Top eCommerce Tips for Black Friday Success

Black Friday is around the corner and before you know it, you’ll be hitting the pre-Christmas sales hard. More and more shoppers are making the choice to shop online so we’re predicting a major BFCM rush for 2021. If you want to make the most of the biggest shopping event of the year you need to stay ahead of the game by forward planning. Black Friday and Cyber Monday gives your business the opportunity to end the year on a high, and we’re here to show you how.

Create a Strong Content Strategy

Content is key to helping your audience connect with you, the business, by giving them the opportunity to make an informed choice when purchasing from your online store. You can successfully increase traffic to your online store through great content, by communicating your message, educating your potential buyers into purchasing your product over your competition.

Firstly, you should look to plan and create captivating content, straplines, and deals via your social media and website landing pages. This will reach a wide audience and encourage them to click through and visit your online store.

You should also focus on building a great relationship through content displayed via email marketing both post-sale and delivery. Email is a great way for you to engage with those who already take an interest in your brand by being a subscriber. Within your email content, you can include special offers, CTA’s and time-sensitive deals that create a sense of urgency with potential customers.

By creating strong social media content ahead of BFCM, you are able to generate awareness of your brand and showcase the fantastic offering you have, this is a great way to drive your following and create that initial relationship with your customers.

Enhance Your Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Accessibility

On Black Fridays, it’s often tempting to introduce some new branding or imagery to help promote your offers. This is a great way to help users find what they’re looking for, but always remember to ensure you are making this promotional imagery as accessible as possible to all users. You may get a wider influx of users than normal, and this means a great number with visual impairments or other considerations. Remember to ensure colour contrast, image alt text, and font sizes don’t risk excluding a large number of potential buyers!

Search

Particularly on sites with a large product catalogue, it is vital to ensure users can easily find that bargain they’re looking for. Review your site search functionality and ensure you’re offering relevant results or suggestions. And don’t forget search prominence - are you making the most out of what is almost certainly your highest converting on-site tool? Before Black Friday arrives, consider A/B testing some alternatives if you’d like to see how users interact with different search styles.

Discoverability

Sure, some people will know exactly what they’re looking for, but what about those who love a browse, and are open to being sold a great deal? Remember, users can land anywhere on your site, not just your homepage. In fact, it’s quite likely that the majority of users will enter from another page entirely. So, remember to ensure you promote your offers sitewide and make it easy to navigate the various categories within your offers section. Clear signposting can help users landing elsewhere to orientate themselves within the site structure in those crucial first few seconds on-page.

Future learnings

With a huge influx of traffic comes an opportunity to understand how to maximise the impact of banner/promo placements within your site. A/B testing these elements makes sure you’re on the front foot the next time it comes around and guarantees to make more of an impact than the previous year.

Focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

You want to avoid having the year and date in your URL. Adding a new page every year prevents the ability to build authority on a page. Also, any links you gain over the period will be lost when you take the page down.

It’s also extremely beneficial to utilise Google’s Rich Results Tester to ensure search engines can find key information about your promotions, such as price, images, and ratings.

Finally, keep your Black Friday page live. It’s tempting to disable the page or make it invisible to Google so that customers can’t access deals at other times of the year, but it’s better for visibility to keep it live and remove products and offers so that Google knows the page exists when Black Friday comes round again.

Plan Your PPC Way in Advance

Bids & Budgets

Make sure that you’re prepared with bids and budgets in advance. Ensure your budgets are opened up to capture the extra demand available or your bid strategies are set up to align with your new budgets. It’s worth reviewing Google Trends and account data from last year to understand when demand will increase. Search volume is likely to increase several weeks before Black Friday.

Ad Copy

Ensure your ad copy is submitted well in advance. Resource is typically tight on the Google side over the festive period and lots of other advertisers will also be submitting new ads for the festive period. According to Google one of the biggest reasons for campaigns not running over the festive period is that their ads were disapproved or stuck in review.

Ad Extensions

Make sure you’re maximising CTR on your ad copy by maximising all the available retail space with ad extensions. You can use site links to push black Friday deals and key products on offer. You can use price and promotion extensions to push key products on sale. You can also use countdown ad copy to create urgency and showcase when sales end.

Automated Rules & Scripts

You can utilise automated rules and scripts to ensure your campaigns pause and start based upon performance or set new ads live. You can also use Google scripts to check for issues with landing pages.

Audiences

Make sure you’re creating lists of people who purchase and visit the site over the festive period. You can use this to tailor ad copy and increase bidding aggression as people return to the site closer to the festive period or utilise these lists next year. You can also use remarketing lists to serve display ads across the Google display network to re-engage users across publisher sites.
Black Friday Keywords

Using broad match, you can pick up users searching for (black Friday + product keywords). However, it’s worth considering adding (black Friday + product) and (black Friday 2021 + product) keywords to your account to reach users searching for black Friday deals.

If you’re looking to start your Black Friday strategy and require further assistance, contact us today to speak to one of our team members and find out how we can help you make the most of this busy time of the year.