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Become Bulletproof: Upgrade Your Website for Black Friday and Cyber Week

Black Friday Feature Image

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are going to be huge for online retailers in 2021. 

With the global pandemic still in full swing, more people than ever before will be looking to shop for pre-Christmas bargains online. 

If you’re an eCommerce retailer looking to earn some extra money in lockdown, now is the time to ensure your website and online store is ready for Black Friday and Cyber Week. This means having a bullet-proof website that converts.

Here are our top 9 tips for making your website ready for the busiest shopping event of the year 

1. Be prepared for increased traffic 

Analytics Graph Upwards

The nightmare for all online sellers is that halfway through a killer sale, their website crashes. You could lose hundreds if not thousands of sales if you can’t keep your website online.

Before you do anything else, you need to make sure your website can withstand the extra traffic that your Black Friday marketing and Cyber Week sales will attract. 

If you have a Zyro website, your server space will scale up to meet your needs if you have an influx of traffic. However, if you use another service or self-host, you should check you’ll have space for the demand. 

You can run tests with services like LoadImpact ahead of time to ensure your website won’t fail under the pressure. 

2. Get your banners ready 

Pushing shoppers towards your big, Black Friday deals should be the focus of your website. As such, it makes sense to produce a series of creatives to plant around your website that both announce your deals and direct visitors to your shop. 

Editor’s note 📝 – Your Black Friday banners should be eye-catching and clear. Make sure that you prominently state what your deals are, include images of your best-selling products, and link directly to the pages on which they can be purchased. 

3. Create landing pages

Website on Laptop and Desktop

When visitors land on your website during Black Friday and Cyber Week, they want to find what they’re looking for immediately. 

Instead of directing traffic to your regular homepage, consider creating a series of separate landing pages or seasonal landing pages that appeal specifically to the interests of your traffic:

  • Think about the intent your visitors have
  • Feature what they’d like to buy prominently
  • Be sure to clearly advertise your deals on the landing pages

4. Create sale product listings 

When you plan properly, your work before or during Black Friday should be minimized. One of the best things you can do ahead of time is to create special product listings that you can roll out at the start of the deals. 

How you do this will depend on the eCommerce platform you’re using. It may involve simply timing updates to your existing listings, or creating new ones from scratch. 

Your deal product listings should:

  • Display the deal price
  • Display the normal price/discount
  • Show the level of stock left (the lower, the better)
  • State how long the deal is on for to create urgency

5. Add a countdown timer 

There’s no better way to build hype and suspense around your upcoming deal than to add a countdown timer to your website. 

You can also use the countdown timer to count from the start of your deals down to the end, creating an incentive and urgency for visitors to make a purchase. 

Most eCommerce will allow you to integrate a countdown timer widget with ease. 

5. Set up tracking pixels 

Including Google, Facebook, or other tracking pixels on your website will help you retarget advertising to shoppers who have already paid a visit to your store. 

These pieces of code, which can be added automatically using Zyro eCommerce, track which pages and items visitors are interested in when browsing your store. 

You can then launch ad campaigns for their associated platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), and shoppers will receive personalized featuring the items they are interested in. 

This helps drive traffic back to your website and is linked to higher conversions thanks to the customized, targeted ads. 

6. Update your abandoned cart recovery

Abandoned cart recovery is one of the best ways for you to capture possible sales that aren’t completed.

If visitors place items from your store into their shopping carts but never checkout, you can send automated emails that encourage you to return to your store to complete the purchase. 

In the runup to Black Friday, you should consider updating these emails to send in a shorter time frame, and to remind shoppers of the potential savings related to the deals you’re offering. 

7. Ensure your support is on point

Customer Support

All year round, your support should be exemplary. During big deal events, it should be world-class. If you have the resources you should make sure that you have live chat available 24/7. 

This isn’t just helpful show customers, but can also give you a conversions boost if queries are answered quickly. 

8. Make sure you’ll always have access 

While it should only be your website that’s working overtime during Black Friday, you should be keeping a close eye on what’s going on. 

Be sure to keep your schedule relatively clear, and know exactly how you can access and edit your store at any given time. 

If you run your store through Zyro, we recommend that you download our eCommerce app from within the dashboard. Not only can you keep track of all your listings and orders, you can even access your store data while offline. 

9. Plan for the unexpected 

You won’t have much space for things to go wrong during Black Friday and Cyber Week, as a flurry of activity keeps your store busy. That’s why you need to know what you’ll do if anything goes wrong. 

The simplest things you can do include ensuring you regularly backup your order records and website to ensure you never lose any important information. 

You should also make sure that your supply chain is streamlined, to make sure that you don’t have to put up a disappointing ‘sold out’ sign on product listings during the sales. 

Be realistic about what may go wrong, and have a plan of action to guard against it. If you put that in place, you’ll be set for a successful sales event.

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Written by

Author avatar

Duncan

Duncan is obsessed with making website building and eCommerce accessible to everyone. He explains the best tools and the latest digital marketing trends in ways that are clear and engaging. His focus is on supporting the sustainable growth of small to medium-sized enterprises. When not writing, he enjoys deep sea fishing and endurance cycling.

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