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It's never too early to start planning in the too-early hours of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) -- the most popular shopping time during the calendar year. Both seasons have experienced strong year-over-year growth which means you'll need be prepared to anticipate more website traffic as well as more advertising competition compared to years past.

If you're the first to try running Black Friday Cyber Monday sales or you've been there before, you'll want to start developing this year's strategy now, and you'll be able to utilize the following Black Friday checklist to get going.

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

Black Friday check list: customer engagement

Let's start with the checklist for customer engagement first.

Get started earlier

Really?

Start planning early, so you'll be able to begin your marketing strategies earlier and boost the sales.

Create the Black Friday counter-narrative

Black Friday sales begin whenever you want them to. People are starting to figure this out. Thus, create an anti-Black Friday in the weeks prior to the event.

"Why wait? You're here to shop now, so grab these great discounts and get shopping done early."

The anti-Black Friday marketing slant 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 through December with the crowds of shoppers who are rushed because you got yours done in advance.

Combine this with an assortment of constantly changing specials and discounts in the days prior to Black Friday.

Aim to reach your target customers

You can do this for multiple product lines too and run multiple ads, including on Google and other social media platforms.

Imagine you own an online retailer that sells health foods.

One product category features protein-enhanced breakfast bars. A different category includes gluten-free and dairy-free snack items. The other category is nutrient-rich, all-natural products. You can advertise each with the primary language of your brand, of course.

What is the intended public for these items sound like? What matters to them? Put that language in your Black Friday marketing content and you'll see more people interested and increase sales.

Identify products to feature this year

If you're selling lots of products, don't do blanket Black Friday sales that will impact your profit margins. Instead, highlight a few items with incredible deals and then increase profits by making use of them to bring many more people to your doors.

If you can motivate more purchases beyond the Black Friday discounts, you'll increase average order value and net profits.

If you have overstock, discontinued items, or other seasonal products, they make great options for extreme discounts because you'll need to sell them out anyway. Use items you can produce abundantly for a great agreement with the supplier as well as products that are great demand or have higher profit margins.

Also, think about creating dedicated Black Friday sale landing pages to showcase your top items, and not only the usual product page.

What are the products you can offer with extreme Black Friday deals this year?

Make sure you are prepared to market through several channels

Multichannel marketing can yield more results than using just a single channel. Identify at least three channels that you intend to use this year for your Black Friday marketing strategy.

Channels include but are not only

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

Make sure to build optimised landing pages, and keep track of the amount of traffic that you receive through your various channels.

Have follow-up marketing plans ready to go

The other key to profiting on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the Christmas shopping season is to keep in touch with potential customers who discover your online store this year.

Many Black Friday shoppers will come to buy, leave, only to never return. But you can win some of them and then turn them into regular and loyal customers.

Create a welcome email series. Start sending consistent email marketing. Make sure to categorize your prospective clients based on the products they already bought, and any additional information you have gathered about them from their first purchase experiences. Then, engage them with additional relevant content during the year ahead.

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

Utilize email to send your message to the masses early and often

In preparation for Black Friday this year, develop email marketing campaigns in order to target your different customer segments ahead of the Christmas rush. They should be thinking of your brand before competing online retailers start competing to get their attention. It is important that they buy from you while the other small business owners are just realizing they didn't plan beforehand to prepare for Black Friday.

Your first email marketing campaign should probably be sent out by October. Email inboxes start to overflow in late November. So if you can make use of email to start making seeds and offering discounts that are competitive before the rush, you'll improve sales, and increase your brand's recognition and loyalty to customers.

Create eye-catching visuals

If it's on your product page as well as the landing pages or pages for the products you choose to feature it is essential to use photographs that have high resolution to attract the attention of your visitors and allow them to practically feel the product with their fingers.

Send emails to abandoned carts

Setting up these ahead of Black Friday will give you an opportunity to evaluate your campaigns and see what marketing strategies and offers will work for your web store.

Divide your campaign into three pieces

You have a lot of things on your Black Friday checklist, and it's easy to get overwhelmed. To help organize your work and figure out what priorities to put in place You can divide your campaign into its three natural components.

First is the lead up prior to Black Friday. The process begins at any time you'd like it to start, and will end the day prior to Black Friday.

After that, you'll have to deal with the day. It could include weekends or the next week, if taking on the entire Cyber Week. The definition of"daytime".

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

Black Friday is only one of the days. Your marketing strategy should encompass the whole season.

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

Make or edit your return policy

If you've run your e-commerce firm for some time it's likely that you have this. If not it's time to create one. Or, if you do own one, perhaps you've learned from prior experience that the one you have is outdated.

• A process for returning shipped items. Do you need an original package, exact product condition, etc. ?
• The refund policy. Do customers receive their refund, store credit, or something else?
• Clear deadlines. What is the maximum time they can be returned to receive full refunds or credit?
• An address for shipping. What address will they use to send back items?
• Contact information. Which way can customers contact you with any additional concerns?

