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It is impossible to begin making plans earlier than Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) that are the busiest shopping season of the year. Both seasons have witnessed increases in sales from year to year so you'll have to prepare yourself to anticipate an increase in traffic to your website and advertising competition compared to the prior years.

If it's your first time conducting Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or have been in the past, then it's best to start creating your strategy for this year's event today because you'll be able to use the following Black Friday checklist to get going.

To help to prepare in the coming season to help you prepare for the season ahead, we've broken down this ecommerce Black Friday checklist into two components: the customer engagement checklist, as well as the checklist to assist you in organize your back-end systems.

Black Friday checklist: customer engagement

We'll start with the initial customer engagement list.

Begin earlier

Really?

Plan ahead so that you can begin implementing the strategies you have planned earlier in order to increase the sales.

Create a Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales start whenever you'd like. It is becoming apparent that the public will recognize that this. So, it is time to create an initiative that is opposed to Black Friday for the entire week preceding it.

"Why wait? You have plenty of time to shop now so you can avail of these amazing deals and finish your shopping early."

An approach to marketing that doesn't encourage Black Friday will promote benefits such as making the most of the holiday shopping season, crossing off your shopping list prior to the rush and spending time at peace throughout December at all the shoppers who are in a hurry because you got yours done sooner.

Combine this with an assortment of regularly-changing deals and deals in the weeks that lead up the day on Black Friday.

Make sure you connect with your targeted market

You can do this by using multiple product lines as well as run multiple ads which include Google and other social media platforms.

If you run an e-commerce shop selling healthy food.

A particular category of products is a protein-enriched breakfast bar. Another category provides dairy-free and gluten-free snacks. A different category is nutritionally-rich organic foods. These can be promoted using the main language used by your brand's name, of course.

However, what is the ideal people for the items? What's important to them? Utilize the same language throughout the Black Friday marketing content and your customers will be more engaged and increase sales.

Identify products to feature this year

If you're selling a variety of products, don't do broad Black Friday sales that will affect your profits. Instead, concentrate on a select selection of products with amazing deals, to boost sales making use of them to gain an increase in customers to the store.

If you can motivate more orders beyond Black Friday discounts, you'll raise the value of average orders in addition to net profit.

If you're shopping for discontinued, overstocked items or items that are seasonal, these make great options in terms of extreme savings since you'll need to dispose of them in the event that you have to. Use items you're able to produce in abundance in exchange for a deal with your vendor, or for products that are popular or have higher profit margins.

Additionally, consider creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages to showcase your top items, and not only the normal page for your product.

What items do you plan to include in your extreme Black Friday deals this year?

Make marketing plans for a range of channels

Multichannel marketing is a good strategy to reap more benefits rather than focusing on a single channel. Choose at least three channels you plan to use this year as part of your Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels can include, but aren't limited to:

• SMS
• Social media includes all possible platforms including Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Direct post
• Television and Radio
• Video streaming online, such YouTube and YouTube and YouTube

Don't forget to design optimized landing pages, and monitor the visitors to your site via your preferred sources.

Prepare follow-up marketing strategies that you can use

Another key element to making profits from Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the other days of the holiday shopping season is to keep in touch with customers who have discovered your store online this year.

Yes, many Black Friday shoppers will come, buy, go, then disappear forever. But, it is possible to get some and make them repeat and long-term customers.

Create a welcome email sequence. Start sending consistent email marketing. Try to segment your new customers according to what they've already bought along with any other details you've gathered regarding them based on the first time they purchased. Then, you'll be able to engage them with more relevant content during the coming year.

Are you able to follow up with a advertising strategy in preparation for Black Friday?

Use email to get messages frequently and in the early hours.

To prepare for Black Friday this year, develop email marketing campaigns that get your message to all segments of customers before the flurry of Christmas shopping. It's crucial that they think of you before all the online retailers begin competing for customers' interest. You should have them buying from you, while smaller business owners only waking up to the fact that they didn't plan beforehand for Black Friday.

