Black Friday is one of the most crucial shopping events of the year, and in 2024, it promises to be bigger than ever for ecommerce businesses. It is an unparalleled opportunity for ecommerce businesses to maximise revenue, grow their customer base and increase traffic to their website. With consumers increasingly shifting to online platforms for deals, it's essential to have a well-planned strategy to capture attention and drive conversions.
If you haven’t started getting ready, there is no time left to spare. And if you’ve already started – well now is still the time to amplify your efforts even more. There is no such thing as over-prepared!
As Shopify experts and leading digital strategists, we’re here to guide you through two of the most important processes that will help you succeed: getting your Shopify store into top shape, and expanding your audience reach through effective marketing tactics. Follow our tips and you’ll be sure to see increased sales and maximised profits during this epic time.
What Is Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Black Friday is an annual shopping event that takes place the day after the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving, which is the fourth Thursday in November. Traditionally seen as the start of the Christmas shopping season, Black Friday is known for massive sales and discounts offered by retailers, both in-store and online.
In recent years, Black Friday has expanded beyond just a one-day event, with sales often starting earlier in the week and continuing through the weekend, leading into "Cyber Monday," which focuses on online deals. Cyber Monday always falls on the Monday immediately following Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The term ‘Cyber Monday’ was coined in 2005 by retailers to promote internet shopping and has since become one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
Black Friday Cyber Monday Highlights From 2023
Black Friday Ecommerce Tips & Ideas
It’s important that you spend time preparing your Shopify store for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Here is a breakdown of the BFCM checklist we created:
1 Plan For A Longer Sales Period
There are sales and promotions in the months and weeks leading up to Black Friday which also continue through to Cyber Monday so it is important that your business is prepared. This should involve setting clear objectives such as revenue and average order value goals, mapping out your promotional calendar including pre-Black Friday teasers or early access programs. You also need to ensure that your fulfilment can handle the extended demand to avoid selling out on certain items. Consider reserving stock for peak days and work closely with your suppliers to ensure your stock covers the entire period
2 Ensure stock, fulfilment and shipping are ready
Before you even think about your online store, you need to ensure your back of house processes are up to speed. If sales go through the roof thanks to a successful sales and marketing strategy, you need to ensure you have the infrastructure to fulfil them. Make sure your inventory, fulfilment, customer support and returns processes are all robust enough to deal with the influx of business.
If you anticipate running out of some products, use it as an opportunity! Utilise an out of stock notification app on your store like Now Back in Stock - it enables customers to leave their details if their chosen product is unavailable. They will then be automatically notified by email or SMS when their item is back in stock, and they can click straight back to the product to complete the purchase. Grow your contact database, sell more products and provide a great customer experience!
3. Website Speed Optimisation
On Black Friday there will be a dramatic increase in online shoppers that will be navigating your site. If your website is slow, you will lose customers so it is vital that your website is fully prepared for a surge in traffic and orders. This means optimising your site speed and performance to ensure fast load times for Black Friday Cyber Monday shoppers. You can help improve the speed of your Shopify site by reducing the size of your images and compressing them on tools like Tiny JPG, minimising JavaScript and CSS, using adaptive image sizing that scales them for desktop and mobile and finally converting your images to WebP or another Next-Gen format. Avoiding slow loading times on your website or site crashes will help improve the user experience, build more customer loyalty and increase conversions.
4. Prepare landing pages, images and other creative to promote your sale
Once you’ve got your sale planned, you need to get your creative ready. That killer deal? It’s time to shout about it with enticing imagery, bold banners and eye-catching gifs. (People still read words too, on occasion.)
To drive more Black Friday ecommerce sales it is particularly important to optimise your homepage with Black Friday Cyber Monday creatives. Consider adding visual creatives to promote the annual shopping event, such as hero images on your homepage that are eye-catching and memorable.
We have a team of Shopify designers, web developers and marketers, ready to improve your store in time for the sales season. Need a conversion-focused landing page to draw customers in? Some eye-catching imagery to make your brand cut through the noise? A bold banner to promote your sale? Contact us and we can help.
Create A Dedicated Black Friday Landing Page
We would also recommend creating a dedicated Black Friday landing page as this can be a highly effective strategy to boost traffic and conversions during the holiday shopping season.
Here are the main reasons why a Black Friday landing page is a must-have:
- You can target Black Friday related keywords to drive more organic traffic
- Users can find relevant offers right away which can increase their likelihood of purchasing
- Promote Black Friday sales, discounts and bundles in a more clear and eye-catching manner
- Allows you to track performance metrics specifically tied to Black Friday campaigns helping you to refine strategies
- You can point Email, Social Media and Ads traffic to the Black Friday landing page to amplify your sales.
