Five Tips to Prepare Your eCommerce Website For Black Friday (2022 Edition)
The holiday season is fast approaching, and your Black Friday eCommerce strategy can make or break your Q4 results. That’s why it’s important to prepare your online store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday by ensuring it can handle increased traffic and sales. Here are five tips for 2022 you can use to ensure your website is ready for the holiday season:
1) Get Your Website Speed in Check and Load Test It
The importance of website speed is something that can’t be overstated. Here are a few key reasons why your Black Friday eCommerce strategy depends on you getting your eCommerce site running as fast as possible before Black Friday:
- It impacts your overall performance metrics, including conversions, time on site, and bounce rate. If visitors arrive at your store and don’t find what they want quickly enough, they will likely leave the page before continuing to check out or finding additional items. This means lost revenue for you!
- In today’s world of instant gratification, people don’t have time for slow-loading websites. The average user expects pages to load within 2 seconds—and when sites take longer than 3 seconds, there is an 18% decrease in traffic from search engines (compared with those that load within 2 seconds).
Your website may also be sufficiently fast now, but what happens when it comes under pressure? Using a tool like Load Ninja or Load Runner, you can add thousands of simulated users to see what your website does under stress.
2) Deliver a Seamless Mobile Experience for Black Friday
You should ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile users are typically on the go, with less time to spare than desktop users. They want a quick and straightforward experience when they visit your site, and they don’t want to deal with clunky, non-responsive interfaces that take forever to load. That’s why having a solid mobile design and flow is crucial to your Black Friday eCommerce strategy.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to ensure your checkout process is easy for customers using their smartphones or tablets (or both). You could incorporate responsive design, so your site adapts itself automatically depending on the screen size being used—but this isn’t always necessary if a user can still easily navigate the website without any problems.
Loading speed is another factor that can make or break an eCommerce website’s performance during Black Friday weekend sales season: If people have trouble loading pages within five seconds of landing on them, they’ll quickly click away from your store in search of something faster.
Black Friday email to your potential clients is also advisable. Run Black Friday email marketing campaigns often around the black Friday event. Ecommerce trends make it possible to run ads targeting your main audience.
Pre-Black Friday sales ads and announcements help as well. These ideas to boost successful Black Friday marketing are a must-do. Special black Friday offers make you generate enough revenue during black Friday sales. Provide multiple people with access to your black Friday from the beginning of the week of Black Friday sales.
3) Your Black Friday eCommerce Strategy Should Include Marketing Campaigns
Offer a limited-time discount on your store. This can be done through Facebook ads or email marketing.
Promote a Black Friday sale with in-store signage. You’ll want to ensure that this is visible from the street so that passersby can see it when they walk by your store.
Run a social media contest on Facebook and Twitter where you ask people to share their favorite Black Friday memories. Then, announce the contest’s winner on social media and link to their blog post about their favorite memory!
Start a blog post series about Black Friday, outlining the best deals you’ve found online and in-store, how to save money on gifts this year, and more.
You can even host an Instagram giveaway contest where each blog post ends with a call to action asking people to share their favorite Black Friday memory with you!
Hosting sales events on your eCommerce platform and every year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday is amazing for sales. Always up your black Friday strategy from the previous year’s Black Friday strategy. It will surely pay off if you use these effective strategies, marketing tips, email, and social media to promote your black Friday rush.
To read more about creating a digital marketing plan for the holidays, click here.
4) Make Sure Your Checkout Process is Simple and Streamlined
When it comes to the checkout process, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First, make sure you use a secure payment processor and checkout process. This way, shoppers feel safe sharing their information with you and won’t be worried about having their data stolen or compromised.
You also want to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices (which is especially important if you’re targeting customers who are likely going shopping while they’re on their phones). To do this, test out different versions of your site in different browsers and platforms until it’s perfect!
Finally, don’t forget about the basics: ensure that all of your links work properly and that any text on screen is easy for visitors to read no matter where they’re looking at any given time (for example: avoid using small fonts).
5) Prepare Your Shipping Strategy
You’ve heard it before, but it’s worth repeating: your Black Friday eCommerce strategy is incomplete if you don’t have a shipping plan. You should know how many packages will be shipped, what packaging you will use, and where your shipments will come from.
If you cannot meet demand or encounter shipping delays, make sure that customers can contact customer service and understand whether or not they will receive a refund on their order.
What happens when an order is lost or damaged in transit? It may seem like an unlikely scenario, but it does happen occasionally, so make sure that the process for handling this is clearly spelled out on your website.
Preparing Your eCommerce Store Now Will Help You Better Serve Your Customers
The months leading up to Black Friday are the perfect time to make sure your eCommerce store is ready for the holiday rush. With the clock ticking down and so much on your plate, it’s easy to overlook some important tasks that require little time or effort but will significantly impact how well you handle an influx of orders.
Black Friday eCommerce Marketing Strategies
If you’re an eCommerce business owner, Black Friday is a great opportunity to reach new customers and grow your brand. While many people are busy shopping in stores on Black Friday, others stay home with their families and browse the internet for deals. As such, there are plenty of opportunities to get creative with your marketing efforts. Here are some ideas for getting more traffic this Black Friday:
- Use email marketing to send out holiday deals to your subscribers.
- Write and publish blog posts about the best Black Friday deals that you know of, or create an in-depth guide to the best Black Friday shopping strategies.
- Social media marketing is also an effective way to get more traffic this Black Friday. You can use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share the best deals you find with your followers, as well as some of your own advice on how shoppers can save money without sacrificing quality.
Don’t Neglect Cyber Monday
Your Black Friday eCommerce strategy really isn’t complete if it doesn’t mention Cyber Monday. As with Black Friday, plenty of people shop on Cyber Monday, and other online retailers are happy to oblige them.
This is a great opportunity for you to get in front of some new customers, get online sales, and build your email list at the same time.
Here are some ideas for getting more traffic this Cyber Monday:
- Run a Facebook ad campaign with a Cyber Monday offer.
- Use email marketing to send out holiday deals to your subscribers.
- Write and publish blog posts about the best Cyber Monday deals that you know of, or create an in-depth guide to the best Cyber Monday shopping strategies.
Black Friday is one of the biggest online shopping days of the year, an opportunity for you to capitalize on the traffic that comes along with it. But to do so, you need to be ready. As we’ve outlined above, there are plenty of things you can do now to prepare for Black Friday and beyond. These tips should help prepare your website for a busy shopping season without any major hiccups! These black Friday marketing ideas and eCommerce marketing ideas will make sure you boost sales and compete with the top online vendors out there.
