How to prepare your online store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
With everyone shopping online due to the impact of Covid-19, this year Black Friday and Cyber Monday have the potential of being bigger than ever. As an online store, how do you prepare for the rush?
Prepare for the busiest Black Friday and Cyber Monday ever…
It’s no secret that in 2020 more stores have prioritized an online shopping experience than ever before. Due to Covid-19, no one is shopping in stores anymore, rather, everyone is online and just a couple clicks from buying your products.
Because of that, this year we could see a record-breaking online rush on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). You should be preparing for that rush now, and here are a few tips to ensure you’re ready for it.
1. Make inventory decisions as soon as possible
The last thing you want is to be unable to fulfill orders because of the surge in demand. In order to set your store up for success, it is essential to pick the products you want to promote for BFCM as soon as possible, especially if you rely on suppliers and manufacturers.
Promoted and discounted products are going to fly off your virtual shelves, and suppliers and shippers need to be ready for the demand.
They have already been working over capacity throughout the pandemic, and the rush of the holiday season will only back them up more. But if they are prepared and know what products to be ready for, you will be able to fulfill every order.
But how do you choose what products to feature?
2. Be smart about what products to promote
There are two ways to think about promoting items on BFCM: Driving revenue by selling a ton of your top-sellers, and selling off dead stock to free up shelf space.
Driving Revenue: Check out your sales analytics and pinpoint your top sellers, both annually and during the holiday season.. Chances are they contribute to about 80% of your sales. Use these analytics to gauge what items will be most popular, and prioritize promoting those products.
Selling Dead Stock: Every business has overhead that won’t sell, and BFCM is the best time to discount those products so you can just get rid of them. This frees up shelf space in your warehouse for better-selling products going into the new year.
Take some time to identify your strategy going into BFCM. If you simply discount every item in your store, you will dilute the sales and the customer won’t feel like they’re finding a steal.
3. Make some irresistible sales and discounts
The concept of BFCM for stores is simple: reel in the customer to your website with a jaw-dropping deal, and hope they buy more products once they are in your website.
Don’t discount your entire store. If every product you have is 50% off, chances are you’ll lose money no matter how many products you sell. Instead, be strategic about the handful of items you promote, and hope that once in your store, customers will add more items to their carts (which they’re more likely to do because of the AMAZING deal they just found!).
Get creative with your promotions:
Free shipping on all orders: It’s simple: customers love free shipping.
50%-90% off select products: Go low with a handful of products. Sure, you’ll lose money on them, but when a customer finds a “steal,” they’re much more likely to add more full-price items to their cart, and you’ll end up profiting.
Limited time offer: Nothing results in a cart conversion faster than a time limit. Make your customers race to the checkout knowing the sale will only last so long.
Discounted gift cards: Sell gift cards for 15% off. Chances are high that when the gift card is used, the customer will buy much more than the balance on the card.
We hear you already: “But how do I captivate potential customers with my promotions?
4. Prioritize visual content to display your promotions
You’re going to be just one of thousands, if not millions of online stores offering awesome promotions for your products. Consumers’ emails are going to be bombarded with BFCM promotions. So how do you stand out?
Tease your customers: Get a leg up on the competition by sending out teaser emails to your customers weeks before BFCM, before the surge of emails come. That way your customers will be expecting your BFCM promotional emails, and will be more likely to click into them.
Create stunning headers and photography: Partner with professional photographers and designers to produce captivating headers for your emails, and photography across your website and social media. We live in a visual era, and customers expect stunning visual content.
Get creative: Ditch the emails that have nothing but text and graphics. Pair the jaw-dropping photography you produced with unique and interactive customer experiences, such as “spin the wheel for a deal,” “click the button for a surprise,” or “enter a raffle for a chance to win.”
Subject lines that stand out: Every email and ad in the country will say “Groundbreaking Black Friday Sale!!!” Stand out by incorporating the promotion in the subject line itself. Customers will be more likely to click into the email or ad.
Be transparent: Customers love honesty. Say things like “we need to clear our shelves before the new year.” Allow them to empathize with you. They’re more likely to buy when they know why your promotions are so great.
Limited time offers: Similar to before, give your customers a reason to race. They’re less likely to ignore your email or scroll to the next ad if they know they don’t have much time to take advantage of it.
5. Test your website’s capabilities for a surge of traffic
Sure, we saved the boring tech stuff for last, but the truth is that this is, without a doubt, the most important step in preparing your website.
Massive amounts of customers flocking to your website sounds like a great thing to happen, yet there’s one stressful concern: high traffic causes websites to crash. But crashing isn’t the only thing you have to worry about: slow websites are one of biggest customer deterrents.
46% of shoppers say they will never return to a slow-loading website.
Because of that, it’s smart to run tests, troubleshoot the back end of your website, and prioritize certain platforms over others. The last thing you want is to lose sales due to your site being slow or down, even if for just a few minutes. Here are a few ways of preventing that.
Tech Tweaks: Take the time to check up on the boring tech stuff, you’ll be happy you did. Check with your website hosting company to ensure their servers are equipped for high traffic. Check that your website it up to date by updating your themes and plugins. But always remember to create a backup of your website before doing this.
Streamline your checkout process: A quick and easy cart conversion is essential for a customer to finish their purchase. Simplify the cart bu removing unneeded questions, text, and imagery. Move all steps to a single page and remove multiple confirmation pages. And look into offering more types of payment to increase the likelihood of your site being able to accept any payment method a customer may have.
Prioritize mobile first: This is the most underrated step. 75%-90% of customers today are shopping on their phone, yet most websites prioritize design and functionality for desktops. Ensure that all design, functionality, optimization, and tests are done through the mobile lens. After all, this is how the vast majority of your customers will experience your website.
Optimize image sizes: The leading cause of slow websites is because of imagery that is not optimized for the web. Many sites have massive files bogging down page load times. In reality, most screens are not big enough to truly experience these large files, so scale them down to speed up your site. We like this Shopify article: 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips.
Run tests: After you’ve considered everything on this list, test your site. Run a speed test with software such as Page Speed Insights By Google. Ensure that the precautions you took paid off and resulted in a fast and efficient website, ready for a surge of customers.
There are many, many more ways you can prepare your online store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but we promise that if you prioritize these 5 steps, you will be more equipped for the surge that is coming.
