Black Friday weekend needs to be explored much deeper than a 4-day event. We’ve trained customers to anticipate this weekend and they have taken that lead by decreasing purchasing behaviors leading up to the holiday weekend in anticipation of a sale. The entire month of November should be utilized to capitalize and build-up to Black Friday. Entice customers with email drip campaigns using sales on specific items. You can have a sale a day for a specific product or category. Utilize the fear of missing out by emphasizing “supplies will not last” and “ensure delivery by Christmas.”
Lastly, ensure your remarketing campaigns are fully functioning and you have a specific campaign set up for cart abandoners so that when black Friday does come, you will be able to break through all the noise with highly targeted ads and email campaigns.
Brian Barnes – Director of Marketing
Madwire
You have to make sure your website is ready for the increased traffic load. You cannot have a slow website, or worse yet, a website that goes down, on Black Friday. A couple of extra seconds in load time will frustrate your users and cost you business, and a website that crashes under the increased server load could tank your whole Black Fiveday weekend plan. Load and stress test your site and network equipment early. Make backup plans for additional servers, a CDN, and instances you can spin up quickly if needed. Every second gained in speed matters and providing the best user experience possible for the shoppers on your website is critical to your success.
Erica Lovestrand – Digital Marketing Strategist
August Ash
To prepare for Black Friday, you should make sure you start planning your discounts and advertising them to your audience far in advance of the actual date. People start their Black Friday shopping research pretty early, so you can start advertising deals as early as September or October to get your audience excited and ready for the upcoming sale. Additionally, you should make sure you have extra coupons dedicated to those who buy over a certain amount, to increase your AOV as much as possible. You can boost the effectiveness of these coupons by making sure you have easy upsells and cross-sells for products commonly bought together placed next to each other on your next and ones that pop up after someone orders a particular product.
Stacy Caprio – Founder
Growth Marketing
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
