Black Friday is fast approaching so this blog will highlight some of the best practices on the run-up to the event.
Promotion
Not every store participates in Black Friday so a banner with a message stating these will be the lowest prices / great deals is a great enticement for current customers to return to your store on Black Friday weekend.
In addition social media continues to be a great tool for eCommerce sites. A Facebook campaign or piggy-backing the current hashtags in Twitter can help boost sales significantly.
Email marketing campaigns can still be very effective as you are directly targeting your customers or those who have shown an interest in your products having signed up to your mail list. Multiple emails prior to Black Friday deals and the current great offerings followed by an email the day before. Even once Black Friday / Cyber Monday has passed you can still send out further emails both asking for feedback and reviews, and advertise further products to retain customer’s for future purchases.
Another advertising avenue is to include a list of gift ideas in your Blog weeks prior to the sale. This can help bring your products to the attention of potential customers generating interest and sales.
Mobile sales: Is your store mobile friendly?
There is a growing trend in the use of mobile phones to browse and shop online. Ensure you site is mobile friendly to benefit from this growing market. Magento is a fantastic eCommerce solution with great mobile friendly integration and a range of additional apps.
Payment options
Ensure the customers can see that you offer all the main payment options. For more expensive purchases 0% finance is often a very enticing selling point whereby people will pay more to gain zero percent finance than pay less to get a discounted cash price.
Plan ahead
Make certain you plan ahead and know which products you intend to discount. Run though the various stages of your website to check everything is running correctly. Make discounted products easy to find, maybe have a Black Friday landing page. Be ready and fully staffed to deal with enquiries as and when they come. Ensure site images are optimized and loading quickly, speed is an important factor to sales.
Black Friday has evolved into a weekend long event. Customers will expect some great deals on the Friday but the weekend is also great time to sell additional products. One method would be to to cross-sell related products to those that were on sale on the Friday. This not only spreads the deals through out the weekend it maintains the customers interest. This also has the benefit of spreading server load.
Finally it is important to not discount only products that are difficult to sell or less popular. Discount some of the products that people already want to purchase. Black Friday is an opportunity to drive sales so don’t waste it trying to sell products you know aren’t going to sell.
Black Friday 2017 recorded sales of £1.39bn according to IMRG, an increase of 11.7%. Will you be joining the sales bonanza in 2018?