Black Friday Checklist for Success

As discussed in our previous black Friday blog posts, plan for success is the key to a successful Black Friday. This has been focused on your website and landing pages but have you thought about the nitty gritty of what to do once these orders have been taken?

We’ve put together a checklist for Black Friday success, so read on below for what you can do to improve sales and hopefully succeed at Christmas.

1) Set delivery time expectations

To start with a fairly easy point, make sure that you set delivery time expectations with your customers so that they’re realistic. If you use an external courier, ensure that you know their shipping schedules and can update your website to match what they say for delivery dates. If you’ve got an in-house team, make sure that you’re able to react accordingly when it comes to any particular crunch times, as this can often make or break a sale from an unsure customer looking to buy at this time of year.

2) Outline your returns policy

Likewise, with the delivery time expectations, it’s important to let your customers know about your returns policy to help them decide about whether to purchase from you for Black Friday. You might be offering an extended returns policy to help cope with Black Friday items being bought, so it’s also important to make sure that this is incredibly clear on all of your relevant pages, such as your product pages and FAQ pages.

3) Keep an eye on postage dates

Relating to the delivery time expectations, if you use an external courier service, it’s worth making a note of the postage days, as often customers will panic-buy last-minute Black Friday items or over-order from you. Delivery can become backed up around this time, as it is also the run-up to Christmas. It’s worth making sure that you can cope with the sudden influx that can often occur at this point, and if you’re unable to cope with it, make sure to let your customers know. Even if you don’t make a sale due to not being able to fulfil the order, customers appreciate the honesty and candour and will consider you in the future as you’ll have built up some loyalty there.

4) Be clear in your communications

If you’ve got an email marketing list, then you’ll need to make sure that all of your emails are clear on what deals you’re offering as well as anything else that might be occurring. Keep it simple with a site-wide percentage discount if possible, which then should translate to a simple email offer. Clear communication is key at this time of year, as everyone else is going to be sending your customers emails and other ways of communicating, so you’ll need to stand out from the crowd with your proposition. Same with your other communications, such as social media or paid advertising copy, it all needs to be clear so that your customers get exactly what your offers are and aren’t confused.

5) Extend the offers

If they work well, why not consider extending your offers a bit longer? With Black Friday and Cyber Monday now usually extending to the end of the week where Cyber Monday falls, if you’re on a roll with sales on Cyber Monday or the Tuesday afterwards, it’s worth extending the deals that you’re offering whilst people are still caught up in the moment of getting a bargain. You can notify everyone that you’re extending errors via all of your social media channels and email, which should bring in extra customers.

6) Utilise PPC ads to their fullest

If you’re not using it, PPC can often be one of the best ways to quickly drive traffic over a short period time. If you are using it, then you’ll already know this, but what you may not know is that you can create a campaign that is tailored to your exact needs for your existing Black Friday sales overall marketing campaign. 

Are you planning on running specific offers on an hourly basis? Or are you going for a week-long campaign instead? Utilising a specific PPC campaign can help improve your traffic as you can create specific ads to match your offers and have them display at the correct times that you’re running those offers. So if you’re really needing a quick traffic boost at this time of year, you should really be using PPC if you’re not already doing so!

7) Carry out outreach campaigns with SEO

 When Black Friday arrives, SEO is not the ideal channel to be focusing on, but you can still get some results here. If you can afford it, carrying out a very quick outreach campaign can generate some sales both due to the links that you’ll build in it, as well as potential traffic from those links as well. Plus, it’s good as a starting point for next Black Friday. Just make sure to not turn off your Black Friday pages and de-index them, as this will destroy all of your hard work.

8) Don’t forget your seasonality keywords as well

Related to both SEO and PPC, it’s key that you’ve got the appropriate keywords in place. Ideally, you should start putting these in place 6 months before Black Friday, but if that is not possible, start as soon as possible. Even if you don’t see any quick results now, it’s worth keeping this for next year as this will only help your future performances. For more information on seasonality keywords, check out our blog on seasonality keywords and Black Friday SEO.