Are you ready?
With two of the biggest shopping days of the year looming, your website needs to be able to cope with the challenges major online events can pose for retailers. So, are you all set for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? With UK consumers now well accustomed to shopping online and restrictions and uncertainty easing, now’s the time to make sure you’ve done all you can ahead of what could be a huge period for sales. Last year’s Black Friday was unprecedented. With many high street stores closed, the shift to Ecommerce was given a major boost as millions of shoppers grabbed an online bargain and got their Christmas shopping done early. Adobe research showed that 2020’s Black Friday online sales grew by 22% compared to 2019, and sales in the UK were 271% higher than in October. The Ascensor team have put together a guide to ensure your Ecommerce site is optimised for what could be a vital trading period.
New visitors
New site visitors often benefit from being able to view trending suggestions and your best-sellers, giving them the confidence to make a purchase. Combining high-converting social proof and product recommendations also inspires visitors to check out popular items on the site.
Abandonment emails
Cart abandonment and browse abandonment emails are a great idea. They’re automated messages sent to your subscribers who were either viewing products and never placed them in the cart, or left them in the basket without checking out. You can further encourage shoppers by adding product star ratings to abandonment emails.
Dynamic pricing
Extra discounts and flash sales mean that prices are often more fluid than usual during Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. This means it’s important to display the most up-to-date pricing to avoid lost sales, abandonment and customers frustration.
Ensure visitors will convert
If you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in getting visitors to click through to your product pages, carrying out a conversion rate optimisation audit will help ensure you don’t lose them once they arrive.
Your product pages should all have clear calls to action and feature everything visitors need to make informed purchasing decisions. This includes product specifications, delivery and returns information and, potentially, visuals that show stock levels and availability.
Optimise for mobile
Today, mobile devices account for over half of the time spent on the internet and 55.7% share of all web traffic. Black Friday is very much a mobile shopping event, with the majority of traffic coming from smartphones.
Ensuring your Ecommerce site is fully responsive and optimised for mobile devices is vital, but it’s also essential to optimise site performance for all platforms and devices by testing site speed on both mobile and desktop before any Black Friday offers go live.
Have a chat
Customer service has always been key to Ecommerce success, and getting your chat function ready for the Black Friday rush can prevent basket abandonment and convert customers more quickly. Live chat can also increase revenues through cross- and up-selling during the checkout process. Preparing some specific Black Friday/Cyber Monday FAQs in advance, based on 2020’s experience, can speed up response times and ensure customer service isn't affected. These can be added to your live chat’s canned responses, or you could generate a Black Friday FAQ bot to deal specifically with sale queries.
Countdown timers
Countdown timers can build excitement ahead of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday events and encourage customers to keep coming back to your site. Countdown timers become even more effective if you merge them with customer data - for example, to address a customer by their first name in an email that contains a countdown timer.
What's next?
If you're looking for a digital partner to help drive more sales for your business, then our Ecommerce solutions are the perfect choice. Get in touch with the Ascensor team to discover how we can help you grow.