How to Prepare Your Website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

 Here are ten tips for how to prepare your store for Black Friday, divided into two sections — getting your store ready and reaching out to customers.● Preparing Your Store for Black Friday Cyber Monday

● Bringing Customers To Your Store For Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Preparing Your Store for Black Friday Cyber Monday

1. Start early – Customers start looking for deals in October.

Start planning for Black Friday now if you haven’t started. A survey found more than half of consumers begin their holiday shopping or researching for Black Friday as early as October. This is the time to entice with coupon codes and special offers.

2. Check Your Site Speed and Checkout Process – Slow Site Means No Sales

A lack of speed will turn customers off. You want to make sure that doesn’t happen on your website.

3. Apply the right discounts

For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, most people are looking for at least 20-30 percent off the items they buy. So naturally, you want to be competitive. However, in order to stand out, you may want to consider offering a free gift with your products as a way to sweeten the deal. Shopify allows you to add gift cards to your store for free. ​

Bringing Customers To Your Store For Black Friday / Cyber Monday

1. Use Social Media

While social media tends to cast a wider net in terms of marketing, these platforms can help you tease upcoming promotions and provide creative ways of distributing deals. You can also boost your posts to target specific audiences or reach a larger crowd for only pennies on the dollar.

Please make sure, if you run advertisements on Facebook, the more engagement that you get through your advertisements, the better they do.

2. Email Marketing

Email truly is a star marketing tool, and a healthy, growing email list is invaluable for your small business or website. Email marketing gives you an opportunity to directly connect with your loyal customers and those who have joined your email list. This gives you the opportunity to provide them with a special discount for their loyalty.

3. Start with Interesting Email Headlines

When starting your email campaign early is important, you want to be sure that those emails are being opened. People are more likely to open something that they can tell is pertinent to them. You can include their name in the headline and detail about the email.

4. Make use of Word of Mouth (like Referral Programs)

While bigger brands are increasing their media and ad spend, you can make use of a more personal, intimate channel: conversations. That’s a channel that’ll cut through the noise and bring you extra traffic during this over-exposed season.

5. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If you’ve got more of a marketing budget at your disposal, you can utilize PPC to have more control over your search engine rankings and at best, turn clicks into customers and see strong ROI. The basic steps: create an ad and make bids on virtual auctions for top placement in search engines. pay-per-click advertising allows you to pay for more clicks right now.

6. Keep an Eye on the Competition

Due to the increasing popularity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals flooding every inch of the web, your small business needs to set itself apart against other small operations and big-name retailers.

Consider offering a gift (or an additional discount on future return purchases) with each sale, expedited or free shipping, special packaging, or customized thanks-for-shopping messages from your business.

7. More Buzz

In addition to your organized marketing efforts, you can boost the hype for your Black Friday steals by engaging in additional awareness-building activities like:

● Utilize Hashtags

● Build-in Scarcity

● Craft Winning Copy and Create Alluring Graphics

● Update Your Blog

● Display Shop Signage