The marketing email campaign's first phase will likely be sent out in October. Inboxes of emails begin to grow at the close of November. Therefore, if you utilize emails to start in the seeding process and provide promotions that can compete before the peak of sales, you'll improve sales, as well as boost the reputation of your company and create loyal customers.

Create eye-catching visuals

If you're using images on your product page or on the landing page pages you'll create for the products you decide to feature it is essential to use photographs that have high resolution to attract attention and allow your audience to touch the item with their fingers.

Email abandoned carts to notify them of your emails

Setting up these prior to Black Friday will give you the opportunity to experiment with your strategy and discover which methods of marketing and deals are most effective for your online store.

Divide your campaign into three pieces

You're likely to have many things on the Black Friday checklist, and it's a lot to take in. To help you organize your efforts and figure out what priorities to be putting in place it is possible to break the campaign down into three natural parts.

This is the initial step in the run-up prior to Black Friday. The process can start anytime you'd like to begin, and ends the day before Black Friday.

Following that, you'll have be able to manage the remainder of your days. This could be weekends or even next week if you're going through the whole Cyber Week. It's up to you to define the 'day'.

Everything that follows your Black Friday period is the second phase of your advertising plan.

Black Friday is not only one day. Marketing strategies must be encompassing throughout the entire duration.

Did you split your Black Friday promotions campaign into three sections?

You can edit or change your return policy

If you've run your e-commerce business for a while, you're likely already familiar with this. If not, now is the best time to create one. In the event that already have one Perhaps you've learned from previous experience that it's the right time to upgrade your collection.

• An option for returning of items that have been shipped. Will you require the original packaging, exact item condition or other. ?
• The policy on refunds. Do customers receive refund in store credit or something else?
• Clear deadlines. What is the best time to send products back for credits or refunds?
• A shipping address. Which address should they use to send back the items?
• Contact details. What is the best way for customers to contact you with any additional inquiries?

Your returns policy needs to be posted at all times it's pertinent. The policy must be displayed in the email confirmation of your order which is sent after the purchase is made. It should be printed out and placed in the product to be shipped. The information should be posted located on your site and simple to locate, such as at the footer, the FAQ page, or on the pages for products.

Have you updated your Return policy?

Provide faster shipping options

The time for shipping can be delayed during the Christmas buying season when consumers generally expect quicker shipping options.

Based on the results of a 2021 Baymard research that 19% of abandoned carts are due to delivery times being too slow. Offering more efficient shipping choices will reduce the amount of sales lost. This is an especially effective method to help you prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In addition, speedy shipping methods encourage buyers and ensure your items arrive at the right time during times when shipping times may be slightly longer because of the large volume of orders that carriers have to take care of.

You might think about making a sale Buy Now and pay later

You can make this option available in the final step of your checkout. It is also possible to add it to the website's homepage, the product's webpage the landing page, or anywhere you believe it could aid customers to overcome cost-related concerns and keep buying.

Make use of chatbots

Chatbots assist with customer support and can increase sales. Most of the time people need answers to basic issues which a chatbot could answer. If they can get one or two issues clarified then they'll be able to make a purchase.

If they have to look up an email address or a contact number, look through help forums, or wait for live chat support to respond the chances are they'll quit the process and move to a different site.

If you are able to do it, then Chatbots could reduce the price of purchasing without an increase in customer service.

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

It is common to think of every year as a brand fresh start, in which we begin from scratch and re-invent the wheel without any benefit from hindsight.

If you've been operating an online store over a period of time, and have run Black Friday marketing campaigns before it, then you've had some experience. There's some data you've gathered in the past. Some of what you've done in the past may have worked well.

Before getting too deep into planning for next year's calendar, look over the results of last year. What worked well? What didn't?

Can you replicate the success from the previous year? Do you have the potential to make improvements by paying attention to the areas you didn't succeed at?

Black Friday checklist Checklist of Backend Systems

Moving on to Black Friday checklist items that consumers don't see every day but you rely on to help customers make purchases and enjoy a wonderful Black Friday shopping experience.

