Black Friday is the most expected event from shoppers and businesses. During this shopping season, shoppers have spent billions of dollars at Shopify stores. In this blog post, we suggest some tips and tricks for driving more traffic and sales to your online store.
Shopify Black Friday Preparation Tips And Tricks
Shopify Black Friday Research
For your Black Friday marketing strategy to be effective, you need to conduct insight research that can help you understand the market and offer you an overall understanding of how to attract consumers.
You may plan marketing strategies and increase sales by taking a look at Shopify consumers’ behavior during the busiest holiday shopping period in the previous years. You can consider some key points here while doing research:
- Choose your Black Friday deals: The deals are the main reason for Black Friday’s excitement. On Black Friday, you need to provide the deals that consumers demand. Which goods or services may you offer at a discount to increase your profits?
- Discounts: What discounts will you provide? It’s not necessary for promotions to only take the form of flat discounts. Why not offer a buy one, get one free deal? or no shipping costs? With purchases of a specific amount, maybe an additional gift. The options are unlimited, so carefully examine your products to determine which promotions will benefit you the most.
- Review Data: How did the ROI/ROAS rate? Look at your campaign data to see how many clicks and impressions you had, the average CTR for the period or particular campaigns, and the conversion rate. What were you good at and bad at? What could you improve to do better than last year’s outcomes?
- Advertising Budgets: How much did you spend on advertising for Black Friday? How much do you spend on product and operation costs? Do you incur any additional costs? etc.
Optimize Your Shopify Black Friday Online Store
Page Loading Speed Optimisation is one of the most important factors that affect the Shopify online store. Not only should you focus on optimizing your Shopify store on desktop devices, but you also need to pay attention to mobile devices.
The speed at which a page loads affects customers’ purchasing decisions as well. They might think your online store is a scam if the website loads too slowly.
To speed up website loading, you should concentrate on image optimization, especially for product pictures. When optimizing images for Halloween, keep the following things in mind and double-check them:
- Add a suitable image format for your needs. You can select from a variety of formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WEBP.
- Size up the images. Make sure your website’s page layout and your graphics are exactly in line.
- Compression can help reduce image file size while maintaining image quality and speeding up page loads.
- Improve the captions and Alt text. These descriptive elements help increase awareness and support your online store’s SEO.
You can try PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google, as a free tool to estimate your page’s loading speed.
Moreover, you need to take a look through the policies, checkout process, etc. In case your business is working on customized print-on-demand products, you also need to test the customized placing order process.
Additionally, to highlight your promotion, you can use product badges to promote in the Shopify store. Product labels and stickers are other names for product badges. Try the ShineTrust app, which is a simple and easy-to-use app, to add product badges to your Shopify online store.
You can add a product badge by selecting pre-designed labels, editing some text using a variety of shape badges, or uploading labels with your distinctive design.
For instance, you could add a product badge that reads “20% Off” and alter the color scheme to go with the style of your website.
A countdown timer can be used in addition to product badges to run a flash sale on Black Friday and highlight it on the homepage.
Refer to how to add a product badge and countdown timer with the ShineTrust app.
Ensure Stock And Support Are Ready
Before starting to plan your Black Friday marketing strategy, you need to make sure of the quality and quantity of your stock. Your inventory management, fulfillment, customer service, and return processes must all be trustworthy enough to handle business growth.
By doing this, you may plan for the sale and avoid having to rush at the last minute, which will help you because the holidays are already busy.
Restocking as soon as you can is the first thing you need to do to reduce the rate of cart abandonment. Second, you might take this chance by creating a sense of urgency to boost purchases on your website.
Use the Shopify app Back in Stock & Restock Alerts to automatically notify your consumers when the products they want are refilled and avoid losing important deals.
Planning For Marketing Strategy
To come up with a successful Black Friday marketing strategy, you have to set a clear objective for the sale. More revenue, more customers, and fewer problems are the basic goals here.
You can imagine your Black Friday sales and marketing plan using the key point checklist below:
- What is the duration of your sales?
- Which types of social media channels do you wish to use to reach your potential customers?
- What kind of events are you planning to draw the interest of customers?
- Which products should you prioritize?
- What if the shipping business you use has become crowded due to holiday demands?
- If goods run out earlier than expected, how quickly can they be restocked?
Additionally, when setting up Shopify for Black Friday sales, you should be prepared for the worst. Create backup plans whenever you can throughout the planning stage to avoid having to rush to find solutions during the busiest sales week of the year.
