Checklist: Make Sure Your Black Friday Online Strategy is Foolproof

Digital Marketing / November 16, 2018

Article updated in October 2020.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner! We all know how important this weekend is to every e-commerce brand out there. Online holiday shopping has become common practice amongst consumers as they expect lower prices and greater discounts.  We’ve laid out a checklist to make sure your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing strategy is ready for these unmissable shopping dates.

✔︎ Shopping feed is up to date

Many effective tactics around e-commerce involve having a Shopping feed such as Shopping Ads or Dynamic Remarketing Ads. Take some time to make sure all your product listings are up to date and well labelled for upcoming promotions. We all know that potentials customers are going to search for your products on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so double-checking your shopping feed is crucial if you want your Black Friday online strategy to runs smoothly.

✔︎ Offers are irresistible

As we said before, customers are expecting some great money-saving promotions over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But, besides offering these money-saving discounts, why not top it off with something more attractive like free shipping or something exclusive. That could really set yourself apart from others in this highly-competitive period.

Speaking of competition, a good Black Friday strategy is nothing without a deep and conscious study of your competitors. Take some time to look at your competitors’ prices and types of offered deals before the big days. It will give insight as to which items should be more targeted than others, and what type of price range should be applied. To do so, sign up for their newsletter, follow them on social media or create a Google Alert.

✔︎ Audiences are up to date

When audiences are provided to platforms from CRMs, it’s important that they are up to date, if they are not automatically updated. Make sure to send the latest audiences to be uploaded into your advertising platforms, especially if they are going to be custom, like “high values clients” or “past black friday purchasers”.

✔︎ You are staying away from any site changes

It’s not recommended to do any major site changes prior to Black Friday week unless you have an internal team ready to make quick changes or revert back to a working version. Technical problems on the website caused by a site update would affect user experiences considerably. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

✔︎ Website is live and fast

While very rare, sites sometimes go down because servers can’t handle the increase in incoming traffic. It’s highly recommended to monitor closely the site during peak traffic times. Expect any technical bugs and make sure that your e-commerce platform can sustain the massive inflows of visitors and customers. Smart navigation, hug-free whip-quick, and online payment modules are also expected to facilitate your customer’s orientation through your website.

In these highly competitive times, potentials customers won’t hesitate to leave your site if they see bugs or if your site takes too long to load. According to Google, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load and 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again. So, we can’t say it enough, you need to test your site before the big day.

✔︎ Email lists are fresh

Make sure your email lists are cleaned up and well segmented. They might have some dust on them, so might be a good time to clean that up before they get lots of action in emails or towards paid audiences.

✔︎ You are leveraging incoming traffic

Since you’re sure to be getting lots of traffic to your site (Paid or Organic), we recommend you start collecting data from visitors to make plans for future site improvements. Install a heatmaps or visitor recordings software on your site before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This type of data is extremely valuable when deciding how to improve the user experience and ultimately your website conversion rates.

✔︎ Remarketing audiences are ready to go

Focus on building your remarketing audiences prior to the big holidays so you have a decent group of prospects that understand your brand and positioning. In addition, you’ll be able to match your ads messaging to where your customers are in the journey after your segmentation activities. Oh and try to find creative ways to get more email subscribers!

✔︎ You are building anticipation

Get people pumped and start making easy sales prior to the big stampede.  There is a lot of awareness around Black Friday so people are already excited to save and shop, so why not start the celebrations earlier or even extend it? If you want to stick to the typical Black Friday and Cyber Monday dates, make sure you share your promotion in a newsletter or on social media to create a buzz around your promos beforehand.

There you have it! If you’ve got every point on this checklist covered, your Black Friday and Cyber Monday digital marketing strategy should be a winner. If you have any questions concerning digital strategies for e-commerce brand feel free to contact us, we would be happy to help you out. Happy shopping!