It is well known that Black Friday is a special day for e-commerce. The sales season opens, a period of great opportunities. It is known in advance, but as our experience shows, many traders are caught off guard and for some reason are not ready to sell more. In 2016, Black Friday will be on November 25. As usual, most major retailers and online stores will open very early, often at or before midnight. Now, there is still enough time to prepare. In addition, we will consider some suggestions on how to prepare your store for the season of big sales.

Promotion plan for each holiday

There are many holidays in the period of late November and December and you need to identify which one your online store will participate in. You can choose all of them, but it is not so easy to manage all the campaigns and activities. Maybe it makes sense to pay attention only to the most popular holidays like Black Friday, Cyber ​​Monday and Christmas.

Scheduling your activities

Planning your marketing steps and activities will go a long way during the stressful and overburdened holiday season. A promotional plan and a calendar with all activities and reminders allow you not to forget to do everything on time. For example, you can add the following elements:

• Dates in which you need to upload or update the images and banners in your online store.

• Email campaign dates on which you need to send emails to certain customer audiences.

• Dates you should start and stop AdWords campaigns for each promotion, etc.

Clarify return policy and payment options.

Many online stores offer a more flexible return and exchange policy during the sales season. You should decide if this service is possible for your store by carefully considering how it will affect your business and established processes.

Additionally, additional payment options may be considered. Some of them are easy to implement and can increase conversions and revenue for customers who prefer these payment methods.

Choose ad channels carefully

Marketing campaigns have many details that need to be planned in order to achieve the best results. When multiple channels are involved in the promotion, careful planning is very important. We recommend paying attention to various advertising channels that you have experience dealing with or can attract professionals to help you. Here’s a look at some popular advertising channels:

• Quality content can help increase sales. You definitely need to prepare blog posts for each of the major campaigns. With keyword planning and SEO optimization, your blog post can be an effective tool for attracting new users. And don’t forget that SEO takes time. The published article can start to generate traffic in 1-2 months, so the content must be published in advance.

• Email campaigns, depending on your CRM system and customer database, can be one of the most effective sources of traffic for your online store. If you can target different customer segments and create appropriate messages for each target audience, you will significantly increase your sales. Be sure to pay attention to the converted users who bought from your store during the period of late November and December of last year. It is the most important segment for which you need to create a special communication to inform potential customers about the range of products, discounts, advantages, etc. In most cases, people prefer to do the same activities to be prepared for the holiday season. Therefore, they can shop for gifts around the same time and even visit the same online stores. If customers have bought something in the past year, they will be more loyal.

• Pay Per Click – If you know how to handle Google AdWords, you can also use this tool for sales promotion. Keep in mind that this channel will be used by many merchants, so you need to carefully plan your marketing communication in order to stand out from a large number of messages. Remarketing is also the tool that you can include in your marketing plan. Showing the Ad to your previous online store visitors can increase sales at a lower cost.

A visitor’s cookie can be retained in your remarketing list if this user does not visit your online store again. On the Display Network, you can activate the remarketing list of users who made purchases on Black Friday last year. Membership duration is 30 days by default and its maximum duration is 540 days for the Display Network. So if you have a remarketing list from the previous Black Friday, you can use it this year. If not, you can make the appropriate settings to collect this information for the next year.

• Facebook and other social networks. If you have your community on Facebook or Twitter, it is also an extra channel to attract users. Prepare special posts or Tweets to inform users and empower them on time, a little in advance before the start of the sales season. Remarketing or retargeting can also be used here and can help bring back customers who visited your store but didn’t complete the purchase.

Monitoring and analysis of results

Your preparation activities should include verification of all tools that allow you to track and analyze the results of all campaigns. We hope you have Google Analytics or a similar analytics tool. If not, visit this page to be able to do this. The analysis and monitoring of the campaigns must be active throughout the sales season. Therefore, make sure you know how to use the tools and plan the time for the analysis in advance. This is very important because the timely identification of problems allows campaigns to be corrected. Do not forget to do a final analysis of the campaigns when the Sales season ends.

In conclusion, there are some technical tips:

Please pay attention to payment and navigation. It is clear that you must allow users to search for the products they need and then they must be able to purchase the chosen items. For now there is enough time to verify these flows and make some corrections if necessary.

Check store performance. The traffic increases during the sales period and that means that the store must be ready for additional load. If there is a suspicion that the site is not working properly, it is better to ask for help from professionals, because a variety of reasons can affect the operation of the site.

Mobile version. More and more people prefer to shop online on the go using their mobile devices. Mobile traffic increases every year.

Please test and fix any problems of the mobile version before the vacation starts, if necessary, ask for help from the technical experts.

The main recommendation is to complete all kinds of technical work until the beginning of November, and then not make significant changes to the active version of the online store.