Black Friday eCommerce Strategies For 2021

The countdown of Black Friday has already begun. It is the most important day for retailers and Holiday shoppers. On Black Friday, Adobe found consumers spent $6.3 million per minute online, or $27.50 per person, on average. So, it is crucial to plan ahead for Black Friday eCommerce 2021, since shoppers spend more money on shopping than they ever have.

This is why almost every business expects to generate revenue during the Black Friday ecommerce sale. In order to fulfil customers expectations businesses should take the necessary footprints making this upcoming Black Friday sale a big bonanza. So, we have prepared an exclusive blackfriday checklist to help retailers to drive sales.

How To Prepare Your Ecommerce Store For Black Friday?

1. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly:

Mobile commerce has surpassed eCommerce as 75 percent of shoppers used mobile devices to research products after various comparisons before purchasing. Looking at this, it is necessary that the sites should be mobile optimized. The ideal option for mobile optimization is responsive design.

A responsive design website adapts and displays more effectively depending on the screen width of the device being used, whether desktop, tablet, or smartphone. It is not designed for a particular device; it is intended for all of them. As a result, your site will always display correctly regardless of the device used to access it.

2. Optimise Your Website Speed:

If your site takes an excessive amount of time to load, you immediately repel visitors the moment they click through to your business. In fact, as per the hosting tribunal, a delay of 1 second leads to a loss of $2.5 million if your eCommerce store makes $100,000 per day in a year. Not only have you missed a sale, but you’ve also squandered the marketing dollars you paid on your internet store.

Throughout Black Friday, a website’s goal should be to maximize conversions, not to maximize bounce rates.

Utilize tools such as Google Page Speed Insights to avoid losing potential customers to the competition. It analyses core CSS and JavaScript elements that may be slowing down the site and makes personalized recommendations on improving the site’s efficiency and speed.

Similarly, Google’s Test My Site tool will determine how to improve your mobile conversion rates based on your site’s speed and loading times.

3. Improve The eCommerce Checkout Process:

This is the step of your visitor’s shopping journey where prospective customers convert. Buyers with intent will proceed to the checkout flow to complete their purchase; if the checkout flow is not optimized, they may abandon it. Retailers should consider and implement checkout page best practices for their online store.

Any tiny design error can result in significant revenue loss, yet small design changes such as CTA buttons can also help improve user experience and hence increase online sales. Given that Thanksgiving is a time for relaxation, choose a guest checkout to expedite the process by omitting the extra step of requiring customers to register before checkout.

Additionally, the sale will occur throughout the holiday season, which means that the checkout UX should be prioritized. Because enormous thumbs and small screens might result in accidental clicks, wasting time and frustrating users, it’s critical to minimize this risk and create one page checkout. By adding necessary form fields, allowing guest checkout, removing header, footer and sidebars businesses can give users a smooth shopping experience.

Image Source : Bellroy

4. Offer Personalization:

In the world of eCommerce, one size does not fit all. Customers expect a customized experience that makes them feel unique. Businesses today must communicate with their customers to gain a deeper understanding of them and establish meaningful, continuous relationships. Adopting “Me-commerce” entails matching the ever-changing and increasingly demanding expectations and habits of a customer.

5. Drive Powerful Data Insights From Analytics:

Track the success of your marketing initiatives and efforts using Google Analytics. You’ll be able to assess the site’s traffic flow in detail, including how many people visit your page, where they came from, which link they clicked on, and whether or not they visited your page.

Google Analytics helps you to study and compare your data across periods. This will allow you to determine where a change happened, whether positive or negative. You can view data for the last month, three months, six months, or a year.

6. Maximize Your Sales with Email Marketing :

Send an email. One of the most successful Black Friday marketing ideas. According to Radicati’s 2020 Email Statistics report, The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 306 billion in 2020, and is forecast to grow to over 361 billion by year-end 2024. Prepare a solid email subscriber list with prior clients or send a personalized email to the customers who had abandoned the cart.

You can even send customised emails to your potential customers about the deals and discounts to touch directly with their emotions and create a strong relationship with them.

Following the below-mentioned email marketing tactics will help increase your sales:

• ⦁ Be inventive with attention-grabbing subject lines and copy that draws the reader in.
• ⦁ Make use of eye-catchy images
• ⦁ Use a creative, simple and professional design
• ⦁ Keep the copy concise
• ⦁ Use a converting call-to-action like Buy now or regret later, get the look or complete your purchase
• ⦁ Send different mails like welcome mail, personalised limited time offer mail, discount mail, new arrival products mail.
• ⦁ Avoid promotional words
• ⦁ Check for mobile compatibility
• ⦁ Test Test Test

Lastly, don’t forget to track each and every action of your customers. Tracking will help you avail the benefits for the upcoming years too.

7. Special Black Friday Sale Offers:

Keep your eye out for special offers and coupons, such as “Buy 2 get one free!” or “Refer this to a friend and receive 50% off your next purchase.” You can create special marketing campaigns.

Launch offers like ‘Black Friday Special’ in which various packages and combos can be introduced. You can create special marketing campaigns.

Further, you can make use of referral marketing. Asking customers to refer to your brand during sales can help you grab a significant amount of customers. It has been noticed earlier that businesses were able to achieve 92% of customers using referral marketing as per review42.com.

Just think, who wouldn’t like to have their favorite products, even if it means without having to spend a lot of money? So, all you need to do is devise an enticing reward system with an expiration date to elicit a sense of urgency in your customers, leading to them making a purchase.

Some of the best Black Friday deals to grab in 2021.

