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You can never start planning earlier than Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) which is the most popular shopping time of the year. Both seasons have experienced an increase in sales year over year which means you'll need to prepare yourself to anticipate more site traffic and increased marketing competition, compared to the prior years.

If it's your first time conducting Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or you've been there before then you'll need to start developing this year's strategy today as you can use the following Black Friday checklist to get to work.

In order to help you prepare ahead for the season to come, we've broken this ecommerce Black Friday checklist into two components: the customer engagement checklist as well as the list to help you manage your back-end systems.

Black Friday checklist: Customer engagement

Let's start with the first customer engagement checklist.

Begin earlier

Really?

Start plan early so that you can begin implementing your marketing strategies earlier and boost sales.

Make an Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales start whenever you'd like. The public is beginning to realize this. Thus, create an initiative that is anti-Black Friday throughout the days preceding it.

"Why wait? It's time to buy now and you can take advantage of these fantastic bargains and get your shopping completed early."

A marketing strategy that doesn't promote Black Friday will promote benefits such as making the most of the holiday shopping season, crossing off your list before the rush, and enjoying your time in a relaxed state throughout December at all the shoppers in a rush because you got yours done earlier.

Combine this with an assortment of constantly-changing special offers and discounts in the days that lead up the day of Black Friday.

Try to connect with your targeted market

It is possible to do this with several product lines as well and run multiple ads that include Google and other social media platforms.

If you run an e-commerce shop selling healthy food.

A particular category of products includes proteins-enhanced breakfast bar. The other category offers gluten-free as well as dairy-free snack items. Another category includes nutritionally rich organic items. They can be advertised with the primary language of your brand, obviously.

But what does the target audience for each of these items look like? What is important to them? Use that same language within your Black Friday marketing content and your customers will be more involved and boost sales.

Identify products to feature this year

If you're selling a variety of products, don't do broad Black Friday sales that will impact your profit margins. Instead, focus on a select selection of products with amazing deals, to increase sales by using those to get an increase in customers to the store.

If you can motivate more purchase beyond Black Friday discounts, you'll increase average order value as well as net profit.

If you're in the market for overstocked, discontinued items, or seasonal items, these make great options for extreme discounts because you'll need to dispose of them in the event that you need to. Utilize items that you are able to produce in abundance for a special deal with your supplier, or products that are in great demand or have higher profit margins.

Also, think about creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages to showcase your top products, not just the normal product pages.

What products are you planning to feature with extreme Black Friday deals this year?

Create marketing strategies for several channels

Multichannel marketing is a good way to achieve greater results than targeting just a single channel. Choose at least three channels that you intend to utilize this year as part of your Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels include but are not limited to:

• SMS
• Social media, all the possible platforms including Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Direct post
• Radio and TV
• Video streaming online, such as YouTube and YouTube

Don't forget to design optimized landing pages and track the traffic to your website from your selected channels.

Prepare follow-up marketing strategies for use

Another key element to making money off Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other days of the holiday shopping season is to follow up with customers who have discovered your store online this year.

Yes, many Black Friday shoppers will come, buy, go, then disappear forever. However, you could win some of them and turn them into repeat and loyal customers.

Start a welcome email sequence. Start sending consistent email marketing. Try to segment your new customers according to what they already bought, in addition to any other details you've gathered regarding them based on their initial purchase encounter. After that, you can engage them with more relevant content in the new year.

Do you have a follow-up marketing strategy in place for Black Friday?

Utilize email to send the message out early and often

For Black Friday this year, create email marketing campaigns to reach your various customer segments prior to the rush of holiday shopping. It is important that they think of you before all the other online stores start vying for their customers' attention. They should be buying from you, while smaller business owners only waking up to the fact that they did not plan ahead in advance for Black Friday.

The initial email marketing campaign will likely be sent out by October. Email inboxes start to overflow at the end of November. Therefore, if you utilize email to get started planting seeds and offering discounts that are competitive before the rush, you'll boost sales, and increase the brand's reputation and build customer loyalty.

