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You can never start planning earlier than Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) as they are the biggest shopping season in the entire year. Both of these shopping seasons have witnessed significant growth year-over-year and you'll have be prepared to anticipate more site traffic and increased advertisement competition as compared with prior years.

It doesn't matter if this is your first time running Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or if you've already done it, you'll want to start developing this year's strategy now in advance, and you can use the following Black Friday checklist to get to work.

In order to help you prepare ahead for the season to come, we've broken this ecommerce Black Friday checklist into two components: the checklist for customer engagement as well as the list for your back-end systems.

Black Friday list of items: Customer engagement

Let's start with the checklist for customer engagement first.

Start earlier

Really?

So, start your plan early so that you can begin implementing the strategies you have planned earlier and maximize your sales.

Make the Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales start whenever you want them to. The public is beginning to realize this. Therefore, you should run a campaign that goes anti-Black Friday in the weeks preceding it.

"Why wait? You're here to shop now, so grab these great deals and get your shopping started early."

The anti-Black Friday marketing slant could promote advantages like having a head start on the holiday shopping season, crossing off your shopping list prior to the madness, and then having fun laughing through December with all the shoppers in a rush due to the fact that you've completed your shopping in advance.

Pair this with an array of ever-changing special offers and bargains in the months that lead up until Black Friday.

Try to connect with your targeted customers

It is possible to do this with multiple product lines too and create several ad campaigns that include Google as well as other social media sites.

Suppose you have an ecommerce retailer that sells health foods.

The category that is one of the most popular features proteins-enhanced breakfast bar. Another category has gluten-free and dairy-free foods. The other category is nutrient-rich, all-natural products. It is possible to promote each one using your main brand language obviously.

But what does the target public for these products sound like? What matters to them? Use that same language into the content you create for your Black Friday marketing content and your customers will be more interested and increase sales.

Select products that will be featured this year

If you have a lot of merchandise, do not conduct broad Black Friday sales that will impact your profit margins. Instead, feature select merchandise with great deals which will increase your profits making use of them to bring more customers in the door.

If you can motivate more purchases beyond the Black Friday discounts, you'll increase average order value as well as net profit.

If you're in the market for overstocked and discontinued products or other seasonal products, they are great choices for extreme discounts because you'll need to sell them out anyway. Use items you can produce in abundance for a special agreement with the supplier and products that are in high demand or earn larger profits.

And consider creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages for your most important items, rather than just your typical product page.

What products are you planning to feature that offer the most amazing Black Friday deals this year?

Prepare marketing for various channels

Multichannel marketing can yield greater results than targeting just a single channel. Identify at least three sales channels you will utilize this year as part of you Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels may include, but not be limited to:

• SMS
• Social media - all possible platforms, including Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Direct post
• Radio and TV
• YouTube, streaming video online and YouTube

Make sure to build optimized landing pages as well as track the traffic to your website through your various channels.

Have follow-up marketing plans ready to go

The other key to profiting off Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other days of the Christmas shopping season is to keep in touch with new customers who find your website in the coming year.

Many Black Friday shoppers will come to buy, leave, only to never return. But you can win some of them and then turn these into loyal and repeat customers.

Start a welcome email sequence. Start sending consistent email marketing. Try to segment your new clients based on the products they already bought, in addition to any other information you have gathered regarding them based on their initial buying encounter. Then, engage them with additional relevant content during the new year.

Are you following-up with a marketing strategy in place for Black Friday?

Make use of email to get your message to the masses early and often

In preparation for Black Friday this year, make email marketing campaigns that target your different customer segments prior to the rush of holiday shopping. You want them thinking about you before all the competitors on the internet start to compete for attention. They should be buying from you when the others with small businesses are simply waking up and realizing that they haven't planned ahead to prepare for Black Friday.

The first marketing email campaign will likely be sent out by October. The email inboxes begin to overflow at the end of November. So if you can make use of email to start making seeds and offering discounts that are competitive before the rush, you'll improve sales, and increase your brand's recognition and loyalty to customers.

