Black Friday eCommerce: Ideas and Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategies are essential to the success of any business, and this holds true for Black Friday eCommerce sales as well. Black Friday or BFCM eCommerce marketing strategy involves building brand awareness, acquiring new customers, increasing your store revenue, and maximizing sales in your store.

Keeping in mind the huge sales numbers your store will face, it is best to prepare your e-commerce store in advance and set up your website to handle the vast influx of Black Friday website traffic.

Hence, in this article, we have provided the best possible ways to prepare your eCommerce store in advance, along with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 marketing ideas for online stores to boost sales.

Why is Black Friday Important?

Following are the reasons that stress the importance of black Friday sales for your eCommerce store.

• Revenue Generation: Based on Sender’s recent survey, 2023 Black Friday saw a record $9.8 billion in online sales alone and 2024 is anticipated to have more sales. This offers businesses a chance to generate significant revenue in a short period of time, surpassing average monthly sales.
• Inventory Clearance: Black Friday eCommerce deals are a great chance to clear out old and excess stock from your inventory. By offering discounts on those products, you can quickly sell them to customers.
• Customer Loyalty: Black Friday eCommerce sales can turn first-time shoppers into loyal lifelong customers provided you deliver a seamless shopping experience and customer service.
• Customer Acquisition: Store owners can acquire many new customers through BFCM shopping deals. Since many people discover new brands during this period, it is wise to make your brand visible enough to hook new customers.

The list doesn’t end here and there are many more reasons why black Friday is an excellent chance for eCommerce stores to push their sales. Read below to learn more about preparing your store for the black Friday season.

How to Prepare Your Store for Black Friday eCommerce Sales

Since Black Friday eCommerce sales involve handling a massive number of orders, expanding your customer base, and dealing with customer issues more than you’ve ever seen, it is advisable to prepare your store in advance. Doing so will give you a head start and keeps you ahead in the competition.

Following are some of the best practices for preparing an eCommerce site for Black Friday.

a) Optimize Website to Handle Black Friday eCommerce Website Traffic

The first thing you should do is preparing your eCommerce website for black Friday traffic. A reliable website or a landing page lays the foundation for a great eCommerce black Friday sale. Following are some of the points to remember while doing website optimization for Black Friday.

• Upgrade Hosting: Choose scalable hosting solutions to accommodate Black friday traffic boost.
• Enable Caching: Improve your website loading times by implementing browser and server-side caching.
• Optimize Website Speed: By compressing images, CSS/JS files, enabling lazy loading for faster page load speeds and using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to serve content quickly to global users.
• Landing Page Optimization: During Black Friday season, create a dedicated landing page for your eCommerce website with clear offers, faster loading times, and a simple design. Also, ensure mobile responsiveness, as most customers shop on mobile devices during peak sales.
• Website pop-ups: Allowing light and well-timed pop-ups for product promotions or for capturing customer emails are a great way to boost sales during eCommerce black friday sales. While doing this, ensure these website pop-ups doesn’t slow down the website or becomes an obstructions, especially for mobile users.
• Stress Test your Website: Once you’ve made all the necessary changes, stress test your stite and ensure your eCommerce website can handle Black Fdiday website traffic. Tools like LoadImpact or Apache JMeter can help you simulate black friday traffic boost and identify bottlenecks.

By focusing on fast loading times, landing page simplicity, and non-intrusive pop-ups, you’ll ensure a smooth shopping experience in your eCommerce store, even during high-traffic periods like Black Friday.

b) Begin Black Friday eCommerce Preparation Early

There are a lot of advantages in starting your black friday eCommerce preparation at the earliest. For example, starting your black friday marketing campaigns early helps you build brand awareness and fine-tune your marketing campaigns. It also gives more time for customer engagement, which helps in building trust. Starting out early helps store owners identify where they lag and correct their mistakes before the commencement of black friday sales.

c) Attract Customers to Increase Black Friday eCommerce Sales

Competition has always been fierce in the eCommerce industry and it is bound to increase during the black friday season. Follow the below steps to capitalize on this holiday shopping surge.

