Have you started to prepare for BFCM? It’s never too early to prepare for the biggest online shopping weekend of the year. According to the comScore, online spending over Black Friday and Cyber Monday reached a new record in 2016, between the 5 days online shoppers spent $8.72 billion!
Marketing for Black Friday is all about momentum and excitement. You only have one weekend to maximise your online sales. Go down our checklist and make sure you’ve got all your bases covered.
- Site Speed Checked
- Mobile Optimization
- Black Friday On-Page SEO
- Black Friday Landing Pages
- Refreshed Email Mailing List
- Black Friday Email Campaign
- Tracking & Post Mortem Analysis for Next Year!
You’ve worked tirelessly over your BFCM marketing campaign and it’s flawless! But if your website is not prepared for the number of shoppers flocking to your site, it will come to a grinding halt. Your site has to be ready to handle sudden spikes in traffic, if it isn’t it will slow down and customers will leave, no matter how good the deal is. For this reason, it is very important that the payment process is as smooth. The longer or more complicated the check out is, the likelier of abandoned carts.
Mobile Optimization
And we can’t forget about mobile purchase also known as M-Commerce. Smartphone users are driving online sales, and digital retailer saw a massive increase in mobile purchases. According to Invesp; ‘By the end of 2017, over two billion mobile phone or tablet users will make some form of mobile commerce transaction. 95% of mobile internet users look up local information on their phones for the purpose of calling or visiting a business.’ Make sure you offer your customers a great mobile experience with a seamless checkout process!
On-page Black Friday SEO
To get your site seen by the Black Friday online crowds, you need to know your niche and carefully target your keywords. You probably already have a list of top-performing keywords for your business. However, it’s important to treat this campaign separately and create a list of Black Friday-specific keywords. It will help your business attract new customers searching for the perfect gift.
TIP: Consider creating a landing page for your best products to pick up people using specific “Black Friday [category]” searches.
TIP: Although Cyber Monday is technically the online deal day, Google Trends shows us that Black Friday is the keyword of choice for people hunting down bargains.
Prepare you Black Friday Email Campaign
35% of customers open emails based on subject lines, so you need to make sure that every part of your email campaign is exceptional if you want to stand out from the Black Friday inbox barrage.
TIP: Emails with emoji in the subject line get 45% better open rates :).
Use your email to target basket abandoners. 65% of users on e-commerce sites abandon their baskets, but a specifically targeted email can help you win them back over to finish their purchase. The more data-driven your email campaign can be the better. For example, if you create lists of people who have visited a specific product page and identify which shoppers didn’t make it to the Order Confirmation page, you can create highly targeted remarketing ads featuring that specific product. The more targeted you remarketing ads are, the more effective they will be.
Get The Word Out
It’s important to get the word out to as many channels as possible as early as possible, and social media marketing is one of the key consumer drivers. In 2015 Salesforce, the #1 CRM platform stated there were 3.8 million social posts mentioning Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the seven weeks leading up to it. As an e-commerce site, you should be dedicating a serious amount of your social media budget to an exciting social media campaign.
Create engaging visual content that your customers want to share and encourage them to share their purchases on social media too. User-generated content is gold for marketers because savvy consumers are more prepared to take the word of a fellow consumer over a brand. You can also use social media to keep your customers up to date and reward them with exclusives and up-to-the-second details. Nothing ups hype like saying “Only 3 left to sell, then it’s gone! Exclusivity and FOMO are powerful drivers of impulse purchases.
We can Help
Need some help with your Black Friday or Holiday campaign? Our goal at Sparrow Digital is to build alluring, responsive websites to be viewed and used on any device: desktop, tablet, and smartphone. We pride ourselves with our hosting and website security, allowing our websites to be speedy and safe from any bugs. We offer professional email marketing services allowing you to directly communicate with your customers. View our list of services here and how we can help your business be discovered by millions of online shoppers.
