Countdown to Black Friday: Best Tips to Drive Holiday Success

Black Friday continues to dominate as one of the most lucrative sales events of the year. In 2023, U.S. consumers spent a record $9.8 billion online during Black Friday, marking a 7.5% increase from the previous year.

With these growing numbers, it’s clear that a well-prepared online fashion business can reap tremendous rewards from this important holiday shopping event. But, is your fashion e-commerce website ready to capitalize on this surge?

In this guide, we'll share essential steps to help you prepare your business for Black Friday success, from defining your offers to optimizing your tech and creating a winning promotional strategy.

3 Steps to Prepare for Black Friday

1. Define your product offers
2. Identify and plan your promotional strategy
3. Optimize your technology

Define your Product Offers

The first step is to clearly define the products you want to promote, backed by data such as analytics, customer surveys, or competitive analysis. It’s crucial to strike a balance between maximizing sales and maintaining profitability.

How to decide what to promote:

• Focus on higher-margin products: Offer discounts on products with a healthy profit margin and bundle them with other items to increase your average order value.
• Check inventory levels: Make sure you can handle the potential influx of orders and avoid over-promising.
• Plan for order fulfillment: Timely order processing is key during Black Friday. Ensure your fulfillment team is ready, and clearly communicate estimated delivery times to customers.

These alternative promotions offer flexibility for businesses that may not be able to offer deep discounts while still creating excitement and encouraging purchases during Black Friday and the holiday season:

BOGO (Buy-one, get-one 50% off): This is a classic promotion that appeals to both new and returning customers. By offering a discount on the second item, you not only boost the chances of selling multiple products but also increase your average order value. This type of promotion works well for complementary items, allowing customers to feel like they're getting more value for their money while moving additional stock.

Upsells and cross-sells: This strategy involves encouraging customers to either upgrade their current purchase (upsell) or add complementary products to their cart (cross-sell).

Upselling typically promotes a higher-end version of the product they're considering, such as a premium edition or a larger quantity, increasing the total order value. Cross-selling, on the other hand, suggests related products that complement the main purchase, like matching accessories, care products, or bundled items. These tactics can significantly boost revenue per transaction while providing customers with a more tailored shopping experience that meets their needs. For example, if someone is purchasing a winter coat, you could suggest a matching scarf (cross-sell) or offer an upgraded version of the coat with premium materials (upsell).

Gift with purchase: Everyone loves a freebie. By offering a gift with purchase, such as a small accessory or sample product, you incentivize customers to complete their purchase while enhancing their overall shopping experience. This strategy is particularly effective when the gift is perceived as high-value or exclusive, encouraging shoppers to hit a minimum spend threshold to qualify for the free item.

Early access to new collections: Create a sense of exclusivity by offering early access to your upcoming collections or limited-edition items for loyal customers or email subscribers. This can make your audience feel special and appreciated, while simultaneously driving early sales and helping you gauge customer interest in new products. This promotion can be combined with a "members-only" sale for extra impact.

Free shipping or gift cards with a minimum purchase: Shipping fees are one of the biggest barriers to conversion for online shoppers. Offering free shipping above a certain order value encourages customers to add more items to their cart to avoid shipping costs. Similarly, offering gift cards for future purchases can incentivize customers to spend more now, while ensuring repeat business when they redeem the gift card later.

Limited-time bundles or gift sets: Curate a selection of products into special bundles or gift sets that are available only for a short period. This approach not only helps you move inventory but also provides customers with a convenient, value-packed purchase option that simplifies their shopping experience. Highlighting the savings compared to buying items individually can make the offer even more enticing, especially for holiday gift shoppers.

You need to entice first-time buyers as well, since this is the time that many customers will be open to looking for new products. You may have loyal customers but make sure to position your brand to a brand new audience and build market share.

Identify and Plan Your Promotional Strategy

The second step you want to do is define and plan your promotional strategy. BFCM is the most popular shopping day of the year. Your promotional strategy should be aligned with your goals and start well in advance of Black Friday. Here's a breakdown of how to ensure your products and brand stand out.

