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It's never too early to start planning earlier than Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) which is the biggest shopping season in the entire year. Both seasons have experienced strong year-over-year growth, so you'll need be ready for the potential of more web traffic as well as increased advertising competition compared to previous years.

Whether this is your first time operating Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or you've been there before and you're ready to begin planning your strategy for this year's event today in advance, and you'll be able to utilize this Black Friday checklist to get to work.

For you to plan your plans to prepare for the coming season, we've broken this ecommerce Black Friday checklist into two sections: the customer engagement checklist as well as the one for your back-end systems.

Black Friday check list: customer engagement

Let's start with the customer engagement checklist first.

Start earlier

Really?

So, start your plan early so that you'll be able to begin your marketing strategies earlier and maximize your sales.

Create an Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales start whenever you want them to. People are starting to understand this. Therefore, you should run an initiative that is anti-Black Friday in the weeks prior to the event.

"Why wait? Now is the time to shop, so grab these great discounts and get shopping started before the deadline."

A marketing strategy that doesn't promote Black Friday will promote benefits such as getting a jump on your Christmas shopping, ticking off your wish list ahead of the crowds, and enjoying your time in a relaxed state throughout the month of December watching all the shoppers in a rush due to the fact that you've completed your shopping earlier.

Pair this with an array of constantly-changing special offers and bargains in the months leading up the day of Black Friday.

Make sure you reach your market

It is possible to do this with several product lines as well and create several ad campaigns that include Google as well as other social media platforms.

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

A particular category of products includes protein-enhanced breakfast bars. A different category includes gluten-free and dairy-free snacks. And another includes nutrient-rich all-natural items. You can advertise each with your main brand language naturally.

What is the intended audience for each of these products be like? What is important to them? Put that language in your Black Friday marketing content and your customers will be more interested and increase sales.

Choose the products you want to highlight this year

If you have a lot of products, don't do broad Black Friday sales that will bite into your bottom line. Instead, highlight a few products with amazing deals, and then increase profits by making use of them to bring many more people to your doors.

If you are able to motivate additional orders beyond Black Friday discounts, you'll boost the average value of your order and net profits.

If you have overstock products, items that are no longer in stock, or other seasonal products, they can be great alternatives for massive deals because you need to sell them out anyway. Make use of items you have abundantly for a great deal with your supplier, as well as products that are high demand or earn larger profit margins.

And consider creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages for your most important items, rather than just your usual product page.

Which products can you feature in the face of extreme Black Friday deals this year?

Prepare marketing for various channels

Multichannel marketing can yield more results than using only one channel. Choose at least three channels that you intend to employ this year to implement the Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels can include, but aren't only

• SMS
• Social media: all platforms like Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Direct Post
• TV and radio
• Online video like streaming and YouTube

Make sure to build optimized landing pages as well as track the web traffic you get from each of your chosen channels.

Have follow-up marketing plans ready to go

The other key to profiting from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the Christmas shopping period is to communicate with potential customers who discover your online store in the coming year.

Many Black Friday shoppers will come, buy, go, and never be seen again. But you can win some of them and turn them into repeat and loyal customers.

Start a welcome email sequence. Start sending consistent email marketing. Make sure to categorize your prospective customers according to what they've already purchased and any additional details you've gathered regarding them based on their initial buying experience. After that, you can engage them with additional relevant content during the year ahead.

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

Use email to get messages out quickly and often

For Black Friday this year, develop email marketing campaigns in order to target your different customer segments before the holiday rush. It is important that they think of you before all the competing online retailers start competing for attention. They should be buying from you while the others with small businesses are only waking up to the fact that they did not plan beforehand in advance for Black Friday.

The initial email marketing campaign is likely to go out in October. The email inboxes begin to overflow in late November. So if you can utilize email to get started planting seeds and offering discounts that are competitive before the rush, you'll improve sales, and increase the brand's reputation and build customer loyalty.

Create eye-catching visuals

On your product pages as well as the landing pages or pages you'll create for products you've decided to showcase, you'll need some high resolution images to grab the attention of your visitors and allow them to practically feel the product within their fingers.

Create abandoned cart emails

Setting up these ahead of Black Friday will give you the chance to try out your marketing strategies, and discover which advertising strategies and promotions work best for your online store.

Your ad campaign can be broken down into three pieces

You have a lot of items to check off on your Black Friday checklist, and it can get overwhelming. For help in organizing your efforts and know what to prioritize, you can break the entire campaign into three essential elements.

The first is the build-up to Black Friday. The process begins at any time you'd like it to begin it ends on 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. You can define what constitutes the 'day'.

Then, anything that happens after following the Black Friday period is the phase that follows your marketing strategy.

Black Friday is only one day. Your marketing strategy should encompass the entire time.

Did you break into the Black Friday promotions campaign into three components?

Create or update your return policy

If you've been running your online firm for some time it's likely that you have this. However, if not it's time to create one. In the event that you already have one, maybe you've learned from prior experience that yours needs to be updated.

