Black Friday is around the corner! The countdown has started, and the competition is vicious in the eCommerce industry. While Black Friday is definitely a huge opportunity to increase sales and revenue, it comes with stress on your resources; marketing team, support team, fulfillment teams, and your website servers! If not prepared, you might miss out on this huge opportunity. Don't worry, we got your back!
We will walk you through tips and tactics to prepare your online store for Black Friday and increase your revenue in 2022.
First things first. You need to closely monitor your inventory levels. Check what you need to clear out and offer deep discounts on those, restock your most popular items, so you don't run out of them too soon. The last thing you want is to be sold out of all of your inventory with no backup plan. This is wasted traffic and wasted money.
Dedicate sufficient time for testing your website before Black Friday. Test everything; loading speed, performance, any possible bugs, and issues. Make sure your website servers are ready for a huge amount of visits.
You don't want to be down during this important day. Also, you need to test the entire process, from searching for a product to product pages. Lastly and most importantly, the checkout process. Make sure it's streamlined with no issues. Remember, the simpler the checkout process, the better. Don't drive customers away with a slow and glitchy website or a complicated checkout.
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Shopify merchants reported that mobile transactions in 2021 were 71% of all sales, compared to only 29% on desktops. Boost your sales by optimizing your store for mobile shopping, don't miss out on any aspect; speed, layout, adding products to the cart, and checkout.
Help your customer find what they need quickly. The larger collection of products you offer, the more likely customers won't know you sell certain products. That's why you need to build strong product categories, smart search, and search filters. A study found that 70% of shoppers will abandon a site due to poor on-site search and user experience.
During Black Friday, impulsive purchases are so common. This can lead to a huge number of cancellations and return requests later. Build a plan for cancellations and returns for a good customer experience and to avoid load on your support team. Highlight your return policy everywhere you can to earn your customers’ trust. According to Socital, almost 90% of the shoppers who had a good return experience would buy again from this retailer.
More traffic, means more customers, more questions, and possibly more problems! Avoid all this by making sure you have enough support team trained and covering all time zones so your customer can get an answer as quickly as possible and complete their purchase smoothly. Build up canned responses for the frequently asked questions and one for shipping times and cancellation and return policy. It would be a shame to lose potential customers cause no one answered their questions in time.
Have the Black Friday landing page ready as soon as you can, and show some teasers and countdowns to create anticipation. Invest time in the graphics and text on the page to maximize results and conversion. Have a pop-up on the page to collect email addresses from visitors to be notified once the sale starts to build up your email marketing database.
Start Black Friday buzz-building social media campaigns. Use social media to create anticipation before Black Friday. Post about the biggest Black Friday sales you are going to be offering and the products that will be offered on the sale. Use hashtags and countdown. Try to get customers to visit the Black Friday landing page to create excitement and possibly capture their email addresses to be used in email marketing later.
Learn More about 8 Black Friday Marketing Strategies to Drive Sales
Before Black Friday starts, work on your customer segmentation for both existing customers and any new email addresses you receive from the landing page and social media. Segment customers based on interests, gender, location, and past purchases. You can also segment them as a certain category buyer, seasonal customer, or only a past visitor that never converted. Converted.in helps you with customer segmentation.
Similar to social media, start early buzz-building email marketing campaigns. Make your customers anticipate the big day. Share some teasing pictures of products that will be on sale during Black Friday and a countdown. Use personalization in your emails; the name of the customer and showing images of products they previously showed interest in.
Discover 10 Black Friday Email Examples To Double Your eCommerce Sales
Most brands would start leaking out some offers before Black Friday because of the vicious competition. This is a very good Black Friday tactic. Start early and leak some 15-20%-discount-offers then go more generous on Black Friday.
Use Black Friday to reward your loyal customer with VIP early access to discounts and offers. Highly segmented VIP emails often only make up just 3–5% of your overall list, but these customers spend three times more than other customers in your database, according to a benchmark report by Klaviyo.
Make sure you have this type of email segmented and personalized to offer them discounts on the products they love the most and would definitely buy again. This would not only drive sales and revenue but also would increase customer retention and brand loyalty.
Customers will be receiving emails from all over the place. Make sure your subject line stands out by using personalization and catchy high-conversion words; deals, big sale, 30% discount, sale, black Friday, etc. According to Socital, the top-performing term is “Deals” with a 13.6% open rate and 2.1% click rate.
Again, customers will be receiving codes from all brands. The last thing you want is for them not to be able to locate their code and abandon their carts. Allow a quick application of codes at checkout with one click only. Using automatic discounts boosts conversion and provides a better customer experience.
To stand out in the crowd, offer deep discounts of more than 30%. The 10-20% discount won't stand the competition on Black Friday. However, don't get too excited about the surge in sales numbers and forget profit. Save deep discounts for loyal customers and for new customers after reaching a certain order value.
Avoid returns and angry customers but promise clear shipping time ahead of ordering. Set their expectations right from the beginning to avoid frustration later which can result in a load to your support team and many cancellations.
Related to the above point, have your shipping company prepared for the expected volumes and decide on the promised time together, so your brand looks professional and keeps customers satisfied. You want to earn your customer's trust and win them as repeat customers, so you can't afford late shipping or damaged shipments.
Display your offers on the website in a visually appealing and catchy way wherever possible. Don't forget to add a sense of urgency by using a countdown and wording about limited quantities.
Use Black Friday as an opportunity to grow your email list to be used for marketing later. Don't waste traffic that didn't convert into sales. Use popups and capture email addresses whenever possible.
Black Friday is good for boosting sales, but you can also use it to increase average order value (AOV). Unlock free shipping and higher discounts after reaching a minimum order value. Set this value to be higher than what most customers normally reach.
Another good tactic to increase order value through Black Friday is free gifts. Show customers that they get receive a free gift once their order reaches a certain amount of money.
A third way to increase average order value during Black Friday is by showing relevant product recommendations to encourage upsells and cross-sells.
A great amount of generated traffic won't convert into sales, people will explore the store and leave. Add an exist-intent popup to offer them a larger discount or at least try to capture their email address to retarget them later.
SaleCycle report showed that the total cart abandonment on Black Friday 2021 was 77.74%. Work on rescuing cart abandonment by using pop-ups to offer larger discounts or free gifts. Increase the sense of urgency. You can also try to recover lost sales with cart abandonment emails. Lastly, capture their email address and work through email marketing to retarget shopping cart abandoners.
After Black Friday ends, email your customer's gift cards or points as loyalty rewards. This will encourage them to come back and buy more from you. Most customers would respond to emails that include rewards because they feel that they have worked to earn them and wouldn't want to lose those points or gift cards.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday is a huge opportunity to increase sales and revenue and build up your email database. Prepare your store and teams for this big day to maximize profits. Converted.in got your back to accomplish customer segmentation, personalization, automated emails, and re-targeted ads. Book a demo now!