It’s been a year since the last Black Friday and it’s time to start thinking about what your company needs to do in order to prepare for 2021. We know how crazy things got last year, so this is your chance to avoid that chaos by taking advantage of these tips before the next holiday season approaches. Here are some ways you can get ready for Black Friday in 2021 – we asked specialists and marketing consultants!
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Number one practice I can suggest is to start warming up your email list a few weeks earlier. Email warm-up aims at building your email account’s credibility and reputation. You can do this by promoting your offer or just sending your regular emails to stay on top of mind. The worst thing that you can do is to ignore your list for a year and then start spamming it hard a week before Black Friday. People probably forgot they even signed up and you’ll just get more unsubscribes instead of getting new sales.
Petra Odak, Better Proposals
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Get your mobile data in shape
SMS marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your Black Friday offers.
90% of all texts sent are read within 5 minutes. Makes sense. When was the last time you ignored a text?
And over two thirds of consumers would like to receive offers from companies and brands that they love. (Source Mobile Squared)
But in order to capitalise on the potential of SMS you need to have your customers’ mobile number.
So now would be an excellent time to start collecting mobile numbers. There are several ways you can do this.
You could create a text club which gives members exclusive offers that are not available to non-members. The mobile numbers could be collected with a web form or given as an option when someone makes a purchase.
You could also collect mobile phone numbers using a keyword and short code. E.g
‘To receive exclusive offers and join our text club, text OFFER to 88440.’
Whichever route you choose for collecting numbers, the key is to provide genuine benefits to the consumer. Then, when Black Friday 2021 comes around you’ll have a great database of eager customers waiting for your offers.
Henry Cazalet, The SMS Works
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Set up your post-purchase funnel.
Seriously, with the cost of paid ads on the rise, maximizing the value of each sale is more important than ever.
One low-effort and high-reward method to make more money this BFCM is to set up a post-purchase funnel.
With a post-purchase funnel you can guide customers to spend more by offering upsells, cross-sells and downsells that change based on multiple conditions.
For example, if a customer buys a pair of shoes, you might use a trigger-based cross-sell to offer a pair of socks immediately post-purchase. If they accept your offer, you might try to sell them a protective shoe spray.
The beauty of a post-purchase funnel is that when set-up right, you’ll get a crazy high conversion rate. People who see your offers are in peak buying mode and highly likely to take you up on your offer.
Try adding one click-upsells just after checkout. Then, combine it with a customized thank you page with more product recommendations to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of your traffic in BFCM 2021.
Ruth Even Haim, Co-Founder, ReConvert
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1. First and foremost – decide on what deal/discount you are going to run as part of your Black Friday campaign
2. Work on the copies, landing pages and other content to be built around the same
3. Define the timeline for each task including start and end dates of the campaign
4. Define your metrics, goals and objectives
5. Define your budget and how is your ROI going to be calculated
Rangarajan Nallappa, Marketing Lead Vmaker
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We are going through terrible times and financial constraints are a real concern. So, it is important that we begin by communicating to our subscribers about the upcoming Black Friday 2021 shopping season.
Mobile-friendly UI design, great customer service, and returns guarantee are three points that’ll help eCommerce platforms succeed. You may need to consider increasing the workforce, implementing a new UI design, moving to a server with higher capacity, and improvising your product return policy if required.
Also, make sure to follow the standard SEO practises to make sure your landing page ranks on top SERP. You need to update the headings, content, images, etc. to reflect the latest Black Friday 2021 changes, fix broken links, generate new internal and external backlinks, and recrawl the pages on search engines.
The best you can do is to design custom offers & deals for your audience which they may not find on any other website.
Vineet Gupta, Digital Marketing Team Lead, https://5minutesseo.com/
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The most important thing to do to prepare for Black Friday is to get organized and plan out your campaigns – whether you’re working with YouTubers, bloggers, coupon sites – it doesn’t matter. Keep track of everything in one place and share it with a couple of other staff members, so if someone is sick, it is accessible. Create a list of the people you want to run campaigns with, start communication early (if you haven’t done it already, start now), find out precisely what your influencers need from you, and get it done about a month out from the day itself. By being ahead of time, it will mean that there are fewer surprises down the road. The last thing you want is to be frantically rushing around at the last minute trying to get everything done.
Ashley Howe, Senior strategist, www.tapfiliate.com
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Start building your SMS list. If you haven’t yet added an SMS opt-in incentive to your site, now is the time to start.
You can use a tool like Privy or Attentive to start gathering phone numbers along with email addresses. Even if you don’t have an SMS strategy yet, you’ll be able to enjoy 90%+ open rates on your Black Friday offer to a sizable list in November, and you’ll be happy you got started.
Zach Grove, GM, ClickFlow, www.zachgrove.com
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One of the best practices for Black Friday preparation is to make sure that your website is performing well. It’s crucial to check your website speed and the whole check out process. No visitor will continue their browsing experience (let alone make a purchase) on a slow website. It’s also important that your website has no errors of any kind – even those that don’t affect the speed directly but may indicate a poorly maintained website.
Also, you need to ensure that the checkout process is as simple as possible. The second you complicate the checkout process, that’s when you lose a customer. It’s also always better to provide and have all payment methods (e.g., bitcoin, Paypal, debit card, etc.) and make the iconography easy to understand.
Andre Oentoro, CEO of Breadnbeyond
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Preparation is key to success in your Black Friday 2021. Oftentimes, marketers lack preparation that hinders their business from performing well during the day. With the surge of Covid19 cases worldwide, many still preferred online shopping when celebrating the day. Hence, your website and its content should be ready to commemorate one of the biggest sales days for business.
Beforehand, it’s important to start your marketing campaign early. Promote your content on multiple social media accounts to get your words out there. Your goal should be reaching out to as many people since the more people saw your posts, the more likely you will see a sale increase on the due day. Also, make sure that your website performs well to avoid crashing or lagging when many people visit your page.
Natasha Rei, Digital Marketing Manager at Explainerd
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While the Holiday Season and the great shopping fests of Black Friday sales events are still a far stretch away, you must start preparing right now. Surveys show that more than half of the online shoppers start planning or shopping for the holidays as early as October.
So, instead of aiming to offer the best deals during the highly competitive sales time, you must target these “early planners and early shoppers” for making better profits.
Check your online shopping channels thoroughly and conduct the website optimization activities right now.
Some of these tasks include the following:
1. Analysing heat maps to find the website areas with maximum visitor activities and the least visited pages or sections.
2. Conducting small surveys to learn more about the shopping and browsing experiences of your customers.
3. Checking the site speed and getting ready for scaling the resources as per the traffic trends of previous Black Friday events.
4. Taking back-ups and improving the check-out processes
5. Product optimization and backups etc.
Joy D’Cruz, Content Marketing Specialist, http://linkoholics.com
