Are you ready for Black Friday?

Another great trade celebration is ahead! Is your store ready for Black Friday 2022? As always, you can expect a lot of traffic, many orders, and new potential customers, but also a lot of work. The sooner you start preparing for Black Friday, the better. You should pay attention to two crucial aspects of this special day of the year – marketing and technical. Let’s have a closer look at them.

Black Friday – statistics

Black Friday is always a fantastic opportunity to increase sales and get more new customers. In 2021, order values were 9% higher compared to 2020¹ and over half of the online shoppers at that time were first-time buyers. Surely, you, as an e-commerce business owner, want to make the most of that time. How can you do that?

Get ready marketing-wise

During Black Friday, customers are looking for really good deals. This means that you should come up with a special offer just for this day (or week, more and more stores celebrate Black Week instead of just Black Friday) and communicate it far and wide. Use all of your marketing channels to encourage people to visit your store on Black Friday and place an order. Here’s what you can do:

• Send a newsletter to all your current customers (you can think of an additional incentive, e.g., a special promo code).
• Publish Black Friday posts on all your social media channels – inform your customers what you have prepared, what products will be discounted, and by how much. 
• Try new communication channels, e.g., push notifications or text messages.
• Conduct additional performance marketing campaigns. Of course, ads during and shortly before Black Friday will be more expensive compared to other days of the year, but it’s an excellent opportunity to broaden your customer base – treat this period as an investment for the whole year. Concentrate on the two most effective marketing channels – Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram Ads.
• To help your customers find the best deals, you can create a new tab in your online store with just special offers for Black Friday.

What products should you put on sale? That, of course, depends on your strategy and sales goals. Usually, it’s a good idea to put last-season products on sale. Black Friday is close to the end of the year, so you want to make room for 2023 collections. You can also analyze what your competitors are planning for Black Friday (many of them communicate that for many days ahead) and look for inspiration this way.

How to lower the number of abandoned carts

Granted, this issue is a problem all year round, but when it comes to Black Friday, there is one crucial reason why customers don’t finish the order in your store – it’s because they’ve found a better deal elsewhere. According to the source mentioned above, shoppers view, on average, 5.28 products during Black Friday. Your goal is to encourage them to buy YOUR products. Here’s what you can do.

First of all, start building tension way before Black Friday. Use social media and other marketing channels for this. Inform your customers that you are preparing something special for this day and slowly reveal more details concerning your offer. This way, when the day comes, they will be ready to place an order because they know that your offer is really good.

Secondly, opt for remarketing. During Black Friday, customers visit tens of stores and browse hundreds of offers. With remarketing, you can follow the customer in their search for the best deals. Remarketing is based on displaying ads reminding your customers about the open cart or recently viewed products. You will most likely need a good remarketing tool to pursue this strategy, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

The technical aspect of Black Friday

The second question that you ought to pay attention to is the technical condition of your store. It is a good idea to go through the entire purchasing process to make sure that all stages, features, and buttons are working correctly. 

If your store doesn’t usually handle heavy traffic every day, the sudden and significant traffic increase could result in overloading your server, meaning your customers won’t be able to open your store’s website to place an order. It is worth checking what’s your current bandwidth. If necessary, talk to your IT team or hosting provider to find out what you can do to avoid such a problem. 

Secondly, check all of your plugins and additional tools that you use in your store, e.g., concerning payment methods. Make sure everything is fully operational. And the last thing to remember is the SSL certificate. Make sure the certificate is working and won’t expire in the middle of Black Week because that would result in many lost sales opportunities (search engines are reluctant to display webpages not secured with such a certificate).

Pay attention to all the elements we mentioned in this post, and you’re good to go! If you need help checking your Magento-based store and improving it before Black Friday, feel free to drop us a line! We will gladly help you make the most of your e-commerce business, not just during Black Friday, but all year round!

¹https://spendmenot.com/blog/black-friday-sales-statistics/