TRANSCRIPT
2024 is going to be a recording breaking Black Friday, with sales expected to surge to $10 billion. With competition heating up online how are you takes sales from industry powerhouses with bigger budgets and more resources.
My name is David Wagoner, co-founders of P3 Media, and today I’m going to share 10 battle-tested tips to maximize your revenue this BFCM.
First, let's start with the obvious:
1. Create an irresistible BFCM offer.
Lots of retailers use Black Friday to run a jaw-dropping sale on popular items, and you should too. What moves the needle for your customers depends on your niche. But according to a Klayvio meta-analysis, the deals most commonly offered on Black Friday across verticals are 20, 25, and 30% off.
Once a customer enters your online store for your big deal — that’s when you can market other products on the way to checkout. Black Friday is one of the best times to discount a core product, and upsell your customers on accessories and nice-to-haves. Or, to encourage bigger purchases with buy-more-save more bundle deals.
2. Plan for a longer sales period.
Black Friday will dominate online shopping, but shoppers love starting early.
Seed your sales and promos in the months and weeks before BFCM. Build your email lists with the promise that your best deals are coming. Give your most loyal customers early access. And don’t limit your big promotions to the 4 day period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Many brands start offering deals on Thanksgiving or earlier, and don’t end them until after Giving Tuesday. Year after year we’re seeing the promo period get more competiive earlier and earlier.
3. Increase conversions with buy now, pay later.
Offer customers the ability to pay over time with a native checkout tool like Shop Pay Installments. Pay over time is a powerful convenience that can lower cart abandonment by as much as 28% and increase average order value up to 50%. Just be aware that third-party install-pay apps can impact your site performance.
4. Prioritize your mobile site experience.
During Black Friday 2023, 72% of purchases were made from a phone. Having a mobile-first store isn’t a nice to have –it’s essential to your success. Most ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, are designed for mobile selling. But we recommend reviewing your mobile experience anyway. Ask yourself:
- Is your store built on a theme optimized for responsive or adaptive design?
- Is it easy and intuitive to navigate and buy on your site with just a finger?
- Are your assets properly sized for mobile?
- Does your store’s performance degrade over weak wifi or cellular connections?
- Do you offer simple payment options that enable a speedy checkout like Shop pay or Apple Pay?
If by hearing any of these questions, your starting to feel your shoulders tense, invest in fixing them well before BFCM. You’ll thank yourself when your mobile conversions make a quantum leap.
5. Double down on your top sales channels.
Embrace multi-channel selling and use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest and Shopify’s Shop App to sell to your customers where they spend the most time.
If you’re a Shopify merchant already selling on multiple platforms — Shopify’s Sales Channels tool can help you identify which platforms are most lucrative for your business, and let you easily sync your products and inventory across channels.
6. Go international.
Black Friday is now an international shopping holiday.
And offering your best deals to shoppers in other countries makes sense, if you can swing it.
If you’re on Shopify, their internationization tool, Markets, makes it especially easy to reach cross-border customers. Say you’re a US retailer and you wan to sell retro sports apparel to customers in France. Markets lets you creates a localized buying experience using your original US store. So customers in Paris can shop in French, see your prices in Euros, pay with local credit cards, and access your website under a French domain. All while seamlessly helping you manage the international taxation and compliance on the backend.
7. Set up a holiday shipping strategy.
Customers expect fast and free shipping, especially when they’re already getting a deal. So defining a customer-friendly shipping strategy can be the difference between making or losing a sale.
If you can offer expedited or free shipping at purchase tiers, for example on orders $99 and up, do it. If your shipping partners offer package tracking, be sure to include those details in order confirmations.
Review the details to your shipping policy on your FAQ page and make sure they’re up to date. Communicate shipping transit times at checkout so your customers know when to expect their items.
Clearly communicate your holiday shipping deadlines so that customers know the last day they can order gifts and still receive them for the holidays. Schedule SMS and email campaigns leading up to your shipping deadline to help create urgency and manage customer expectations. For long, lead-time products like furniture this communication may happen months before the holiday.
8. Retarget past visitors and customers.
If you haven’t done it yet — set up Meta Pixel and Google Ads Conversion Tracking to retarget past customers and visitors to your site. These tools let you serve relevant ads to potential customers by tracking specific actions, like what product pages they’ve visited.
A major benefit of using pixels is the potential to re-engage people who are familiar with your site and likely to convert, but who may not have checked out your sale.
9. Leverage data to identify your best products for promo.
Use a sales reporting tool like Shopify Reports to see which products sold best last holiday season and incorporate that data into your decision-making.
Be sure to pick the products you want to promote during Black Friday as early as possible. If you rely on suppliers to source inventory, give them plenty of lead time to get your products ready and delivered in time.
10. Test and prep your store for traffic surges.
Your store’s performance has a big impact on conversions. The rule of thumb is that for every 1 second delay, 11% of your customers walk away. So, it’s a good idea to use analytics tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix any performance issues on your website well before Black Friday.
At P3, we build “clean” versions of our clients’ stores just for BFCM. To keep performance crisp at peak traffic, we disable all non-essential third-party apps, condense large images, and remove large animations. In most cases, addressing these three factors alone improves pagespeed–and conversions–dramatically.
If you’re looking to accelerate your sales this holiday season, reach out to us at pthreemedia.com and we’ll show you how we can custom tailor your growth strategy.
