The eCommerce Guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday

While everyone celebrates the spooky season in October, the truly scary season any eCommerce business kickstarts at the end of November when Black Friday and Cyber Monday take place.

In the US alone, 2023 Thanksgiving weekend that encompasses both Black Friday and Cyber Monday brought over 200 million in sales. And all that in only a couple of days!

To an untrained eye, this may seem like a low-effort opportunity to cash in and close those quarterly targets way before Christmas comes around. And this is true to some extent! Customers are willing to spend money, and they’re on a hunt for good deals during this period.

Though, capitalizing on this online shopping madness is not as simple as you may think. Sticking a discount on your product and calling it a day is no longer cutting it.

But fear not! Today we’ll be sharing a comprehensive guide to making the most of this lucrative season.

When is Black Friday 2024?

The Black Friday countdown is on. This year the big day takes place on Friday 29 November – the day after Thanksgiving.

While Black Friday is traditionally a 1-day event, over the years many retailers extended the shopping extravaganza to an entire week. Some say it’s diluting the effect, others claim it brings them that much more revenue.

Whether you choose to go with a single day or a week, don’t wait too long before starting the promotion. Generating the hype and making people count the days before Black Friday is a good way to stimulate demand and increase conversions on day X.

When is Cyber Monday 2024?

Cyber Monday always happens the first Monday after Thanksgiving, which falls on 2 December this year.

Only a few days after Black Friday, Cyber Monday gets to benefit from the excitement that’s been built up by customers, resulting in yet another boost in sales for eCommerce.

Optimize Your Products and Your Branding

The first thing you need to do in your Black Friday preparations is to focus on your current products and branding.

Tip: Whenever you’ll be reading this article, a few weeks prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or a couple of months after they’ve passed, – it is the perfect time to start preparations.

The hard work of Black Friday doesn’t begin when the date rolls around. Instead, you need to be building trust in your products long beforehand.

The best way to achieve this is by making sure your company is as customer-centric as possible.

• Take a look at the products you’re selling with a critical eye. Are they best-in-class? Would you buy it yourself? What are customers saying about it?
• Find the ways to highlight the positives, especially in comparison with competition.
• Align your product’s main features with value to customer and use it in marketing campaigns.
• Identify quick fixes, i.e. pains that you’ve not yet addressed but can easily cover with new functionality, design, or payment model.
• Review your customer support performance. Introduce additional communication channels, such as WhatsApp in addition to Facebook Messenger to make sure you’re available to customers in messengers that they prefer. Create templates to help your team respond quicker to typical queries or, better yet, introduce a chatbot that can do it automatically. See if you need to hire reps that speak other languages.
• Generate value beyond the product. One way of doing that is through high-quality content creation. You can entertain your customers with funny content or educate them and share helpful tips – it’s up to you. Just make sure you’re not posting basic AI-generated stuff that nobody is going to read or watch.

On Black Friday, a lot of customers will be searching for specific products, but even more of them will be browsing and scrolling, trying to find a good deal on something they didn’t even know they wanted.

Companies will be fighting for them, and grabbing their attention will be extra hard.

An effective way to break through to these customers is to make sure your products stand out from the crowd.

How do you achieve that?

By focusing on nurturing and strengthening your brand.

People don’t buy products anymore, they buy brands. Having a group of loyal customers who love and support what you do will make a world of a difference when Black Friday rolls around. They’ll keep you on the top of your mind, and they’ll be the ones to run to your website during sale season and purchase something.

The trick to good branding is creating a concept that your customers can relate to and believe in. But remember that launching a new brand identity several months before Black Friday is better than doing so a week before. You’ll have enough time to perfect your vision and messaging, and customers will get acquainted with the new you.

If you are short on time, and Black Friday is around the corner, you might be better off with minor tweaks to your brand. Leave all major work for after the holiday season, and in 12 months you’ll achieve incredible results for sure.

Build an Affiliate Program to Generate More Traffic

This is another Black Friday and Cyber Monday tip that you can act on now.

Create an affiliate or influencer program as soon as possible, and you’ll reap the rewards once November rolls around.

Influencers are people who have a good following on social media and have the power to convince their following to purchase products or services they recommend.

Affiliates are people you work with to generate sales for your website. They bring you new customers, and you reward them with a percentage commission based on how many sales they refer to your site.

These days, social media influencers are often leading affiliate marketers, but you can also work with bloggers, websites, and other content creators, especially if you are selling niche products.
But why work with affiliates and influencers when you can simply keep on doing what you’re doing?

