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The best time to begin planning is earlier than Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) as they are the largest shopping period of the year. Both seasons have experienced significant growth year-over-year and you'll have to prepare yourself to anticipate more web traffic as well as increased advertising competition compared to previous years.

If this is your first time operating Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or you've done it before, you'll want to start developing this year's strategy now, and you'll be able to utilize the following Black Friday checklist to get started.

In order to help you prepare for the upcoming season, we've broken this ecommerce Black Friday checklist into two components: the checklist to help customers engage as well as the list for your back-end systems.

Black Friday checklist: Customer engagement

We'll start by completing the customer engagement checklist first.

Get started earlier

Really?

Start preparations early, so that you'll be able to begin the strategies you have planned earlier and boost sales.

Create a Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales begin whenever you want them to. People are starting to realize this. So, run with an initiative that is against Black Friday during the months prior to the event.

"Why wait? Now is the time to shop and you can take advantage of these fantastic bargains and get your shopping completed early."

A marketing strategy that doesn't promote Black Friday could promote advantages like having a head start on your holiday shopping, checking off your shopping list prior to the crowds, and having fun laughing throughout December at all the frantic shoppers due to the fact that you've completed your shopping in advance.

Combine this with an assortment of constantly changing specials and discounts in the days leading up the day of Black Friday.

Make sure you reach your audience

This can be done for different product lines and run multiple ads that include Google and other social media platforms.

If you run an e-commerce store selling health food.

The category that is one of the most popular features protein-enhanced breakfast bars. Another category has gluten-free and dairy-free foods. Another category includes nutritionally rich all-natural items. You can advertise each with the primary language of your brand, of course.

But what does the target public for the products sound like? What are their priorities? Include that message into the content you create for your Black Friday marketing content and you'll get more customers engaged and will boost sales.

Choose the products you want to highlight this year

If you have a lot of merchandise, do not conduct blanket Black Friday sales that will hurt your profits. Instead, feature select products with amazing deals, and then increase profits by making use of them to bring an increase in customers to the store.

If you can motivate more purchase beyond Black Friday discounts, you'll increase average order value as well as net profit.

If you've got overstocked items, discontinued items, or other seasonal products, they can be great alternatives for massive discounts because you'll need to sell them out anyway. Use items you can produce in abundance for a special arrangement with your supplier and products that are in great demand or have higher profit margins.

Also, think about creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages to highlight your best products, not just the typical product page.

What products are you planning to feature that offer the most amazing Black Friday deals this year?

Create marketing strategies for several channels

Multichannel marketing can yield greater results than targeting only one channel. Identify at least three channels that you intend to utilize this year as part of you Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels include but are not only

• SMS
• Social media - all possible platforms, including Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Direct Post
• Radio and TV
• YouTube, streaming video online and YouTube

And don't forget to create optimised landing pages, and keep track of the web traffic you get from your selected channels.

Make sure you have follow-up plans for marketing for use

Another way to make money on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the Christmas shopping season is to keep in touch with customers who have discovered your online store this year.

Sure, a lot of Black Friday shoppers will come, buy, go, and never be seen again. However, you could win some of them and turn these into loyal and repeat customers.

Make a welcome series of emails. Start sending consistent email marketing. Try to segment your new customers based on what they've already purchased and any additional data you've collected about them from their first buying encounter. Engage them by providing new and relevant content throughout the new year.

Have you a follow-up marketing strategy in place for Black Friday?

Utilize email to send your message to the masses early and frequently

In preparation for Black Friday this year, create email marketing campaigns to get your message to all of your customers prior to the rush of holiday shopping. They should be thinking of you before all the other online stores start vying to get their attention. You want them buying from you when the other small business owners are just realizing they didn't plan beforehand to prepare for Black Friday.

The first marketing email campaign should probably be sent out by October. Inboxes of emails begin to fill up in late November. So if you can use email to begin planting seeds and offering special deals prior to the peak, you'll increase sales as well as build your brand's recognition and loyalty to customers.