• An option for returning shipped items. Will you require your original packing, exact quality, etc. ?
• The policy of refund. Do customers receive their refund, store credit, or something else?
• Clear deadlines. When can customers return items for full refunds or credit?
• An address for shipping. What address will they use to send back products?
• Contact details. What is the best way for customers to get in touch with additional questions?

The returns policy must be displayed frequently as is necessary. This should be included on the email notification for orders sent out following the purchase has been made. The email should be printed, and included in the package. It should be on your website and be easy to find, such as in the footer, on the FAQ page, or on product pages.

Are you aware of the latest returns policy?

Offer faster shipping options

Delivery times may increase in the holiday shopping season and customers often expect faster shipping choices.

According to an 2021 Baymard study from 2021 the study found that 19% of carts that are abandoned are due to delivery times being too slow. Offering quicker shipping options could reduce these lost sales and is a great method in the period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Fast delivery methods incentivize customers and ensure your items arrive in time in the season where shipping times may be slow due to the large volumes of shipping that the carriers process.

Consider the possibility of offering Buy Now or Pay Later

This option can be made available right on the checkout page. However, you could also highlight it on the product page, home page, landing page or wherever else you think it might aid customers to overcome an objection to price and stay buying.

Employ the chatbot

Chatbots assist with customer support and boost sales. The majority of the time people have basic concerns that chatbots are able to answer. If they could just have a couple of questions answered, they'll make a purchase.

If they are forced to find an email address, sift through help forums, or just wait for live chat support to respond, they are likely to leave the process and shop elsewhere.

If you are able to make it happen Chatbots can reduce buying friction without requiring additional customer service personnel.

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

It's common to think of every year like a new venture, where we start from scratch and reinvent the wheel with no advantage of experience.

But if you've had an online store for a period of time and run Black Friday marketing campaigns before then you've got some knowledge. There's some data you've gathered previously. Some of what you've done previously may have worked very well.

Before you go too far into your planning for next year, review your results from last year. What was successful? What wasn't?

Do you have the potential to repeat your success from the previous year? Can you improve by focusing on the things that failed?

Black Friday checklist: Backend systems

We'll now move to our Black Friday checklist items that consumers don't see every day, however, you rely on to help customers make purchases and have a great Black Friday shopping experience.

Make your website faster

90% of customers abandon a site when the website loads too slow. Site speed should be top of the list at all times of the year, but it's especially important for those who anticipate an increase in volume of traffic. Here are some quick things you can do to speed up the loading time of your site:

• Test your website performance. Find what areas of your site need optimization by running a speed test. Tools like Pingdom and Page Speed Insights will tell you how fast it loads and how well it performs in particular 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 with cached content by the CDN closest to them this reduces load time and conserves bandwidth and loads on your server. Jetpack comes with a free CDN as well, and in contrast to other providers, you are able to connect and configure the Jetpack CDN in the click of a button.
• Improve your image. Even if you're making use of a CDN that optimizes your files for you, it's a good method to upload only the minimum file size necessary while preserving a high-quality resolution. Exporting for web using Photoshop as well as using the free tool for image resizing and optimizing such as ImageOptim is a simple way to get your photos ready to be uploaded on the internet.
• Upgrade the hosting service you use. If you're on shared servers you may see lower load speeds, in particular if other sites that are on the server experience significant spikes in traffic. Think about a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.

Here are a few other ways you can improve the speed of your shop.

Is your ecommerce website running as quickly as it can be?

The inventory syncs with the products pages

Simplify and speed up the checkout process

The checkout procedure may be working however, is it effective and intuitive? You want to keep the checkout process as easy as possible, with minimum distractions, to encourage your customers to finish their purchase. Some things you could implement to make your checkout more efficient are:

• Eliminate the visual distractions. Eliminate header and menus for footers, widgets in the sidebar and any other distractions on your checkout page so that the customer is completely focused on their purchase.

Be ready to fulfill orders on time and deliver your items

Do your dropshippers and suppliers ready to handle increased sales? Are you able to ramp up production in case demand is higher than your expectation?

While this is a good situation to face but you shouldn't squander the opportunity to increase the revenue of your business and gain new customers because the supply chain becomes overwhelmed.

If you're looking to expand production ahead of the holiday season, make sure to place orders with your material suppliers early. The same holds true if your items are produced by a different firm -- especially when the products are created overseas. Many other companies are taking orders from sellers in preparation to prepare for Black Friday sales as well Make sure that you secure your order before the deadline. If you don't, you may be faced with higher prices or be out of stock products.

If you're working with the services of a third party logistics service (3PL) to ship your goods, review historic data on shipping and sales of your goods and request the company to shift stock to warehouses near the locations where you typically make the most business. This can speed up delivery times to your clients. If speedy delivery is paramount to your business then ask your 3PL to send frequent shipments and choose companies that provide the fastest delivery times.

You may also need to hire more staff or expand hours in order to cope with the expected increase of production in the festive season. This is particularly important when you're making handmade products or producing products in-house. However, even if production outsourcing is done, you may still have an increased need for customer service or order fulfillment, marketing, and more.

