcase your Offers
Front your discounts clearly on the front/home page and on the product pages where the offers apply, and throughout the entire purchase funnel. Use clear and distinct CTAs (Call to Action) texts.
-
Even pressure
To ensure even traffic pressure on the website, send the newsletters in pulses, and not to the entire base all at once!
-
Personalize for Relevance
During a day when offers and discounts are aggressively being communicated and pushed, it is more important than ever to demonstrate relevance through personalized messages. Smart use of customer data, personalization tools, automation and smart logics help you achieve this.
-
Cross-selling & Up-selling
Try to cross-sell and create upsells of additional products that can match what the customer is looking at, or based on what they have already put in the shopping cart. Have you set up and possibly also tested logic for product recommendations ahead of the sales period?
-
Re-targeting
Remember to re-target visitors of your page during the period with relevant content based on history, both programmatically and via SoMe.
-
Urgency
Use urgency functionality such as a countdown clock that clearly shows how long the discount applies - both throughout the website and in the newsletters. This will create a FOMO effect (fear of missing out) and will increase sales in this period.
-
Gather data
Use this opportunity to collect data throughout the period, which you can optimize on during the next big sale!
Finally, we also mention mobile optimization - although we know you probably know... But with all the other stuff you have to remember, it's easy to forget it on Black Friday itself, so we are including it as a friendly reminder, just in case!
All of us at PearlConvert wish you GOOD LUCK WITH THE BLACK FRIDAY SALE, and feel free to contact us for a chat about this or anything else. We can help you with good ideas, campaign planning, design and onsite preparations such as setup in Adobe Commerce, or Pimcore etc. This is high season for both us and you, so get in touch well in advance of Black Week so that we can help you as best as possible.
Eager to learn more?
Get in touch with Markus! He knows quite a bit about eCommerce - oh, and he's quite nice to talk with as well!
