Should Your Ecommerce Store Offer Black Friday Discounts?
Black Friday is the most important time of the year for ecommerce stores, but are you and your site ready to offer your customers a Black Friday discounts and offers?
As one of the busiest days of the year for shopping, make sure you don’t miss out on an increase in potential revenue.
To help you prepare, we’ve put together some top tips and strategies for success over the Black Friday weekend.
Why You should Care About Black Friday
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are rapidly becoming the busiest and most important shopping days of the year.
There’s no denying that Black Friday (and the few days that follow it, including Cyber Monday) are rapidly becoming the most important online shopping days of the year.
In 2020, Black Friday generated over $9 billion in the U.S. alone, a 22% increase on the year before.
Black Friday is not only important for large ecommerce businesses, but is a great opportunity for small and medium sized businesses too.
To make the most of this opportunity, it’s vital to prepare your site and optimise the online experience for your users.
Get a Strong Plan of Action
Be prepared for Black Friday by getting a solid plan of action in place.
Many retailers will start to promote their sales around a month before Black Friday, so you’ll need to get a plan of action in place ready for the start of November.
In your plan of action, you should include some of the following tactics to successfully increase revenue:
- An enticing and excitement building digital campaign utilising your social media platforms, email marketing, a countdown to the big day, and graphics on your website.
- Sneak peaks for some of your deals that will be live in the run up to and on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Coordinate your entire Black Friday & Cyber Monday strategy across all platforms, including email marketing, social media and on your ecommerce website to ensure consistency, increase trust of your brand, and ultimately increase revenue
- Catch last minute shoppers with Cyber Monday deals reminding them about last dates for Christmas shipping and gift wrapping
Prepare Your Website For An Increased Number of Visitors
On average, ecommerce websites show a 10x increase in website traffic compared to normal levels.
Just like how a brick and mortar store would make some adjustments to prepare for a higher footfall of customers, it’s important to make sure your site is ready to deal with a rapid increase in traffic.
Firstly, contact your server provider to increase your website’s memory usage. You might choose to do this temporarily, or as a permanent upgrade to your site. Depending on the server provider, the amount of memory usage you require, and whether it is a temporary or permanent increase, this might be a free upgrade, or come with a fee.
Another step you can take to prepare your site for increased levels of traffic is to increase your site speed. Whilst your site should already be optimised, check to see if there is anything else you can do to increase site speed as a higher volume of traffic to your site will inevitably slow it down.
Optimise for Mobile Shopping
Mobile users account for 70% of traffic on Black Friday
Over the past few years, in the week before and on Black Friday itself, mobile users account for around 70% of online traffic, and on Black Friday, mobile sales are 24% higher than desktop sales.
With this in mind, it’s crucial that your mobile ecommerce user experience is flawless. If it isn’t, users won’t hesitate to leave your site and shop with your competitors who have better sites than yours.
Abandon Coupons and Codes
Set up automatic coupons that apply discounts straight away to avoid users missing out on your Black Friday deals.
Coupons and codes will be flying all over the place this Black Friday. Whilst manual coupons are easy for you to implement on your website, they can be more of an inconvenience to your users who may type the wrong code, or forget it, and end up abandoning their cart.
Instead, set up coupons that apply automatically to your customer’s cart once the conditions of the coupon have been met, such as adding 3 products to the cart, but the cheapest is free, or free shipping over a certain order value.
Automatic discounts have a variety of benefits including:
- Boosting conversions – because the promotion is applied automatically, the user can see the discount in their basket without needing to enter a code
- Increased flexibility with promotions – not only can you specify the conditions of the coupon such as the number of products required to fulfil the promotion, but you can also offer more Black Friday discounts without having to email out a long list of codes to your subscriber list
Go above and beyond
To stand out from your competitors, go above and beyond and offer something extra to your customers.
Customers expect great Black Friday discounts over the weekend, but if you want to stand out from your competition, you need to go above and beyond.
Take the opportunity to offer more than just discounts on your products and give your customers something extra such as free delivery, free gifts.
If you have a loyalty scheme, you can offer double points to your customers, acting not only as an incentive to make a purchase, but also as a way to increase the number of members of your loyalty club.
Giving extra loyalty points also gives customers a reason to return to you following the festive purchase, increasing the number of repeat customers to your store.
Black Friday Almost Here, Are You Ready?
Is your ecommerce shop prepared for the biggest retail period of the year?
Whilst Black Friday is known for a massive increase in sales, you need to have a strong plan of action in place if you want to reap the rewards.
Make sure your site can handle the expected 10x increase in traffic, keep all promotional material consistent across platforms and remember to go above and beyond to stand out from the competition.