It’s almost time for Black Friday, one of the absolutely busiest shopping days of the year, and the traditional start of holiday shopping on November 26. Black Friday is the culmination of Black Week, also known as Cyber Week. Traditionally, “black week” begins the Monday before Black Friday and continues through Cyber Monday.
It’s getting close to the much-anticipated Black Friday sale, so it’s time for online retailers to start getting ready. This article will discuss a 6-point checklist that will help you prepare your SEO agency in London for Black Friday sales.
1. Determine If There Is Sufficient Demand & Supply
Make sure your online store can meet the supply and demand. Website traffic should not be overwhelmed, and orders should be easily fulfilled from available stock.
The sales data from the prior year can also be used to make projections for the current year. Use this prediction to get ready for the uptick in business.
2. Perform A Site Analysis
The best way to prepare your business for the upcoming Cyber Monday and Black Friday shopping seasons is to comprehensively analyse your website. Before the holiday traffic surge hits, you just have a few weeks to find the weak spots in your conversion funnel.
As a bonus, a technical assessment of your website should be the first step. It’s important to get the website’s technical aspects before focusing on the user experience.
Having a quick e-commerce site might also be the real difference between a sale and a lost customer. If your site takes even a millisecond longer than average to load, you might lose as much as 1% of your online revenue. Unfortunately, many eCommerce managers put improving a website’s load speed near the bottom of their to-do lists.
While most brands understand the importance of having a fast-loading homepage, they often overlook the need for similarly fast-loading product pages, category pages, and shopping carts. If your shopping cart takes 10 seconds to load (or worse, times out), you will lose a sale even if your homepage loads in 2 seconds.
So, how can you thoroughly investigate the lags in your website’s loading times?
Start with Google PageSpeed Insights, and if you need a more advanced tool, GTmetrix will assist you in figuring out why your site is taking so long to load.
3. Establish A Plan For Your Marketing Campaign
It’s time to let customers know what discounts will be available now that you know what those discounts will be. Prepare your customers to buy by advertising early.
Given the current economic climate, we thought we’d share some low-cost (yet innovative) strategies for developing a successful BFCM marketing initiative during this time.
A strong, growing email list is invaluable for any small business or eCommerce website, and it’s a great place to begin your Black Friday marketing efforts.
Customers who have actively opted to receive your company’s marketing communications can benefit most from targeted, customized messaging just before they make a purchase.
A larger marketing budget will allow you to implement pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, giving you greater influence over search engine rankings and, in the best-case scenario, converting clicks into customers and generating a substantial return on investment.
Simple approaches include making an ad and bidding on it in online auctions to have it appear at the top of search engine results. If you’d like to learn more about how to get more people to visit your site, you should look into Google AdWords.
4. Get Rid Of Unnecessary Distractions
Firstly, get rid of any static carousels currently featured on your site.
The research shows that only 1% of site visitors interact with static image carousels (carousels that don’t change automatically). In addition, the first slide receives 84% of the clicks, while the subsequent slides earn a total of 16%.
Automated carousels don’t fare any better in terms of attendance. Evidently, the first slide in auto-rotating carousels always gets the lion’s share of clicks (40%) of the time. Click-through rates drop by 18% and 11%, respectively, when links are located in positions two and three.
Utilising a carousel is a notion that seems excellent in theory but fails when examined quantitatively. There is a pitifully low click-through rate (CTR) on carousels, with the majority of clicks going to the very first slide.
Signing up for an online store’s email list is another common homepage distraction. Finally, to improve your browsing experience, we suggest avoiding sites with intrusive pop-up windows.
5. Prioritise Mobile-Users First
Smartphones are becoming popular among consumers, as $2.9 billion in sales were made on Black Friday via mobile devices in 2019. To ensure your e-commerce site is accessible on mobile devices throughout the holiday season and beyond, you should build it with mobile users in mind from the start.
Your site’s mobile version needs to load quickly and be simple. Images and websites should be mobile-optimised to load quickly and be easy to navigate and purchase.
6. Remember To Double-Check Your Checkout Procedure
During the holiday season, internet shoppers have access to a plethora of online stores. Avoid giving them any incentive to look elsewhere, as doing so could hurt your rankings. The checkout procedure may be a contributing factor. Did you know that shopping cart abandonment costs online retailers around $18 billion annually?
In order to make shopping as simple and quick as possible for your customers on Black Friday, try eliminating processes like needless registration or forms, providing a variety of payment choices, and optimising your checkout for mobile devices.
Conclusion
The holiday shopping season officially begins on Black Friday, so it’s time to get your e-commerce site ready. If you implement the aforementioned strategies, your e-commerce company will always be a step ahead of the pack.
