With the upcoming Black Friday shopping craze, many businesses are tying up all loose ends in anticipation for the incoming sales.
However, have you thought of everything?
Here at Userpeek we collected overall 119 tips from top sources about how to get your business ready for Black Friday. Check if everything is ready or you’ll end up leaking money and customers.
eCommerce University brings out the big guns with a great guide how to get ready for the holiday season and how to leverage the insane traffic you’ll get.
Inside you’ll find a detailed plan, holiday prescriptions, preparation guidelines, and a 6-stage plan how to efficiently execute a Black Friday sale.
Snippet from inside:
Just as important as having overall tracking set up on your site is understanding how to use campaign specific tracking to better manage the results on individual promotions and channels. This is simply a matter of using a unique, trackable link, called a UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameter for each of your campaigns and advertising channels.
Hubspot introduces you to the technical preparations that you need to cover when readying for the Black Friday.
Their 7 tips going over website speed, trust & security, SEO, and more will help you verify whether your website will handle the incoming boost of visitor numbers.
Snippet from inside:
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a technology that encrypts the connection between your visitors’ browser and your website. At a minimum SSL, which can be seen when the URL contains HTTPS instead of the traditional HTTP, should be enabled for your checkout process to ensure the users private information remains safe, and the confidence they have shopping with you remains high.
The Future of Commerce: Black Friday is fast approaching: Is your e-commerce store ready?
Patrick Bonuso goes over the basic steps to prepare your campaign but also brings forward the issue of performance testing and omni-channel marketing: are your servers ready for the traffic increase? Have you properly evaluated the spike? Also, is your holiday marketing message consistent on all channels?
Determine the answers with the help of this article.
Snippet from inside:
An often overlooked but critical function of site performance is clearing disk space on your hard drives.
Much like anything else that stores things: physical filing cabinets, your junk drawer at home, your desk at work or the files on your computer, if they become overloaded, performance will be less than optimal.
Be sure to clean the log files and delete old entries; failure to do so may result in a slow site or perhaps a crash; slow sites can cause headaches where there should be hustle and bustle, so make sure your site isn’t turning away customers.
eConsultancy: Black Friday landing pages analysed: AO.com to Tesco
eConsultancy goes over the most popular retailers and ecommerce stores and analyzes their landing pages in detail in order to point out the most effective strategies. They also underline those that are harmful for a potential business owner.
A great benchmark when optimizing your landing pages for the holidays. Also, a great vault of tips not only for that highly intensive period, but for overall conversion rate optimization.
Snippet from inside:
I love the clarity of Tesco’s Black Friday page.
The two call to actions are very strong, though perhaps the page could benefit from some incentives to register ahead of time, and some product previews to entice users to click through to latest offers.
Additionally, the message about delayed delivery (in yellow) that was displayed when I visited could conceivably be miscontrued as applying to Black Friday.
This is a minor consideration but perhaps could be solved with a change to copy.
LeadPages.net brings more content to the table by proposing you 10 landing page ideas that will make your Black Friday campaigns rock. Since they are experts at optimizing landing pages, their tips are not only go-to’s, but also must-have’s when it comes to designing a well-converting page. Great for websites and for social media as well.
Are you offering a particularly amazing deal on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? If so, you may want to try this idea.
Like the Pre-Black Friday Welcome Gate, you could also use this page as a welcome gate. After all, if your top goal during that 24-hour period is to sell as much of a particular product as possible, why not point your organic home page traffic straight there?
This page was built using the Video Squeeze Page template inside LeadPagesâ„¢.
In the video section, you can place a compelling video about your time-sensitive offer. Then, you can link the button below the video to a more expansive sales page.
Below the button, visitors have an option to click a text link to bypass your welcome gate and go straight to your site if they’re not interested in the offer.
