5 Last Minute Black Friday Optimization Tips

It wasn’t supposed to happen… You told yourself you wouldn’t procrastinate, but Black Friday is upon us, and if you haven’t done anything to prepare, this is the blog post for you.

While it might seem hopeless now, all is not lost. Below are five last-minute tips for optimizing your store and getting into shape for the big weekend.

Two-Minute Summary (jump to any section!)

1. Inform your visitors about any shipping delays, extended product lead times, or other considerations with alert banners. If things are running smooth, consider promoting or offering free shipping (with cart thresholds if desired).
2. Add holiday cheer to your site with prebuilt promotions available in your Justuno account. Access 200+ additional premium templates with Justuno Plus.
3. Create a gift guide or other helpful resource, and promote to your new visitors to help ease their holiday shopping stress.
4. Experiment with other marketing channels to cut through the crowd of email, paid ads, and other more traditional avenues. Push notifications are another great option to get visitors to opt-into, along with SMS and Facebook Messenger.
5. Start using our recommended ‘foundational promotions’ including a new visitor welcome offer, abandoned cart offer, and exit offers. Get more marketable customers moving forward, close more sales, and keep visitors on your site longer.

We’ve said it before, we’re saying it now, and we’ll say it again…free shipping works. Consumers have grown accustomed to free (and fast) shipping options which means you’ll need to make this offer prominent on your site. If you can’t swing this on every order, then use free shipping thresholds to boost the average order value and offset your shipping costs. Banners are great for sitewide offers like free shipping, or to show customers how much they have left to spend before reaching an offer minimum.

Another great use for sitewide banners is to clearly display order and shipping deadlines, making customers aware of the timeline for placing and receiving their orders. Since the holiday season is centered around several specific dates, it’s critical to make sure shoppers know when their packages will arrive. Use these website messaging promotions to encourage shoppers to purchase their gifts in time and manage expectations from the start. 

As we all know, 2020’s retail landscape is vastly different, with more shoppers than ever turning to e-commerce to check off their holiday lists. This means that shipping and logistics networks are being pushed to their limit. If you’re experiencing delays in packing, or your preferred carrier is experiencing slow delivery times, it’s critical to communicate that to customers. Use this as an opportunity to build trust and ease any concerns they have about shopping online or while making a first-time purchase from your site.

This is an easy way to make it look like you’re more prepared for the holidays than you really were. Justuno users have access to pre-built pop-up templates created by our graphic designers. Set them live in just minutes as-is, or tweak the designs to reflect your own branding–it’s your choice!

Lean in to the reason for the season with these pop-ups. They add flair and fun to your website which goes a long way with consumers this time of year. Check out a few of our new designs below, and log in to your Justuno account to add these to your site in minutes.

Don’t put all your eggs in the BFCM basket either. You can use pre-builts for other holidays throughout December, big and small. This year has proven that the holiday shopping only gets longer each year, so there are sales to be made even after this weekend.

Pro Tip: Justuno Plus users have access to 200+ additional premium templates all designed to take your site to the next level.

Curate your most popular products and build temporary product collections grouped by gift-giving suggestions. You can create pages for your most popular products, gifts for certain buyer personas, or structure by price point. Depending on your target audience and store inventory these collections will look slightly different, but the idea works across all industries! 

Most consumers are shopping for others and already overwhelmed by the holiday season, so any website tweaks you can do that make navigating your site easier or reduces the overall effort will result in more conversions. 

If you’ve been promoting your holiday sales heavily through email marketing, it may be worth exploring other channels such as Social Media, SMS, Messenger, or Push Notifications. Most consumers’ inboxes have been inundated by now with sale email after sale email and trying to cut through the noise this late likely won’t work.

This is where newer channels can save the day. Use your social media platforms to appeal to your followers by featuring highly visual content that clearly displays the value and sale. Beyond that, if you’re using SMS marketing or Facebook Messenger Chat-Bot provider, you can start engaging subscribers via those channels as well. Both of these are highly personal channels, so be sure to properly segment, target, and tailor the messages so they provide real value and don’t annoy.

Influencer marketing is another option as well, they can help recommend products to their followers to boost your brand reach further than paid ads or your own profiles can. Influencers, and especially micro-influencers, are a resource for their following, who’ll look to them for inspiration during this season. 

Finally, if you’re a Justuno user, you can use our Push Notifications product to connect with subscribers even when they’re not on your site. This is a great way to move your strategy beyond your onsite promotions and connect with subscribers even more in months to come.

Here at Justuno, we have three promotions that we consider to be the foundation of an onsite conversion strategy. These are something that we suggest every retailer has at a minimum, (and keep live all year long) but are more important than ever during the holiday season.

The three foundation promotions are: a new visitor offer, an abandoned cart promotion, and an exit offer.

New Visitor Offer

Holiday season traffic surges are given this time of year, making your new visitor offer a critical promotion to have live. With more traffic comes increased bounce rates, decreased time on page, and an overall drag to your website’s overall SEO performance. Counteract this flightiness of first-timers with a new visitor offer that engages them and increases their time spent on your site. Want to learn more about these? Check out this webinar where our CEO, Erik Christiansen, chats with SEMrush and Tinuiti about combating this post-holiday ranking problem.

Abandoned Cart Offer

Cart abandoners are a retailer’s best friend all year long, and during the holidays can prove to be a promotion where ROI is through the roof. If shoppers have added items to their cart and then try to leave your site, they’re likely going to price match you vs the competition. Stop them before they can leave by closing the sale with an attractive cart abandonment promotion.

Exit Offer

Finally, exit offers are a great way to give departing visitors an offer they can’t refuse that encourages them to convert same-session. Exit offers are different from abandoned cart promotions because these will fire when someone displays an intention to leave your site, regardless of their cart contents. A last-minute appeal with a slightly better offer than they’ve seen before can make the difference between another bounced visitor and a completed sale.

Even if you only have the time and resources to implement one or two of these suggestions, they’ll help you make the most of these busy shopping days with minimal investment on your part. If your 2020 BFCM initiatives aren’t what you imagined, don’t lose hope yet. There’s still an entire month left of the year to make additional sales, reach your Q4 goals, close the year out strong, and set yourself up for 2021 success.

Want more holiday content? Check out the Justuno holiday corner filled with content created to help you build and optimize your holiday marketing. Also be sure to watch our holiday webinar series, download the 2020 Holiday Guide, or just check out other blog posts for strategy ideas.