Create eye-catching visuals

Whether on your product pages as well as the landing pages or pages that you'll design for items you've decided to showcase it is essential to use photographs that have high resolution to attract interest and let your customers to feel the item within their fingers.

Make abandoned cart email addresses

Getting these set up prior to Black Friday will give you the opportunity to test your strategies and determine which methods of marketing and deals will work for your web store.

Divide your campaign into three pieces

There's a number of things on your Black Friday checklist, and it can get overwhelming. For help in organizing your efforts and figure out what priorities to put in place, you can break your campaign into its three essential parts.

The first is the build-up prior to Black Friday. It begins when you wish it to begin and ends the day before Black Friday.

The next step is the day, which may include weekends or the following week if you're participating in the complete Cyber Week. The definition of"daytime".

Everything that follows following the Black Friday period is the next stage of your marketing strategy.

Black Friday is only one of the days. Your strategy for marketing should cover all of the period.

Have you broken down you Black Friday promotions campaign into three parts?

Make or edit your return policy

If you've had your ecommerce business for a while, you probably already have this. However, if not, now is the moment to start creating one. Or, if you do own one, perhaps you've realized from experience it's time to update yours.

• A process for returning shipped items. Do you need your original packing, exact quality, etc. ?
• The policy on refunds. Are customers able to get their money back either in store credit, some other thing?
• Clear deadlines. How long can they send items back for credits or refunds?
• A shipping address. Which address should they ship returned items?
• Contact information. What is the best way for customers to get in touch with additional concerns?

The returns policy must be displayed frequently as is necessary. The policy should appear on the email notification for orders sent out following your purchase has been completed. It must be printed and included as part of the package. It should be placed on your site and easily accessible, such as in the footer of your website, on the FAQ page and on your product pages.

Do you have an updated return policy?

Offer faster shipping choices

Shipping times can increase when the sales are in high demand during the holiday period, and buyers often demand faster shipping choices.

According to the findings of a 2021 Baymard study, 19% of carts that are abandoned result from delivery times not being fast enough. Offering quicker shipping options could lower the number of lost sales. It is an especially useful approach for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In addition, speedy delivery techniques encourage customers to buy and ensure your items arrive in schedule during the time of year when shipping times may be a little longer due to the huge volume carriers are processing.

You might consider selling the option to buy Now or Pay Later

This option can be made available right in the check-out page. You can also include it on the product's page, homepage, landing pages as well as wherever you believe it could assist customers in overcoming an objection to price and stay shopping.

Make use of an automated chatbot

Chatbots aid in customer service and increase sales. The majority of the time clients have concerns that chatbots are able to answer. If they are able to find a few issues clarified, they'll follow through on their purchase.

If they are forced to search for the email address of a person, scroll through help forums, or wait for live chat representatives to get back in touch, they're likely to leave the procedure and go to a different site.

If you're able to make it happen the chatbot can help reduce buying friction without requiring more customer service staff.

Take a look at the last season's Black Friday sales data

It's common to think of each year with a fresh venture. We create a new project and then reinvent the wheel with no advantage of hindsight.

If you've owned an online store for any period of time and run Black Friday marketing campaigns before then you've got some knowledge. You have some prior data. You've probably done some things before probably performed well.

If you are getting way too deep into planning for next year, review your results from last year. What went well? What wasn't?

Are you able to replicate the success that you had last year? And can you build on what fell short?

Black Friday checklist: Backend systems

Now, let's move on towards the Black Friday checklist items that people don't often see yet you count on to help customers make purchases, and to have an enjoyable Black Friday shopping experience.