• Additional promo channels generate additional customer streams for your business which is especially crucial during Black Friday and Cyber Monday when all companies are accelerating their ad campaigns.
• Also, the hidden beauty of affiliate programs is that they are relatively cheap compared to many other marketing activities.
• You don’t need to spend a ton of money on ads if you are working with micro-influencers. You can be strategic and set up a specific Black Friday affiliate marketing campaign for your partners and work with them to create buzz around your brand.
• You’re able to benefit from several different advertising platforms at once. By diversifying your message, you’ll reach a larger number of people. This means more people will be converted into visiting your website and purchasing your products.

If you’re looking to get serious about using affiliates, you need to do so the right way. Your relationship with affiliates is a serious task that demands a lot of attention:

• Attracting and retaining partners
• Keeping in touch with everyone
• Tracking sales and allocating commission
• Promoting new affiliate bonuses
• Checking for fraudulent activities

As your affiliate program grows, all those little tasks will start adding up. This is a common obstacle for eCommerce companies that don’t have extra resources to allocate to affiliate management. However, it’s only time consuming and stressful if you’re doing it manually.

That’s why we always recommend using affiliate and influencer marketing tracking software when you start affiliate and influencer programs. The system takes care of onboarding, automatically allocates sales to the right affiliates and calculates how much their bonus should be, plus you get reports to track the program’s performance and so much more, while still having plenty of time for other marketing activities and campaigns.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales Techniques: Don’t Just Discount Everything

The next major aspect of Black Friday marketing lies in the discounts you put on products themselves.

One of the biggest Black Friday marketing ideas is just discounting everything.

Often, eCommerce store owners think that it’s enough to put 50% off signs for the entire product range and they’ll be all set to make the most of the day. That simply isn’t the truth though.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are about targeted discounts that make sense to consumers and to your business.

If everything is 50% off, none of your products stand out.

This also means that you could be tearing into your profit margins on more expensive products.

You need to assess each product line individually, based on its own merits. Take into account the cost of production, the regular sale price, and just how much emphasis you want to put on a certain product.

Having a diverse array of discounts is a proven way of driving customers to certain areas on your website.

Let’s say you’re an eCommerce website that sells both men’s shirts and men’s suits. Your shirt sales are much higher in absolute numbers, but the sweetest margins lie in suits. Here, you might want to engineer the special deals the way that in comparison, the suits discount will be more appealing than your shirts discount. For instance, your shirts can be 20% off, but the suits cost 35% lower during those few days.

Your customers will be getting a better deal by purchasing suits, your margins will still be lucrative, and you’ll be funnelling customers to superior products.

Tip: Bear in mind the role of customer’s digital experience on your website. The more they enjoy browsing, the easier it’ll be to lead them to desired actions, such as subscribing to your newsletter, filling in forms, making a purchase, and anything else.

Automate Your Operations and Sales Methods

Another proven way of improving your Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance is through automation of the sales flow.

Automation provides a range of significant benefits for eCommerce store owners.

• No need to spend as much time on processes like fulfilling orders and issuing receipts.
• You’re able to focus more of your time on marketing and other sales activities.
• Scaling and rapid growth is welcomed as it doesn’t cause overwhelm and disruption.
• There are fewer human errors because the system follows predefined rules that have been verified by an employee.
• Reporting and real-time data shows trends and tendencies that you can act on immediately to maximize sales.

All these things ensure that when Black Friday launches, you’re better prepared to handle it. Communication on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is essential to keeping customers happy, and automation keeps you at peace, even during the most hectic periods of the year.

You don’t want to be working through a Black Friday backlog when Cyber Monday happens.

Automation can help you avoid this nightmare.

Invest in Your Social Media Presence

Social media presence is a must these days. Companies that aren’t online talking to customers and sharing content are seriously missing out. As much as 68% of customers asked confirmed that they follow brands on social media to keep up with what they’re doing and selling.

Social media is a powerful instrument that gives you direct access to customers, who are looking for content from businesses. There’s no excuse not to be there.

Here is what you can start posting regularly to attract and cultivate a loyal online audience, that will later go to your website during Black Friday and make the purchase:

• Product updates – what’s new, what’s changed.
• Promos, discounts, special and limited-time offers.
• Helpful tips to using your products.
• Use cases and customer testimonials.
• Memes and jokes but only when they’re relevant. Stay selective.
• Sharing important company milestones.

Tip: Social media is a place where people connect and communicate. It’s no different for brands. Followers will send you DMs and leave comments, and you absolutely must respond to them. As many as half of people asked confirmed that brand’s responsiveness is what makes it more memorable. And that’s exactly what we want – to stand out and be remembered because of something good, such as our awesome ability to reply quickly and witty, be helpful, and avoid the corporate buzz words.