5. Create a standout BFCM offer
Do you have a killer deal that you can use to launch your sale to hook people in and capture their attention? A good strategy that many retailers use during Black Friday Cyber Monday is to craft a standout offer on one of your website’s most popular items to attract customers to your store. Usually when a customer sees that a product is majorly discounted, they are likely to add higher priced items to their order carts to make up for the difference.
Don’t forget the power of the upsell and cross-sell. Try installing an app like Cart Convert which suggests additional products to your customers based on what they’ve shown an interest in. Buying a hat? Perhaps they’d also like the matching gloves? Or maybe they could be tempted to spend an additional few pounds and hit the threshold to take advantage of free shipping? It’s a great way to easily increase your average order value. You can also use Shopify apps to help with product upsell and cross-sell and promote discounts.
6. Implement a wishlist on your online store
Implement a wishlist on your online store in the approach to the Black Friday Cyber/Monday weekend. This allows customers to save products for later if they’re not quite ready to buy, as well as letting them share the list with friends and family on social channels - free marketing!
7. Increase your conversions with buy now, pay later
Offering Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options during Black Friday can significantly boost your sales and customer satisfaction. It has become an increasingly popular payment method for ecommerce customers and according to this data, around 50% of adults in the UK have used BNPL services as of 2024, approximately 26.4 million people. The main buy now pay later finance options include the likes of Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna. Shop Pay Installments can decrease cart abandonment by as much as 28% and increase average order value up to 50%.
Not only does buy now, pay later encourage more customers to make purchases, it also can encourage them to buy more expensive items or add more products to their cart without worrying about paying the full amount upfront. It can also make products more affordable for Black Friday shoppers looking to buy gifts on a tighter budget.
8. Launch emails in advance to promote your upcoming Black Friday sale
Build up a sense of Black Friday anticipation with your email database. Let your subscribers and past customers know a Black Friday Cyber Monday sale is coming with a series of hints and teaser emails; perhaps give them a sneak preview of a deal or let them know when your sale is launching so they don’t miss out. It is crucial that your Black Friday email marketing strategy is planned, created and scheduled early in advance of Black Friday sales starting so that your customers are on the lookout for your offer announcements. We have Shopify email marketers who are experts in crafting emails that convert - if you need help, give us a shout.
9. Implement abandoned cart emails
During the Black Friday shopping event, shoppers are more likely to abandon their carts, so if you don’t have an abandoned cart email series, now’s a good time to set one up. These can be utilised as part of your email marketing strategy, utilising an email service provider such as Klaviyo. Or there are other abandoned cart apps for Shopify here.If you don’t have an ESP, you can still send a single follow up cart abandonment email via your Shopify store.
The idea is that if a visitor gets part way through purchasing a product but doesn’t actually buy it, a series of emails is sent to entice them back and make it easy for them to return to the basket and complete the purchase.
These emails can incorporate incentives like discount codes or free shipping to increase the chance of a sale. With an average ecommerce cart abandonment rate of 70%, Black Friday is a great time to implement these emails and capture those lost sales.
10. Make use of discount codes
Reward loyal customers during Black Friday with exclusive discount codes so that they can access early deals and offers. By making use of discount codes, it can enhance the customer shopping experience while promoting urgency and driving conversions. Discount codes can also encourage customers to increase their cart value to take advantage of the deal.
When it comes to using discount codes for Black Friday, it is crucial that you choose the right type of discount code, for example “£25 off on orders over £100.” or ‘Spend £200, get 20% off’. Make sure that you create a clear and memorable discount code that users will remember, set clear rules and expiration dates and promote the discount codes through email campaigns, website banners, social media and PPC ads.
11. Use retargeting to capture past visitors and customers
Capitalise on the increased browsing activity of bargain-hunting customers by using retargeting. This enables you to ‘follow’ people who may have added products to a basket, looked at a particular item or made a purchase. It really just means that you’re able to remind them of something they looked at on your site recently, on other forums like Facebook, to give them the opportunity to come back and finish the purchase or buy something else.
12. Instil a sense of urgency
Create a sense of urgency around your sale in your ad copy and onsite content. Limited stock or an imminently ending sale: these factors help nudge your visitors towards hitting the ‘add the basket’ button. Try adding a countdown timer on your product page that tells people how many minutes they have left to qualify for next day delivery. Bear in mind that Black Friday purchases are often impulse buys, and a little bit of persuasion helps get those items into shopping baskets and through the check out. If you need help installing apps or making improvements and changes to your site, get in touch.
