…sales are expected to top £7 billion this year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the UK alone. Can you afford to miss out?
Nothing screams ‘it’s almost Christmas’ like Black Friday – I know, I said it; the ‘C’ word, but it’s true. Many of us will spend hours scouring the web to research and find the biggest and best deals on 29th November.
Either so we can splash out on the stuff we want for ourselves or pick up cool, dirt-cheap Christmas gifts for others. However you choose to get involved in Black Friday (or not) there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a big deal and it’s getting bigger in the UK every year.
Retailers – Black Friday not on your radar? It absolutely should be
Here in the UK, us Brits are a little behind on the Black Friday phenomenon compared to the well versed veterans in the US. However, in the UK, consumers buying and partaking in Black Friday continues to grow every single year.
In fact, sales are expected to top £7 billion this year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the UK alone. Can you afford to miss out?
Shoppers are researching Black Friday deals as early as September
It might sound ridiculous to believe, but shoppers are literally itching to get their hands on the best Black Friday deals as early as September according to Google Trends:
This gives you a real opportunity to capture the eyes (and wallets) of customers earlier than your competitors. I’ll shed more light on this later.
Avoid the mistakes many online retailers make
If you’ve not guessed it, this post is all about how to ensure your Black Friday campaign is a hit with your visitors and shoppers. I’m also going to share how you can avoid the mistakes many online retailers make that’s costing them customers and sales every year.
Let’s focus at these four key areas
I’m going to dive in to four key areas including:
- SEO – Extracting the best rankings and traffic from Google during the Black Friday event
- Merchandising – How to attract more customers and sales with effective merchandising
- Customer experience – Why a great CX is important for increasing returning customers and why it’s so important to get it right
- Reducing abandonment – Ways you can proactively reduce checkout abandonment, improve conversion and maximise sales
SEO
Using the same page URL every year for Black Friday will pay dividends for SEO
This is where so many retailers make their first mistake. Every year retailers are killing last year’s equity-rich Black Friday pages only to spin up new ones. This puts retailers on the back foot for one key reason.
Newly built pages can take longer to rank than older, more established ones. Ultimately, this means newer pages are less likely to perform as a page that’s been attracting links and equity for several years.
By using the same URL every year, your page is likely attracting more and more equity via backlinks each year and is already known to Google and other major search engines. As a result, your Black Friday page is likely to rank better and possibly higher than your competitors too.
There’s other benefits to using the same URL too
You can rest assured that if you’re using the same Black Friday URL every year, shoppers from your previous Black Friday events that may have bookmarked or shared the page can be confident that it will continue to work for future years too. Another small yet positive way to improve customer experience.
Make your Black Friday page work months before Black Friday
Now you’re using the same URL every year, why not take full advantage and get the page working for you for more o f the calendar?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article:
…shoppers are literally itching to get their hands on the best Black Friday deals as early as September
Leverage traffic from this influx of ready-to-spend shoppers before the event and use it to grow your mailing list.
Give your audience and potential customers something to whet their appetite. Maybe give them an exclusive, VIP access pass to your biggest deals, an extra discount, or for those who subscribe to be the first to know what deals you’ll be tempting shoppers with before anyone else.
Make your Black Friday page work long after Cyber Monday too
Again, using the same URL means you can benefit here too. So Black Friday’s finished? Well guess what, not all Black Friday shoppers have. By keeping your Black Friday page active, you can lightly tweak the copy and campaign and still grab shoppers who are sniffing around for those last deals.
By continuing to keep the page active after BF, you’ll likely rank higher too as your competitors begin to take down theirs.
If you don’t want to continue selling, then why not use the page to again grow your mailing list? A few ideas:
- Missed out on our BF deals? Make sure you don’t next time by joining our mailing list
- Missed out on BF? Be the first to know about our Xmas offers
Once a Black Friday item has sold out, don’t disable the product’s page!
Again, something you’ll competitors will likely be doing once a Black Friday item has sold through is to disable/delete the product’s page. This is a bad idea for two reasons:
- You’ve dramatically reduced your chances of being able to sell them an alternative option – No one expects to be taken to a product only to see a 404 page or to be redirected elsewhere. It’s annoying.Ok, so the item’s sold out – not a great feeling; but by taking them to the page they were expecting to go to, you can at least recommend some similar alternatives for them to check out.
- 2. Disabling / deleting the page without redirecting kills backlinks to your site – Black Friday items are some of the most linked to items in the eCommerce space. If you’re lucky enough to get hot coverage for your Black Friday items, don’t just waste it.This is just a light summary, I go in to much more detail on why it’s important and how to manage out of stock / discontinued products in this blog post.
Merchandising
When it comes to Black Friday. Actually scrap that.. When it comes to any eCommerce site, there’s no excuse for poor merchandising. Bad shopping experiences increases abandonment and directly erodes conversion rate.
You wouldn’t put up with a poorly thought out or laid out supermarket, so why would you expect your customers to put up with the same online?
Build your Black Friday landing pages and stack them together (there’s a limit)
Remember that your shoppers and visitors will enter your site on multiple pages, so it’s important to make every page a landing page.
What I mean by this is, the experience needs to be awesome regardless of where your visitors are entering. It’s not just a case of merchandising the top Black Friday page. Optimise the sub-category pages too.