Your return policy must be made public as often as relevant. It should be in the order notification email sent out following the purchase is made. It must be printed and included in the shipped product. The information should be posted placed on your site and easy to find, such as in the footer, on the FAQ page, and on the product pages.

Are you aware of the latest return policy?

Offer faster shipping options

The time for shipping can be extended when the sales are in high demand during the holiday time, when customers typically expect expedited shipping options.

According to a 2021 Baymard research, 19% of carts that are abandoned result from delivery times being too slow. Offering faster shipping options can help reduce the loss of sales, and is a great strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Not only do quick shipping methods encourage buyers, they ensure that the products are delivered on time during a season when the shipping time may be slow due to the large volume carriers are processing.

You might consider offering the option to buy Now or Pay Later

You can make this option present in the check-out page. But you can also mention it on the product page, the home page, on your landing page or wherever else you believe it could help customers move beyond an objection to price and stay purchasing.

Make use of an automated chatbot

Chatbots aid in customer service and boost sales. The majority of the time, customers have simple questions that a chatbot can solve. If they could just have a couple of questions answered, they'll make a purchase.

If they are forced to hunt down an email address, wallow through help forums, or just wait for live chat support to respond, they are likely to abandon the process and shop elsewhere.

If you can achieve it, a chatbot will make buying easier without the need for an increase in customer service.

Check out the previous calendar year's Black Friday sales data

There's a tendency to approach every year like a new endeavor, in which we create a new project and then reinvent the wheel, without advantage of the hindsight.

But if you've had an online store for any period of time and been involved in Black Friday marketing campaigns before then you've got some knowledge. There's some data you've gathered previously. You've probably done some things previously may have worked very well.

Before you go way too deep into planning for the year ahead, take a look back at your results from last year. What worked well? What failed?

Are you able to replicate the success from the previous year? Can you improve the areas that fell short?

Black Friday checklist: Backend systems

Now, let's move on to the Black Friday checklist items that people don't often see yet you count on to help customers make purchases and have a great Black Friday shopping experience.

Speed up your website

90percent of visitors are likely to leave a website if the site loads slow. Site speed should be the top priority all times of the year and is particularly important in times of more visitors. There are a few easy things you can try to speed up the loading time of your website:

• Test your website performance. Determine which areas of your website require improvement by running a speed test. Instruments like Pingdom as well as Page Speed Insights can tell you how quickly it loads and its performance in certain zones.
• Implement a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN serves your site's files from high-speed, dedicated, and geographically-distributed data centers. Users will receive caching content from the CDN closest to them that reduces load time and conserves the bandwidth as well as load of your site. Jetpack comes with an unpaid CDN as well, and in contrast to other networks, you can setup and install the Jetpack CDN in only one click.
• Improve your image. Even if you're making use of an CDN which optimizes your images to your specifications, it's best procedure to upload the least files that you can while maintaining a high-quality resolution. Exporting for web with Photoshop as well as using the free image resizing and optimization tools like ImageOptim can be a quick and easy way to make your images ready for use on the internet.
• Change your hosting plan. If you're on shared servers you may see slow loading times, particularly when other websites located on your server are experiencing high volumes of traffic. Consider a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.

Here are some more ways to speed up your shop.

Is your ecommerce website running as fast as it could be?

Sync inventory with products pages

Speed up and simplify the checkout process

It's possible that your checkout process works, but is it efficient and intuitive? You want to keep the checkout process as easy as you can, and with the least distractions in order to motivate your customers to finish their purchase. There are a few things you can make to enhance your checkout process can be improved, including:

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

You must be prepared to fill orders and have them shipped on time

Do your dropshippers and suppliers prepared to deal with increased sales? Can you ramp up production if demand exceeds your expectation?

While this is a good problem to have but you shouldn't miss the chance to boost revenue and win new clients because the supply chain becomes stressed.

If you're looking to expand production ahead of the Christmas season, be sure to place orders to your suppliers of materials early. This is especially true for your products are manufactured by a different company, especially when the products are made in a foreign country. Many other companies are making larger purchases from suppliers in order to get ready to prepare for Black Friday sales as well, so make sure you secure your order prior to the date. In the event that you do not, you might be facing high prices or no stocks products.

If you're using a third-party logistics provider (3PL) to deliver your merchandise, take a look at the past patterns of sales and delivery of your goods and request the company to shift the inventory into warehouses near the locations where you typically make the most business. This helps speed the delivery process for your customers. If quick delivery times are paramount to your business Ask your 3PL to ship shipments more frequently and use providers that have the most rapid time for delivery.

Also, you may need to hire more staff or expand hours in order to cope with the expected rise in production during the holiday time. This is especially important in the case of hand-crafted goods or producing products in-house. However, even if manufacturing is outsourcing and you're still in an increased need for customer service, order fulfillment, marketing, and more.