13. Increase your email subscriber list
Encourage people to sign up for your newsletters by incentivising them with previews of upcoming sales or exclusive discounts. This will help them engage with your brand and make them easier to contact when your sales are launched.
14. Focus on customer retention
Black Friday is the perfect opportunity to attract new shoppers and turn them into loyal repeat customers. To help improve your customer retention during the Black Friday period, you should personalise your follow-up emails after a purchase to say ‘Thank You’ and offer a warm message that includes the customer’s first name in the subject lines and body text. This could include an exclusive offer for their next purchase like a discount code or incentive. You should also use their purchase data to recommend similar products they may be interested in.
You can also build more customer retention through offering a loyalty program for newly acquired customers. This allows Black Friday shoppers to gain points or rewards for their purchase. This can encourage repeat purchases by offering discounts for higher spending and more points for future shopping.
15. Improve your customer support
Delivering exceptional levels of customer support is key in helping you retain customers long after Black Friday is over. Therefore you should ensure that your ecommerce site provides Black Friday shoppers with prompt and personal customer support. This includes preparing your team with thorough training, additional staffing and necessary resources to support your customers through checkout to purchase. Your website must have 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, or telephone. Offering multiple support channels means every customer can access help.
16. Assess Your Checkout Experience
Be sure to optimise your website checkout experience for desktop and mobile use, ensuring that it is fast loading and fully responsive on all devices. To make your checkout process more seamless for customers, consider using online checkout services like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. These are great in accelerating the process by autofilling saved billing information and reducing the number of clicks to make a purchase. As a result, this can lead to higher conversions.
17. Track your performance
If you’ve followed our advice in this article and our conversion checklist, you should be on track for a great Black Friday weekend. However, it’s important that you track your metrics through Google Analytics and your store’s analytics, plus your email provider and any other channels that you use like Facebook.
Once the sales weekend is over and the dust has settled, you’ll need to understand what went well and what could have been deployed differently so that you can make your next sale even more of a success!
Right. That sounds like a lot to do already! What more could you possibly be doing? Well like we said – there’s no such thing as over-prepared. Once you’re sure you’ve got these areas covered, you can go the extra mile by following the rest of our tips too.
Take Your Black Friday Ecommerce To The Next Level
1. Build and use a pre-launch Black Friday page
Nothing creates a bigger hype than an upcoming product! Many companies take advantage of Black Friday Cyber Monday – and the entire Christmas sales season for that matter – by launching new products.
Building a pre-launch page and pouring effort into its marketing as the famous shopping weekend approaches will not only gain traction to your brand, but also help you gather valuable feedback on consumer wants and needs before you even start selling. It gives you a much appreciated head-start, helps you build and promote in parallel and ensures that you have an audience to target when the day of chaotic sales hits.
The feedback you receive through social channels will give you rich insight on the audience segments you need to focus on, what you can do to capture their interest and how you should be talking to them about your new product for the next few weeks.
What to include on your pre-launch Black Friday page:
- Compelling content.
- Striking design elements.
- Information on the product at hand including a detailed description and price.
- A concrete timeline for the launch – or in this case a countdown to 29 November (you can use apps like ULTIMATE Countdown Timer to promote special sales).
- A live chat widget like Shopify Chat that urges prospective consumers to communicate with you, ask questions and stay in touch before the launch.
- An option to add products to a wishlist.
- An option to pre-order.
- An opt-in option for marketing content.
- An option for consumers to share on their social platforms.
- An incentive that urges visitors to share on their social platforms.
A few creative ways to drive more interest to you pre-launch page also include:
- Early bird pricing – spread this news fast, far and wide.
- Exclusive discounts for particular audience segments or for returning visitors.
- A discount voucher either for all visitors, or for visitors who engage through direct traffic – it all depends on your defined strategy (we can help you build one).
- Entry into a competition (look at Gleam Competitions – it’s a quick and highly effective way to implement competitions directly onto your Shopify store).
Source: Shopify
Remember, these pre-launch page tips are also intended for new products that are launching at any time of the year. This advice is not restricted to Black Friday – it’s just especially crucial to understand and use right now.
If you combine all the knowledge and resources you have, and put it into practice as soon as possible, you’ll be well prepared to control the frenzy that comes when your crush of shoppers hit their screens. Use your skills and team efforts wisely and you’ll stand the chance of doubling – or hey, even quintupling your sales for the month!