Create a faster website

95% of visitors will leave websites if they are load too slow. Site speed should be a top priority throughout every day throughout the year but it is especially crucial in the times when there are more people visiting your site. There are a few easy ways to improve the loading time of your site:

• Test your website performance. Determine which aspects of your website require improvement by performing a speed test. Tools like Pingdom along with Page Speed Insights will let you know the speed at which it loads as well as how well it performs in specific zones.
• 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 caching content through the CDN nearest to them which minimizes loading times as well as the load and bandwidth of your servers. Jetpack includes a free CDN as well unlike other providers, you are able to setup and install the Jetpack CDN in just one single click.
• Optimize your photos. Even if you're making use of the CDN that optimizes your photos to your specifications, it's an ideal practice to upload as few files that you can with the maximum resolution. Exporting for web using Photoshop as well as using the Image resizing and optimization tools like ImageOptim are easy ways to make your photos suitable for upload to the internet.
• Modify the hosting provider that you are using. If you're on an shared server, you might have slower loading speeds particularly if the some other servers on your server receive a large volume of traffic. Consider an online server (VPS) or dedicated server.

There are other methods to improve the efficiency of of your shop.

Does your online store function as quickly as it can be?

The inventory syncs with the products pages

Make it faster and easier to checkout procedure

The checkout procedure may be working however, is it effective and intuitive? It is important to make the checkout process as easy as is possible with minimal distractions to help shoppers to finish their purchase. Some things you could make to improve your checkout process are:

• Eliminate visual distractions. Eliminate header and menus in footers, widgets on the sidebar, as well as other distractions from the checkout page, so that your customers are determined to complete their purchase.

You must be prepared to make your order and have them shipped on time

Do you have dropshippers and your suppliers ready to handle the increased demand? Do you have the capacity to expand production when demand exceeds your expectations?

While this is a great issue to be faced with but you shouldn't miss the chance to boost sales and gain new customers when your supply chain gets overloaded.

If you're planning to increase production ahead of the holiday season, make sure to place orders at the earliest possible time with your provider of materials. This is especially true for your products are manufactured by a different company, particularly if the items originated from a foreign country. Numerous other businesses are accepting orders from sellers to prepare in preparation for Black Friday sales as well Be sure to lock your order well in advance of the date. If you don't, you may be faced with expensive prices or insufficient stocks of items.

If you're working with a third-party logistics service (3PL) to ship your merchandise check out the past data on selling and shipping of your products and ask the company to shift inventory to warehouses that are closest to the areas where you are likely to make the highest transaction. This will speed up the delivery of your products to customers. If fast delivery times are essential to you, request your 3PL to send out shipments more frequently and use carriers that offer the fastest delivery times.

Also, you may have hire more employees or expand hours in order to accommodate the anticipated increase in production over the holiday season. This is especially important when you're making handmade products or producing products on your own. Even if the manufacturing outsourcing is done, you could be able to meet the need for customer service, marketing, order fulfillment and more.

Get customer contact information to follow-up with marketing

In the past, we talked about how for follow-up if the store's website be visited by customers who may never have visited your shop in the past.

It is impossible to reach them in the absence of the information of your customers.

If you're sending products it's inevitable that you'll get their address for mailing. Direct mail marketing the follow-up and mailing costs significantly more than online marketing this is the reason you need to be able follow-up via email or SMS.

For these, the buyer needs to be given the option to choose whether or not they want to. The best place to do this is at the bottom of the checkout page. On that page, solicit your customer's email address, along with their telephone number. Make certain that you've got their permission to reach out to the customer either via SMS or email. Include a phone number as an option in order that those who aren't opted-in for SMS marketing don't become lost.

However, not everyone is willing to agree this is okay because certain people might. For those that will, it is time to begin your next marketing strategy.

Are you ready to gather contact numbers and email addresses?

Configure tracking of conversions

It's crucial to track customer behavior and also how well your advertising campaigns are performing throughout Black Friday and the rest of the festive season to ensure you can tweak your strategy the following year.