Create Social Media Campaigns
Social Media is very crucial for driving traffic to your website and improve brand awareness. By using social media like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc, store owners can promote their products, limited-time offers, etc can help you reach a wider set of audience.

You can also collaborate and do influencer marketing for Black friday or use paid ads and kickstart your Black Friday social media marketing campaigns.

Retarget Customers
Retargeting ads for Black Friday will bring back customers to your website and convince them to purchase products from your eCommerce store during black friday. Customers who visited your site but have abandoned their carts should be shown personalized ads on other platforms. Special offers to your customers can also help bring customers to your website.

Optimized for Mobile Shopping
More than 50% of black friday customers access eCommerce websites via mobile phones. If your website is not optimized for mobile usage, you risk loosing your customers to competitors. Ensure your eCommerce website loads quickly in mobile phones along with providing mobile payment options and one-click purchases.

d) Integrate New Tools and eCommerce Plugins

eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce allows store owners to install and integrate third-party plugins. Since these platforms have limited functionality, you can add additional features and customizations using these plugins. Some of the features that can be added using plugins are listed below.

• Enhanced Customer Experience: Plugins like “WooCommerce Product Recommendations”, “UpsellWP” recommends products to customers based on their previous purchases and browsing history. Doing so, helps increase the average order value of your store and provides a tailpored shopping experience.
• Simplified Checkout & Payments: Simpler the eCommerce checkout process, higher the conversion rate is. During high-pressure sales such as Black Friday, having a simplified buying process for your eCommerce store makes the transactions easier and lets the complete the purchase quickly.
• Black Friday Marketing Automation: Plugins like Retainful, Mailchimp for WooCommerce collects customer data and helps you conduct email marketing for black friday with ease. During Black fridayt sales, store owners can easily recover abandoned carts or send follow-up emails and bring back customers with ease.
• Real-time Analytics: While preparing for Black friday eCommerce sales, having information such as customer behavior, best selling products, traffic sources, customer locations, etc help you channelise your black friday digital marketing efforts. MonsterInsights and Metorik are some of the analytics plugins.

e) Easy Check Out Process

Cart abandonment has been a major bottleneck in eCommerce sales and having a more streamlined checkout procedure prevents store owners to fall into that category. During Black Friday eCommerce campaigns, customers should be provided with a hassle-free checkout procedure. Some of the tips for a successful checkout includes,

• Offering features like express checkout or one-click checkout via plugins can reduce the time it takes to purchase.
• You don’t want to loose a customer just due to lack of payment options. Having multiple payment options during your black friday eCommerce campaigns allows customers to choose any payment method of thier choice.
• More than 55% black friday eCommerce sales are done via mobile phone and having an optimized checkout process for mobile phones becomes very much essential.

f) Customer Service

Customer service directily impacts your customer’s satisfaction during your black friday eCommerce campaigns. During peak black friday eCommerce sales, customers might enquire about stock availability, returns policies, etc and having a strong customer support will build trust and encourages repeat businesses.

Black friday eCommerce sales involves heightened number of transactions and there’s always a chance that some of the purchases may fail to get delivered, or customers will be provided an incorrect product instead. In such cases, having a proactive and empathetic customer service can de-escalate issues and prevent negative feedback.

Best Black Friday eCommerce Marketing Strategies

Make your offers known to customers by following the step-by-step Black Friday eCommerce strategy given below. Even small online shops can use the below eCommerce marketing strategies and get benefitted.

a) Email Marketing for Black Friday Campaigns

Running Email marketing campaigns during black friday eCommerce sales is an effective way to boost sales and increase conversions. Some of the steps to do a successful email marketing campaign are listed below.

• Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails: Setting up automated shopping cart abandonment emails during peak black friday eCommerce sales helps remind customers to complete the purchase.
• Teaser Emails: Black friday is known for its offers and informing customes of the upcoming deals builds via emails builds anticipation among customers.
• Countdown Emails: These emails remind customers of the limited-time offers for Black Friday and when the sale will end during your black friday eCommerce campaigns.
• Segmented Offers: Targeted emails involves sending customized emails based on customer behavior, purchase history or demographics. These kind of emails increases relevance and eCommerce conversion rates.

b) Social Media Black Friday Campaigns

According to a latest study, more than 82% of consumers use social media for product research and purchase. This makes social media, a hotspot for black friday eCommerce offer promotions. Here’s what you can do in social media black friday campaigns.

