Black Friday e-commerce Tips – Weyco Group, Inc., WebFX, and Search Engine People

It’s time to start planning your digital marketing strategy for the holiday season. We’ve collected tips from Weyco Group, Inc., WebFX, and Search Engine People on the best ways to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The best piece of advice I can give any company preparing for Black Fiveday is four-fold: Consistency, Adjustments, Timing, and Testing, which can be summed up in the acronym CATT (I personally am a dog lover btw). First, your Black Fiveday or Cyber Week campaign should have consistent messaging across all marketing channels. Get behind this offer in big ways, so your customers only see this great offer. Secondly, do not be so rigid in your promotion that you can’t make adjustments if performance is not panning out like you expect. Monitor your competition before, during and after Cyber Week (cough…all year…cough) and make adjustments if necessary. 5% can go a long way. Third, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only 2 days, but the timing should reflect a wider period. Starting early and ending late gives your new and returning customers the best chance of having a great experience with you no matter when they visit. Finally, use the tests you’ve run throughout the entire year to optimize your Black Fiveday and Cyber Week campaigns, but also test your Black Fiveday and Cyber Week experiences. Are you using the winning messaging you A/B tested for your Google Ads? Have you looked at the landing page on an iPhone 11 lately?

Remembering CATT can help you land on your feet this Black Fiveday and Cyber Week!

Ryan Wittmann – Senior Marketing Analyst
Weyco Group, Inc. 

Tools like Google Trends help you identify questions and keywords people search for around Black Friday.

Then, you can create custom content on your site to address searchers’ questions, highlight your products, and share special deals you’re offering.

This will help you gain valuable territory in online search results, so more people can find and purchase from you. You can also repurpose website content for email and social media campaigns to boost awareness and connect with more shoppers.

Emily Carter – Web Marketing Analyst
WebFX 

Be wary of product cannibalization. We often get excited by the prospect of promoting one sale driven product without realizing the impact on other products. Boosting units sold for one discounted product may make for some great graphs but when it comes at the expense of full-priced products with consistent sales, no one wins. The best approach is to discount products that drive complementary sales and make sure you promote those basket fillers to the best of your ability.

Those who fail to plan, plan to…we all know the saying. When it comes to Black Friday you cannot plan early enough. Implementing site-wide sales online is a daunting task. Having campaigns and ads built out weeks or months in advance will save you a ton of headaches. It is easy to change an ad from 75% off to 70% off prior to launch. It is incredibly challenging to launch a great campaign on a moment’s notice. No one in the history of advertising has ever said: “I wish we didn’t plan so far ahead.”

Andrew Marsh – Director of Sales & Marketing
Search Engine People