Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the beginning of the holiday shopping season which means now is the best time to start preparing for the holiday sales. In fact, now is the best time to get prepared if you want to make the most out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, considering those two holidays are responsible for the majority of retail sales year after year. 

In this post, we’ll share nine tips that will help you capitalize on Black Friday sales as well as Cyber Monday deals. 

1. Make Sure Your Advertising Campaigns Are Ready November 1st

Most major retailers will start promoting their deals and sales at least a week before but some, like Amazon, will start even earlier. If you want to drive the most sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping craze, you need to start advertising early.

Use the last days of October and early November to create your advertising campaigns and make sure they are ready to go. The sooner you start advertising, the earlier you can start creating excitement for your products which is sure to lead to an increase in sales. 

2. Consider Free Shipping

Offering free shipping is a tried and true method for driving more sales at any time of the year. Holiday sales are no exception, so it makes sense to employ this tactic in your online store during Black Friday. 

Another benefit of offering free shipping is the fact that you will effectively reduce your cart abandonment rate. 

Statistics shows high shipping costs are one of the major reasons why customers abandon carts so this is a great way to minimize the chances of cart abandonment. 

3. Create Product Bundles

Consider bundling a few related products together for a discounted price and offering them to your customers. You could, for example, bundle a few fashion articles together, combine a wine glass set with a wine stand or cooling rack or bundle a set of tools with a power tool. 

This increases your average order value as well as sells more of your products. Don’t forget that you can still use traditional upsell and cross-sell methods to showcase related items or even related bundles. 

4. Stock Up On Inventory

The last thing you want to happen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday is to run out of a particular product. This can not only hurt your sales but also present your store in a bad light, especially for first time buyers. 

To prevent this from happening, double-check your inventory and make sure to stock up on popular products. You can also check your store’s sales data to see which items are most in demand during this period and increase the quantities accordingly.

5. Create Gift Guides

Another way to make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is to create gift guides. You can create gift guides based on different price points, product categories, buyer personas, and more. 

Publish the guides on your store’s blog and you have another way to promote your products. You can also offer them as a downloadable guide and build your list at the same time. 

Anthropologie has gifts bundled by price, recipient, product categories, and more. 

6. Generate Excitement With Your Email Campaigns

Announcing and promoting your upcoming Black Friday deals on social media is a must if you want to generate sales. But don’t forget to send an email campaign to your existing audience. 

Plan a promotional email drip campaign that will build excitement with your email subscribers and get them in the shopping mood. You can send them gift guides, ask them to vote for their favorite product bundles, offer them extra loyalty or reward points, and offer them an exclusive discount. 

Another way to build hype is to create gift cards and tell your subscribers they can be bought in the weeks before the Black Friday. They can then use them or buy them for their friends and family. 

7. Build Up Your Reviews

Research shows that people trust reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations. With that in mind, ensure your store as well as individual products have excellent reviews. This will help build trust in first-time visitors and make them more inclined to make a purchase.

Consider sending an email campaign to past customers and remind them to leave a review for a product they’ve purchased. Alternatively, consider asking them to review your store on Facebook, Google or other review sites that are relevant to your store’s niche. 

While you’re at it, ensure that your store has rich snippets enabled for reviews to ensure they show up in search engines when someone searches for your store or keywords related to your products.

8. Test Your Site

Once all the marketing preparations are done, you need to test your site to minimize the chances of crashes and other issues during the sale period. Start by testing how fast your site loads with a tool like Pingdom. This will give you a general idea of how fast your site loads and list necessary improvements to implement. 

Next, check that your site is mobile-friendly as mobile sales accounted for nearly 40% of all retail ecommerce sales in the US. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your website performs on mobile devices. 

Finally, consider testing how your site performs during traffic spikes. Use a tool like LoadImpact to evaluate your site and see how it behaves when there’s a lot of visitors browsing your store. 

 

9. Track and Evaluate Your Sales Campaigns and Stats

Lastly, don’t forget to keep track of your promotional campaigns and your sales stats. When you evaluate your sales date later on, you will be able to see which advertising channels brought in the most traffic that resulted in sales as well as which campaigns performed best. 

Tracking sales number will make it easy to understand which products are high in demand during the holiday season and which products performed poorly. You can then plan your inventory and ensure you have plenty of the popular products so you don’t have to worry about running out of stock. 

Wrapping Up

According to statistics, Black Friday and Cyber Monday account for the majority of sales and revenue earned for most retailers. With a little bit of prep work, you can make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and ensure you meet your sales goals for the year. 

If you’re ready to capitalize on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, your store needs to be in top shape to handle the increase in traffic during those days. 

Check out our managed WooCommerce services and learn how we can help you secure your store, setup intelligent caching, and configure automatic backups so you can focus on marketing your Black Friday deals.