Mageants Black Friday And Cyber Monday Sale:

Offer: Get 10% Discount on Any Magento 2 Extensions

Coupon Code: BlackFriday10PercentOff

Valid From 16th Nov To 30th Nov 2021

Grab Now

Cloudways Black Friday deal:

Offer: 40% OFF for 4 Months on all hosting plans

Promo code: BFCM2021

Valid from 23rd November 2021 till 1st December 2021

Grab Now

8. Create a Gift Guide:

Gift Guides make it easier for clients to not only draw attention to the items or special offers but also provide a sense of direction for people who are new to the world of gift-giving.

For example, suppose you are selling Crossfit gear. In that case, you could want to include phrases like “Gifts for Crossfit Lovers,” “Crossfit Gifts for Her,” “Crossfit Gifts for Him,” “Funny Crossfit Gifts,” and “Funny Crossfit Coaches” in your gift idea searches to attract more customers.

There are two simple methods to create a gift guide:

• ⦁ Building a collection of items
• ⦁ Publishing a blog post with gift ideas.

Image Source: goodhouskeeping

No matter which way you choose, a bit more effort will be required in terms of SEO. You can investigate what your competitors are doing to rank higher on Google for similar gift guides or blogs if you want to beat them to it. Create a post that includes more products to encourage more click-throughs.

To increase the amount of traffic to your Gift Guides, position them prominently on your website’s homepage or other areas where they will be seen frequently. To increase the amount of traffic to the post, we propose boosting it with Facebook Ads. Keep in mind to track the performance of sales generated by your Gift Guide. In the week leading up to Black Friday, you can target people who clicked with a retargeting conversion campaign at a time when they are more likely to purchase and when you are offering the most attractive deals.

9. Influencers for the BFCM campaign:

Making a collaborative effort with influencers to publicize your offer is an excellent Black Friday marketing strategy to increase trust and awareness. Using influencers to spread a word about your sale then you are choosing the strongest social media power.

In today’s world, there are a bunch of influencers so it’s advisable to pick top highly engaging influencers. In simple terms, influencers are the gateway that can help you better connect with the right audience in a shorter time. In fact, influencers will help you build long-term relationships with customers. So, here is how you can take help from influencers this Black Friday:

• ⦁ Influencers can share a sneak peek with their audience ultimately promoting the sale and your brand.
• ⦁ Ask influencers to give away free gifts. For implementing this, you need to take into consideration the buyer persona happening due to seasonal changes.
• ⦁ You can choose various influencers for your various social media channels. You can ask them to share the glimpse of the products that will be available for sale.

The brand Tubby Todd also speaks about their Black Friday Sale by sending gifts along with a card greeting their influencers. The gifts were those products that they wanted to promote. The brand also considered the time and delivered the gifts before the Black Friday Sale. As they can use and share the reviews with their audience.

10. Using Chatbots To Deliver 24X7 Support:

Potential customers should be able to reach you easily during the Black Friday Sales. One of the best ways to validate that not a single customer leaves because you failed to answer their query quickly is by integrating Live Chat in your eCommerce website.

You should be ready to answer any query during the rush hours on the different deals you offer on the BFS page. Also, be aware of people when they are viewing the shopping cart, and they have queries. Chatbot helps to connect with customers by solving their queries in real time.

Related: 8 Benefits of Using a Chatbot For eCommerce

11. Unlock the Power of Social Media:

Part of your Black Friday marketing strategy for BFS should include social media. It is one of the best places to engage the customers and provide high-quality and attractive content that will allure them to purchase. You can also add value to the customers’ knowledge by promoting blog posts through social media.

We suggest when you are using social media to attract customers, the posts should be captivating enough to create a sense of urgency in purchasing the items from your website. But you have to walk the thin line between being pushy and being enticing. You have to be creative because phrases like ‘limited time offer’ become cliché, and buyers soon ignore them.

12. Cross-Selling & Upselling:

One of the most successful Black Friday promotion ideas is to avail the cross-selling and upselling tactics. The process is aimed towards customers purchasing higher-end products and finding related and better products that offer improved solutions compared to the item they initially intended to purchase.

Amazon has been doing cross-selling and upselling for years now, where the customer is automatically prompted to view through items that are like the product they have selected or better and at times even more expensive than the original choice.

The process can also include combining a complimentary item with 3 or 4 purchases of a similar product type.

13. Create The Best Landing Page:

When you are launching a website, you must have heard that efforts should be made in optimizing the landing page to boost your ranking on the search engines. But how do you optimize your landing page for the Black Friday Sale?

Find out how you can increase conversion today with the below landing page optimization tricks:

• ⦁ Write relevant headlines
• ⦁ Show specific offer
• ⦁ Use high quality images
• ⦁ Eliminate navigation elements
• ⦁ Utilize bullet points to highlight benefits
• ⦁ Create clear call-to-action (CTA)
• ⦁ Create urgency
• ⦁ Optimize for mobile
• ⦁ Improve web page speed
• ⦁ Include live chat option

Image Source: Asos.com

Typically the shoppers begin the online search for products before Thanksgiving week. Hence the smart move will be to create evergreen content, i.e., online shoppers should be able to find both Black Friday and Cyber Monday relevant pages throughout the year. Another way to entice the audience for Black Friday is to add a subscription section for potential buyers to get a notification for the BFS.

Make the Most Out Of Black Friday Promotions:

The key to success in all of these marketing endeavours is to raise awareness of your  black Friday Sales Offers. Sending out a single tweet, one email, or one leaflet is unlikely to yield significant results. It would help if you created an exclusive Black Friday campaign that places your message before your prospective and current clients more than once to be effective.

Don’t forget to test your website to warrant it can take the traffic overload. Stay prepared with your Black Friday eCommerce strategy and start promoting months beforehand.

Still need help to prepare your store for Black Friday commerce? Contact us, we will be happy to help!