Black Friday 2021 – Your Ultimate Preparation Guide

Countdown to Black Friday 2021: Is your business ready?

The busiest period for eCommerce businesses is nearly upon us, but will you be partaking in Black Friday this year? Retailers need to be on top of their game and have their marketing campaigns in place ahead of time so that they can win big this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

eCommerce is at the core of many survival plans following the lockdowns of 2020, so a winning peak period eCommerce strategy is essential.

Our Black Friday Guide for Retailers

See below for our guide on some top Black Friday eCommerce tips and marketing tactics to help get you ahead of your competitors:

Black Friday Email Marketing Techniques

Black Friday email marketing is not something that should be overlooked. Email campaigns are a fantastic way for retailers to engage with their audience and promote their latest deals. Here are some tips that should be considered by retailers before scheduling campaigns:

• Don’t let customers forget deals – create a call to action (CTA) that allows customers to add a “save the date” to their calendars so their phones notify them of your deals.
• Segment and personalise – this is where smaller brands can really take off. Segmenting audiences based on previous actions and adding personalisation so emails don’t get lost in the sea of discount messages.
• In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, retailers should test their subject lines and marketing messages as teasers for their offers. By monitoring metrics and assessing customer response, retailers can analyse who is most likely to engage with their emails.

Consider Personalisation in eCommerce

You may find that brands larger than yours are able to offer more impressive discounts than your business. This is not a reason to panic, instead it’s an opportunity to play to your strengths.

Personalisation in eCommerce can be a game-changer and is particularly effective with smaller businesses. Smaller businesses are able to offer more personalised services which could be a way to top your competitors.

For instance, setting up early sales for your top customers or creating personalised email offers using segmented audiences. Make the most of the special relationships you can build with your customers, especially compared to the more generalised discounts bigger brands will put out there.

Focus on Customer Retention

Customer retention strategies are another crucial part of a Black Friday survival guide. These add value to purchases in other ways. Examples include adding a free gift for purchases over a certain amount, offering a personal shopping experience, or even free delivery for the next 3 months. This will also help focus your long game on customer retention.

Generate Noise Through Black Friday Social Campaigns

Now is the time to start posting teasers of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offerings. Social platforms are a great place to do this. The best social media campaigns are those that get customers excited early and keep up the awareness posts. This keeps the brand in the customers’ mind as they’re being inundated with offers.

Pay Attention to Mobile Optimisation

We can’t discuss a Black Friday eCommerce strategy without mentioning mobile. It is essential that retailers ensure their sites are optimised for mobile use in today’s digital landscape. We are talking blazing fast loading speeds, CTAs that pass the ‘thumb test’, and visual content that looks just as good on a small screen as they do on a desktop.

Benefits of AMP pages

You may be wondering, what is AMP? Well, it stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Whilst we don’t recommend retailers making big changes to their site code so close to the peak periods, there are effective ways to optimise a site and this includes using AMP.

AMP uses minimum HTML and JavaScript so that Google can serve users with a cached version of your page. This basically means users can shop quickly and efficiently via Google.

Websites using AMP can more easily deal with extra traffic. Any users searching for Black Friday offerings via Google will be able to shop through the search engine rather than competing with other brands. See it as a queue-jumping pass for potential new customers.

If a retailer’s store is powered by BigCommerce, they have the added benefit of the platform being the first to have a native integration for AMP. This means an even quicker setup process.

Fast Checkout

There’s nothing more infuriating for a customer looking to score the best deal quickly than a checkout page with terrible UX. Make purchasing your products an easy and swift process by optimising your checkout.

Integrating Fast, the world’s fastest checkout, is the best place to start. One click and your customer has made their purchase. Forget filling out long forms or slow processing speeds, Fast will enable your customers to grab those discounts quickly, meaning you’ll reduce cart abandonment and be one step ahead of your competitors.

Look to the Future

It is important for retailers to learn from everything that goes right and wrong during this peak period so they know exactly what to plan for the following year.

Perhaps the eCommerce platform being used doesn’t live up to expectations when greeted with high numbers of traffic – quite a common occurrence! If that’s the case, retailers can begin thinking about re-platforming ahead of peak next year.

For 99.99% uptime, we recommend BigCommerce if one of your main issues was downtime due to sales traffic over the holidays.

If you’re looking for help with your Black Friday eCommerce strategy or help delivering your campaigns over your peak periods, give us a call on 0121 369 5874 or email success@5874commerce.com.