Black Friday is easily one of the busiest times for businesses – both online and office. However, there are a few things owners can do to prepare your business for Black Friday.
While it might be a lot to handle on the day, with the right preparation your business will be able to handle the influx of shoppers with ease.
How to prepare your business for Black Friday
- Word of the day: prepare
Block out some time to properly outline all your upcoming promotions. Select the products and do the maths. The festive season is a chaotic time as is, avoid any added panic by not leaving your Black Friday planning to the last minute.
- Pre-sale announcements
While Black Friday only rolls around at the end of the week, people are planning their purchases long before the actual day.
Give your audience a sneak peek into what they can expect on the big day. This way your customers can include your products or services into their budget.
- Have a back-up plan
This is the time to be realistically optimistic – hope for the best, but plan for the worse. That way, IF something does go wrong, you know exactly how you’ll deal with it.
Between shipping companies, restocking and sick team members, you have to know what you’ll do if things don’t go 100% according to your ideal plan.
- Test your traffic
All the surveys and stats show that your site needs to be ready for the onslaught of traffic it’s undoubtedly going to get (because of all those pre-announcements no doubt!). In less than 4 seconds, 25% of shoppers will abandon a slow-loading page and 79% of shoppers then won’t return to a website that was slow when they previously visited it. Don’t be part of those stats!
A sudden rush in traffic can not only slow down but also totally crash your website. Double-check with your host that they can handle the sudden burst of traffic and make any necessary changes in advance.
Shoppers want to be in and out as fast as they can on this big day, prepare your business for all that Black Friday traffic in advance.
- Stay in contact with your suppliers
Selling out is the goal – but that goal quickly turns into a nightmare when there’s a supply and demand issue. The last thing you’d want is to disappoint excited customers with supply problems.
After you’ve carefully created your promotions and mapped out the plan for the day – create your social media campaigns. This way when Black Friday does roll around, you don’t have to worry about creating a Facebook cover image or an Instagram post, you can focus on what really matters on the day – keeping your customers happy.
- Start using ads
Black Friday and the festive season is the optimal time to use digital marketing – people want to buy. They’re ready and willing to spend money so get in front of them while they’re keen to open their wallets.
Because of this eagerness to buy, people are open to ads and what you’re selling, you just need to put out the right content to the right people.
- Get better support
People are always going to have questions. You could have the most up-to-date FAQ page and hundreds of articles talking about the benefits and uses for your products and services, and people will still want to live chat or speak to someone on the phone.
This is simply human nature. Customers want that final reassurance that this is the right buy or that you’re the best brand for them- don’t fall short during this final stage in the customer journey.
Have a dedicated team member on the phone, on chat and someone monitoring your social media accounts – make the most of every customer interaction.
- Measure, track and analyze
There’s no such thing as failing, there’s only starting again from experience.
Measure, track and analyze every single marketing effort for Black Friday. This way you’ll know exactly what your customers are engaging with, what to do next year and what you should scale back on.
Every campaign is a learning experience and this is your chance to get the data that could help with making informed future decisions.
Now that you have a list of the ultimate ways to prepare your business for Black Friday, where do you think you’ll be placing your efforts this year?
