Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Prepare for Black Friday Sales
We all know that Black Friday provides a nearly incomparable source of foot traffic and e-commerce sales for retailers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a boost for all businesses, it is important to communicate your discounts or promotions and create a strong Digital Marketing Strategy.
With all the competition in this era one of the best ways to get advantage is to keep your site optimized for Black Friday. In this article from Shopify, you will find the best tips to prepare your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales.
1. Anticipate
There is not an exact month to start preparing the campaigns. While Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO, Hawke Media, recommends starting in January, Dan Conboy, managing director of Shopify Plus Expert Statement, recommends planning your campaigns in May.
“It may be a sin to mention ‘Christmas’ in the middle of May, but that’s the best time to start your planning and preparations,” he explains. “Everything from sourcing stock to creating marketing collateral, the sooner you plan ahead, the more time you’ll have to ensure you have put in place the best possible promotions that will drive the best sales for your client’s store at this pivotal time in the retail trading calendar.”
Within this step you should also review the basic technical aspects of SEO such as:
- Resolving 404 error pages
- Placing 301 redirects on broken links and lost landing pages
- Ensuring servers can handle high visitor traffic
- Optimizing page speed for fast loadouts
“It goes without saying that all content should be optimized for search engines, so that customers can easily find products and BFCM deals.” – Nicola Carruthers
2. Communicate With Your Clients
It is important to encourage your potential customers at this time, be sure to let them know what they could find at this time, invite them to add items in your wishlist that they can buy at a good price on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
And there is no better way to communicate this juicy information than through Email Marketing.
A tip of Nicola Carruthers, co-founder and CFO of digital agency Underwaterpistol, is to send emails to catch consumers. Aim for an initial email, followed by a couple of valuable emails designed to keep your client’s product top of mind. Also, consider offering exclusive pre-sales coupons only for email subscribers.
3. Make Your Social Media Game Strong
Social Media is an excellent channel to communicate your promotions, identify your social media channel and which ones convert the best for holiday promotions and also which ones receive the highest engagement for contests and user-generated content submissions.
According to a survey of Locowise, 75 percent of users will take action after seeing a brand’s post on Instagram while Pinterest is 30 percent more effective in generating sales.
Focus on the right networks: do not try and be active on all networks. Focus on 1 or 2 – whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or any other channel depends on your customers, your product and the country they live in.
4. Offer a Good User Experience
In a world where we look for immediacy, nobody wants to deal with a slow website or navigation problems, especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday!
Matthew Curry, says:
“Create a dedicated page for merchandising deals, and promote it for ‘black friday’ on PPC. If you’re lucky, CPCs will be cheaper and competitors will just be running generic brand ads.”
5. Make Tests
In order to ensure that your website is working well and offers a good experience to the user, you must do two types of tests:
- Regular load testing
It examines how the system behaves during normal and high loads and determines if a system, piece of software, or computing device can handle high loads given to high demand of end users. This tool is typically applied when a software development project nears completion.
Nicola Carruthers also recommends optimizing images to keep file sizes down by running all content through Google PageSpeed, and checking on all browsers early.
“This is a given, but sometimes things are missed until the quality assurance stage and by that time a rebuild of a section isn’t pretty!” she warns. “Also use Sass files, they are minimized for the browser.”
- User testing:
“Proper user testing is always important, but it’s absolutely vital during major events like BFCM, as the impact of every poor UX decision on your client’s website is magnified,” explains Gavin Ballard, CEO of Disco and author of The Definite Guide to Shopify Themes.
User testing is like watching over someone’s shoulder while they interact with your app or site, except that you get to ask questions along the way and nudge them in the direction you want to explore. It’s not that expensive or hard to do.
6.How To Deal With Deals
“There’s nothing to say you have to hold everything back for Friday – you’ll be competing with lots of brands for attention, if you can extend promotions to before and after. Your client and their competitors are after the same share of wallet, so try to get them to empty that wallet on your client’s site first! ” – Matthew Curry
Consider leveraging customer journey mapping and advanced audience analytics so you can target users with the highest intent with your advertisements.
These tips will help you take into account the aspects that you should not neglect to have an era full of positive numbers and new users.
Happy shopping season!
Is your website is optimized and ready for Black Friday? Contact Us, our Digital Marketing strategists will give you a digital consultation to improve your website and generate leads.
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