Create eye-catching visuals

Whether on your product pages or on the landing page pages you'll create for products you choose to feature You'll require high resolution images to grab the attention of your visitors and allow them to experience the product with their fingers.

Send emails to abandoned carts

Getting these set up in advance of Black Friday will give you an opportunity to evaluate your campaigns and see what methods of marketing and deals work best for your online store.

Break your ad campaign into three pieces

There's a number of items to check off on the Black Friday checklist, and it can get overwhelming. For help in organizing your efforts and determine what you should prioritize, you can break your campaign into its three natural elements.

It's the first step in the run-up to Black Friday. This begins whenever you want it to begin, and ends the day before Black Friday.

After that, you'll have to deal with the day. It could include the whole weekend or the following week if you're taking on the entire Cyber Week. The definition of"daytime".

Last, everything after your Black Friday period is the follow-up stage for your marketing strategy.

Black Friday is only one of the days. Your marketing strategy should encompass all of the season.

Did you break into you Black Friday promotions campaign into three parts?

Update or create your return policy

If you've been running your online company for some time it's likely that you have this. If not it's right time to make one. In the event that you already own one, perhaps you've learned from prior experience that the one you have is outdated.

• A process for return of items that have been shipped. Will you require your original packing, in perfect product condition, etc. ?
• The policy of refund. Do customers receive their money back, store credit, or something else?
• Clear deadlines. What is the maximum time they can be returned to receive full credits or refunds?
• The shipping address. Where will they send returned articles?
• Contact information. Which way can customers be able to contact the company with further questions?

The return policy must be made public frequently as is necessary. It should be in the order notification email that goes out after your purchase has been completed. It must be printed and placed in the package. The information should be posted placed on your site and easily accessible like in the footer, on the FAQ page and on the product pages.

Are you aware of the latest return policy?

Offer faster shipping choices

Delivery times may increase in the holiday shopping period, and buyers often demand expedited shipping options.

Based on an 2021 Baymard research in 2021, 19% of carts that are abandoned result from delivery times getting too long. Offering quicker shipping options could reduce these lost sales and is a great approach in the period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In addition, speedy shipping methods encourage buyers, they ensure that the products are delivered on schedule during the time of year when delivery times might be longer due to the huge quantity of orders that carriers have to process.

You might consider offering Purchase Now or Pay Later

It is possible to make this feature accessible at the bottom of your checkout. However, you could also highlight it on the product's page, homepage, landing pages or wherever else you believe it could aid customers to overcome a price objection and keep shopping.

Employ the chatbot

Chatbots help with customer service and can increase sales. A lot of times clients have concerns that chatbots are able to help them with. If they are able to have a couple of things clarified, they will follow through on their purchase.

But if they have to find an email address, sift through help forums, or sit and wait for live chat representatives to reply, they're likely to abandon the procedure and go to a different site.

If you can create it the chatbot can help make buying easier without the need for additional customer service personnel.

Take a look at the last season's Black Friday sales data

There's a tendency to approach every year like a new endeavor, in which we start from scratch and reinvent the wheel with no benefit of experience.

However, if you've been operating an online store for a amount of time, and you've been involved in Black Friday marketing campaigns before it's likely that you've had some experience. You have some prior data. A few of the things you've tried previously may have worked well.

If you are getting way too deep into planning for next year, review your results from last year. What was successful? What failed?

Do you have the potential to repeat your success that you had last year? And can you build on what fell short?

Black Friday checklist: Backend systems

We'll now move into the Black Friday checklist items that consumers don't see every day, but that you depend on to help customers make purchases and enjoy a wonderful Black Friday shopping experience.

Accelerate your site's speed

95% of customers are likely to leave a website if it loads slowly. Site speed should be top of the list at any time, but it's especially important when you are expecting an increase in volume of traffic. There are a few quick things you can do to speed up the loading time of your website.