Choosing the products you want to run a Shopify Black Friday discount on and planning the start dates and sale prices are the next steps. Then, notify your customers and website visitors in advance about your deals.
More than half of US shoppers make holiday buying plans before Black Friday. Therefore, you need to think of a creative Black Friday deal for Shopify stores. And you run the risk of falling behind if customers are not aware of your sale.
Therefore, in addition to starting to plan your Black Friday promotions early, you also need to make sure that your customers can find you and are aware of the deals.
The most straightforward way to promote your Shopify Black Friday sales is by creating stunning banners with graphics and imagery. Your Shopify Black Friday banner or attractive image can be changed to match the Shopify Black Friday sales. This will help you draw in more customers and boost your sales.
So, how to notify potential customers about your Black Friday deals?
Email marketing is an effective way to drive more customers to your online store and boost sales, especially if the email includes an amazing Black Friday discount or offer.
The most important part of any email to your consumer base is the subject line. A strong email subject line is necessary if you want to immediately attract their attention. They will ignore an email in their inbox if it doesn’t catch their attention.
To get the most out of Shopify’s Black Friday email marketing, focus on the following areas:
- Subject headings: Several subject lines need to be evaluated ahead. In the number of emails that will be sent to your subscribers around Black Friday, you have to stand out. Remember that the subject line points out what is being offered.
- Transactional emails: Ensure that any sales emails sent to recipients have been edited according to Shopify’s Black Friday deals. Customers will be encouraged to return to your online business often to make more purchases with a limited-time discount voucher.
- Last-minute reminder: You must go after customers who looked around but didn’t buy or who left items in their shopping carts.
- Landing pages: For your best-selling products, it is recommended to make landing pages and link to CTAs in marketing emails.
Besides email marketing, you can use more social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. to attract potential customers. Here are some suggestions:
- Collaborate with Influencers and Content Creators: In recent years, influencer marketing has grown into an effective way for businesses to boost their online awareness and in-store sales. Working with content creators or influencers to produce content that promotes your store and, in this case, your offer is known as influencer marketing.
- Advertise Your Promotions on Social Media: Running social media campaigns near the holidays is another strategy to achieve record sales. Advertising will make sure that the audience you want sees your content and offers.
- Make Flash Sales for Black Friday: Flash sales are special offers and discounts that are only available for a limited time. As a result, they give customers a sense of urgency or fear of missing out, making them want to take advantage of the deals as soon as they can.
- Giving Free Shipping: If you offer free shipping, you’d be quietly encouraging customers to buy from you since 90% of consumers list free shipping as one of the main reasons they shop online.
- Offer Discount Coupons and Codes: Another traditional strategy for increasing sales during your holiday marketing campaigns is to create discount coupons and codes. People enjoy it when prices are reduced without reducing quality because that’s what you’ll be doing. You’ll also be reducing cart abandonment, which can boost sales, by giving customers discounts when they wish to leave your website.
- Set up Referral Awards: Marketing through referrals can be amazing for your business. There is a very significant chance that you will gain more consumers if you can persuade your loyal customers to recommend you to their contacts in exchange for a reward.
- Sending a Gift Card: Gift cards are an ideal way for you to bring in potential customers and encourage your current consumers to make more purchases. Gift cards can be either inside or outside your store. They work great with several different offers and are ideal for Black Friday campaigns.
Shopify Black Friday Tricks
Holding your own in the sea of competing businesses fighting for customer attention is one of the most difficult parts of developing a successful Black Friday social media campaign.
You must prepare in advance when creating a Black Friday social media marketing campaign. Then, you need to test to find the most suitable strategy for your business, because nothing is perfect the first time.
You may A/B test your different creative possibilities by starting your Black Friday campaigns early in time. Consider how an infographic with the same message works in comparison to a short video.
Choose the creative format that will result in the most engagement, awareness, and good reaction as Black Friday approaches. Remember to choose suitable content creatives for your target audiences.
Additionally, you also need to plan your content post-production during the busy season. You can use automated tools to run your plan smoothly.
There are many options for you to choose from; however, here are some points of focus you should focus on:
- Schedule posts in advance at the best time of day
- Program chatbots to handle multiple messages
- Track the performance of different post types
- Use social listening to monitor brand views and conversations around your brand
Finally, search for successful examples of other brands that stood out on Black Friday that you can use as inspiration. You can search for hashtag #blackfriday on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok for research.
In Conclusion
Each campaign should be planned ahead of time, carefully evaluated, and automated if possible. Make this the most successful shopping season in your company’s history by using the above Black Friday suggestions.
Hope you will have a great Black Friday sale season!