Cake’s Black Friday series: THE BIG DAY

This year, Brits plan to spend an estimated £4.8 billion on Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases, according to the latest research by Finder. 

Here at Cake, we’ve been helping our eCommerce clients prepare for Black Friday for months. We’ve made the relevant development changes to their websites, ensured their customer acquisition strategy is top notch, and their creative campaign is thumb-stopping. 

But if you’re reading this post and don’t feel like you have everything in hand by now, fear not, we’ve got your last-minute checklist covered in this blog. 

Whilst your store’s online presence is highly important, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to make major design or functionality changes this close to Black Friday. However, there are still plenty of smaller changes and preparations you can make, even with a week to go! 

The biggest shopping days of the year are almost here so let’s get your ducks in a row before it’s too late. Here’s our last-minute checklist for eCommerce merchants… 

1. First thing’s first, set up your Black Friday launch email flows – we recommend a teaser campaign with a tangible action to spark intrigue; maybe even start with a ‘sneak peek’ or sign-up for early access!
2. Check the time of previous email sends and your email data from the same time last year. Ensure you’re hitting your subscribers at the right time with the right message, based on your segments. 
3. Ensure that your abandon cart email flow is updated to drive urgency and scarcity.
4. Stay on top of your organic social game by scheduling posts to go out using a scheduling tool such as Creator Studio or Hootsuite. 
5. Don’t forget to turn off any other discount codes that you have live, so that customers can’t apply multiple offers.
6. Who doesn’t love a hashtag? Tons of people will search far and wide for Black Friday deals so get hashtagging your social content now!
7. Inject some FOMO (fear of missing out) with language that creates a sense of urgency in your comms:
   1. Hurry!
   2. Limited time offer
   3. Last few remaining 
   4. Today only / 24 hours 
   5. Don’t miss this
8. Humans are inherently emotional beings so embed your content with emotions such as amusement, joy, hope and inspiration. A study of 1.6 million organic posts on SocialFlow found that the content that does go viral makes people feel something.
9. Merchandise your site to ensure your best sellers and stock with plenty of availability are prominent.
10. Make sure your affiliates are briefed with the relevant offers and have the correct branded assets. 
11. Update your website homepage Meta Title and description, to reflect your Black Friday offers.
12. Set up your sale category and collections on your website. 
13. Add Black Friday messaging to a theme, ready to launch before go-live. 
14. Update your customer service SLAs and ensure you’re autoresponders on socials and email have the correct messaging.
15. Disable your welcome pop-up, or update this to include Black Friday specific messaging.
16. Update your organic social bios with the correct messaging and link.
17. Shipping policy reviewed and updated inline with service proposition for November and December trade. 
18. Add promotions to your Google Ads account (add the promotions into Merchant centre too). 
19. Book in your team and/or agency scrums. How often are you reviewing and optimising your campaigns over the next week?
20. Plan for some downtime ✌️

We hope that you have enjoyed our Black Friday series. It’s not over yet though… the next step is to think about the afterlife of any new and returning customers in a way that will scale your brand year on year. 

Stay tuned!