Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are the biggest shopping events of the year, offering a prime opportunity for e-commerce businesses to increase sales and grow their customer base. In 2023, Black Friday saw 90.6 million people shopping online in the U.S, making it the most popular day for online purchases. As Cyber Week approaches, it’s important to ensure your Shopify store is ready to handle the increased traffic, deliver a seamless online shopping experience, and maximize conversions.
Whether you’re a seasoned retailer or new to the e-commerce scene, reviewing your site with an updated strategy can make all the difference in reaching your targets. This Shopify Black Friday guide provides actionable steps to prepare your store for Cyber Week, including how adding a product recommendation quiz can drive sales.
Your Shopify Black Friday e-commerce strategy
Follow the steps to get your Shopify store ready for the season:
Plan early
Early preparation is key. For example, SEO improvements can take up to four months to show results. The sooner you optimize your website, the more you’ll benefit from the results. If adding a product recommendation quiz to your site for Black Friday (more on that below), be sure to create, test, and integrate it with your other applications to ensure it functions seamlessly.
Optimize site speed
Site speed is a key factor that can make or break your Black Friday performance. Slow-loading pages can frustrate shoppers, leading to higher bounce rates and lost sales. For example, slow page load times cause 50% more visitors to abandon your site.
Besides affecting the user experience, page speeds also significantly impact a website’s SEO value. When crawling a site, Google assesses how quickly its page loads. If your website loads slowly, it automatically ranks lower on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This means your website will be less visible to consumers, with less traffic and, ultimately, fewer sales.
Speeding up your site is a quick fix. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Shopify’s performance tools to identify areas for improvement, including optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, and minimizing JavaScript.
Ensure your site can handle high-traffic volumes
With your site speed optimized and other Black Friday e-commerce preparations underway, you should expect higher traffic volumes — and ensure your website can handle it.
While the Shopify platform is designed to scale with your business, it’s not worth taking any risks on your biggest retail day of the year. The Shopify store offers great plugins like Uptime Robot and Pingdom to alert you if your website experiences any downtime. These notify you of any problems immediately, letting you resolve them quickly and minimize any downtime that could impact sales.
Make it mobile-friendly
If you check the analytics for your website, you will likely see a large portion of your traffic comes through mobile. In fact, it may be the main source of your traffic, as the scales have tipped in favor of mobile shopping over desktop shopping in recent years. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, smartphones accounted for approximately two-thirds of online shopping orders in the US.
A mobile-friendly site ensures a seamless shopping experience for your customers, no matter what device they use. This is important for both your customers and Google. Google’s mobile-first indexing means your mobile site’s performance can significantly impact your search engine rankings.
Making your website mobile-friendly includes using responsive design, easy-to-navigate menus, and fast-loading pages. Check that all your site’s elements, from product images to checkout processes, are fully optimized for mobile users. Tools like this Mobile-Friendly Test can help you identify and fix any issues before Black Friday.
Have dedicated landing pages
To capture Black Friday shoppers, create dedicated landing pages that showcase your offers and discounted products.
Optimize the pages for desktop and mobile devices, target relevant keywords, and include compelling visuals and concise copy that communicates your Black Friday offer. All pages should be easy to navigate. You can also promote your product recommendation quiz on this page. Speaking of…
Add conversion-focused quizzes to landing and product pages
Interactive quizzes are a powerful tool for boosting conversions on your Shopify store. They create personalized shopping experiences that help customers find the right products for their needs. This not only drives sales but increases your average order value (AOV) and reduces returns.
Visual Quiz Builder allows you to create tailored product recommendation quizzes that help customers find the perfect products based on their preferences. Visual Quiz Builder allows you to create quizzes that match your brand design and fit seamlessly into your website.
When Thigh Society implemented Visual Quiz Builder, their conversions more than doubled. For SKOON, conversions more than tripled.
Visual Quiz Builder also provides valuable zero-party data that you can use for future targeted marketing campaigns. Incorporating this Shopify quiz app into your landing pages can significantly improve your Black Friday performance.
Make your offering enticing
For consumers, Cyber Week is all about finding the best deals. To stand out, your retailer’s promotions should be irresistible. This could involve offering a substantial discount, bundling complementary products together, or providing free gifts with purchases.
Creating urgency, such as limited-time offers or countdown timers, motivates customers to act quickly. Don’t forget to promote your offering within your brand’s communication channels, including your social media, email marketing, and website. You could even customize your quiz result page with a banner highlighting your Black Friday offer.
Have an upsell strategy
Upselling is a proven strategy for increasing AOVs during high-traffic shopping events. Customers are more likely to purchase complementary products or premium versions if you suggest them.
A product recommendation quiz is a great way to offer complementary products to customers. For example, if they’re completing a shampoo quiz, your result page could also recommend the appropriate conditioner. These upselling strategies can easily be implemented with VQB. Simply add a widget to suggest additional products that might interest your customers, such as your best sellers, newest arrivals, or related and complementary products from your Shopify theme. You can learn more about our upsell products feature here.
Alternatively, Shopify’s built-in upsell features, along with apps like Bold Upsell or ReConvert, make it easy to implement an effective upsell strategy. The upsell suggestions should be relevant and add value to the customer’s original purchase.
Streamline your checkout process
Clunky, confusing checkout experiences can cause customers to abandon their carts — especially during high-pressure events like Black Friday. Research shows that the less friction and delay in the checkout process, the more likely a customer is to complete their purchase.
Simplify the checkout process, by offering guest options instead of requiring customers to create accounts and support multiple payment options. Shopify’s one-page checkout and integrated payment gateways help to deliver a seamless checkout, ensuring customers can complete their purchases quickly and easily. Don’t forget to include the checkout page in your mobile optimization check since many of your customers will likely attempt to check out on mobile.
If you’re using a product recommendation quiz, why not customize the result page functionality to open up your store’s cart drawer? With Visual Quiz Builder, you can add an “Add-to-cart” (as well as “Add-all-to-cart) CTA button on the result page and either provide a “Product added to cart” toast message, open up your store’s cart drawer, redirect the quiz taker to their cart, or redirect the quiz taker directly to checkout.
Avoid manual discount codes
Requiring customers to input a discount code extends the checkout experience. On Black Friday, it’s worth implementing an automated discount at checkout for applicable products through Shopify Scripts.
To better convert quiz takers, you can also automatically apply discount codes to the quiz taker’s cart if you use VQB. You can either provide a single promo code per quiz or dynamic promo codes that are different for every quiz taker (based on email). Learn more about applying automatic discounts or see how effective this strategy was for Thigh Society.
Prepare a Black Friday shipping and returns plan
If all goes well, your retailer will have an increased demand on Black Friday, and you’ll need a plan to handle it. This includes ensuring that your shipping providers are prepared for the volume, offering expedited shipping options, and clearly communicating shipping deadlines to customers.
It’s also a good idea to offer an extended returns window or free returns to give customers peace of mind when making a purchase. Though, if they’ve purchased via your customized product quiz, they’re a lot less likely to need to return their items!
Add extra customer support
Black Friday is an event that attracts a lot of new customers who, before checking out, may have a question. A quick response to customer inquiries can make the difference between a successful sale and a lost opportunity.
Add a live chat to your website to cost-effectively increase customer support. Hopefully, a bot can easily answer their question. If not, it’s good to have employees on hand to answer any queries. An FAQ provides immediate answers, especially around common questions like shipping times or return policies. For product-based questions, why not direct them to your product recommendation quiz?
Ready for your best Black Friday yet? Try Visual Quiz Builder to boost your sales today.
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