Black Friday is quickly approaching, and while it’s great to get started holiday shopping early, it can be a lot for the eCommerce industry to handle. In fact, retail experts speculate that Black Friday 2022 will come back with a boom, especially for online shopping. This comes as no surprise following the pandemic, but many industries have excess inventory they are looking to sell through promotions.
That’s why we’ve created a guide to help you and your business with all things eCommerce including strategy, website preparation, and useful tools.
Replo Reviews: Black Friday eCommerce Strategy
What Is A Black Friday eCommerce Strategy?
First off, if you’re looking to crush this Black Friday with stellar traffic and sales, you’re going to need a strategy. This means putting together a plan, similar to what is done when creating a marketing strategy. You may want to think about:
- Website Maintenance - You may want to clean up your website to make it easier for customers to search for products. This is the time to remove any inventory that is in low stock or add product descriptions.
- Social Campaign - With Black Friday around the corner, think about boosting your social media with a variety of tools (listed below). Think about interacting with your customers and utilizing clever graphics and copy to draw customers in.
- Organization - While this may seem like a no-brainer, you need to consider your communication channels and how organized your strategy for Black Friday is. Below we have listed some useful tools to keep teams on track.
The Pros And Cons Of Black Friday For eCommerce
Black Friday is either a dream or a nightmare depending on your shopping preference! Some love the hustle and bustle of shopping in the store, while others prefer the calmness that comes with shopping online. Whatever the preference, there are pros and cons of Black Friday to consider from an eCommerce perspective. This includes:
Pros
- Increase traffic to website and generate sales
- Acquire new customers
- Can avoid inundating your stores or even make much more money if you do not have a brick-and-mortar location
- Brand recognition
Cons
- With an increase in sales and overall buying you may also face an increase in returns
- Potential to lose money if you do not plan out your strategy
- A lot of prep work for an influx of orders
How To Prepare Your Website For Black Friday
There’s no need to sweat the Black Friday rush! A lot of what is needed comes down to preparation and planning. You may want to consider optimizing your website to help shoppers when on Google. Everyone is trying to rank for Black Friday, but you can stay ahead by doing keyword research.
You’ll want to avoid keyword stuffing and emphasize the importance of making your website mobile friendly. More and more shoppers are on Instagram to start and are looking for an easy transition to shop on their mobile devices rather than switching to a different device.
Use this time to brainstorm your customer base and try thinking like a buyer rather than a seller for a bit. You may find that there are holes in the process that can be fixed quickly, making a world of difference in the long run!
Black Friday Marketing Tips And Strategies
While the tips and strategies for Black Friday are endless, we have called out a few top ones to consider implementing. This includes:
- Creating a buzz on social media to draw customers in early with hashtags and even product videos (and remind them of what is to come)
- Install a chat function to communicate with your customers and help with customer support before the big day
- Consider selling directly to customers on social media, like Instagram
Start Advertising Early
It’s never too early to begin advertising for your upcoming Black Friday sales. This gets shoppers prepped for what’s to come and can even help to create buzz around your store and offerings. Brainstorm clever campaign strategies and marketing tools to help.
Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
According to Shopify, by 2024, ~187.4 million U.S. users will make a purchase via the web or mobile app on their mobile device. This comes at no big surprise to many, as smartphones continue to dominate thanks to robust offerings and intuitive shopping experiences. Now, many retailers have begun creating their own apps
Offer Free Delivery
So many retailers offer free delivery/shipping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, that you may want to as well! There are a few reasons to consider this including:
- To reduce cart abandonment
- Incentivize sales (sometimes the shipping and delivery fees turn shoppers off to the purchase)
- To beat the competition
Create BFCM Discount Codes
Discount codes are a clever way to help your customer out with total payment, but also perhaps even incentivize them to buy more. Much of this comes from the idea that people will buy more if they feel that they are getting more out of it. For example, let’s say a customer finds a discount code and is able to save much more than they were planning on. They may even go back in and add another item to their cart. This means that in the long run you may even see a rise in average order value thanks to your customers buying more.
In the long run, discount codes are becoming the top choice for retailers to use. You can implement this by giving discount codes to new customers, email subscribers, or on certain items that you need to push.
Run An Email Discount Campaign
Similar to the above addition of discount codes, you should consider running an email discount campaign. Email marketing is a highly effective way to drive sales, increase engagement, and increase loyalty over time. You’ll want to be cautious with how much you discount because if it's too high and you’ll take away from your overall profit margin.
Aside from the actual discount, think about the copy and tone of your email. You want to interact with your customer base and interest them from the first line.
