Get A Head Start On The Competition For Black Friday 2024

Annually, the Black Friday period has turned into a retail juggernaut, threatening to push anything non-promotional out of the limelight. As the Black Friday window has lengthened from being just the actual Friday, to in some cases a full month long promotion, you have to be planning ahead if you don’t want to fall behind your competitors.

Don’t Leave It To Chance

Don’t leave it to chance and hope your loyal customers will buy from you during that window. Your competitors will probably have already started their preparations to maximise their sales through the period, so you should start at least have the outline of a plan outlined, even if it’s not the finished article.

I know for small to medium businesses in particular, this can feel daunting when your competitors have huge marketing budgets. However, if you put the building blocks in place now, you’ll stand a much better chance of taking more sales in November and December.

I am here to provide you with a number of methods and options to at least think of implementing. It isn’t an exhaustive list as every business has their own products, customers and quirks. What I can do though is to formulate some ideas that you mightn’t have thought of yet.

Where Do I Start?

Let’s do a simple exercise first. Seriously, please do it. This may actually help shine a light on the problem you face.

Imagine Black Friday starts next week. Off the top of your head, start listing all of the tasks that you know you would have to put in place. This could include:

• Price reductions (what products are you going to reduce and by how much)
• Setting up discount codes
• Testing to ensure codes / prices work correctly
• Extending your opening hours
• Draft rotas for staff
• Marketing imagery
• Marketing through affiliates
• Sending email campaigns
• Changing abandoned cart messaging
• Printing picking lists
• Shipping parcels
• IT Issues that need rectifying

If at this point your piece of paper is pretty empty, you aren’t preparing enough to maximise for sales.

If your piece of paper is starting to fill and a feeling of dread has came over you – good – because you’ve recognised how much there is to do but we still have plenty of time to prep for it.

Create a Black Friday Disaster Recovery Plan

This is not within the scope of this article but in the next week I will be releasing a Black Friday Disaster Recovery Plan to ensure that you have thought of every instance of failure across the business. You cannot afford your online shop to be down for a minute within that peak period.

Follow me on Linkedin to hear when I release this.

1. How To Price Your Products For Black Friday

Before you bounce off the article thinking it’s for pure beginners, bear with me.

Pricing is massively important during Black Friday; not just in the value you place on your products, but the methods that you use to implement it.

Sale Pricing Decisions

First of all you need to decide how you are going to price your products. Are you going to stick to a margin you’re comfortable with or are you going to be reactive to other competitors deals at the time of launch? Are you prepared to start at a certain discount and then introduce an extra percentage during the promotion, or maybe on the actual Black Friday date?

If you are going to be reactive to other competitors, then you have to bear in mind that their pricing could change as the period goes on so you’ll have to monitor closely, along with any promos they distribute.

Watch Out For:

Factor in affiliate marketing at this stage if you use it as a marketing channel. The commission and platform fees that are involved, can quickly eat into your forecasted margin and when sales are flying, it’s easy to get carried away with the pound signs on screen for the day until you have to pay your hefty affiliate bill later down the line.

Sale Pricing Setup

Different CMS systems allow for different ways to set up price rules or promotions as they may be called. You need to make sure that you’re comfortable with the process and you’ve done it before.

Are you happy to implement pricing rules in groups across categories or would you prefer customers used voucher codes to implement the sale reductions? Personally I much prefer to manage pricing on-site without a code. It allows the customers a hassle free experience and the prices filter down to products feeds and Google Shopping etc.

Trial it on a few products beforehand to ensure you’re comfortable with the process and forecasted timescale.

I’ve personally had issues with Magento sale pricing in the past as the client wouldn’t use sale promotions and instead relied on csv imports to be very specific with pricing. This meant manually finding skus, amending category ID’s, amending sale pricing, sale stickers etc. It’s fine when it’s 10 products but when it’s 1,000 products, it’s an entirely different story.

Watch Out For:

Conflicts of price rules and voucher codes. I have seen it before where dynamic price rules and voucher codes have conflicted at the bag stage, rendering the checkout process impossible.

Check price competitiveness in GMC

2. Implementing Black Friday Marketing Efforts

Free Delivery Thresholds

free delivery delivery methods need to be updated

Promotional Imagery

3. Optimise Your Site For Black Friday

Merchandise Your Store

Implement Relevant Related Products / Cross-Sells

4. Optimise Your Product Feed

Recently I’ve audited numerous client product feeds and been surprised at how many of them use the basic, mandatory fields only.

update GMC and your affiliate channels after doing this

5. Ensure You Have Multiple Payment Methods Available

It is always advisable to have numerous payment methods available at the checkout.

Firstly for customer convenience and to prevent abandoned basket rates. If you use a service like Adyen or checkout.com, it’s always good to offer relevant local card options to your international customers. This will increase conversion rates for those particular customers.

Secondly and most importantly this acts as a safety valve in case your main payment method goes down.

Imagine the scenario: You launch your sale, you drive 10x traffic to the site, and a plugin conflict or security measure prevents your Adyen or Sagepay modules from working! Disaster. You should have some standalone methods such as Paypal available at the checkout so you are not entirely missing out on sales.

Watch Out For:

Ensure you test any new payment methods fully before a peak sale. Some methods may not qualify for 3DS and leave you vulnerable to fraud transactions, potentially leaving you liable for missing parcels.

6. Set Out Customer Expectations

Have you got the resource to deal with the volume of sales that you could potentially be increasing by? If not, you need to let customers know in advance that there may well be delays to orders or delays to customer service enquiries.

Delivery Delays

think about delivery options at checkout

Think about Google merchant centre deliveries / charges

7. Implement A Livechat Module

Yes, it’s probably an additional cost but the strain it will take off your customer service staff from having the phone ringing constantly will be really worth it. If you generally get customers calling with sizing or delivery queries for example, this is going to happen more and more during Black Friday.

Implement a livechat module, preferably one with a ticketing system, whereby each chat is logged as a case and you can go back into it to update its status. If you politely tell the customer that there’s a delay on getting their enquiry, it’s better than missing their phone call as you didn’t have the resource and purchasing from someone else.

Watch Out For:

Don’t get caught in a module that has a long contract. Try and find one with a trial period to judge its effectiveness for Black Friday and potentially through Christmas. Also factor in that you may need a developer to implement it. An additional warning is that some of these livechat widgets can be quite heavy on page load times if you are precious about your Core Web Vitals scores.

7. Set Some Budget Aside For Your Employees

Without your team of staff, you aren’t going to be able to pull any of this off. They are your saviours through this entire busy period.

Keep in mind, this is not their business, yet they are likely going to be asked to:

• All of the above prep work is done ahead of and during Black Friday
• Work longer shifts if possible
• Work extra days
• Potentially work in roles they’re not used to
• Supervisors have more responsibilities as the volume of orders increases

Make them feel like you care. Show your face, make them a cup of tea, buy them some food if they’re working extra, have a beer at the end of the day with them, do some giveaways of some food vouchers etc. If you’ve done really well, put some money aside and throw a party or take them away for a day or two.

Your staff won’t forget these minor outlays in what should be a bumper week. Make it a period to remember for them, rather than a period to forget – thus resulting in them potentially looking for a job in another sector. Black Friday should save jobs, not result in you losing staff.