Invest your time and energy into building a following, and you’ll have more potential customers on the big sale day, and all year round.

Work with Influencers to Expand Your Reach

Influencer market is huge. It was worth over 20 billion globally in 2023, and the growth is not slowing down. Whether we like it or not, more sales than ever before come from influencers these days.

You can (and should) ask influencers to work with you as affiliates, as they have the widest reach to different target audiences that you might struggle to get hold off yourself.

Tip: You don’t have to work with influencers only via your affiliate program, some of them can do good-old advertising for you throughout the year or as a one-off partnership that will generate a lot of interest and sales too.

If you are working with influencers, make sure you optimize their marketing efforts as much as possible. Depending on who you’re working with, they may want you to have significant, or very little, input on their posts. Try to honor that and be flexible. eCommerce websites know their products, but influencers know their audience and what they’d respond better to.

If they are happy to work together with you, then take advantage of some key strategies:

• Refine your influencer brief to make sure you find the right influencer for your particular brand.
• Make sure to check in regularly with your affiliate to ensure they post and promote your products on time.
• Nurture the relationship by providing them with suitable perks for the hard work they do.
• Keep up with influencers’ lives and make sure to congratulate them on their birthdays and other important milestones.

But don’t just rely on other influencers to sell your products on social media.

Though influencers can be an essential component of a strong Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you should also build your own social media following. These days, TikTok and Instagram represent huge opportunities for market growth for eCommerce stores, so make sure you’re not missing out.

Simplify Your Checkout Process and Shopping Experience

Having a high-quality eCommerce store layout is something many underestimate. Epic Games, for example, received a fair amount of criticism when their store didn’t include basic tools during launch, such as a shopping cart.

The harder it is for a customer to buy something on your website, the more likely it is that they’ll look elsewhere.

A good way of checking how your website works at the moment is to do a trial run yourself. Access your website as if you were a customer who’s experiencing it for the first time. You can also hire someone who works in marketing to do this for you.

The actual purchasing process should be the simplest part of your website. Work with UX design team to ensure that the browsing experience is as straightforward as possible, and there are no extra steps that move your customer farther away from the purchase.

Don’t forget these basics:

• Ability to add multiple products to a cart before paying.
• Saving customer’s selection if they reload the page.
• Multitude of payment options, including services like PayPay and, if that’s legal where you are based, cryptocurrency.
• Option to purchase without an account.

Anything you can do to make the purchasing process easier will benefit you during both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Elevate Your Product Shipping

Think about how you ship your products to customers.

A large shipping fee can put some buyers off on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Remember that these days have been designed to make sure consumers get the best deal possible.

It might be worth covering the shipping on your products for these days if your profits outweigh the fee. You won’t know 100% until you try, but you can estimate the numbers and see whether it makes sense for your eCommerce business.

You can position free or reduced shipping as an additional bonus to anyone who makes a purchase during those particular days. There are countless memes online about people adding hundreds of dollars worth of products to their carts but abandoning them because shipment is 20$. There’s a lot of truth to that, so see if you can avoid missing out on sales because of delivery cost.

Tip: If you are shipping worldwide, your costs are probably higher than with domestic-only eCommerce businesses. In that case, consider reduced shipment fees for selected or all locations, depending on your growth and expansion plans.

Also, make sure there is enough margin for you to survive after all these discounts. Acquiring new customers and making more sales is what every company wants, but not at a cost of going bankrupt. If you still have enough time before the big weekend, have a look at your supply chain, talk to partners, and see if they’re willing to provide you with special conditions on their end, since your volumes will be going up.

Once you’re done with the math side of the question, review your overall shipping experience.

• Can customers easily find all delivery information?
• Do all updates come in on time? Such as when the product leaves the warehouse.
• Is it possible to track their order, once customers make a purchase?
• How do you handle delays or lost packages?

People appreciate honesty and transparency more than anything. Make sure each step of the way is clear to them, and they’re fully comfortable from the moment they entered their credit card details to when the order is at their door.

Think about doing a Cyber Monday extension

Some eCommerce businesses extend their Cyber Monday special offers for a day or two to maximize profits and increase their conversion rates. It can be a great strategy to capture those who missed out on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.

Plus, you don’t have to do it site-wide if you don’t want to. You could offer a time-limited, date-specific coupon code to those customers who didn’t purchase on the day of a big discount. It’s a great way of capturing email addresses for your email lists too!

Learn More About Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales Methods

You should now know how to improve your eCommerce store’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance so that you can maximize your sales and profits. We hope these Black Friday ideas for ecommerce and Cyber Monday promotional strategies have helped. Here’s to the best sale season yet!