Prepare to collect customer information for follow-up marketing

In the past, we talked about preparing to follow up when your store is visited by customers that haven't previously visited your online store previously.

However, you won't be able to follow-up if you don't collect their information.

If you're shipping items, you're bound to get you their mailing address. But direct mail marketing and follow-up costs significantly more than digital marketing, so you want to be able to follow up with email, and perhaps SMS as well.

To do that, the purchaser needs to be given the option to choose whether or not they want to. The most effective place to make this happen is on the checkout page. On that page, request their email address and telephone number. Make sure you have their permission to communicate with customers via text and email. But make the phone number optional so that the customers who do not opt-in to text message marketing won't get confused.

Not everyone will consent, and that's okay, because some will. For those that are, now is the time to start your follow-up advertising strategy.

Are you prepared to collect email addresses and phone numbers?

Set up conversion tracking

You'll want to be able to monitor the behavior of your customers and how well your marketing efforts perform during Black Friday and the rest of the Christmas season, to make adjustments next year.

Make sure your website is secure

An easy and efficient way to improve your website's security is by installing the security plugin. Jetpack includes no cost protection against brute force attacks which stops an attack that is one of the more prevalent forms of hacking, and two-factor authentication to safeguard your login method. And Jetpack's WordPress security plug-in also offers regular backups, malware scanning and monitoring of downtime for spam prevention along with other features.

Check that your website works across all devices and browsers

The website you're selling on must display correctly on desktop devices, tablets, mobile phones, and all leading browsers. It is possible to test this using your personal devices quickly, however you'll want to test how your store displays using a browser and device emulator such as LambdaTest.

While you might not be able to ensure that your site looks and works flawlessly across 100% of devices and operating systems, you can use tools like Google Analytics for you to discover what web browsers and gadgets your customers are using. You can then put your focus on testing and revising your site to work best for the specific platform.

Are your websites mobile-friendly and working on as many devices as is

Verify the key functions of your site

Create your sales schedule and coupon codes

It is possible to reduce the stress and stress that comes with the biggest holiday shopping time of the year by doing everything possible in the months beforehand.

A simple task is setting up coupons and planned sales ahead of time. When you've figured out which products will have deals as well as the timeframe for certain flash sales and special deals, as well as how the price will fluctuate over time, you can create coupon codes and other backend support systems that ensure sales success. If you're planning to offer a free present with purchase, make sure that the items are available.

Make sure you highlight Black Friday sales in your online store

Customers can't take advantage of a sale without knowing about it. Even if your clients visit your site naturally or get them there through email marketing and paid advertising, you'll want them to be able to find your sales easily.

There are several ways to do this:

• Implement pop ups announcing the sale, with a call to action and a button that will take direct to the sales.
• Include a banner on your home page to promote your sales.
• Include an "Black Friday Sales" menu item on the navigation of your website.
• Highlight sale items in your shop page sidebar.
• Display sale icons on the thumbnails of your products.

Prepare your customer service software

While you may require more employees to assist your sales and customer service team on Black Friday, onboarding and training temporary workers is laborious and time-consuming. There are other ways to improve customer service in addition to hiring temporary staff.

Below are three customer-service methods to try this year.

Give a range of choices to support customers

Alongside direct line phone support -- which you should offer if you have capacity for it, here are different ways for customers to receive answers to their queries.

• FAQs and knowledge base. Help customers help themselves by providing an easy-to-use and easily accessible FAQ page or knowledge base
• Use a customer service contact page. Let people get in touch with your customer service department via email with a contact form. Utilize conditional logic, in response to the question type to route questions from customers to the appropriate email address.
• You can put AI chatbots in action.Filter out some of the most commonly-asked queries such as "How much will shipping cost me?" or "Do you deliver to my country?" by using an AI chatbot. This can save your customer service staff valuable time as well as provide customers with rapid answers to the most basic of questions.

Utilize a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM)

CRMs can help you track the interactions of your customers with your company and quickly solve support issues, identify leads, and upsell your customers.

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

Check that your customer services procedures and FAQs are up to date

Review your procedures to assist customers and be sure they're up to date. If you've got any particular procedures or deals that your employees must know about for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Document them, and make sure your team is aware of them. An informal meeting to discuss your procedure a week or so before you launch the Black Friday deals may help keep these new processes top-of-mind for your staff.

When you've streamlined your customer service experience for your customers as well as your staff You may discover that you're still required to recruit more staff members to assist you during the holiday season. But maximizing your current team's performance will decrease the amount of seasonal employees that you'll need to make.

Are you ready for the festive shopping time?

It's a Black Friday checklist may seem like an overwhelming task to prepare for a sale that only lasts a few days, but these tips aren't designed only for one weekend.

When you've put them in place, the systems and methods will continue to strengthen your business online every day. If you stay in the forefront of these items on your checklist throughout the year, you won't have to make extraordinary efforts for the holiday season next year.