This year's Black Friday, just like Black Friday 2020, could become a testing ground for eCommerce industry. How to prepare for shopping madness in times of pandemic insecurity? What can't you forget during the hottest shopping period? Read today's article and see how much you still have left to do. September is the last moment to lay out and implement your action plan for the last quarter of the year!
Black Friday 2021 - opportunity for eCommerce
Black Friday 2021 - when will the biggest sales promotion take place? Each year this day takes place on the fourth Friday in November - in 2021 it will be November 26. When planning the schedule of activities for the fourth quarter, remember to place Black Friday in the broader context of the pre-holiday period, which also includes other extremely important occasions for eCommerce, i.e. Cyber Monday (29 November) and Free Delivery Day (10 December). For many industries, Grandmother's Day and Grandfather's Day (January 21 and 22) are also important. When planning communication and ordering materials, it's worth taking a broader perspective into account - creating content on the fly in November, even if possible, may bring mediocre results due to the high load of other tasks.
Black Friday is a holiday that came to Poland from the United States. It became firmly rooted in the consciousness of Polish consumers in 2015. Are we willing to take advantage of November bargains? As shown by the research of the Picodi group and the platform Black-Friday Global in 2018 during Black Friday sales compared to other working days throughout the year increased by 979%! And how was the situation last year? 2020 was special - consumers having to move online, increased eCommerce traffic and sales, with perhaps a permanent change in their habits by opening up to online shopping. Did the industry seize its opportunity?
Black Friday 2020 was definitely better than the previous one. According to the Shoper platform, the value of in-store transactions increased by 53%. Salesforce, on the other hand, reported that Black Friday of the pandemic year set a new record. Global sales reached $270 billion, 36% more than in 2019.
What are the predictions for Black Friday 2021? Last year's edition taught us to have several plans in store for use depending on the pandemic situation. This one certainly won't be known until the last minute. Will shopping malls be closed? How will the global situation unfold and what will the public mood be?
There are a lot of unknowns, but there are a few universal things that if planned and implemented in your eCommerce will be the foundation for success during this year's Black Friday.
Optimize your platform for Black Friday
Even the best marketing strategy won't work without the foundation of a well-functioning eCommerce platform.
So before you move on to developing promotion strategies, setting discounts, and product selection - start with a priority - optimizing your site. What is most important in this context??
- Server power - Black Friday can cause a real siege of your eCommerce servers. So take care of their bandwidth and increased power. If you do not have an IT department in your company, you should think about cooperating with an external company which will quickly repair any failures in case of a crisis.
- Page loading speed - crucial, especially during the emotional rather than rational shopping experience. Fast loading page is important both in desktop and mobile versions. Do a test of this parameter using free tools (e.g. Page Speed Insight) and fix the indicated errors to make the page run faster.
- Mobile-ready eCommerce - this is a cornerstone that still needs to be discussed because too many online stores don't care about mobile users. And the growth of smartphone usage in shopping is significant (2019 - 61%, 2020 - 69%) and as a trend it certainly won't go away.
- OSEO optimization - the effects of SEO are not visible in a short time. It is a process that must last, therefore it is worth including it in permanent eCommerce actions. During Black Friday, make sure to create a dedicated landing page with content explaining the sale rules, optimized for well-chosen keywords. Audit the existing pages, especially the main categories and the most popular products. Analyze their descriptions, improve meta title and meta description, check if key subpages are visible in the index.
What else? In terms of the technical operation of your site during Black Friday, make sure that the most important processes and functionalities are really working. Ask yourself
- Does the ordering process work, from adding a product to the cart, to selecting delivery and payment?
- Do you have multiple delivery and payment options?
- Does the search engine work properly and is it intuitive for the user?
- Do discount codes work and are they visible to a user?
- Do your WMS integrations work? Does your eCommerce display current product inventory?
Black Friday - campaign preparation
If the technical side of eCommerce is working, it's time to plan paid campaigns. Black Friday period, which is extremely intense in terms of traffic and sales, should be made even stronger through Ads (Facebook and Google are still the strongest digital channels). How to get down to it?
If your company wasn't established just this year, you certainly have experience with previous November promotions. Begin by analyzing them - check which products were the most popular and which were the least popular. Use your promotions to boost the former. Next, analyze your sales channels. Those with the best results will help you reach your potential clients. The next step is to distinguish the audience of a campaign within the channel. Did you get better results with campaigns targeted at new users or with remarketing? Finally, take a look at the content - which creations were the best and which were not effective? Use this knowledge in this year's campaign!
When you have analyzed the previous years, start planning for Black Friday 2021. You need to include aspects such as:
- heroes of promotion - discounted products
- length of promotion
- audiences
- selected sales channels
- budget
- remarketing lists
A ready-made plan will allow you to prepare the most important materials for Black Friday, i.e. landing page, banners, images and graphics adapted to sales channels. Once you have set your goals and keywords, constant monitoring remains. Remember that Black Friday is a great time for testing. High traffic will allow you to collect user data faster. So don't be afraid to test different graphic creations and copy. Test, learn, improve and earn!/p>