Gather customer details for follow-up marketing

We discussed earlier how to follow up should your store is visited by customers who haven't shopped in your e-commerce store in the past.

But you can't follow up without collecting the details of their contact.

If you're shipping items, you're bound to get the address of their postal service. But direct mail marketing as well as follow-up cost significantly more than online marketing and follow-up, therefore you should be able to follow up with email, and perhaps SMS too.

To do that, the purchaser should be offered an opportunity to sign up. The most effective place to make this happen is at the bottom of checkout. There, you can request their email address and telephone number. Make sure to get permission to talk with the customer via email or text. Make the phone number optional to ensure that customers who do not opt-in to messages via text won't be confused.

Not everyone will consent but that's fine, since some people will. For those that are, now is the time to commence with your follow-up strategy for marketing.

Are you ready to collect email addresses and phone numbers?

Set up conversion tracking

It's important to track customer behavior and also how your marketing strategies perform over Black Friday and the rest of the holiday season to make adjustments this year.

Make sure your website is safe

A simple and effective way to increase your website's security is by installing the security plugin. Jetpack comes with free brute force attack protection which stops one of the most prevalent forms of hacking as well as 2-factor authentication to protect the login procedure. The Jetpack WordPress security plug-in includes regular backups, malware scanning and monitoring of downtime for spam prevention along with other features.

Make sure your site works across all devices and browsers

Your ecommerce website needs to be displayed correctly on desktops tablet, smartphones as well as all major browsers. It is possible to test this using your personal devices quickly, however you'll be interested in testing the way your website displays when you use a computer and browser emulator like LambdaTest.

Even though you might not be able to guarantee that your website looks and functions flawlessly on all devices and platforms, you could make use of tools such as Google Analytics for you to discover what browsers and devices your visitors use. You can then concentrate your efforts to test and tweak your website to ensure it works on those specific platforms.

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

Make sure you know the primary functions on your website.

Schedule your sale as well as coupons

Reduce the anxiety and stress that comes with the biggest holiday shopping time of the year by doing as much as you can in the months prior to.

One easy task is to create your coupon codes and sales in advance of date. Once you've decided which products will have deals as well as the timeframe for certain flash sales and special deals, as well as how the prices are likely to change with time, create the coupons and the additional back-end support systems to will ensure the success of sales. If you're giving away a gift with purchase, make sure that the items are on hand.

Highlight Black Friday bargains in your online store

The customer can't benefit from a sale when they aren't aware of it. Whether your customers come to your site organically or you get them there through email marketing and paid advertising, you'll want them to discover your sales quickly.

There are a variety of ways to do this:

• Create pop-ups that announce the sale, and a call to action and a button that will take you directly to your sale.
• Create a banner for your website to advertise your sale.
• Create the "Black Friday Sales" menu item to your site's navigation.
• Highlight sale items in the shop's sidebar.
• Make sale icons visible on the thumbnails of your products.

Prepare your customer service systems

If you do require more employees to help your sales or customer service team during Black Friday, onboarding and training temporary workers is difficult and lengthy. Other ways are available to increase customer service support in addition to the hiring of temporary workers.

Here are three customer service techniques to be implemented this year.

Offer several options for support services to customers

Alongside telephone support via direct linethat you must provide if you have capacity for it -- here are some other ways to help customers find answers to their questions.

• FAQs or knowledge base. Help customers help themselves by providing a easily navigable and accessible FAQ page or knowledge base
• Make use of a customer service contact form. Let people get in touch with your customer service department via email using a contact form. Utilize conditional logic, in response to the question type to route questions from customers to the appropriate email address.
• Start putting AI chatbots to work.Filter out some of the most commonly-asked questions like "How much does shipping cost?" or "Do you ship to my country?" by using an AI chatbot. This will save your customer support team precious time as well as provide customers with quick answers to basic questions

Make use of a customer relationship management tool (CRM)

CRM software can assist you in tracking your customers' interactions with your business and swiftly resolve support tickets, qualify leads and even upsell your clients.

Jetpack CRM is a compact and user-friendly tool that is able to integrate directly into your dashboard. There's no limit on contacts and it's one of the most affordable CRM options for stores.

Be sure that your customers instructions and FAQs for service are current.

Regularly review your customer service procedures and make sure that they're up to date. If you have any special methods or special offers that your staff must be aware of in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, document them and ensure your team can access them. Meetings to go over your procedures one week or two prior to the launch of your Black Friday deals may help keep these procedures in mind for the staff.

When you've streamlined your customer service experience for both your visitors and your team You may discover that you still need 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 holiday shopping season?

The Black Friday checklist may seem like a lot of work to plan for a sale that only lasts a few days, but these suggestions aren't designed only for only one weekend.

After you've implemented them some of these methods and strategies can continue to help strengthen your business online every day. If you keep at the top of these checklist items throughout the year, you won't need to put in a lot of effort as the time approaches for Christmas next year.