5 Key Elements of a Great Promotion:

1. Define your timeline. Start promoting early to build anticipation. Ideally, begin by late October and ramp up in November with weekly or bi-weekly email campaigns. You can try sending 1 -2 emails per week, featuring the offer you want to promote.
2. Prepare your audience. Build anticipation and excitement in advance, perhaps you can work with influencers to post sneak peeks of upcoming promotions, send teaser emails, or showcase upcoming promotions on social media to get your audience excited. This way your customers know what to expect and is ready for your offer.
3. Create urgency. You want to create a sense of urgency to have your audience ready to take action as soon as the promotion starts. Use countdown timers and limited-time offers to encourage immediate action.
4. Choose the right marketing channels. There are many channels in which to reach your audience. Leverage email marketing, paid ads, social media, and SEO to reach your audience effectively. Focus on the channels that have historically driven the most conversions for your business.
5. Create supplementary content. Promote your brand with various content such as blogs, videos, and other promotional materials to reinforce your brand's message and engage customers with value beyond discounts.

When should you start promoting your Black Friday offers? Depending on the size of your business and resources you have available, you can start as early as October or around Halloween. The critical time for heightened promotions is two weeks before Black Friday, gradually increasing the urgency.

Here are 4 ways to reach your audience:

1. Email Marketing- Black Friday emails tend to have the highest open rates, so prioritize a strong email strategy.
2. SEO- Make sure you perform quality Keyword Research prior to BFCM so that your know exactly what your audience is looking for. Target holiday-related keywords early to ensure you're visible when shoppers start searching for deals.
3. Social Media- Engage with your followers through interactive posts and stories to generate buzz around your offers.
4. Paid Media- Make sure to plan ahead and target your ads in a timely fashion

As you can see with all that needs to be done to ensure successful holiday sales, it's important to plan your online marketing ahead of key dates this holiday season.

Don't forget to make sure to follow up with new customers, through the new year and beyond!

Optimize Your Technology

A seamless shopping experience is essential to converting Black Friday traffic into sales. Make sure that your website is optimized for performance, usability, and reliability.

First, you want to make sure your tech can handle Black Friday. Here are four key areas to focus on:

1. Website UX- Check to see if there are any issues that would stop a customer from converting. Eliminate any barriers to checkout. Review your site’s navigation, speed, and mobile responsiveness to ensure a smooth customer experience.
2. SEO- Make sure people can find you and products you are offering. Ensure your website is search engine-friendly with optimized product pages, meta descriptions, and holiday-related keywords.
3. Ad Accounts- Ensure your paid ads are set up on the right channels and are optimized for your target audience.
4. Analytics- Do you have software in place that can track orders, sales & shipments? Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor site performance, track customer behavior, and optimize your campaigns in real-time.

Plan your campaign in advance (now) and upload your assets early to ensure they are approved in time for the launch of your Black Friday campaign. Creative approvals (paid ads) are a huge pain point and could cause an advertiser to completely miss out on running ads for BFCM.

In addition to these tech optimizations, list expected delivery dates, return policies, and payment options clearly on your website to reduce friction for new customers. Remember, first-time buyers also need to be catered to. So make it easy for them to buy on your website. That's why it's important that you take the steps listed above so that you don't lose them dues to a glitch on your website.

Some last tips to help give your e-commerce marketing a boost this holiday season:

1. Show "order-by" dates when a customer needs to order a product to get it before the holidays
2. Show countdown timers on your website and emails leading up to the sale
3. Make sure your messaging and branding is consistent from your ads, social posts and make sure your messaging matches on your website
4. Have several online payment options such as Paypal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Recurly
5. Give customers more flexibility with payment installments such as Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, or Sezzle
6. Displays scarcity messaging, such as “Only X-left”, "X people have this in their carts", “X people viewing this product now” to encourage quicker purchases.
7. Make the return policy easy to find. Have it near the add to cart button
8. Make sure chat is prominent and that your support team is able to respond quickly.
9. Clean up minor design issues like ugly fonts, mismatched icons, generic stock photography, add to cart and checkout buttons are easy to find
10. If your brand is focused on sustainability and want an alternative to Black Friday- while supporting a good cause, you can look into initiatives such as Green Friday.

With record-breaking online sales expected once again for Black Friday 2024, preparation is the key to success. By defining strong offers, planning a strategic promotional campaign, and optimizing your website for peak performance, your fashion e-commerce business can stand out and maximize sales.

Hope you found these tips to be helpful and let me know in the comments which ones you plan to use for your online store.