Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner, which means it’s time to get ready for shoppers eager for sales on these major shopping days. In this blog, we discuss tips for getting your ecommerce store ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Planning Your Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the perfect days to promote new products, offer product bundles, and end your year with a boost in sales. To do this successfully, however, requires some preparation.
Create a Landing Page
You’ll want to prepare a campaign page for any sales you plan to run that will act as a landing page for ads and social posts. This will serve as a central location that provides the details of your sale, featured products, promo codes, and more.
Here are some things to keep in mind for this landing page:
- Use an eye-catching hero image that grabs visitors’ attention
- Add a bold headline that includes numbers (50% off, or Buy 2 Get 1 Free for example)
- Offer special discounts or bonus points for your visitors to increase conversions
- Include a CTA button(s) on your campaign page that includes exciting offers
Ensure Stock Availability
While a big sale such as Black Friday is a great way to move out older inventory, you should first make sure you have enough stock of any product you plan to promote that day. Nothing will frustrate your customers more than to find the product has sold out quickly, is on backorder, or will have lengthy shipping times.
The exception to this, is if you are running a promotion on a limited-run product. In this case, you need to be sure to make it clear to your customers ahead of time there is limited availability and they should act fast.
Checking Your Hosting and Website Speed
Nothing will deter customers more from completing a sale is a slow website, or even worse, one that keeps crashing. For this reason, it’s a good idea to run a site audit prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday to ensure everything is up to date, and that your website speed is optimal. You should also run a couple of test sales to ensure your checkout process is running smoothly.
Implement Tools to Recover Abandoned Carts
Customers tend to abandon their cart for one of these common reasons:
- High shipping costs
- Lack of payment options
- Return policy
- Website errors or slow-running website
- Delivery too slow
- Credit card declined
- Complicated checkout process
Implementing a plugin into your website that helps to recover abandoned carts is something all ecommerce businesses should consider. You can also try providing them discounts in their cart recovery email in an effort to add a bit more encouragement to return to your site and complete their sale.
Keep Your Offers and Promotions Simple
Over-complicated sale offers can actually reduce sales in the long run. Instead run promotions such as offering a discount code that can be used only on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, reducing certain products down for those shopping days, or offering free shipping. Even deals that offer discounts when they hit a certain spending threshold can be viewed as too complex for major shopping days.
Cross-Sell Products
Cross-selling products is another marketing technique to implement prior to Black Friday as it is a great way to boost sales. Implement a plugin that helps to cross-sell products as customers are browsing, making complementary product suggestions. Displaying related products with the ones purchased especially prior to checkout is another great opportunity to cross-sell.
Reward Your Customers:
The concept of rewarding customers by encouraging them to take part in specific activities at your store helps to encourage more shoppers on sales days. Customer rewards not only encourage new shoppers to purchase from your store, but is also a great way to bring back past customers. Consider dropping some extra points in their account prior to Black Friday or offering higher points on sales made that day.
Implement a Chatbot & Live Chat
Having the ability to help your customers faster with live chat, and powerful chatbots will make heavy sales days much smoother for both your customers and your employees. Re:amaze Chatbots can answer your customer’s most common questions, give updates on product inventory, provide shipping times, and escalate issues to a live agent when necessary.