Unbounce: 7 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Landing Page Examples [with critiques]
Unbounce is another expert at landing page optimization – since we’ve been told what to do on landing pages, with this article you’ll also learn what not to do on landing pages based on 7 businesses Unbounce set sights on.
Snippet from inside:
Strategy: Minor modifications to existing landing pages [promoted via Google Adwords]
Why reinvent the wheel? If you already have a successful landing page that’s crushing conversions for your company, you may not need to make large sweeping changes for a holiday promotion.
If you’re in a pinch, you can set up a landing page just like this. Sage sells account software, and it looks like they’re using a basic template for their landing pages. This allows them to swap out the background image and the headlines for various promotions quickly and easily.
But what about urgency?!
This page is simple and to the point, but it could use more urgency. The beauty of Cyber Monday/Black Friday is that you have that urgency built right in. Remind your visitors that this is a limited time offer and it’s going to expire very soon.
Sage could throw a countdown on this landing page, which might give visitors that extra little push to convert.
eConsultancy: SEO & Black Friday: How are brands preparing their landing pages?
eConsultancy covers another sensitive aspect of Black Friday website changes – the SEO. Search performance is crucial for search-oriented shoppers, and even though the holiday period is short, this still needs to be covered properly. The article goes over some major players in the industry, so you can learn from the best.
Snippet from inside:
As one would expect, Amazon ranks well for all sorts of Black Friday search phrases.
However, something funny is happening when we look at ranking for the phrase ‘Black Friday 2015′ once again.
The chart below shows two pages that have both, at some point over the last six months, been the top returning Amazon URL for ‘Black Friday 2015′.
The pink page initially ranked highest and still occasionally deposes the yellow page, with neither having ranked on page one of Google for this phrase since April 2015.
What is causing the poor search performance for this phrase?
Black Friday and holiday marketing is not only landing pages and social media channels, but also e-mail. Shopify prepared a great list of 8 e-mail campaigns for holidays that you can easily use when preparing a strategy for your holiday campaign, go over the post and check for those last-minute newsletter ideas.
Snippet from inside:
Have fun with your marketing. If it suits your brand, experiment with unique subject lines for your emails and use humorous images.
You don’t need a lot of copy in your Black Friday emails to convey a message. Don’t just tell your customers your shorts are comfortable, show them in an entertaining way.
Lastly, you don’t need to promote several products in your Black Friday email. Promote your Black Friday sale with one product (or a few) instead. Consider choosing your best-selling or most interesting product and promote it on Black Friday to drive traffic.
If you desire a general checklist of what a successful business owner should do before the holidays, Kissmetrics delivers. In 38 steps you can verify whether you are fully prepared for the Black Friday craze.
Snippet from inside:
Run a Pinterest contest. As a major driver of retail and online sales, you can’t afford to ignore this social media site. Encourage customers to share holiday ideas, recipes, and more, and to tag you so that you can pin their suggestions to one of your Pinterest boards.
Another set of 26 tips that are conversion boosting. Shopify’s checklist goes over the similar topics, but you still can learn new insights from their experts. The list is conveniently divided into sections that are an areas of interest of every entrepreneur. Useful to read even if only for that one tip.
One of the easier and most effective ways of doing this is by setting up awesome abandoned cart emails. This way, when a customer adds a product to their cart but leaves your store, you can use a compelling email to bring them back to complete their purchase.
Bonus! QuickSprout: How to Leverage Black Friday for Your Business
So, are you ready for the influx of traffic? We hope you are thanks to these tips.
There’s a final tip coming from us: do not waste the traffic you’ll get – you can get tons of insights about your website’s usability.
You ask how?
Simply register for our free trial here and start tracking all actions such as clicks, scrolls, taps, swipes etc. on your website coming from your users. You’ll stop in no time both conversion opportunities and bugs on your website.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
![Unbounce: 7 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Landing Page Examples [with critiques]](https://userpeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Ubounce.png "Unbounce: 7 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Landing Page Examples [with critiques]")
