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Your brand website needs to be in top condition for Black Friday, an event where companies can have huge sales and encourage massive purchases from customers.
But how do you get your website ready for an event as big as Black Friday?
We outline six steps to get your website Black Friday-ready so you can improve traffic and sales on the day of the event and beyond.
Step 1: Prep Your Website Before Black Friday
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| Source: Venngage |
Preparation is key in event marketing, particularly when a major event like Black Friday is on the horizon.
Check and test your site speed—nothing can be more agonizing for a customer than a site that loads slowly, or fails altogether. This will impact negatively on your sales.
Your server should also be checked and tested thoroughly, especially because you will be seeing additional traffic than you usually would on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Conduct thorough Wordpress maintenance services, either in-house or through an external agency, but ensure that all plugins and affiliated software is updated and running well.
Double check your APIs and ensure that everything is connected properly—you don’t want customers clicking something on your app, only for it to not go through or get registered.
Do plenty of A/B testing before Black Friday comes around so you have all your options covered.
Remember that mobile devices and tablets account for a large percentage of online purchases, and your website should be made responsive to handle mobile design requests.
You absolutely must protect your website against data breaches and cyber attacks—with the amount of sensitive data you will be gathering during Black Friday, you can ill-afford a breach.
If it isn’t possible to get something up and running in time, or if you anticipate problems, keep some handy messages ready to apologize for the inconvenience, or to redirect customers towards another option. You need to make sure that people don’t leave your site.
Black Friday is going to be a busy time for your website so you need to ensure that everything is ready for the influx of traffic you will receive before the event even takes place.
Step 2: Post Teasers
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| Source: Venngage |
How is your audience meant to find out that you are holding Black Friday sales? Not by visiting your website on the day. That is far too late.
No, you need to let your audience know about your sales before the event starts, so people know to visit your site and make their purchases.
Create banners for your website’s homepage and landing pages, or Wordpress popups that clearly announce the kind of sales you will be holding on Black Friday, and what time they start.
Share sneak peaks, and pre-Black Friday discounts, if you can.
You should also double down on your customer loyalty and rewards programs to make your Black Friday sales more incentivized for returning customers.
Step 3: Open Up Email Subscriptions
A great way to keep customers engaged and notified about your Black Friday sales is by opening up your email subscriptions.
Encourage subscriptions by offering limited-time discounts, sneak peaks, and gift guides.
You can also look at making your newsletter accessible only to members or those who have joined your loyalty program—this could drive up more interest in the program, as well.
Take a look at this case study on how paid subscriptions boost conversions to learn more.
Email marketing and websites are intricately tied to each other and should feed into each other.
Use your website to increase email subscriptions, and in turn, use your newsletters to drive more traffic to your website for Black Friday.
Step 4: Set Up Tracking Methods
While it is important to ratchet up the growth marketing aspects of your Black Friday promotions, you do need to track your efforts to see what is working.
You can look at this growth marketing blueprint for more information as to why tracking is important.
Look at your website analytics, using Google Analytics, for the year. Focus on high purchase days when you held sales to understand what you can do for Black Friday.
You will also want to study which sources are bringing more traffic to your site—social media, email marketing, or organic search. What can you do to improve those areas?
What keywords were being used in searches to find your site and your sales? Could you adopt similar keywords and tighten up your copy to improve your SERP?
Use website heatmaps to determine what areas of your web pages are getting more attention than others. More likely than not, you will find visual-heavy sections hold the eye longer.
That can be used to your advantage—by employing visuals, you can garner attention and share relevant information to your audience.
Step 5: Get Customer Service Ready
On a sales-heavy day like Black Friday, your customer service will have to bring its A-game.
Customers will have questions, either about the products they are looking for, or items that work well with ones they have in their cart.
They may need troubleshooting help because they have forgotten their password or so that they can use multiple discount codes on an item.
Or, in a worst case scenario, if something doesn’t work the way you intended it to, customers will come to your customer service with complaints.
And in all these scenarios, customers will want answers immediately—they will not wait a second for their requests or complaints to be addressed.
Why would they? There are multiple Black Friday discounts at other stores—there is little reason for them to stay with you if you can’t answer their questions immediately.
Employ sophisticated, machine-learning chatbots that can deal with most queries, like where products can be found or what discount codes are valid together.
You should also have an in-house or external team of people that can handle bigger situations.
The key is to ensure that customers go away happy after interacting with your brand, or you will have lost them and harmed your brand reputation.
Step 6: Omni-Channel Marketing
Your website cannot exist in a vacuum—we have already alluded to this with regards to email marketing.
But you should also bring in your social media and offline marketing plan to drive traffic to your website for Black Friday.
Share your Black Friday discounts in social media posts with clear links to your website.
Your advertising campaigns—digital and print ads—should also clearly state your website address and why people should visit your site.
When you design a poster, a tri fold brochure, or a flyer, they should all send readers to your website.
With an omni-channel marketing campaign, you will drive enough traffic to your website to boost sales during Black Friday.
Summing Up
Your website can be ready for Black Friday in these six steps:
- Early preparation
- Website teasers
- Email subscriptions
- Site tracking
- Customer Service
- Omni-channel marketing
Following these steps will help you update your website by the time Black Friday comes along so you can see your traffic and purchases grow.
Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the infographic templates and design platform. Ronita enjoys writing about anything and everything, but limits herself to digital marketing, pop culture, and the importance of representation .
Twitter: @Venngage
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