Dubbed Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these fateful shopping days fall right after the U.S. celebration of Thanksgiving, and are some of the biggest days of the year for ecommerce businesses. According to a report from Salesforce Inc, U.S. shoppers spent $17.2 billion on Black Friday 2022, up 10.2% compared with 2021.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday present huge opportunities to drive traffic to your online store. Customers will be expecting promotions and deals, and having a strong ecommerce strategy is essential in converting prospecting shoppers into loyal customers.
But in addition to having a marketing plan in the leading months, you’ll also need to bolster your operations for the influx of orders and customer interactions, from inquiries to returns. You’ll need inventory to be ship-shape, order fulfillment to be speedy and accurate, and a solid strategy for customer support.
Running a business day-to-day is demanding enough. The stakes jump higher for the holiday rush. Be ready to go into November strong, and you’ll reap the benefits for the rest of the year.
We’ve made it easier for you to conquer this year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday chaos, by mapping out these crucial tools, tips, and tactics for a successful holiday season.
1. Run email campaigns, and run them early
Email campaigns build buzz and awareness, bringing your store top-of-mind for customers. Tease offers to build hype, and get people engaged ahead of the sale. Countdown clocks are a great way to spark excitement surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. You can also reward loyalty by offering early access to email subscribers or frequent buyers. Early access can also be used to incentivize people to sign up for email updates, thereby increasing your communications base.
As always, you should be segmenting your mails to increase effectiveness. This means targeting different audience segments differently–for instance, first-time purchases could receive a welcome bonus in the form of a higher discount. You can target returning customers with emails that reflect their interests and prior purchases. In general, segmented emails drive significantly higher conversion than non-segmented campaigns.
Because competition will be high for Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, it’s absolutely essential that you get ahead. Don’t leave campaigns to the last minute. Rather, you should be nurturing prospects for at least a month in advance. By warming up your audience, you’re more likely to have high engagement by the time you activate your offers.
2. Optimize your website—SEO & mobile
Your website should be working for you, not against you. Ahead of Black Friday, put in the time to make sure your website abides by best practices for SEO and mobile browsing.
SEO:
When you increase your search ranking, you help customers find you. This gives you a boost on conversions, and a head start on the competition. Take advantage of a free Search Engine Results Page (SERP) checker to see how you’re ranking. Here are some best practices to help you rank higher:
- Speed up your load time. Slow-loading sites take a hit in search rankings. Check your site speed, and increase it by compressing images and upgrading your hosting service.
- Improve product names and descriptions for keywords and search terms. This will help with discovery, as your site will come up when customers search for products that you offer. Google tools can find the relevant keywords for your PLPs.
Mobile browsing:
According to a report from Shopify, In 2022, 69% of Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases were made on a mobile device, and the trend only seems to be increasing. People will very likely be browsing on mobile, and if your website is clunky or hard to navigate, you’ll lose potential conversions. Make sure to thoroughly test your website on mobile browsing, and make the necessary improvements to make the user experience as smooth as possible.
3. Leverage social media—paid ads, working with influencers, and social shopping.
Your social media should always be engaging, but in the months leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday, consider putting extra energy into your socials. As organic reach continues to decline, paid ads are essential. Get creative with your paid ads to hold engagement. Play with filters or hashtags, or offer users rewards for sharing in their channels.
If last year was an indicator, TikTok will be a massive driver of sales. Consider partnering with influencers to increase your reach. Influencer marketing can be incredibly effective, especially for younger generations. By having an influencer promote your business in the months before the holiday season, it primes your business for success. You’ll gain new audiences who will be ready to take advantage of your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, possibly even making their first purchase.
Remember not to blindly partner with influencers. You’re building a relationship with a brand ambassador who will be representing your business to their followers, so make sure their presence aligns with your brand values. They don’t need billions of followers. Micro-influencers (creators with fewer than 100,000 followers) often have audiences that are more engaged, and thus more likely to take them up on product recommendations.
4. Do an inventory sweep and optimize order fulfillment.
Make sure you’re well stocked on your biggest sellers, and generally well stocked across your inventory. Give yourself a healthy amount of padding, if possible, by overestimating how much orders will spike on Black Friday/Cyber Monday. It’s never a great customer experience to order something, only to find out it’s out of stock. Avoid this issue by prioritizing inventory replenishment in the lead-up months to the holiday season. This is also a good opportunity to move slow-selling goods, by offering special deals or increasing promotion.
As you review your inventory, you should also update product pages. You’ll likely have many new customers visiting your site on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and it’s a good reason to ensure your product landing pages are up to date with accurate information and high quality imagery. Add page features like customer reviews to further drive engagement.
Once you feel inventory is in a good place, it’s time to look at your order fulfillment process. Can it flex to accommodate a massive influx in orders? You might need additional labor to get through Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals efficiently. Or, look into warehouse automation tools and systems to increase productivity. Warehouse automation technology helps you do significantly more with the employees you have, boosting speed up to 5x at high levels of accuracy.
