Black Friday Strategy: 5 Tips To Drive More Online Revenue

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for many eCommerce businesses because it generates significant revenue. Adobe Analytics reports that Black Friday online sales reached $7.4 billion in 2019, the second largest online shopping day ever (right behind 2018's Cyber Monday).

To help prepare your eCommerce store for Black Friday, we're sharing 5 strategies to help you plan ahead of this hectic holiday season and maximize your revenue growth.

Creating A Black Friday Strategy That Converts

First, analyze your campaign's performance from last year to see what was successful. Determine any areas that can use improvement, and focus on enhancing those this year − there's almost always something that can be improved.

Follow these 5 Black Friday strategy tips to drive more online revenue this year:

1. Optimize for mobile
2. Up-sell and cross-sell products
3. Leverage email marketing
4. Offer product recommendations
5. Capture abandoned carts

Optimize For Mobile

According to Statista, half of all global website traffic was generated by mobile devices (excluding tablets) in 2019. If your eCommerce site is not compatible with mobile devices, chances are you're missing out on substantial revenue.

Optimize your mobile eCommerce design to target consumers who holiday shop on devices other than a desktop. We encourage brands to use a top navigation menu, provide a one-page checkout, and follow other mobile eCommerce best practices to improve site functionality, elevate the user experience and increase conversions.

Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Products

One of our favorite elements of a successful Black Friday strategy is to optimize eCommerce merchandising. We're huge advocates of using up-selling and cross-selling tactics to drive more sales, increase average order value and impact your bottom line.

Up-selling involves encouraging shoppers to purchase anything that would make the primary product they intend to purchase more expensive. For example, if you're shopping for a men's razor on Amazon and initially intend to buy one handle and one blade, you may come across an offer that includes a variety pack with two handles and 5 blades. This merchandising strategy helps to increase customers' perceived value by making them feel like they're getting more for their money.

Cross-selling involves presenting shoppers with additional products − in addition to their primary product − that can easily supplement the product they've intended to buy. Let's pretend, for example, that you've added a Nikon camera to your shopping cart. Prior to checkout, you may see cross-sell opportunities that encourage you to add an SD card, camera strap, battery, or more to your shopping cart. This merchandising strategy helps eCommerce brands sell more product and increase sales.

Both up-selling and cross-selling are valuable tactics for driving more revenue during the holiday season. If your goal is to increase average order value, we recommend up-selling to increase the price of orders. If your goal is to increase sales, we recommend cross-selling to sell more products.

Leverage Email Marketing

Any great Black Friday strategy involves creative email marketing to engage more users and drive more sales. Build suspense around your Black Friday deals and promotions by sending emails in advance − we recommend the end of September or early October.

Create a sending cadence based on email engagement to nurture customers through the buyer's journey, and send emails on different days and times to see which has the best performance.

Use remarking email campaigns to better tailor products and services to fit customers' needs. If you want to see which parts of your emails customers are most interested in, leverage an email marketing platform, like Klaviyo or HubSpot, to track their browsing behavior, view customer insights and customize future emails to fit their needs.

Offer Product Recommendations

Benefit both your customers and your eCommerce store with this tactical Black Friday strategy. Offer product recommendations to help customers easily find what they might be interested in, improve the user experience and increase conversions.

Base product recommendations off of a person's shopping behavior, demographics, geo-location and more to accelerate their movement through the conversion funnel. It helps shoppers navigate through your site's countless inventory and leads them closer to converting.

Capture Abandoned Carts

Take advantage of a customer's abandoned cart history to offer product recommendations that include the item(s) they left behind. Create an abandoned cart workflow in Klaviyo or HubSpot to remind customers of the items they forgot to purchase. This will help them make a decision of whether or not they want to purchase it.

There are a variety of reasons why people abandon their shopping carts − maybe it was too expensive or they purchased something else as a holiday gift. Whatever the reason may be, it's not necessary to send a discount in the first email of your abandoned cart workflow. Rather, just remind them that they left an item behind.

Conclusion

We hope these 5 Black Friday strategy tips help to improve your campaign's performance and increase online revenue. Remember to save yourself enough time to prepare your eCommerce store for Black Friday and the holidays that follow. The earlier you start planning, the better.

Need help with your eCommerce holiday prep or want to learn how Groove's website and marketing services can help grow your online business? Contact us through the form below with any questions or concerns, and a member of our team will be in touch shortly!