Trying to get your Shopify store ready for the craziness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Well, you don’t have to figure it out all on your own, here are 17 tips to help you prepare your store for your Black Friday sales.
Back in stock notifications
Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales can be disappointing for your customers if they reach your store late and the product they intended to buy was sold out. But you can make it possible for them to leave their contact information with you if the product they’re looking for is unavailable.
You can then use an out-of-stock notification app to automatically notify them via email or SMS when the product is back in stock. You could include a link in the notification to bring them right back to that product page in your store for them to complete their purchase
Conversion rate optimization
What’s the point of putting in those marketing efforts to drive traffic to your Shopify store if hardly any of them end up making purchases?
You could spend less marketing dollars on ads if you could optimize your landing pages and product pages to drive more conversions and nudge your customers to make purchases.
One of the most effective ways to do that is to use conversion triggers on a Shopify chatbot from Engati. These make it possible for you to trigger promotional pop-up messages from your chatbot when shoppers land on your pages, scroll through them, spend a pre-defined amount of time on them, add products to their carts, or remove them.
Cart abandonment
If a shopper has added a product to their cart and abandoned it, you can’t afford to let them go easy. At this point, you need to pull all the stops and do everything you can to bring them back and get them to make the purchase.
Cart abandonment emails seem like the most obvious solution - you shoot them an email and hope that they read it and take action. But then again, simply ‘hoping’ is not good enough to fix your (cart) abandonment issues.
A safer bet for you would be to send them cart abandonment notifications on a messaging app that you know they’re going to keep opening throughout the day. And guess what, your customers open WhatsApp 23 times a day.
Your Engati Shopify chatbot can send out cart abandonment notifications to your shoppers directly on WhatsApp, making it easier for you to recover abandoned carts.
Prepare your website for high traffic
The chances are that you’re going to see way more traffic than usual on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You need to make sure that your website can handle this influx of traffic without creating a bad experience for any of your shoppers. Ensure that your servers can deal with a higher amount of traffic than usual. Here's a good Black Friday case study of toy sales on Amazon.
Have backups ready
Yours is not the only store that expects a ton of traffic and orders on Black Friday. Your regular shipping company might be flooded with orders, causing yours to get delayed. You don’t want to ruin a good customer experience by delivering the orders late, so it would be a good idea to have a backup shipping company ready. Don’t wait and find yourself scrambling at the last moment, you need to have a contingency plan.
Automate your support
You don’t want to leave your customers waiting for a reply from your support team. They’re going to be ultra-busy and they need automation to help them out. You need to deploy a Shopify chatbot that can answer questions about everything from product details to store policies and order tracking.
These Shopify bots can handle about 80% of your product queries, leaving your agents to deal just with the remaining 20% (the really complex queries) over live chat.
Plan for a spike in demand
High shopper traffic means that you need higher than usual levels of inventory as well. But you don’t want to go overboard and get more than you can sell.
You need to forecast your sales effectively and get the right amount of inventory so that your customers can find and buy what they’re looking for without you being left with too much surplus stock.
Wishlists
If your customers aren’t ready to make a purchase just yet, let them add it to their wishlist. You’d want to implement a wishlist to your Shopify store before BFCM so that shoppers can save products earlier and find them easily during the actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Bonus points to you if you make those wishlists sharable. Allowing shoppers to share their wishlists with friends and family across social media is essentially free marketing for you, don’t miss out on it.
Here's an additional resource on Black Friday marketing!
Retargeting
When you try acquiring a new customer who has never bought from your store before, they’re not feeling completely secure about buying from you. They might be worrying that you’ll rip them off or send them a substandard product. Some of them might even be worrying about how safe it is to enter their payment details on your site.
But someone who has already bought products from you in the past might not have these qualms. You’ve already earned their trust and they’ll be more comfortable purchasing additional items from you.
That’s why retargeting ads are extremely important during your BFCM sales. They’re also more effective because these shoppers can easily recognize your brand when they see your ads, making them less likely to ignore your ads.
Create scarcity and urgency
BFCM is all about impulse purchases. So, you need to work on your shoppers’ impulses by introducing urgency and scarcity into the mix. When items are close to being sold out, show your shoppers how many of those items are left in stock, creating the fear of missing out. You should also display a countdown timer for certain offers, making shoppers more inclined to make their purchases sooner rather than later.
Display social proof
Black Friday and Cyber Monday would get your Shopify store a lot of new visitors and you need to show them you’re on the up and up. Everyone is a little afraid when they’re shopping at a new online store, but showcasing social proof can help you make these new folks feel safer and more comfortable making purchases from you.
Display reviews, ratings, and testimonials showing that real people have used your products and liked them. You could also display review videos from YouTube, Tiktok, and more.
Simplify purchases
If you want customers to buy from you, you need to make it easy for them to do that. You want to reduce the customer effort involved. Reduce the number of steps in the purchase process and don’t force them to navigate through a million pages before they can actually place their order with you. Take a hint from Amazon’s 1-Click ordering (especially because their patent on it has expired).
Build suspense and hype
You want to hype up your sale and get people intrigued. Maybe don’t directly reveal what the big offers are going to be, build up suspense before the big reveal to get your audience excited and keep them engaged.
Optimize for mobile
Most of your shoppers are going to be on their mobile devices, so make sure that your web store is mobile optimized. You can’t risk delivering a substandard experience to such a large segment of your shoppers.
Exclusive deals
Looking to build up your email list for the future? Offer exclusive deals for your newsletter subscribers. This tactic essentially allows you to trade bigger offers for email ids, a total win-win situation for everyone.
Here are 70+ Black Friday Email Subject Lines to Boost Open Rates!
Offer easy returns
A lenient return policy is a great way to get new shoppers to trust you. The fear of losing money if the product doesn’t work for them just vanishes, making them more likely to buy more products, even if they were just buying them to try the products out. They’re thinking that they could just return them if they don’t like the products they could just return them, but what tends to happen is that the Endowment Effect kicks in, making them assign greater value to the product once they own and possess it, thus making them less likely to return the product.
Sell gift cards
What happens if a customer can’t find the product that they’re looking for? You might just lose the sale, but there’s a way for you to get it. Let them know that the product will be restocked soon and that they could buy a gift card that could be redeemed when the product is back in stock. You’re essentially getting the money upfront and you have time to restock since the shoppers would (in all likelihood) redeem the gift cards after BFCM.
Here's an additional resource that'll help you get ready for Shopify BFCM!
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