Days are getting shorter – tempeatures are getting cooler. This means winter is getting closer, but also the so-called “peak season”. The official start of the pre-Christmas business starts again with Black Friday on 27 November, followed by Cyber Monday on 30 November.
What is Black Friday?
Black Friday is the day after American Thanksgiving. This marks the start of the Christmas holiday shopping season for consumers, meaning retailers often heavily promote their stores and mark down prices to entice shoppers to buy products both online and offline.
What started as a one-day event has become a four-day shopping event ending on Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is essentially the same type of event falling on the Monday after Black Friday with the promotions targeted at online buyers.
Many customers take advantage of the days around Black Friday and Cyber Monday to benefit from substantial discounts. Customers often inform themselves early about planned promotions in various online shops. For shop operators, this is the start of the strongest sales period of the year.
Typically, prices are marked down for the entire four days. Some businesses offer different types of discounts or Black Friday deals for each of the four days. For example, a fashion retailer may have 50 percent off everything on Black Friday, Buy One Get One Free on Saturday, 30 percent off Sweaters on Sunday, and 50 percent off online purchases on Monday.
There are no rules for these four days, so you have the freedom to do your Black Friday marketing anyway you’d like to better entice purchases. That’s why you should know the following 6 valuable tips on how to make your Black Friday promotion a real success.
6 valuable tip hot to make Black Friday boom for you!
#Tip 1: Plan your campaign early
Good planning is essential! You should already start thinking about which products from your online shop are suitable for the Black Friday Sale. Would you like to offer individual products at a reduced price or even your entire range? What should your discount campaign look like? Here are some examples of exciting promotions:
- Absolute or percentage discounts for the entire purchase
- Award of a free article from a minimum purchase value
- Your customer receives a discount when buying a second item
- Your customer buys three articles, but only pays for two
#Tip 2: Prepare campaigns and advertising material:
Define channels and a budget to promote your campaign. After you have determined which products are available for sale, you should think about the appropriate application. Which marketing channels do you want to use? Is there a budget for paid advertising? We have listed the following suitable marketing channels that could be used to promote your Black Friday campaign:
Social media: Use your reach on the social media channels and make your followers aware of your Black Weekend Sale.
SEO-Traffic: Already a few weeks in advance it can be worthwhile to use the organic search to draw attention to your campaign. For example, create a specific Black Friday landing page early on, prepare it with appropriate images, texts and keywords so that you can be found in the search results. If you have integrated a blog or magazine into your shop, you can also publish corresponding topic contributions here. Create a list of Black Weekend keywords your competitors are ranking for. To do so, you can use tools like SEMrush. Investigate their backlinks. What pages are they linking to & from? See if you can get similar or better links.
SEA campaign: Push your campaign with paid advertising! It can be worthwhile to spend a small budget to generate more traffic. Here, for example, ads on Google or paid advertising on Facebook, Instagram & Co.
E-mail marketing: Use e-mail marketing to inform your existing customers about your Black Friday promotions. Prepare the corresponding action newsletters in good time and thus tease your action to your customers at an early stage.
Besides the listed channels and measures, you can also register your campaign on portals such as www.blackfriday.de.
#Tip 3: Avoid shopping cart abandonment and increase your conversion
After you have successfully drawn attention to your Black Friday campaign, you now have to convert your shop visitors into customers. In order to achieve this, please note the following points:
Mobile Shopping: Today there is no way around a mobile-first strategy! Especially in the run-up to Christmas it makes sense to put your shop to the test and check how well your shop is optimised for smartphone shopping and to make adjustments if necessary. Mobile devices accounted for 67% of all digital traffic on Black Friday 2018, that’s 61% more than the previous year.
User experience: When it comes to boosting the conversion in your shop around Black Friday, the user experience is particularly important. Use eye-catching banners, coupons, promotions or a countdown to make sure that your customers are aware of discounts in your shop. A specially designed Black Friday Sale experience world, which is listed in your main navigation, can also help here. You can find more general tips for conversion optimisation here.
Checkout optimisation: You should check your checkout process at the latest on the day of the big Black Friday Sale to avoid shopping basket cancellations. Do you offer the most popular payment and shipping methods in your shop? Even a one-page checkout can help to complete the purchase faster and more efficiently.
#Tip 4: Points for customer service!
Make your Black Friday Sale a special experience also in terms of service. A smart alternative for telephone and e-mail to clarify the
#Tip 5: Performance check: Does your shop withstand the increase in traffic?
It’s not the best idea to drive all of your traffic to your store’s homepage or worse, to a non-optimized product page that doesn’t showcase your product correctly.
There is hardly anything more nerve-racking for your customers than long loading times or a shop that cannot be called up at all. According to statistics, 53% of mobile shoppers will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds (Google marketing Platform). Site speed is even more important in countries from tier 2 and tier 3. If your CDN is not optimized, you will lose many clicks due to page loading. Many customers inform themselves before Black Friday about discounts in online shops to get the best price. So you should definitely expect an increased number of visitors to your shop on Black Friday. If necessary, talk to your hosting partner in time to turn the performance screw up.
#Tip 6: Take into account pandemic-relevant product trends
Of course you always want to highlight the products that sell best, but this year it would be wise to consider products where you have seen an upward trend thanks to Corona. In one of our surveys, we found that 38% of Shopify retailers* will introduce new products at this BFCM.
This doesn’t mean you need to make a 180-degree turnaround with your business at the last minute. However, if you are already selling some of the products below, you should consider increasing your inventory. According to our internal Shopify data, the fastest growing product categories since the lockdown in March are the ones that are being sold:
- Indoor and outdoor furniture
- Home office equipment and accessories
- Board games and puzzles
- Sports accessories
- Care and beauty products
- Comfortable clothing (leisure wear)