2. Use your pre-launch strategy to enhance your email listing strategy
As an added benefit, a pre-launch page (along with its marketing campaign) will also help you build a stronger email list and improve your retargeting capabilities - a top priority throughout the business year! Make sure you’re asking your audience to sign up to your mailing list so that you can alert them when a new product launches, or so that you can deliver enticing details on all your Christmas season specials.
Consider using exit-intent pop-ups that capture website visitors and convert them into subscribers/customers. You can look into Shopify apps like Privy to get started, which integrates with leading email service providers like Klaviyo, Bronto, smile.io, octane.ai, and Retention Rocket. Remember, it’s good to go over the basics of GDPR for Shopify Store Owners before you start gathering and using consumer information.
If you want to get started on building your pre-launch page, and get your audience fired up and excited for your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions, contact us right away – we will help you in a heartbeat!
3. Gain international traction
A common misunderstanding among Shopify owners is that Black Friday Cyber Monday is only worth giving attention to if your company and its consumers are based in North America. Sure, North America may hold the majority of online sales during this time of the year, but according to Shopify the retail movement continues to expand its global footprint at an increasingly fast rate. In fact, last year 18.54% of all orders placed with Shopify stores were shipped internationally!
If you need more convincing, tune into Shopify’s BFCM Data Story over the weekend of 29 November and watch them live stream sales data across the globe. It will be so interesting to see – simply fun to watch! It will also give you great insight into buying trends and top sales locations for all your future efforts.
There are a number of things that you can do to prepare your Shopify store in order to accommodate a global market over the Black Friday weekend.
Four of the most important things include:
4. Optimising for mobile shopping
This one sounds so obvious, you might be wondering why we’re even bringing it up! Granted, this is an important aspect for making sales on any day of the year, but in this case it holds unparalleled importance.
At times, store owners may overlook the fact that a high majority of their first-time visitors are users who just so happen to stumble onto their store during a casual internet browse – which mostly happens on mobile. Over the Black Friday weekend, you’re not only dealing with these casual internet browsers, but also with an extremely high volume of active and well-prepared competition! If your store isn’t optimised for mobile shopping over this particular time, you’ll lose visitors to another brand in a flash.
Make it easy for shoppers from all around the world to engage with your specials and make purchases by implementing responsive themes and multiple mobile-friendly payment options. Shopify Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay are all examples of apps that make the complete purchase process easy on any device.
5. Considering peak shopping hours in different time zones
One of the key steps in preparing your Shopify store for Black Friday is to ensure that stock, fulfilment and support are ready. And not only for buyers in your own country. If you want to gain international traction, you have to keep every single one of your visitors, potential buyers and converted buyers happy. So plan ahead to ensure that you have members of your support team available around the clock over the entire Black Friday weekend! You will need staff members to assist with order fulfilment, reply on live chats or just generally be available in case any issues arise.
Make sure your whole team is fresh and hands-on at noon - in your own country as well as in the USA - and again in the late evening. Don’t forget to implement last-chance promotional offers at the right time. You will definitely see a spike in sales towards the end of the whole ordeal if you follow these tips!
6. Prioritising your highest converting channels
Different traffic sources (email, direct, search, social etc.) have different levels of impact on your conversion rate. You have to gather and analyse all the traffic, engagement and conversion data you’ve accumulated over the past couple of months to pinpoint exactly where your qualified traffic is coming from, and how it’s influencing your conversion rates.
No two companies will follow the same approach, so consider your brand as the unique entity that it is and put effort into building a highly customised marketing strategy. Give data analysis the careful attention it deserves and you will find the answers that promote the smart marketing and effective content distribution decisions that will increase your conversions.
You should also download and use our Conversion Optimisation Checklist. This free copy is jam-packed with practical tips that turn visitors into customers throughout the entire year.
7. Entice your audience through shipping
Are you connecting with audiences from all around the world by making your product available to them? According to an extensive survey done by Inc Magazine, the top two benefits that consumers say encourage them to do more online holiday shopping are free shipping (80%) and fast shipping (54%).
So keep in mind that Black Friday Cyber Monday is not all about the low prices, but also the convenience your buyers experience when supporting your brand. Gone are the days of stampedes through brick-and-mortar, and checkout queues that are longer than time itself. With the major capabilities that Shopify has to offer, your buyers can shop in peace and quiet! Make sure you’re not giving them a reason to get loud by having your shipping and delivery strategy planned as well as possible and communicated clearly.
Let Us Help Build Your Black Friday Ecommerce Strategy
Call us if you want to reach a notable milestone with your festive season sales this year. With the right knowledge, attitude, energy and vigour we can create a Black Friday Cyber Monday hysteria around your Shopify store that will shine light on your product specials and reel in profit like you’ve never seen before.
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