Black Friday is just around the corner and you know what that means! It’s time to gear up for the biggest shopping event of the year. If you’re looking for ways to increase sales on your Shopify store, begin with this list of Shopify BFCM checklist items.
To make sure that your store doesn’t crash during Black Friday, it is important to prepare your store well before of time. In this article, we will show you how to get ready for Shopify Black Friday sales, with a checklist of all the things you need to do before the Holiday season starts.
Let’s begin the read with a brief introduction.
- What is BFCM?
- Shopify BFCM Checklist 1# Research What Your Customers Want to Buy
- Shopify BFCM Checklist 2# Ramp Up Your Store for Black Friday
- Shopify BFCM Checklist 3# Prepare your store for the traffic spike
- Shopify BFCM Checklist 4# Create Your Black Friday Sales Strategy
- Shopify BFCM Checklist 5# Plan Out Your BFCM Marketing Strategy
- Wrap Up!
What is BFCM?
BFCM is short-term for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. BFCM is one of the best times to promote your Shopify products and boost your sales. It is a huge opportunity for your store to gain new customers and make them loyal shoppers.
Many online store owners like you increase their sales through this biggest holiday season sale. To get the most out of Black Friday in your Shopify store, you need to have a checklist prepared beforehand.
Make sure you are ready to have a successful Black Friday sale this year by preparing in advance with our BFCM Checklist!
Shopify BFCM Checklist 1# Research What Your Customers Want to Buy
The best way to prepare for BFCM sales is to understand what your customers want. And this means more than just going through their purchase histories and browsing their wishlists.
1. Review Your Site Analytics
To do this, you need to dig into the analytics data of your Shopify store — not just in Google Analytics but also in Facebook Pixel data. You need to understand what drives them to shop at your store in the first place, what they like about it, and how they feel about it after they buy something from you.
2. Check Out What Your Competitors Are Offering
Competitors or market leaders are the best guides to follow when it comes to identifying trends. It’s important to know what products and promotions your competitors are offering on their sites. You should know if they’re offering free shipping or other special offers so that you can beat them in terms of pricing and offerings.
Also, check out how they’re marketing their products and whether they’re using any special techniques that can be adopted for your eCommerce business.
3. Discover Products For Your BFCM Sale
Look at what people have been searching for over the past few months and see if there are any trends or patterns that emerged during the year. This will help you choose the best products to sell during BFCM sales as well as help identify gaps in your inventory that you might want to fill before the BFCM sale begins.
Shopify BFCM Checklist 2# Ramp Up Your Store for Black Friday
Shopping is a joyous moment for the customers. You can make it more fun for them by offering a special user experience with your Black Friday discounts.
1. Clean Up Your Online Store
The most important thing is to clean up all unnecessary items from your online store. Make sure your online store is clean and easy to navigate. If you have any broken links or images, make sure they’re fixed immediately. Also, check if there are any outdated products still available on your site; remove them so as not to confuse potential buyers.
2. Get Your Inventory Ready
If you sell physical products, then you need to make sure that you have enough inventory available before the BFCM sale event starts. If you don’t have enough stock on hand, customers may be disappointed and decide not to buy from you again.
3. Add a Countdown Timer To Your Shopify Store
It’s always good practice to add a countdown timer to your Shopify store so customers know when Black Friday sales will begin. There are many third-party Shopify apps available in the Shopify Apps Store [1] to help you add the countdown timer for your Holiday season sale.
4. Prepare Images & Videos For BFCM Promos
If you like to make BFCM a big part of your marketing strategy, start building up hype early by creating some image assets. It can be used in social media posts, blog posts, and other types of content. You also need to think about how the video would fit into your overall plan and start thinking about what kinds of videos might be appropriate for your business (e.g. product demos or How-to videos).
5. Give Your Product Pages a Makeover
Make sure all of your product descriptions are up-to-date and include all relevant information (like product dimensions) and photos or videos of your products. Also, add Black Friday sale stickers or badges to the product pages so that shoppers can get a better idea of what offer they are getting for better conversion.
Check out the best ways to customize the Shopify product page!