• Test your website performance. Determine which areas that need to be improved through a speed test. Instruments like Pingdom as well as Page Speed Insights can tell you how quickly it loads and the performance of certain regions.
• Implement a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN serves your site's files from high-speed, dedicated, and geographically-distributed data centers. Your visitors will get with cached content by the CDN closest server this reduces loading time, and also reduces bandwidth and loads on your server. Jetpack comes with a free CDN that is, unlike other network providers, you can install and set up Jetpack CDN within just one click.
• Optimize your images. Even if you're making use of an CDN that optimizes your files to your specifications, it's best procedure to upload the least files that you can while maintaining a high-quality resolution. Exporting for web with Photoshop as well as using the free tool for image resizing and optimizing such as ImageOptim are easy ways to prepare your images to be uploaded on the internet.
• upgrade the hosting service you use. If you're on a shared server the site could experience slow loading times, particularly in the event that other websites located on your server are experiencing spikes in traffic. Consider a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.

Here are some other ways you can improve the speed of the speed of your store.

Is your ecommerce website running as quickly as it can be?

Sync inventory with product pages

Simplify and speed up your checkout process

Your checkout process may work, but is it efficient and easy to use? You want to keep your checkout form as simple as is possible with minimal distractions to help buyers to make their purchases. A few things you can make to enhance your checkout process can be improved, including:

• Eliminate the visual distractions. Eliminate header and footer menus, sidebar widgets as well as other distractions from the checkout page to ensure that the customer is focussed on making the purchase.

Make sure you are ready to complete orders and ship on time

Do your dropshippers and suppliers prepared to deal with increased sales? Are you able to ramp up production if demand exceeds your estimates?

This is an excellent problem to have but you shouldn't squander the opportunity to increase the revenue of your business and gain new customers because your supply chain gets overloaded.

If you're looking to expand production in advance of the holiday season, make sure that you make your purchases to your suppliers of materials early. It is the same if your items are produced by a different firm -- especially when the products are made in a foreign country. Other companies will be placing larger orders from vendors in preparation to prepare for Black Friday sales as well So, make sure to make sure to secure your purchases prior to the date. If you don't, you may be faced with higher prices or be out of stock things.

If you're using an outside logistics company (3PL) to ship your goods, review historic data on shipping and sales for your product and request them to move stock to warehouses close to areas in which you tend to do the most transactions. This can speed up delivery times for customers. If speedy delivery is essential to your company, ask your 3PL to ship shipments more frequently and use carriers that offer the fastest delivery times.

You may also need to hire more staff or expand hours in order to cope with the expected rise in production during the holiday season. This is crucial if you're creating handmade goods or making products on your own. However, even if production outsourcing is done, you may still have more demand for customer services, order fulfillment, marketing, and much more.

Collect customer data for follow-up marketing

Earlier, we discussed preparing to follow up when you attract customers this year who may not have visited your online store previously.

But you can't follow up if you don't collect their information.

If you're shipping items, then obviously they will give you their mailing address. However, direct mail marketing as well as follow-up cost quite a bit more than online marketing and follow-up, therefore you should be able to follow up via email or SMS, too.

In order to do this, the customer needs to be given the option to choose whether or not they want to. One of the best places for this is at the bottom of checkout. On the checkout page, you should ask for their email and telephone number. Make certain to obtain consent to contact them using email and text. But make the phone number optional so that the customers who don't opt in for SMS marketing don't become confused.

Not everyone will consent however, which is fine because some will. For those that are, now is the time to commence with your follow-up strategy for marketing.

Are you prepared to collect email addresses and phone numbers?

Configure conversion tracking

It is important to track customer behavior and how well your marketing campaigns perform throughout Black Friday and the rest of the festive season in order to improve next year.