• Countdown Posts: Use social media to post offer countdowns for your eCommerce Black Friday promotions. You can also use graphics and videos to build anticipation with your customers.
• Paid Ads: Reach new audience by running targeted ads on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. Promote deals, limited-time offers, etc that are specific to black fridaty eCommerce sales.
• User-Generated Content: Nothing is as convincing as an user review. Encourage your customers to post their purchase and experience using specific hashrtags using their social media account.
• Shoppable Posts: For the sake of convenience, attaching product purchase links with your social media posts allow costumers to purchase directly. This can directly impact your black friday eCommerce sales.

c) Flash Sales & Limited Time Offers

By leveraging these time sensitive black friday sales promotions, online stores can maximize sales during black friday eCommerce marketing campaigns. Some of the steps to do it are given below.

• Choosing Right Product: Products that are on high demand and are popular should be prioritized. You can also bundle these products and offer budle discounts to do a flash sale.
• Plan the Timing: Scheduling these flash sales at strategic times makes the customers return to your store. Store owners can also provide multiple flash sales for eCommerce stores throught the black friday and maximize conversions in their eCommerce store.
• Set Up Countdown Timers: Creating flash sales and displaying these offers using countdown timers creates urgency for black friday deals online among your customers and make them purchase your products.

d) Online Shopping Discounts & Free Shipping

Online shopping discounts and price cuts are the important reasons why customers anticipate buying on black friday. Here are some points to create an effective discount and free shipping strategy for your black friday eCommerce campaign.

• Discount Strategy: Store owners can provide discounts in a variety of ways. They can provide percentage discounts, cart value discounts, bundle discounts, Buy One, Get One discounts, Flat discounts, etc.
• Free Shipping: During black friday eCommerce campaigns, store owners can provide shipping discounts to customers based on several conditions. For example, they can provide free shipping for purchasing above a certain amount or offer a limited-time free shipping.
• Conditional Discounts: Instead of direct discounts, store owners can set conditions to discounts and make it applicable only after the condition is fulfilled. Conditional discounts can be based on user-role, purchase history, payment methods, coupons, product/category combinations, etc.

e) Customer Loyalty Programs

Having a strong loyalty program for your online store will help you a lot during black friday sales for eCommerce. Some of the ways in which you can create loyalty programs and retain customers are given below.

• Offer Exclusive Discounts: For your loyal customers, you can provide early access to black friday deals and exclusive discounts. This builds loyalty with your customers and increases engagement.
• Reward Points System: Providing points for purchases made from your store is a great way to encourage repeat purchases. For example, with plugins like WPLoyalty, store owners can create a point-based system for your store and allow customers to redeem points for their online shipping discounts.
• Exclusive Access: Provide early access or extended access to your loyal costumers and create a sense of exclusivity.
• Highlight Benefits: It is of utmost importance to highlight the importance and benefits of your loyalty programs to your customers via email marketing, paid black friday sales promotions, ads, etc.

f) Up-Sell and Cross-Sell

Upselling during Black Friday is one of the sureshot ways to maximize store sales during your black friday eCommerce campaigs. Some of the useful points you can implement in your ecommmerce store are given below.

• Suggest Higher-Value Products: When customers add a product to their carts, you can suggest a product that is the same but is of higher value at a slight discount. You can suggest it in the name of black friday sales.
• Related Products Recommendations: Displaying complementary products that are not the same but are related to the parent product is cross-selling. Store owners can bundle these complementary products and sell it as bundle for a discounted price.
• Dynamic Recommendations: Based on customer’s purchase history and recommending the most relevant products to them during your black friday eCommerce campaigs can significantly boost sales.

