Black Friday and Cyber Monday Checklist
Love it or hate it, Black Friday presents a great opportunity for retailers to maximise sales and acquire new customers by capitalising on the biggest sales events of the year.
Each person in the UK plans to spend an estimated £234, on average, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in 2019, according to research by PWC. With an estimated total of £7 billion to be spent across the weekend by Brits, according to Finder.
With this in mind, it’s worth making the most of the opportunity if you sell products through your website, even if you are not planning to heavily discount or run extensive promotions. Here are a few things you can to do get your website and marketing prepared for black Friday and Cyber Monday (known collectively as Cyber Weekend, or BFCM).
Website
1. Google Analytics
Knowing how customers shop on your website is crucial to understanding the impact of each of your marketing channels on sales online. It also gives you the opportunity to optimise your online store in the future to improve conversion rates and get more sales. If you are expecting more traffic across Cyber Weekend, ensure you are measuring website traffic and marketing spend through Google Analytics.
2. Facebook Pixel
Just like Google Analytics, setting up the Facebook pixel to record user behaviour is a great way to build up a picture of your audience and understand the website and marketing performance.
Having data from the Facebook pixel also allows you to run better-targeted ads in the future. To find out more about the Facebook pixel, check out our blog to understand ‘What is a Facebook Pixel?’.
3. Live Chat on your website
Being easy to contact by website visitors as often as possible is crucial to maximising sales revenue. Not answering customers enquiries in a timely manner could results in your potential customer purchasing from elsewhere – often a competitor!
Consider implementing a live chat functionality on your website and monitor it frequently during your busiest shopping times to answer customer enquiries.
Paid Marketing
4. Facebook Retargeting
As more people visit your website to view products across your store, the more people will leave your site without making a purchase, making the need to run product retargeting ads across the Facebook network more important than ever.
In order to run retargeting on Facebook, you will need to make sure your Facebook pixel and your Facebook Catalogue are both set-up correctly.
5. Google Shopping
With search traffic increasing by up to as much as 10X on Black Friday, there are a couple of things we would recommend as a priority to get your Google Shopping campaigns ready for Cyber Weekend and the subsequent Christmas shopping period.
During peak shopping periods you should plan how you are going to increase your budgets to allow you to increase your bids. You should consider scaling in the weeks leading up to Black Friday to capitalise on the higher demand for products when it comes to periods of increased search traffic and demand for your products.
To ensure every product on your website will be shown across your Google Shopping campaigns, take a look at your product feed within Google Merchant Centre and fix any product errors appearing in your account, It’s particularly important to fix products which have been disapproved.
6. Facebook Ads to Promote Offers
As well as retargeting a warm audience who have already visited your website, it’s also worth considering how you are going to get brand new visitors to your site. Targeting relevant audiences with well planned paid Facebook campaigns is a great way to get brand new traffic and showcase your brand to a completely new audience. Facebook’s interest-based audiences (core audiences) and Lookalike audiences are both great options for reaching Facebook and Instagram users who have a high chance of being interested in buying your products.
Email Marketing
7. Email Retargeting
With more website visitors it’s more important than ever to ensure you have an automated process to send automated emails to customers based on website behaviour. If you are not sure where to start, consider beginning with a simple abandoned cart email to get those extra sales over the line.
There are a number of reasons customers abandon their baskets on your website, but sometimes a well-timed email is the little reminder they need to complete their purchase.
8. Email Campaigns
In the build-up to Black Friday and across Cyber Weekend, your customer’s inboxes are going to jam-packed with emails from both your competitors and other retailers, so it’s important to find ways to differentiate your emails from the others during this busy time for email marketing.
Consider how you will take advantage of A/B testing, unique content, compelling offers, personalisation within your email campaigns to stand out in your customer’s inbox.
9. Email Capture on website
Not everyone who visits your website is going to want to purchase something right away. However, if you can capture their email address you can promote your products to them at a later date when they might be ready to buy something from you and more invested in your brand.
Incentivising visitors to join your mailing list with a discount or Free Delivery is also a great way to drive the first purchase whilst growing your list.
10. Create a Welcome Email
With a potential increase in the number of subscribers to your website as a result of increased website traffic consider creating a special welcome email for those who subscribe to your newsletter or mailing list during the holiday season.