5. Offer promotions and deals–and extend them.
Promo codes, discounts, and coupons are table stakes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, the difference lies in how you present your deals. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to take advantage of the heavy discounts. Therefore, you should make it simple for them to both find and apply the discounts to their shopping carts. Make sure all offers are clearly highlighted in messaging, whether that’s an email, a paid ad, or a website banner. You can also:
- Notify the customer with a pop-up window on your home page.
- Create Black Friday/Cyber Monday landing pages.
- Implement a banner or floating bar in the weeks leading up, reminding customers of the upcoming sale
- Apply the code automatically at checkout so that customers don’t need to track down or remember the code.
Remember, these are the biggest shopping days of the year. Make sure your offers align both with the competition, and the feeling of anticipation and excitement.
Also, consider extending your sale past Black Friday and Cyber Monday to catch both early and late-shopping customers. This is a great way to convert indecisive customers who may be regretting missing that amazing deal. You can also clear out old inventory by offering even steeper discounts in the days post Cyber Monday.
You could also extend your deals to activate early, in the days before Black Friday. This helps you quite literally get ahead, and could make the difference in a customer choosing to shop with your business versus a competitor.
6. Stay active with content like holiday gift guides.
Keep the culture of your brand strong and growing in those crucial months leading up to the holiday season. Establish your business in the minds of customers to make your store an easy choice once Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit.
Blog content is a great way to keep customers engaged, without bombarding them on social media. Useful, relevant topics for the holidays such as extensive gift guides for specific audiences (Gifts for Mom, Co-worker, Friend, etc.) are a great way to drive traffic to your site. It makes it easier for customers to make decisions on what to buy, and helps guide them to products they might otherwise not have found.
Choosing and buying the right gift is a common source of holiday stress, especially with the abundance of options. By creating a holiday gift guide, you’re showing people that you empathize with their needs, and set your brand on a positive note with potential customers.
7. Create custom landing pages.
Create Black Friday and Cyber Monday themed landing pages to highlight products, discounts, and focus attention on the offering. You can drive traffic to these pages via email marketing, paid ads, and social platforms.
A smart way to create a cohesive brand experience is connecting content across messaging and platforms—for instance, creating custom landing pages for each of the gift guides you create. The more shoppable you make your site, the more likely it is to drive conversions.
Custom landing pages also make it easier to track the effectiveness of your messaging and campaigns, as they can provide data on customer behaviors, interactions, and patterns. These translate into key learnings that you can not only apply to next year’s holiday season, but throughout evergreen communications.
8. Keep up a good flow of communication.
As the saying goes, communication is key.
Consider what channels you’re overlooking. For instance, SMS marketing is a huge driver of engagement, awareness, and conversions. It’s a great way to remind your customer base about your upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, or send exclusive SMS-only offers.
The data shows that SMS marketing is highly effective, with an average open rate of 98%. Email marketing on average, can only claim a roughly 20% open rate. Texts give you about five times more opens, better visibility, and therefore greater engagement.
You may need to collect more phone number contacts to have a successful SMS marketing plan. You can offer incentives such as free shipping to encourage customers to sign up for SMS messages. A pop-up on your home page is a great way to start collecting more contacts.
As you keep communication steady, make sure messaging is relevant. Don’t forget about abandoned cart messaging, as cart abandonment is sure to occur surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Customers will be researching and considering numerous options, comparing pricing, products, and offers before committing to a purchase. Carts often store their items while they deliberate, and sometimes customers will forget or need an extra push.
Create reminders about unfinished shopping with pop-ups, targeted emails, or SMS retargeting. It’s smart to implement cart abandonment messaging year round, but introducing a holiday-specific campaign for Black Friday/Cyber Monday shoppers can drive conversions, as cart abandonment has historically spiked on those dates.
Use copy with a tone of urgency to remind customers not to miss out. Or, offer additional incentives such as free shipping to sweeten the deal and motivate customers to complete their purchase.
9. Ready your customer support team.
On Black Friday Cyber Monday. Remember, you’ll have an influx of brand new customers who aren’t yet familiar with your business. And first-time buyers can come with a lot of questions.
Prioritize a responsive customer support team to answer the increase in questions from customers who are new to your brand. Slow communication is a sure way to lose prospecting customers who have a plethora of other options to choose from. By answering questions on the spot, you keep customers engaged and prevent them from closing out of your store.
To ensure timely responses, consider adding a live chat or chatbot to your online store. Chatbots can answer the bulk of customer inquiries, freeing up your customer service team to respond to the remainder.
To reduce the number of customer service inquiries, you can create an FAQ page that will take care of the vast majority of customer uncertainties. Do a little research to make sure your answers reflect the common questions your customers have, and provide the answers in digestible, clear language.