Check that your site is secure

A simple and effective way to enhance the security of your site is by installing a security plugin. Jetpack comes with no cost security against brute force attacks which stops an attack that is one of the more popular types of hacking methods as well as two-factor authentication to safeguard your login method. Additionally, Jetpack's WordPress security software also offers regular backups, malware scanning and monitoring of downtime for spam prevention along with other features.

Be sure that your site is working on every device and all browsers.

The website you're selling on must look good on desktops tablet, smartphones, and all leading browsers. Check this out with your devices easily, but you'll also need to check how your store displays using a browser and device emulator such as LambdaTest.

Even though you might not be able to guarantee that your website's appearance and works flawlessly across every device and platforms, you could utilize tools like Google Analytics to determine which browsers and devices your visitors are using. You can then focus your energy to test and tweak your site to work best for the specific platform.

Is your website mobile friendly and working across as many devices as possible?

Check your website's key functionality

Schedule your sale and coupons

It is possible to reduce the stress and anxiety of the most hectic time of shopping by doing as much as feasible in the weeks leading up to it.

It's easy setting up coupons and scheduled sales prior to the time. Once you've decided which products will be discounted, the timing of particular flash sales or offers, and how price will fluctuate over time, design the coupons as well as additional back-end support systems to guarantee sales success. If you're planning to offer a free present with purchase, make sure that you've got the gift in stock.

The highlight Black Friday deals on your website

Customers can't take advantage of an offer if they don't know about the sale. If your visitors come to your website organically, or get them there through emails or paid advertisements, you'll want them to discover your sales quickly.

There are many options to achieve this:

• Create pop-ups that announce your sale with a call to action and a button that will take you directly to your sale.
• Include a banner on your homepage promoting your sale.
• Include an "Black Friday deals" menu item to the navigation of your website.
• Highlight sale items in the sidebar of your shop's page.
• Display sale icons on the thumbnails of your products.

Create your customer support software

If you do have to hire more people to help your sales or customer service team during Black Friday, onboarding and training temporary workers can be challenging and time-consuming. Other ways are available to improve customer service in addition to the hiring of temporary workers.

Below are three customer-service strategies to implement this year.

Provide a variety of options for support services to customers

Apart from the direct line support phone -that you must provide when you can afford it, there are different ways for customers to get their questions answered.

• FAQs or knowledge base. Help customers help themselves by offering an easy-to-use and easily accessible FAQ page or knowledge base
• Utilize a customer support contact form. Let people get contact with your customer service team via email using a contact form. Use conditional logic in response to the question type to route questions from customers to the correct email address.
• Start putting AI chatbots working.Filter out some of the most commonly asked queries such as "How much is shipping?" or "Do you deliver to my country?" by using an AI chatbot. This will save your customer service staff valuable time as well as provide customers with quick answers to basic questions

Use a customer relationship management tool (CRM)

CRM software can assist you in tracking the interactions of your customers with your business and swiftly solve support issues, identify leads, and upsell your customers.

Jetpack CRM is a compact and user-friendly tool that is able to integrate directly with your dashboard. It doesn't have any contact limitations and it's among the cheapest CRM choices for retail stores.

Be sure that your customers service procedures and FAQs are up to date

Review your customer service procedures and make sure that they're correct. If you have any special processes or offers your representatives need to be aware of in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Document them, and make sure that your staff is aware of them. A quick meeting to review your processes about a week prior to the launch of your Black Friday deals may help to keep these processes in the forefront for the staff.

After you've improved the customer support experience for both your visitors as well as your staff You may discover you need to recruit more staff members to help with the holiday season. But maximizing your current team's efficiency will minimize the number of seasonal recruits you'll have to hire.

Are you prepared for the holiday shopping time?

This Black Friday checklist may seem like an overwhelming task to prepare for a sale which only lasts for a couple of days, but these suggestions aren't designed only for only one weekend.

Once you've implemented them, some of these methods and techniques can continue to help strengthen your business online every day. If you stay on top of these items on your checklist throughout the year, you'll not need to put in a lot of effort when the holidays roll around next year.