However, there is a limit. Adding in too many merchandised pages/clicks before a shopper gets to see product and you’ll likely to frustrate them. I find that 2 works nicely here. Anymore and it can appear as if you’re making shoppers work too hard to buy from you.
Product pages are often the most visited landing page for eCommerce, merchandise here too
Over the years, I’ve worked on many eCommerce websites and it’s not unusual to see that the majority of visitors enter your website via product pages (PDP pages). Especially if you’ve large number of items. To make your Black Friday campaign work hard, you need to merchandise here too.
Place a well-fitting Black Friday banner on every product page linking to the right page
This way a customer can quickly check out your Black Friday deals. Better yet, if you’re using Google Tag Manager and dataLayer, track clicks on the banner too to check performance and see whether this is creating sales and what impact it’s having.
To take this a step further, why not link to other Black Friday products that are in the same category? So for example, if a shopper is looking at oil filters, they’re just a click away from looking at other oil filters that are also in your BF deal.
Avoid merchandising the basket and checkout
When shoppers are at the basket, typically they’re in the purchase mindset. There’s enough to fight against when it comes to mitigating basket / checkout abandonment, don’t introduce another one.
In fact, the basket and checkout should be as distraction-free as possible. Avoid tearing them away from the basket funnel with banners or other Black Friday promotional material.
Customer experience
Providing a great customer experience increases conversion rate and AoV, naturally. But that’s not all. If customers enjoy using your website and find it easier to use than some of your competitors, you’re also reactively increasing LTV and how likely they are to be a repeat customer too.
Add a Black Friday filter on to all applicable categories and search results
This way your visitors can quickly narrow down and focus on just the Black Friday deals. You’d be surprised just how much of a difference such a simple toggle/filter can make to your customers and sales. It really does make shopping easier for your customers.
For Pete’s sake – optimise your site’s search for ‘Black Friday’ terms!
Here’s where so many retailers throw actual money and sales down the drain. Don’t believe me? This was snapped on Sunday 27th October from homebase.co.uk. Yup, nothing found!
Now, homebase.co.uk may not get themselves involved in the Black Friday event and that’s fine – but that doesn’t mean visitors won’t be searching for it. They could definitely do better here.
Direct your shoppers to the right place when they search on your website for search terms that include ‘Black Friday’ instead of showing, ‘No results found’. It really does make the world of difference to your customers, conversion and your sales.
Argos have the right idea. This webpage was shown for the search, ‘Black Friday’:
Get creative with your site search; an idea? Hide an Easter egg on the search page
Ok, so Black Friday hasn’t started yet, but that’s no reason to not at least get creative with it for the run up. As an example, when a visitor searches for anything on your website that contains ‘Black Friday’ take them to a page with something hidden or features a cool surprise.
How about a code for free delivery or something inexpensive to really wow your customers. A free bag of sweets with their next order when they enter ‘FREESWEETS’ at the checkout perhaps?
My point here is get creative and be original, give your customers the wow factor that makes them not only shop with you during Black Friday but across the rest of the year too.
Reducing abandonment
Ok so this section isn’t necessarily specific to just Black Friday, but as we’re enter peak shopping season, it’s important to get these elements right to avoid losing out in the run up to Christmas.
Are you offering the right payment options?
So for major retailers, this isn’t so much of an issue as they often have all their bases covered in regards to the types of cards you can pay with. This will be more applicable for smaller websites. But even the larger retailers can do better by offering more options like AMEX (not all do).
If you’re only offering PayPal at the checkout, you’re definitely losing sales
As popular as PayPal is, not everyone is willing to pay using it and not everyone knows that you actually do not need a PayPal account to pay by card.
In fact, according to the ex Ex Senior VP of PayPal], Dana Stalder said that the overwhelming majority of consumers prefer to pay using their bank card (debit or credit) and a minority (<10%) prefer using PayPal.
This proves that if you’re a retailer that’s only offering PayPal as a payment option at the checkout, you’re definitely losing sales and you’re therefore definitely losing customers.
The more payment options on offer, the less likely your customers will abandon
Just to be clear, I’m not saying to avoid PayPal altogether; but what I am saying is to offer as many payment options as you can. Offer American Express. Yes the fees are higher and it takes longer for you to get the funds than say with Visa or Mastercard, but a growing number of customers in the UK are wanting to pay this way (me included).
I’m not just referring to card types either – consider offering AmazonPay, Apple Pay and Android Pay too. These services are great because your customers don’t even need to fumble around to get their bank cards to enter. You’re saving them admin and reducing the amount of effort needed to buy from you- that’s always a win.
If you’ve no discount codes running during your Black Friday event, remove the field from the checkout
According to Barilliance, one of the key and most impacting why shoppers abandon at the checkout is due to seeing a discount code field which prompts them to go and find one. When they don’t find a code, many often abandon.
To reduce falling victim to this, if you’re not running any discount codes during your Black Friday event, temporarily remove the field at your basket and/or checkout. Again, this will help to remove the distraction and reduce abandonment too.
To wrap this detailed post up…
Black Friday can be a massive sales boost for your business, but it can also be a huge missed opportunity if you fail to get the basics right and don’t best serve your shoppers.
However, deliver an awesome customer experience, bake SEO in to the core of the campaign and merchandise effectively and this Black Friday could be your best yet!
Good luck! 🙂
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