It's Not Too Early to Start Your Black Friday Sales Push
Yes, Black Friday is still seven months away, but you’re not racing with the date, you’re racing with your competition – and don’t you want to win?
Long before folks start scrambling to spend their holiday gift budget, you should be checking off the boxes to make sure you’re ready to take their money.
Some people think it's enough to start a promotion or launch a marketing campaign in the days before Thanksgiving, but if your competition started earlier, you’ll be eating their dust, so to speak. This year, you should be out in front! Here is your mid-year, pre-Black Friday checklist for getting ready:
Prep your website
Start by making sure your website is up to date and has a clear focus. If you have pictures on your site, make sure they are current and sized right and set up a holiday-themed photo shoot now so you have the new photos all set for swapping out quickly in the fall.
Re-work the coupons and ads you used last year or create some new ones – and don’t forget to update the expiration. Post fresh content on your site regularly to remind the search engines to keep you indexed. In fact, pre-write your holiday page content now and be ready to start posting early in the fall so you build up some history with the appropriate search terms.
Be sure that your website’s customer experience is a pleasure and that your shopping cart system is easy to use. Be clear about taxes, shipping costs, and shipping dates. And consider an abandoned cart reminder. Sometimes people are “just looking” in the early part of the season, but are desperate to make a decision as the deadline looms.
Prep your social media
Respond promptly to your customers who have a question about your promotions or your product. If you get a lot of repeat questions, type up an FAQ page to guide people and share that URL or have a few stock answers ready to copy and paste. You want to make sure it is obvious that all of your customers are heard and helped.
Prep your holiday spirit
Whether that means creating new banner graphics, writing blog posts about the holidays, or sharing funny holiday memes, start stockpiling all that content now so you can easily post it later when you’re really busy. Customers like to interact with fun people and would rather not do business with a Scrooge.
Prep your sale items
Don’t think that only the big online stores are successfully selling. Find a niche where you can compete. Think personalized, local, unique – all the things that a big retailer can’t deliver. Then promote the heck out of it.
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still big buying days, people are starting to shop already by September. If you wait until November to start marketing, you will miss out on all those wallets already open and looking to type in their credit card number right now.
The Sprocket team gets pretty busy around the holidays, too, with clients wanting to wrap up the year strong or start the new year fresh. Avoid the crush by calling us today to update your pages, add new features, and prep your website to be the one your competition will be chasing in the fall.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov at Pexels.
This article is an update to “Surviving (and Thriving!) on Black Friday” dated 11/19/2014.
Breanne Bannon
Breanne is a Content Writer, Social Media Marketeer, and Sales Associate for Sprocket Websites.
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