Black Friday & Cyber Monday have quickly become the most important dates in the calendars for eCommerce businesses and consumers. With Shopify alone, their total global eCommerce retail sales reached 6.3 billion in their 2021 BFCM sales. This was a 23% increase from their 5.1 billion sales for 2020 BFCM, which is only Shopify.
As we continue to see the increase in global sales across all eCommerce platforms for BFCM, there’s good reason to believe that consumers start their holiday shopping earlier this year and will extend until the end of the year. With this in mind, we’re here with some last-minute strategies to help you prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Improving and rescuing your cart abandonment
The idea of a shopping cart abandonment is when your potential customer adds products to their cart, but they do not complete their purchase. This can be caused by multiple reasons that might affect your customer’s decision. Maybe, you’re lacking purchasing incentives, there are vague return policies or high shipping costs. Abandoned carts have been an increasing problem across all industries today, and here are some of our recommendations to rescue your cart abandonment.
- You can highlight pop-ups of products your customers were looking at to entice them to revisit their cart with unique special offers or discounts.
- Offer free or complementary shipping for purchases over a specific amount. You could even bake these costs into your product’s cost to offset this. Most consumers don’t typically like to see a hefty shipping cost at the end of their cart and checkout process. By doing this, you’re encouraging them to purchase your products at a single price and without any additional costs.
- Send re-engagement emails to your customers about their abandoned cart items, and get creative with the email’s subject line to help bring them back. For example, if you offer free shipping for the holidays, you can mention that you include free shipping for all products in their pre-existing cart in the subject line.
Optimize the checkout process by looking for anything that slows down your customer's purchasing process
Your checkout process plays are large role in cart abandonment. The checkout process for your store should be intuitive, seamless, and straightforward.
You should enable Google autocomplete field options for your forms in the checkout process. By enabling autocomplete, it speeds up the time it takes your customers to checkout, which results in increases in your customer’s purchasing process. If you’re using Shopify, you can enable this option to speed up the checkout. You can learn more about it in their article.
If you’re planning on offering discount codes and holiday coupons, have you considered how your customers will use them at checkout? If your redeeming process is confusing, your customers may become increasingly frustrated during checkout, and they will abandon their cart. We recommend that your codes and coupons be valid, clear, and simple to redeem.
You should diversify and accept different payment methods from your customers. Let your customers pay for their purchases with their preferred payment method. We recommend you ensure that your checkout process includes different purchase options and ensure they all work. Be careful because it can become increasingly frustrating if your customer tries to pay with one of your many payment methods and it doesn’t work. Make sure to double-check check it works if you plan to add new payment methods.
Add updated images for the holiday season for your most popular products
During the biggest shopping season of the year, many eCommerce store visitors expect to see many images when shopping online.
Start by updating the images for your popular products and giving them a fresh look.
- Ensure that your images aren’t too big in file size either. If your file sizes are too big, it can cause slow loading times for your website pages. In turn, your customers will leave if they are exposed to slow-loading pages, and search engines will notice this and rank down your entire website, favoring other sites that offer a better experience.
- You can also bring hype to your existing products by teasing these updated images in your marketing or email campaigns. This excites your existing customers about your products leading into the holiday season.
Maintain a similar website layout and add holiday-themed pages
You can create holiday product pages specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Start by categorizing your gifts to make it easy for your customers to search for your products. Usually, during these two days, consumers buy gifts for other people in preparation for the holidays. You can create sections on your websites such as gifts for mom, gifts for dad, and something for the kids.
Begin to create holiday pages that provide transparency and set expectations. It’s important to let your customers know what to expect during this time of the year. We highly recommend that you freshen up your policies and support pages to ensure that they are aligned with Gooten’s policies so that you’ll get fewer angry customers and reviews.
You should always take the time to understand what your customers are looking for and how you can meet their holiday expectations. This alignment ensures consistency for the service you’re providing your customers and that their expectations are met.
Conclusion
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be coming soon, but it’s never too late to start implementing these strategies in preparation. Even if your business isn’t planning to focus on these two days, these strategies will help you prepare for the holiday season. There are many ways to optimize your e-commerce store, from focusing on SEO to improving your store’s frontend experience. It’s critical that you start preparing for the holidays, and we hope this list of strategies will help you have a successful Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday season!