Create eye-catching visuals

Whether on your product pages or on the landing page pages that you'll design for items you choose to feature it is essential to use photographs that have high resolution to attract attention and allow your audience to experience the product within their fingers.

Send emails to abandoned carts

Getting these set up in advance of Black Friday will give you the chance to try out your strategies and determine which methods of marketing and deals work best for your online store.

Break your ad campaign into three components

You have a lot of items on your Black Friday checklist, and it can get overwhelming. For help in organizing your efforts and figure out what priorities to put in place, you can break the campaign down into three natural parts.

It's the first step in the run-up prior to Black Friday. The process begins at any time you'd like it to start, and ends the day before Black Friday.

After that, you'll have to deal with the day. This could be weekends or next week, if you're taking on the entire Cyber Week. It is up to you to define the 'day'.

Last, everything after the Black Friday period is the next stage of your marketing plan.

Black Friday is not just one of the days. Your strategy for marketing should cover the whole time.

Did you break into you Black Friday promotions campaign into three segments?

Make or edit your return policy

If you've run your e-commerce firm for some time then you're probably familiar with this. If not then now is the perfect time to create one. In the event that you already own one, perhaps you've discovered from previous experience that it's time to update yours.

• A process for return of items that have been shipped. Will you require the original packaging, exact product condition, etc. ?
• The policy on refunds. Does the customer receive their money back, store credit, or some other thing?
• Clear deadlines. When can customers send items back for credits or refunds?
• An address for shipping. What address will they use to send back items?
• Contact details. Which way can customers contact you with any additional inquiries?

And, your returns policy must be displayed whenever it is relevant. The policy should appear within the order confirmation email that goes out after the purchase has been made. It must be printed and placed in the product that is shipped. It should be on your website and be simple to locate, such as at the footer, the FAQ page, and on product pages.

Do you have an updated return policy?

Provide faster shipping options

The time for shipping can be extended in the holiday shopping time, when customers typically expect faster shipping choices.

According to the findings of a 2021 Baymard research, 19% of carts that are abandoned are due to delivery times being too slow. Offering more efficient shipping options will lower the number of lost sales. It can be a particularly effective method for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In addition, speedy shipping methods encourage buyers and ensure your items arrive in time during a season when shipping times may be a little longer due to the huge quantity of orders that carriers have to process.

Think about selling Buy Now and pay later

It is possible to make this feature accessible at the bottom of your checkout. You can also include it on the product's page, home page, landing page or wherever else you think it might help customers move beyond the price-related objections and continue purchasing.

Use a chatbot

Chatbots assist with customer support and increase sales. Most of the time people have basic questions that a chatbot can solve. If they could just get one or two issues clarified, they'll make a purchase.

However, if they must search for an email address, sift in help forums or wait for a live chat person to get back in touch, they're likely to leave the procedure and go to a different site.

If you are able to achieve it Chatbots can lower the cost of buying without an increase in customer service.

Take a look at the last year's Black Friday sales data

The tendency is to view every year as a brand new venture, where we start from scratch and reinvent the wheel, without benefit of hindsight.

However, if you've been operating an online store for any period of time and run Black Friday marketing campaigns before, you have some experience. There's some data you've gathered previously. Some of what you've done before probably performed effectively.

Before you go way too deep into planning for next year, review your results from last year. What worked well? What wasn't?

Are you able to replicate the success from the previous year? Can you improve by focusing on the things that failed?

Black Friday checklist Checklist for Backend Systems

We'll now move to our Black Friday checklist items that customers don't always see, yet you count on to help customers make purchases and enjoy a wonderful Black Friday shopping experience.

