Zach Oldham walks through Black Friday prep for ecommerce stores. Start building retargeting audiences in September since retargeting costs far less than cold traffic when CPMs spike in November. Plan for all of Q4, not just Black Friday weekend, and make sure your fulfillment team is staffed up to handle volume.
Black Friday is the most lucrative time of the year for anybody in e-commerce. And today I'm going to be running through a few of the things that our clients have done in previous years to generate themselves millions of dollars during the Black Friday and holiday season. One of the first things you want to do when you're preparing for the Black Friday and the holiday season is a ton of prospecting. Now, when we're running our clients' campaigns, we start prospecting somewhere around September. And what I mean by this is essentially you're growing your buckets of data that you have for retargeting. During Black Friday, we make most of our clients' revenue off of retargeting people that are somewhere in the funnel. There's a much higher percentage of our clients' budgets being spent on retargeting, whether it's middle, middle of funnel or bottom of funnel during the Black Friday season. So we spend the first 2 months trying to build up those lists of data essentially. So that looks like collecting emails, filling up ad retargeting buckets with website visitors, link clicks, engagements, whatever we can grab there, video views, purchases, add to carts, any sort of data. Because when Black Friday rolls around, CPMs and just the general cost to advertise goes up and is a lot more expensive during holiday season. Months and weeks leading up to Black Friday, do your best to build these retargeting buckets as much as you possibly can so that you have as many people in there as retargeting users is going to be a lot cheaper than paying for cold traffic on the day of Black Friday. A quick side note as well is when you're planning for Black Friday, don't just plan for Black Friday weekend and that kind of like the week leading up to it. Plan for the entire holiday season and the back end of Q4 because one of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce brands are new to Black Friday make is they'll plan everything out for Black Friday. They'll have a great Black Friday shopping sale, and then December 1st rolls around and they don't have anything else planned for the rest of the year. And you still have all of December and most of January as well, where people are spending a lot and receptive to deals and offers that your brand might be running. The next thing that you're going to want to do is create specific landing pages that highlight all of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers. Deals. Make sure that your messaging matches across your entire funnel. So anything that you're promising or talking about in your ads needs to be included on your website for consistency and congruency. And use bold headlines that showcase your products, your deals, and the deadlines on your deals. For an e-commerce store running holiday campaigns, your product pages are going to be primary content. Lots of people treat their product pages as landing pages and they send ad traffic straight to product pages. If you're doing that, you want to make sure that you update all of your product product pages, descriptions, banners, anything on those product pages. Again, making sure that your deals and the information on your product pages are congruent with what you're running in your email marketing, SMS marketing, paid marketing, and organic marketing. Another key tip for Black Friday that is often very overlooked is order fulfillment. If you're selling multiple products and SKUs for your brand, then you want to organize and highlight the inventory you want to sell the most of. Make sure that you have plenty of inventory for your hottest and most popular sellers. And if you're planning on pushing or prioritizing a specific product or SKU, potentially centralize that or highlight that on your website and even make the offer more attractive. So offer more of a discount or throw in more bonus products to incentivize that order. Also prepare all your gift cards, gift baskets, and bundles that you might want to offer. Make sure that your order fulfillment process is dialed in for the holiday rush. So if you're doing your own order fulfillment Make sure that you're staffed and ready to ship. And if you've struggled with this in previous years, consider just hiring an extra couple of people to help you for your expected surge in sales. In the age of 2-day free shipping, you cannot afford delays with your shipping, especially during holiday season. Another bonus tip is to include the last date available for Christmas shipping. Now, lots of people are ordering gifts, gifts for Christmas, and they want to make sure that they arrive on time, ideally before Christmas Eve. So if your product genuinely takes 7, 8, 10+ days to ship, make sure that you're not pushing sales and pushing orders to people that are ordering for Christmas anytime past December 15th, for example, or December 21st, whatever your order date cutoff is. In conclusion, the biggest mistake that online retailers make during the holiday season is not being prepared and not preparing early enough. Now, this video is releasing sometime in early October, end of September. So hopefully you're watching this video around early October, not mid-November, and you're really prepared for your Black Friday and holiday season. If you're looking for more info on how to run a successful e-commerce business during the holidays, you can book a call with myself and my team somewhere in the description below. And otherwise, enjoy your holiday season.