Accelerate your site's speed

95% of customers are likely to leave a website if it loads slowly. Site speed should be the top priority all times of the year, but it's especially important when you are expecting increased traffic. Here are some quick things you can do to speed up the loading time of your site:

• Test your website performance. Find what areas of your website require improvement through a speed test. Software such as Pingdom and Page Speed Insights will tell you how quickly it loads and the performance of specific zones.
• Implement a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN serves your site's files from high-speed, dedicated, and geographically-distributed data centers. Users will receive with cached content by the CDN closest to them that reduces load time and conserves bandwidth and loads of your site. Jetpack comes with an unpaid CDN that is, unlike other providers, you are able to setup and install the Jetpack CDN with just one click.
• Improve your image. Even if you're making use of an CDN that can optimize your files for you, it's a good practice to upload the smallest file size necessary while preserving an excellent resolution. Exporting for web in Photoshop or using no-cost tool for image resizing and optimizing such as ImageOptim is a simple way to get your photos ready to be uploaded on the internet.
• Upgrade your hosting plan. If you're on a shared server you may see slower load times, especially if other sites on your server have spikes in traffic. Think about a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.

Here are a few more ways to improve the speed of the speed of your store.

Is your ecommerce website running as fast as it could be?

The inventory syncs with the products pages

Make it easier and speedier to complete the checkout process

Your checkout process may work, but is it efficient and easy to use? Your goal is to make the checkout process as easy as is possible with minimal distractions, to encourage buyers to make their purchases. A few things you can make to enhance your checkout process are:

• Eliminate the visual distractions. Eliminate header and footer menus, sidebar widgets and any other distractions on your checkout page so that your customer stays focused on completing their purchase.

Make sure you are ready to complete orders on time and deliver your items

Do your dropshippers and suppliers ready to handle increased sales? Do you have the capacity to increase production in case demand is higher than your expectations?

While this is a good issue to be faced with, you don't want to waste the chance to grow your revenue and win new customers because your supply chain gets overloaded.

If you are looking to boost production in advance of the holiday season, make sure to place orders to your suppliers of materials early. The same holds true if your items are produced by another company -- particularly if the items were created overseas. Some companies may be placing larger orders from vendors in preparation for Black Friday sales as well, so make sure you lock your orders in well ahead of time. In the event that you do not, you might be facing premium prices or out of stock things.

If you're using a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for shipping your merchandise, take a look at the past data on shipping and sales of your goods and request the company to shift stock to warehouses near the locations where you are likely to make the majority of business. This helps speed the delivery process for your customers. If speedy delivery is paramount to your business then ask your 3PL to ship shipments more frequently and use carriers that offer the fastest delivery times.

Additionally, you might need to hire more staff or increase hours to handle the anticipated increase of production in the festive season. This is particularly important if you're creating handmade goods or producing products in-house. But even if your production is outsourced there's a chance that you'll have increased demand for customer service and ordering fulfillment, marketing and more.

Collect customer data for follow-up marketing

In the past, we talked about preparing to follow up should you get customers who may not have visited your ecommerce store before.

But you can't follow up if you don't collect the details of their contact.

If you're shipping products, you're bound to get your address for mailing. But direct mail marketing as well as follow-up cost significantly more than online marketing which is why you must be able to follow up with email, and perhaps SMS too.

For these, the buyer should be offered the opportunity to opt in. One of the best places for this is at the bottom of checkout. On that page, request their email address and phone number, and be sure you have their consent to contact customers via text and email. But make the phone number non-contingent to ensure that customers who aren't opted-in for messages via text won't be confused.

Some people won't but that's fine, because some will. And for those who do, you can now begin your next strategy for marketing.

Are you ready to gather contact numbers and email addresses?

Set up conversion tracking

You'll want to be able to monitor the behavior of your customers and how well your marketing campaigns perform throughout Black Friday and the rest of the Christmas season, to make adjustments this year.

Check that your site is secure

An easy and efficient way to improve the security of your site is to set up the security plugin. Jetpack includes free brute force attack protection, to stop being one of the common kinds of hacking techniques as well as two-factor authentication for security of your login method. And Jetpack's WordPress security software also offers automated backups, malware scanning and monitoring of downtime for spam prevention along with other features.