Make your website faster

95% of users are likely to leave a website if the website loads too slow. Site speed should be the top priority all times of the year however it is especially crucial in times of more visitors. There are several quick things you can do to speed up the loading time of your site:

• Test your website performance. Discover which parts of your site need optimization with a speed check. Software such as Pingdom as well as Page Speed Insights will let you know how quickly it loads and how well it performs in certain areas.
• Implement a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN serves your site's files from high-speed, dedicated, and geographically-distributed data centers. Your visitors will get caching content from the CDN closest to them that reduces load times and reduces bandwidth and load on your server. Jetpack comes with a free CDN as well, and in contrast to other providers, you are able to setup and install the Jetpack CDN in just one click.
• Optimize your images. Even if you're making use of the CDN which optimizes your images for you, it's good procedure to upload the least files that you can while maintaining the highest resolution. Exporting for web using Photoshop and using free image resizing and optimization tools like ImageOptim are easy ways to prepare your images for use on the internet.
• Change the hosting service you use. If you're on a shared server you may see lower load speeds, in particular if other sites on your server have high volumes of traffic. You should consider a virtual server (VPS) or dedicated server.

Here are some other ways you can increase the efficiency of the speed of your store.

Does your online store run as fast as it could be?

Sync inventory with product pages

Speed up and simplify the checkout process

Your checkout process may work, but is it efficient and intuitive? You want to keep the checkout process as easy as possible, with minimum distractions, to encourage customers to complete their purchase. A few things you can do to improve are:

• Remove the visual distractions. Eliminate header and menus for footers, widgets in the sidebar as well as other distractions from your checkout page so your customers remain focused on completing their purchase.

Make sure you are ready to complete orders and have them shipped on time

Do you have dropshippers and your suppliers ready to handle increased sales? Do you have the capacity to increase production if demand exceeds your expectations?

Although this can be a great issue to be faced with, you don't want to miss the chance to boost revenue and win more customers as your supply chain gets overloaded.

If you're looking to expand production prior to the holiday season, make sure to place orders at the earliest opportunity with your supplier of material. The same holds true if your products are manufactured by another company -- particularly if the items were made in a foreign country. Many other companies are taking orders from sellers to prepare for Black Friday sales as well Make sure that you lock your orders in well before the deadline. Otherwise, you could face high prices or no stocks items.

If you're using a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for shipping your merchandise, take a look at the past data on shipping and sales of your goods and request the company to shift stock to warehouses closest to the areas where you are likely to make the highest transactions. This helps speed the delivery process to your clients. If quick delivery times are important to you, ask your 3PL to deliver shipments more frequently and use carriers that offer the fastest delivery times.

Also, you may have to recruit more workers or expand hours in order to cope with the expected increase in production over the Christmas time. This is especially important when you're making handmade products or manufacturing products in-house. Even if the manufacturing is outsourcing, you may still have increased demand for customer service, order fulfillment, marketing, and much more.

Gather customer details in order to follow-up with marketing

Earlier, we discussed preparing to follow up should your store is visited by customers who may not have visited your e-commerce store in the past.

You can't contact them in the absence of the information of your customers.

If you're shipping products, you're bound to get you their mailing address. Direct mail marketing, however, and follow up costs much more than online marketing which is why you must be able follow-up via email or SMS, too.

For these, the buyer needs to be given the option to choose whether or not they want to. The best place to do this is right on the checkout page. On that page, solicit their email address as well as phone number, and be sure you have their consent to contact the customer via email or text. Make the phone number optional in order that those who aren't opted-in for SMS marketing don't become confused.

Not everyone will consent however, which is fine because some will. For those that do, you can now start your follow-up advertising strategy.

Are you prepared to collect contact numbers and email addresses?

Configure conversion tracking

It's important monitor customer behaviour and how well your marketing campaigns perform throughout Black Friday and the rest of the holiday season so you can make improvements next year.

Be sure that your website is secure

An easy and efficient way to enhance the security of your site is to install the security plugin. Jetpack comes with free security against brute force attacks which stops one of the most common forms of hacking, and 2-factor authentication to safeguard your login process. And Jetpack's WordPress security plug-in also offers automatic backups, malware scans, spam prevention downtime monitoring, and more.