6. Create the Black Friday Landing Page
Creating a landing page for your Black Friday deals is one of the most important steps in preparing your Shopify store for the big day. A landing page is the best place to showcase your products, and BFCM deals and boost the shopper’s interest in your BFCM sale.
Shopify Black Friday Landing Page – Here is the guide to help you create a high-converting Black Friday landing page in Shopify without using third-party page builders. This is one of the most important point in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday to-do list.
Read More: Shopify Thank You Page Customization Guide (10 Ideas)
7. Promote Black Friday Deals on the Homepage
The first thing that customers see when they visit your site is your homepage. Make sure that it is optimized for conversion by promoting your BFCM deals on it. You can use the announcement bar and black Friday banner on your home page and include links to the CTA that take visitors directly to the landing page.
Need Shopify experts to set up your eCommerce store for the biggest sale?? We can help!
Shopify BFCM Checklist 3# Prepare your store for the traffic spike
When preparing for the Black Friday sale, the first question you should ask to optimize your BFCM Checklist should be – Is your online store ready for the Black Friday rush?
1. Test Your Store’s Performance
If your site is slow or crashes during peak traffic, it can lead to lost sales or negative feedback. This can be the real conversion killer for the online merchant like you. Merchants should always test their store performance before launching your BFCM sales. Make sure to optimize your Shopify store speed and performance so that your store performs well during the holidays.
2. Optimize Your Store for Mobile Shoppers
We all know that Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic in the past few years. That’s why your store must be optimized for mobile devices from day one so that customers can easily navigate through your site with their fingers.
You should also make sure that all images are visible with the right resolution so there are no blurry or pixelated pictures showing up on people’s phones or tablets. Thus, no shopper can leave your store due to poor user experience in mobile.
3. Protect Your Store From Fraud & Chargebacks
The biggest challenge for businesses during Black Friday is fraud. Fraudsters often use this opportunity to attack online retailers and steal their customers’ money by placing fake orders on their websites or mobile apps. To avoid getting caught up in this mess, you need to protect your online store with the necessary precautions.
4. Optimize Your Checkout Process
The checkout process should be smooth and seamless so that users don’t get frustrated while shopping on your website or app during Black Friday sales.
The last thing your customers do is abandon their carts when they find it difficult or time-consuming to purchase anything from your site! So, make sure you offer an optimized and faster checkout experience to make the shopping experience better for your customers.
Additionally, you should add the best payment methods (Shopify payment, PayPal, Stripe, etc.) for your shoppers so that they can complete their payment hassle-free.
Read More: Shopify One Page Checkout Optimization To Skyrocket Your Sales
5. Ensure Your Payment Gateway Is Ready For a Massive Traffic Surge
For many businesses, BFCM sales are their biggest revenue generator of the year. Your payment gateway must be ready to accept high levels of traffic without crashing or slowing down when orders come flooding in.
If your current payment gateway isn’t able to handle high volumes of traffic during this period, consider other payment options that has a great server load capacity such as PayPal or Stripe (who both have great APIs).
6. Set Up a Customer Support Team To Assist Your Shoppers
Every customer expects an immediate response from their preferred brand or store. Many store owners don’t have enough customer support team on hand to help their customers. This leads to frustrated customers who can’t get an answer to their queries or have their issues resolved in time.
To avoid this situation, merchants must have at least one person dedicated to handling customer service queries and complaints during Black Friday.
Shopify BFCM Checklist 4# Create Your Black Friday Sales Strategy
Black Friday is one of the best times to promote your Shopify stores and boost your sales. To get the most out of Black Friday in your store, you need to have a better sales strategy this year.
1. Generate Black Friday Deals, Promo Codes & Discounts
Black Friday Cyber Monday is a time when people are looking to save money, so they look for deals and discount codes that give more for less money. Therefore, when you generate your Black Friday deals make sure it should more focus on benefitting customers to convert them easily.
Make sure that these offers are visible on your product pages so that your customers can see them and use them during their shopping spree.
2. Create Product Bundles, Upsells & Cross-Sells
You can create product bundles for some products with great combinations in your store so that the customers can buy several items at once instead of purchasing one item at a time. You can also offer upsells or cross-sells for certain products when customers check out by showing them other related items that they might want to buy.
