Begin planning for Black Friday now.

You should start looking/planning for Black Friday as early as October. You'll need to prep everything from products (price, types, etc) to digital marketing.

Plan your sales.

Record inventory levels, sales prices, promotion methods, and time your sale starts. Then you can track how things are progressing during the sale and help you determine the success of your sale once it’s over.

Can you handle the demand?

  1. Does your supplier have enough inventory? Do they deal with other business owners, too? What happens if they run out of stock and you’re unable to fulfill your customers orders?
  2. Can your website handle heavy amounts of traffic? Has it ever crashed? If not, has it ever been close to crashing?

Have a contingency plan.

Things don’t always go as planned. Make a list of things that could go wrong, then create a backup plan. You can’t prepare for everything, but if you do this, it severely reduces the chance of a catastrophic events!

Customer Service. Customer Service. Customer Service.

Failing customer service on a normal day is bad enough: Doing so during a large event; a true nightmare.

Returns.

While I’m sure you aren’t hoping anyone will return an item, you have to be prepared for it.

When creating your ads and banners for your Black Friday sales, be sure to add your return policy to the mix.

Marketing.

Implement Facebook Messenger for order tracking.

You can send automated product promotions, discounts, and marketing messages to your customers using a chatbot. Customers can even respond to your bot, and your bot can answer them!

Schedule your posts in advance.

Using a service like Buffer, HootSuite, or MeetEdgar, you can schedule ALL of your Black Friday promotions in advance. This means all of your discounts, any product launches, and even any random, fun/funny posts to liven up your feed.

Create some gift guides.

Suggesting complimentary products together or suggesting gift ideas can go a long way to upselling product and paving the way to a good customer experience.

Creating gift guides can help give customers inspiration regarding which gifts to buy and for whom. These should be a part of your content marketing and SEO efforts anyway, so now is as good a time as any to get started. It can also help them mix and match products that go well together.

Sometimes pairing products together fosters an extra sell and definitely promotes a good customer buying experience. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what they don't know, and guiding them can really help!

Build anticipation.

We’re now one week from Black Friday, and that means it’s time to build anticipation for your sweet holiday deals.

Tease customers with upcoming sales

It’s all about the tease!

If you didn’t already schedule emails to go out this week with teasers for your upcoming sales, do so now. Same goes for social media.

Heck, you can even run some Facebook ads with pre-Black Friday deals or with an offer for people to sign up to be notified when a big deal goes live. Don’t forget to mention that you have a limited supply, so it’s first come, first serve!

Optimize your website.

It's time to address any slowness issues or SEO snafus. Get your site right before the barrage of customers!

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

In 2017, 61% of shoppers visited websites using their mobile devices. More than one-third — 33.5 percent — of all sales are coming from smartphones, totaling $2.1 billion. With another 10 percent coming from tablets, mobile overall is coming close to accounting for nearly half of all transactions

Set up cart abandonment emails.

In 2017; 74.5% of people abandoned their carts on Black Friday. Many times this is because the customer was drawn away from what they were doing and forgot about it. A well-timed abandoned cart email can help bring your sales up.

Update product descriptions using power words.

Sometimes the cheap-sounding and cheesy stuff works. Don't be afraid to test certain phrases and key words.

Words like “best” and “one-of-a-kind” might sound silly. In fact, it might sound like a cheap sales tactic to manipulate people, or it might even sound like people won’t buy it.

But the reality is that these words actually get people to buy. These are called “power words,” and I love using them at every opportunity I can. (The writer in me just loves playing with words.)

It's time to get digital.

This is quickly becoming a staple for business in just about every market space. Don't get caught with your proverbial pants down.

Create banners, ads, and even memes to showcase special Black Friday sales.

Black Friday is not far away! It’s time to get creative and make your content speak. There are different avenues to 'going digital'. Google Ad Words, Facebook Ads, Instagram...all are great avenues to reaching your target audience. Each avenue allows for unique initiatives and targeted reach within a broader campaign.

Make ad promotions ahead of time.

Don’t forget to create your promotion codes ahead of time, unless you’ll just be reducing the display price right on your products.

Note: Remember to go back and add these new banners to your social media scheduling software!


Finally, we have retargeting. Retargeting ads are those ads which are shown to your previous customers and website visitors. They’re perfect to get Black Friday shoppers coming to your store.

Not sure how? Check out our guide to Facebook retargeting.

Retarget Existing Customers

Finally, we have retargeting. Retargeting ads are those ads which are shown to your previous customers and website visitors. They’re perfect to get Black Friday shoppers coming to your store.

Not sure how? Check out our guide to Facebook retargeting.

Create banners, ads, and even memes to showcase special Black Friday sales.

Black Friday is not far away! It’s time to get creative and make your content speak. There are different avenues to 'going digital'. Google Ad Words, Facebook Ads, Instagram...all are great avenues to reaching your target audience. Each avenue allows for unique initiatives and targeted reach within a broader campaign.

Make ad promotions ahead of time.

Don’t forget to create your promotion codes ahead of time, unless you’ll just be reducing the display price right on your products.

Note: Remember to go back and add these new banners to your social media scheduling software!

Track, Track, Track Everything.

If you’re not tracking what your visitors are doing, you won’t be able to improve your conversions or know where you’re losing people. Google Analytics is your friend. You can learn which pages your customers visit before they make a purchase, how much time they’re spending on each page, and more.

Continue learning: 19 Google Analytics segments every Shopify store owner should be using.

Set up heat maps and advanced user tracking services.

Google Analytics is amazing, but you’ll also want some more advanced user tracking to see how far people are scrolling on your pages, what they’re clicking on, and more.

For this advanced tracking, you’ll need to purchase a service such as Sumo, CrazyEgg, or Hotjar.

Focus on your sales.

So now Black Friday week is here, and that means it’s time to focus on sales, sales, and more sales. What should you do? Easy!

Have at least two “limited time” products.

While not completely required, having two “limited time only” products can encourage would-be buyers to take the plunge. Everyone has some fear of missing out (FOMO) in them, and limited time products play on that.

These could be uniquely designed items, or new items altogether. This is also a great time to test a product you’re not sure would work well on your store. If it does well, you can even bring it back after the holidays!

Have a giant doorbuster sale item.

There’s a common strategy in eCommerce called a “loss leader.”

A loss leader is an item where you just break even on, or even lose money on, in order to bring people into the store.

For example, big box stores often lose money on big ticket items like TVs and game systems in order to get people into their store, in the hopes that those people will buy other things from them since they’re now there.

Hand out a delicious deal on something awesome, then promote the heck out of your other items while they’re on your site in order to up that average order value.

Focus on your sales.

So now Black Friday week is here, and that means it’s time to focus on sales, sales, and more sales. What should you do? Easy!

We already talked about optimizing your online store. Part of that should have included improving your checkout page. But in case it didn’t, here’s a 6-step guide to optimize your checkout page for max conversions.

Salesforce predicts social media will play an important role over the continued holiday shopping weekend. 7.5% of traffic to retailers’ websites will be driven by social media.

Free shipping will be a big driver for purchases as well. 81% of orders on Thanksgiving had free shipping associated with them.

More people went online since stores put their best deals on their websites. Online sales for Wednesday through Black Friday was 26.4 percent higher than in 2017.