Simplify The Checkout Experience
Your customer wants a fast and intuitive checkout experience, which means you need to simplify the process. This means that you’ll want to make sure you have:
- Visible CTA Button - Something that stands out and is easy to see such as an “add to cart” option
- Comprehensive Product Descriptions - To help your customers understand what you’re selling and add in any important information
- Captivating Images and Layout - This is the time to enhance your website with better images and clean up any
Cart Abandonment Emails
These are becoming increasingly popular options to remind customers that they still have items in their cart to purchase. Oftentimes online shopping becomes a habit in between other tasks, so the rate of cart abandonment can be quite high. However, these cart abandonment emails serve to remind the customer that they have items in their cart and that they should revisit to avoid losing them (if they sell out or if your browser has to reload for any reason).
Perhaps consider crafting a friendly, quippy email to remind customers of this ahead of your Black Friday season.
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Must-Have Tools For eCommerce Stores
We’ve included the top must-have tools for your store to utilize this Black Friday. They range from communication, tracking, and even website building tools.
Looking to rank higher on Google searches? Use Semrush to do keyword research, look for backlinking opportunities. Their database contains over 20 billion keywords and 808 million domains crawled. This means you can also track Google search engine results pages (SERPS), cost-per-click (CPC) ads, and even do competitor analysis.
Ahrefs is another SEO toolset to help with search traffic to ultimately optimize your website. They crawl the web and process up to 8 billion pages a day, making it the 5th most active crawler on the web. You can also use tools such as: site explorer to analyze backlinks, content explorer for specific topics, keywords explorer, rank tracker, and even a site audit tool to search for SEO issues over time.
Previously Magento, now called Adobe Commerce, is a multichannel platform for B2B and B2C customers. Their features include mobile centricity which is an interesting focus on something they call progressive web application (PWA). This means that you can meet customers wherever they are with smooth conversion no matter the device.
Additional features include: integrated B2B functionality, headless commerce (how data is presented to the customer), Amazon Sales Channel, Channel Manager. This is a more robust tool to consider for larger retailers or those looking to integrate Amazon into their sales portfolio.
Shopify is probably the most well-known tool for retailers on the market. Their offerings are pretty much endless from the store builder functionality to the hundreds of themes and even an app store feature. You can add products, track inventory, manage customer payments, manage delivery, and even create marketing campaigns with tracking for analytics. The options really don’t stop!
Below is how Shopify stands out from other tools including:
- Millions of merchants worldwide
- 175 countries on Shopify
- 5 Million jobs supported in 2021
- $444 Billion + in global economic activity
To enhance your Shopify experience, check out how at Replo we’re cutting down on the dev time. We have pre-built landing pages to get you started and save you time in the process.
Slack is a quick communication option to replace endless email chains. You can communicate with your team to stay organized with a variety of channels from public to private. There is also a feature to connect with multiple organizations to speed up communication with clients and vendors.
This feature is better to consider for organizational purposes rather than for your customers. However, it could be a useful tool when streamlining vendor communications and teams in a variety of locations.
Buffer is a tool to measure and plan social media performance. You can see what’s working in a social media campaign, schedule posts in advance, and respond to comments quickly. As of 2022, they have been in business for 10 years and have 140,000 users with 1.2 million + social followers.
You may want to consider this tool if you’re looking to build your brand on social media before rolling out any upcoming Black Friday campaigns.
This is the free tool to consider! Google Analytics allows you to look at Google’s data across platforms to understand the full journey of your users. This enables you to to understand how your site performs and how users, on your site or app, interact. You can also check in on your marketing campaigns and their performance along with content or product performance.
This is a fully free and robust tool to seriously consider adding on to not only make smarter decisions, but to me be more informed ahead of the Black Friday mad dash.
Monday a great platform for removing the unnecessary back and forth of who has what task. They streamline the process and create a communication channel for all of your needs and project management requirements. You can easily assign tasks and prioritize what matters within a team without getting bogged down with emails. They also have an automation function that helps to automate routine tasks, like email reminders or approval requests.
This is an essential tool to stay organized and free up time to actually accomplish tasks.
Black Friday Your Way With Replo
At Replo we understand that the holidays signify great potential for growth and to obtain even more customers, but that certainly doesn’t come without some stress! To remedy this, why not check out our offerings in order to modify, customize, and build on every part of your Shopify store’s pages, down to the pixel.
We have hundreds of built-in templates that we can teach you to customize or even build a page from scratch. This includes:
Installation - Step-by-step guides to setting up Replo Visual CMS on Shopify
Integrations - Extend you Shopify pages with Replo integrations
Create Your First Page - Learn how to create your first Shopify page on Replo
To get started, why not check out our Replo Demo Video for Shopify. In the meantime, take a look at our Library of templates as well as our blog for even more eCommerce inspiration ahead of Black Friday 2022.