3. Prepare Flash Sales & Giveaways To Boost Sales
Black Friday is all about discounts and sales, so you need to prepare at least one flash sale during this period. It will help you attract more customers and increase your conversion rate.
Giveaways are another great way to encourage more people to purchase from your store by giving them an incentive to do so. A giveaway can be something like a gift card or discount on product sale prices, but it doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. For example, you could offer a gift on all orders over $50 cart value or give away some free samples with every purchase made during the Black Friday holiday sale.
4. Make a Holiday Gift Guide
A holiday gift guide can help increase conversions by showing customers exactly what products they should buy for friends and family members on their wish lists. Create an exclusive holiday gift guide with products from your store and share it with your followers on social media channels.
This will encourage them to buy more products from your eCommerce store and increase its visibility among potential customers.
5. Set Up a Customer Loyalty Program
A customer loyalty program [2] is an excellent way to increase repeat purchases from existing customers, which can help you boost sales during the Black Friday season. You can add a discount code for first-time buyers or provide free shipping for orders over $100, etc., as part of this program.
6. Consider Running a Pre-Launch Sale
You can use a pre-launch sale to build buzz around your Black Friday event and generate early revenue. If you launch your BFCM sale before Black Friday, you’ll build excitement and drive traffic to your store. Therefore, consider running an early sale in late October or early November to increase customer anticipation and help them make their shopping list earlier on in the month.
Shopify BFCM Checklist 5# Plan Out Your BFCM Marketing Strategy
Black Friday is not only about discounts, it also allows you to expand your customer base by increasing your visibility in search engines and social media. This can lead to better brand awareness and eventually more sales over time.
The key to success is planning ahead and having a solid strategy in place. You can utilize your Google Analytics data to improve your marketing campaigns so that you can make the most of it.
1. Create a Promo Calendar
Before you begin your Black Friday Cyber Monday marketing campaign, make sure you have a promo calendar. This will help you determine when and where you should run your promotions as well as how much they’ll cost.
A pre-planned marketing calendar helps you stay organized, and also makes sure that you don’t miss out on any opportunities during the sale season.
2. Prepare Personalized Emails & Text Messages
Personalized emails and text messages are a great way to engage with your customers and increase conversions because these messages match their purchase histories, interests, and preferences. Online merchants can send personalized messages based on your customer’s interests and behavior, such as cart abandonment, recent orders, wishlists, and more.
You can also create personalized templates for the email marketing campaigns that can be used throughout the year to help improve sales performance and engagement with customers.
3. Connect With Influencers
Influencer marketing [3] is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your stores during Black Friday Cyber Monday sales. Consider reaching out to bloggers or influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and more who have large followings related to your niche or product category.
By working with these influencers, you can easily reach thousands or even millions of people with just one post!
4. Set Up Retargeting Ads On Social Media
Retargeting ads can help bring back customers who’ve visited your site or looked at products but didn’t buy anything. These ads will appear on thier social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram, where you can target people based on their previous activity on your online stores, such as pages they’ve visited or items they’ve added to their cart but not bought yet.
You’ll also see a significant boost in conversions when using retargeting ads because they’re targeted specifically toward people who have already shown interest in what you sell. But before you target them, make sure you have resolved the issue due to which they had abundoned the shopping cart; otherwise you won’t notice any improvement in the cart abandonment rate.
5. Run a Contest On Social Media
Contests are another great way to get more sales during Black Friday Cyber Monday holiday season. You can also run a contest on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram so that people will be interested in entering it and win an amazing prize from your store.
6. Plan Post-BFCM Activities
The post-BFCM period is just as important as the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend itself because it gives you a chance to retain customers who have already bought from you this year. If you can keep them coming back through the holiday season, they’ll become loyal customers who will buy from you again next year.
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Wrap Up!
Black Friday is the day when all the shops go crazy to make their store sales. If you haven’t started preparing your Shopify store for Black Friday yet, it’s not too late. You just need to get your Shopify BFCM checklist ready with all the essential tasks and setup processes before the holiday season starts.
Hope this guide will help you plan your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and grab more customers than last year. Please feel free to contact us in case you need Shopify experts to help you prepare your Shopify store for the biggest sale of the year.
