Once upon a time, the festive season held a position of utter retail dominance. Stores would build so much of their schedules around maximizing revenue as Christmas neared, desperate to take advantage of the massive appetite for consumerism. Today, though, there’s another top dog, and it arrives in November instead: yes, the hype around Black Friday has now reached the point of driving more revenue than Christmas.
This bears noting because there are still some sellers who don’t do anything notable to take advantage of it. This is clearly a massive mistake. And while it’s the beginning of September as I write this, late November will arrive before you know it. Will you be ready to profit from the huge rise in demand? Or will you miss out for another year?
The key, then, is to begin your BFCM preparations (BFCM being Black Friday through to Cyber Monday) as quickly as possible. The sooner you start, the better your position will be when that hectic period arrives. To that end, here are some tips for preparing your website for BFCM:
Design some branded merchandise to offer
As much as you’d no doubt like to undercut the competition around BFCM, offering the lowest prices and earning the most sales, that’s a difficult thing to achieve. There’s always going to be someone willing to take a smaller profit margin, or even operate at a loss in an effort to carve out market share. But if you won’t have the lowest prices, how can you set yourself apart?
One option that more and more companies are using is creating and offering branded merchandise to add value to BFCM offers. In addition to reducing something by 20%, you can throw in a branded hat or T-shirt: such items have huge profit margins because they don’t cost that much to create, so they can make your deals more appealing without eating into your profits. It’s also easy to throw your logo on items through print-on-demand services like Printful.
Be mindful that your standard needs to be high, though. The industry around creative products has grown hugely owing to print-on-demand and creator-targeted platforms like Big Cartel, and even the cheapest branded items are expected to be high-quality. Going with bargain-basement merchandise will damage your brand in the long term, so sample products before selling them.
Ensure that your hosting can handle the traffic
When your Black Friday sales get underway, will your site be able to endure the stress? Keep in mind that your number of active visitors could easily rise by a factor of ten (or even more if one of your offers really strikes a chord), so even if your site normally has no issues with performance, it’s far from impossible that people will start to encounter errors.
Delve into your hosting plan to see what the limitations are, then review your store analytics to see how much breathing room you have. And if you concentrated more on value when you were originally setting up your store, check to see that your chosen CMS can scale well: simply having the computational and storage resources at hand doesn’t guarantee that the store architecture can handle a lot of traffic without something breaking.
Something that can help is having a cybersecurity company stress-test your store (just as you might test software) to see how it holds up. If any issues arise, you can address them and ensure that they’ve been resolved by the time November gets here. The alternative of doing manual checks and extrapolating from them as best you can just isn’t as reliable.
Update your website copy accordingly
While most people searching directly for items around BFCM will be using standard keywords, others will have no particular products in mind and simply want to locate the best deals. They might search for terms like “best Black Friday deals 2021”, for instance — and if you want to maximize your sales, you need to improve your chance of appearing when they do.
Part of this will require updating your product listings to tag products based on discounts. If you have a set BFCM sale, as you should, you should make it clear which products are included and which aren’t. That way, someone can visit a page that displays only the items currently discounted by BFCM, helping them to feel that they’re getting a great deal.
In addition to this, you can aim to rank for those general terms by creating your own blog posts listing the best Black Friday deals (concentrating largely on your own, naturally) and reaching out to the authors of highly-ranking deal roundups to let them know what you’re selling. If there’s a specific offer you think will impress people, promote it: if it ends up on a high-profile deal curation website, it could become a tremendous profit-driver for you.
Image Credit: Wallpaper Flare