Make sure your site works across all devices and browsers

Your online store must display correctly on desktop, tablets, mobile devices as well as all major browsers. It is possible to test this with your devices quickly, however you'll be interested in testing how your store displays when you use a computer and browser emulator like LambdaTest.

While you might not be able to ensure that your site looks and functions flawlessly on every device and platforms, you can use tools like Google Analytics in order to determine which browsers and devices your visitors are using. Then, you can focus your energy on testing and revising your site to work best on the platforms you have chosen.

Are your websites mobile-friendly and accessible on as many devices as possible?

Check your website's key functionality

Set up your scheduled sales and coupons

You can reduce the panic and stress that comes with the biggest time of shopping by doing as much as possible in the months beforehand.

A simple task is setting up coupons and sales in advance of time. After you've determined which items will have deals, the timing of certain flash sales and special discounts, as well as the way price will fluctuate over time, design the coupon codes and other support systems for backend that ensure sales success. If you're planning to offer a free gift with purchase, make sure you have the gifts available.

Highlight Black Friday bargains in your online store

It is impossible for customers to benefit from a sale without knowing about it. Whether your customers come to your site organically or you bring them to your site through the use of email marketing or pay-per-click You'll want them discover your sales quickly.

There are many methods to accomplish this:

• Implement pop ups announcing the sale, and a call to action as well as a button to take you directly to your sale.
• Add a banner to your website to advertise your sale.
• Create a "Black Friday Deals" menu item to the navigation of your website.
• Highlight sale items in your shop page sidebar.
• Make sale icons visible on your product thumbnails.

Set up your customer service system

Although you might have to hire more people to help your sales or customer service team in the days leading up to Black Friday, onboarding and training temporary workers is challenging and time-consuming. There are many other methods to boost customer support as well as the hiring of temporary workers.

Below are three customer service techniques to be implemented this year.

Offer several options for support services to customers

In addition to direct line phone support -- which you should offer when you can afford it, here are other ways to help customers find answers to their questions.

• FAQs, or knowledge bases. Help customers help themselves by providing a quickly accessible and easy to navigate FAQs or knowledge bases
• Use a customer service contact page. Let people get contact with your customer service team via email using a contact form. Make use of conditional logic that is in response to the question type to route queries from customers for customer service to the appropriate email address.
• You can put AI chatbots in action.Filter out some of the most commonly-asked queries such as "How much will shipping cost me?" or "Do you offer delivery to my location?" by using an AI chatbot. This can save your customer support team precious time, and give customers quick answers to basic questions

Use a customer relationship management tool (CRM)

CRMs help you keep track of the interactions of your customers with your company and quickly solve support issues, identify leads and increase sales to your clients.

Jetpack CRM is a slim and accessible tool that integrates directly with your dashboard. It doesn't have any contact limitations and it's among the least expensive CRM solutions for stores.

Make sure your customer instructions and FAQs for service are current.

Review your procedures to assist customers and ensure that they're accurate. If you have any special processes or offers your representatives should know about for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Document them, and make sure your team has access. A quick meeting to discuss your procedure a week or so prior to launching the Black Friday deals may help keep these procedures in mind for the staff.

Once you've optimized the experience of customer support for your customers and your team You may discover you need additional staff to help with the holiday season. But maximizing your current team's efficiency will minimize the amount of seasonal employees you have to bring on.

Are you ready for Christmas shopping season?

This Black Friday checklist may seem like an overwhelming task to get ready for a sales that only lasts a few days. However, these guidelines weren't created for just the duration of one weekend.

Once you've implemented them, the systems and techniques are able to improve your online presence every single day. If you keep in the forefront of these items on your checklist throughout the year, you shouldn't be required to do anything extraordinary for the holiday season next year.