Tip! Plugins like UpsellWP can help store owners create a variety of upsell, cross-sell offers along with sale insights in WooCommerce.

g) Referral Programs

Running referral programs during your black friday ecoimmerce campaigs can bring more customers to your store and maximize sales. Some of the ways in which you can conduct a referral program are given below.

• Simplify Referral Process: First of all, make the process of referrals easy for your customers. All you need to do is provide a simple link or code which can be shared directly via Emails, Social Media or as a text message.
• Double Rewards for Referrals: Increase the incentives offered to referrals during black friday eCommerce campaigns. This invites more customers to your store during the black friday season.
• Influencer Marketing for Black Friday: You can partner with influencers and spread the word during black friday eCommerce campaigns. This encourages their followers to visit your store via referral links.

h) Inventory & Logistics

Effectively inventory and logistics services are essential to run a successful black friday eCommerce campaign. Some of the key points to keep in mind are,

• Stock Up Early: Based on previous black friday sales data and current trends estimate which products will get sold fast. Based on that, stock up whats essential and tackle the demands.
• Real-time Inventory Updates: Ensure your eCommerce website are synced for real-time updates during Black friday eCommerce campaigns. You can prevent overselling by displaying low-stock notifications in your store.
• Logistics Partnership: Since black friday eCommerce sales entails increased sales volume, assign product handling and fulfilment to third-party logistics partners. Provide flexibility to customers by providing multiple shipping options such as free shipping, express, standard, etc.

By following the above marketing strategies, you can maximize store sales during black friday.

Post-Black Friday eCommerce Sales – What to do Next?

Store owners can make use of post-black friday sales such as ‘Cyber Monday’ and leverage the momentum to keep the sales going and mazimize profit. Some of the ways in which you can do this are given below.

a) Post-Black Friday eCommerce Sales Emails

After completing black friday eCommerce sales, you must do the following to extend engagement and sales. Here are some of the customer retention strategies that you can follow as a store owner.

• Personalized Thank You Emails: Send personalized emails to thank your customers for shopping with them during black friday. Feedback or product reviews can also build confidence among customers and social proof for future shoppers.
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Recovery: If your customer has left your store without making a purchase, nudge them to purchase the product by offering discounts to complete the purchase.

By sending timely emails after black friday, store owners can keep up customer engagement during holiday sales.

b) Post-Black Friday Rewards

Nothing is as encouraging as gifts and rewards for the customers to make future purchases from your eCommerce store.

• Discounts for Future Offers: Once a customer makes a purchase during black friday eCommerce sale, store owners can offer promo codes or any special discount that can be used for future purchases. You can make these offers ‘time-bound’ to create urgency and quick follow-ups.
• Bonus Points: Offer bonus points or double bonus point as rewards to customers making purchases during black friday sales and encourage repeat sales.
• Gift Cards: Include gift cards as a part of your black friday eCommerce campaigns. Offering gift cards incentivizes customers to return to your store and make them purchase more.

c) Strategise Cyber Monday Discounts

Following are some of the steps to strategise cyber monday eCommerce sales following your black friday marketing campaigns.

• Segment Audience: Customers who abandon their carts during black friday sales should be targeted with emails and offered more discounts and bonuses to make the purchase. You can also offer customer-specific deals based on their purchases and boost conversions.
• Offer Extended Deals: Cyber Monday eCommerce sales is a great way to extend your black friday eCommerce sales. You can create campaigns throughout the ‘Cyber Week’ to capture late shoppers or strategise each day of the entire week that follows.
• Exclusive Deals: Save some of the deals exclusively for black friday. For example, you can offer unique for cyber monday discounts that were not available on black friday to maintain the sales momentum.

By following the above methods, you can retain Black Friday customers post-holiday season and keep up the sales.

Conclusion

By following the above tips and marketing strategies, eCommerce store owners can easily conduct a successful black friday eCommerce campaign. Your store will see a surge in sales, profits, customer base, etc, after the black Friday sales. To capitalize on this, eCommerce sellers are advised to extend the discount till Cyber Week, which comes immediately after black Friday.

A successful black Friday sale will position your store to compete effectively during any shopping season and boost brand recognition, let alone clearing inventory.

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