Be sure that your website is secure

An easy and efficient way to improve your website's security is to install the security plug-in. Jetpack includes no cost security against attacks using brute force that stop one of the most common forms of hacking, and two-factor authentication to protect your login procedures. And Jetpack's WordPress security plugin provides regular backups, malware scanners and monitoring of downtime for spam prevention, and more.

Make sure your site works on every device and all browsers.

Your store's online presence is required to display correctly across tablets, desktops, mobile devices and the most well-known browsers. Check this out on your own devices very easily, but you'll also be interested in testing your site's performance using a browser and device emulator like LambdaTest.

Although you may not be able to ensure that your website looks and performs flawlessly across all device and platforms, you can make use of tools such as Google Analytics for you to find out what web browsers and the platforms that your customers are using. You can then concentrate your time and effort in testing and adjusting your site to work best on those specific platforms.

Are your sites mobile-friendly? operating on all devices?

Verify the key functions of your site

Make sure you schedule your sale dates with coupon codes

Reduce the anxiety and anxiety of the busiest shopping season of the year by doing all you can in the months prior to.

It's easy to create coupons and plan sales prior to. Once you've decided which products are going to be discounted and the time you'll have the ability to provide certain flash sales and special deals, as well as the way in which prices are expected to change with time, design the coupons as well as the support system to guarantee the success of sales. If you're planning to give away products with purchases ensure that you have the product in stock.

Make sure you highlight Black Friday deals on your website

Customers can't take advantage of discounts if they're not aware of the sales. If your visitors come to your website organically, or get them on your website by email or via paid advertisements, you'll want them to discover your sales as quickly as possible.

There are many methods to achieve this goal:

• Pop-ups can be used to announce the sale. They can include a call-to-action and buttons that take them directly to the sale.
• Add a banner to your homepage promoting your sale.
• Add a "Black Friday deals" menu item on the navigation menu of your site.
• The highlight of sale items is on Shop's Sidebar.
• The icon for sales is displayed on the thumbnails of your products.

Configure your customer support software

Although you might require more employees to help your customer service or sales team during Black Friday, onboarding and the training of temporary employees is long and difficult. There are a variety of other strategies to improve customer service as well as employing temporary workers.

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

Give a wide range of options for customer service

Alongside direct line phone assistance - which you have to provide when you can afford it -- Here are several other options to help customers receive answers to their questions.

• FAQs, or knowledge base. Help customers help themselves by offering an easily navigable and accessible FAQ pages or a knowledge base
• Utilize a customer contact form. Let people get to your customer support department by email using an contact form. Use conditional logic that is that is based on a user's query form to direct customer service inquiries to the right email address.
• You can put AI chatbots into action.Filter out some of the most commonly-asked questions like "How is shipping price?" or "Do you deliver to my country?" by using an AI chatbot. This will save your customer service staff valuable time as well as offer customers fast responses to questions they have frequently.

Utilize a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM)

CRMs allow you to maintain track of your customers' interactions with your company and swiftly resolve issues with support as well as identify leads and sell your customers on additional products.

Jetpack CRM is slim and easy-to-use tool which can be integrated into your dashboard. There are no contact limits and it's one of the most cost-effective CRM solutions for retail stores.

     Make sure the customer's instructions as well as FAQs regarding your service are current and up-to-date.    

Check regularly your procedures to assist customers and be certain that they're current. If there are any specific practices or discounts that employees should know about in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Make sure to document these procedures and make sure that all employees are aware of them. A casual meeting to go over your procedures one week or two before launching the Black Friday deals may help ensure that these rules are in the forefront for the staff.

Once you've optimized the experience of customer support to both customers as well as the staff members, you may find that you still have to find more members to help you during the Christmas period. However, maximizing your existing team's performance will decrease the number of seasonal hires which you'll have to do.

Are you ready for festive shopping time?

This Black Friday checklist may seem like an overwhelming chore to be prepared for a sales which only lasts for a couple of days, yet these strategies weren't developed in the midst of one weekend.

When you've put them in your place, a lot of these systems and strategies will continue to strengthen your business online every single day. If you're on top of these things in your list throughout the year, then you don't need to put in a lot of effort when the holidays roll around next year.

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