Make sure your site works on all devices and browsers

Your online store must be displayed correctly on desktops, tablets, mobile devices and the most popular browsers. Check this out on your own devices very easily, but you'll also be interested in testing your site's display on a device and browser emulator, such as LambdaTest.

While you might not be able to ensure that your website looks and works flawlessly across every device and platforms, you can make use of tools such as Google Analytics for you to discover what the browsers and platforms your users are using. You can then concentrate your efforts on testing and revising your site to work best on those specific platforms.

Are your websites mobile-friendly and running on every device feasible?

Check your website's key functionality

Schedule your sale and coupon codes

Reduce the anxiety and anxiety of the most hectic shopping season of the year by doing as much as you can in the months prior to.

It's easy to create your coupon codes and planned sales ahead of time. After you've determined which items will have deals and when you'll be able to offer certain flash sales and special deals, as well as how the prices are likely to change with time, design the coupons and the additional back-end support systems to ensure sales success. If you're giving away a product with purchase, be sure that the items are on hand.

Highlight Black Friday sales on your website

Customers can't take advantage of sales when they aren't aware of the sale. Whether your customers come to your site organically or you bring them to your site through emails or paid advertisements, you'll want them to discover your sales quickly.

There are many methods to accomplish this:

• Use pop-ups to announce the sale, that include a call-to-action and button that takes them directly to the sale.
• Add a banner to your homepage promoting your sale.
• Add a "Black Friday deals" menu item on the navigation of your website.
• Highlight sale items in the shop's sidebar.
• Show sale icon on your product thumbnails.

Set up your customer service software

Although you might require more employees to help your sales or customer service team on Black Friday, onboarding and training temporary workers can be difficult and lengthy. There are many other methods to boost customer support as well as employing temporary employees.

Below are three customer service strategies to implement this year.

Provide a variety of options for customer support

Alongside direct line phone support -that you must provide when you can afford it -- here are some different ways for customers to get their questions answered.

• FAQs, or knowledge bases. Help customers help themselves by offering an easily navigable and accessible FAQ pages or a knowledge base
• Use a customer service contact page. Let people get to your customer service department via email with a contact form. Make use of conditional logic that is that is based on a user's query form to direct customer service inquiries to the right email address.
• You can put AI chatbots in action.Filter out some of the most commonly-asked questions like "How much does shipping cost?" or "Do you deliver to my country?" by using an AI chatbot. It will spare your customer service team valuable time as well as provide customers with fast answers to their most common questions.

Use a customer relationship management tool (CRM)

CRMs help you keep track of the customer's interactions with your company and quickly solve support issues, identify leads, and upsell your clients.

Jetpack CRM is a slim and easy-to-use tool that can be integrated directly into your dashboard. There are no contact limits and it's also among the cheapest CRM choices for retail stores.

Be sure that your customers instructions and FAQs for service are up to date

Check regularly your procedures to assist customers and be sure they're up to date. If there are any specific procedures or deals that your employees need to be aware of in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Make sure to document these procedures and make sure that your staff is aware of them. An informal meeting to go over your procedures one week or two prior to launching the Black Friday deals may help keep these procedures in mind for the staff.

Once you've optimized the experience of customer support to both visitors as well as your staff You may discover that you still need to recruit more staff members for the Christmas season. But maximizing your current team's efficiency will minimize the number of seasonal hires that you'll need to make.

Are you prepared for the festive shopping time?

The Black Friday checklist may seem like an overwhelming task to get ready for a sales which only lasts for a couple of days, but these tips weren't created for just the duration of one weekend.

When you've put them in place, many of these systems and strategies will continue to strengthen your online business every day. If you keep at the top of these things on your checklist all through the year, you won't have to make extraordinary efforts when the holidays roll around next year.