Black Friday Checklist: 24 Tips to Prepare for BFCM 2024 to 2X Sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday offer some of the craziest sales of the year. Electronics, clothing, furniture…everything gets sold at up to 90% markdown prices.

Last year, online sales hit a record $70+ billion. And this number might go up in 2024. While this may seem like a good thing for any eCommerce business owner, it also means that this year’s competition will be even tougher.

To be realistic with you… the only way you can benefit from BFCM is if you start early. I’m talking at least a month before the main event.

To help you prepare for the upcoming BFCM 2024, I’ve rounded up 24 tips focused on marketing and performance optimization strategies that can help you 10x your sales.

Let’s get started…

Black Friday Marketing Checklist

Preparing for Black Friday takes a lot of time and careful planning. Figuring out BFCM SEO strategy, ad and email campaigns, and website marketing creatives can all be quite taxing. To help you streamline your approach, I’ve covered this guide in two parts:

• BFCM marketing checklist
• BFCM performance optimization checklist

Announce Your BFCM Sale Early…October or Earlier

Technically speaking, people don’t start looking for BFCM deals on the actual day that BFCM starts. In fact, people start looking up special deals as early as October.

So… it’s a no-brainer to get the word out about your BFCM campaign early. Build early anticipation. This way, customers will be aware of your deals before BFCM begins. And when the time finally comes, they’ll be ready to purchase.

Now…the way you announce your BFCM deals is completely up to you. Whether you choose email marketing or paid ads, your goal should be to make people aware of your deals as early as possible.

Check out this example from Google, where they pre-announced their BFCM deals.

Source: Google Store

Plan & Segment Your Ad Campaigns

Connecting to the last point I discussed, you must start your marketing efforts early. Considering that email open rates increase by 44% during BFCM, this is something you need to plan carefully.

For BFCM, you can break your email marketing campaign into “pre,” “during” and “post” segments. Then, plan your marketing strategies for each stage.

For example:

• Pre: Build anticipation (teasers), early BFCM access emails, limited-time special offers
• During: Build FOMO, cross-sell, and upsell, create urgency
• Post: Extended sale, last chance offers, follow-up email surveys

Plan your email marketing campaign not just for a single day but for the entire BFCM sale season…which, by the way, starts as early as October.

Advertise Black Friday Deals Throughout Your eCommerce Store

No matter how you bring traffic to your eCommerce store, be or organically or through paid ads, if you’re not putting your BFCM deals in front of your potential customers, you won’t be selling anything.

Solution: Advertise your BFCM deals throughout your store. This way, your visitors can see your deals no matter which page they land on.

The best way to achieve this is by using a global banner to advertise your offer. Check out the example below:

You can also use exit pops to advertise your offer when your visitors either attempt to leave the page or scroll to a certain depth.

Side banners are also a great way to advertise your offers, as they give you considerably more real estate to display your offer not just in text but also visually.

You can also display marked-down prices on items you’re offering discounts on. Seeing before and after prices can encourage customers to make the purchase.

Optimize Product Descriptions With Targeted “Black Friday” Keywords

This strategy is super simple to implement. You already have products listed in your store, so you just need to update their descriptions with relevant BFCM keywords.

You want to make sure that when people start searching for a specific brand or product followed by the words “Black Friday deal (s),” your product descriptions are optimized to appear for such search queries.

Check out how BestBuy has optimized its meta tags with Black Friday keywords.

Create/Update Your BFCM Return Policy

If you’ve been running an eCommerce store for a while, you already have a refund/return policy. But if you’re new, you definitely need one, especially during BFCM season.

According to surveys, 58% of consumers prefer a “no questions asked” return policy.

Your refund/return should be clear and transparent. It should clearly mention:

• Explain your refund/return policy. Make it clear whether the customer will get to exchange their purchased product or they’ll get in-store credit or their money back.
• You must mention the refund/return period. For example, customers can only return sale items within 3 days.
• Mention the shipping address where your customers can return products.
• It is also important to mention the refund/return procedure. For example, if you want your customers to ship the item back in its original packaging–write it in print. Be transparent and let your customers know what can revoke their return request.

Your return policy should be properly showcased in places where it matters the most. For example:

• On checkout page
• Return/refund policy page
• FAQs
• Order confirmation emails

Run Retargeting Campaigns to Target Past Visitors

eCommerce retargeting is a great advertising strategy for re-engaging customers who are already familiar with your brand but may have forgotten about it—hence, unaware of your BFCM offers.

Advertising platforms use pixels to track visitors’ activity on your website so you can decide to re-engage them later with targeted ads.

To run retargeting campaigns on meta platforms, you can use Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel). With Meta Pixel, you’ll get insights into what product a customer showed interest in. You can view what products your customers added to their carts, their pageviews, and products they purchased, among other actions.

Run Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

Hate people who add products to their carts only to abandon them at the end?

Every eCommerce store deals with this every day. But…the percentage of cart abandoners goes way up during BFCM—up to 75%.

Having an automated email trigger with an attractive offer can lure back customers who abandoned their carts and encourage them to purchase.

Abandoned cart email campaigns have an average conversion rate of more than 10%, and they’re inexpensive to run.

You can use any email marketing platform like Klaviyo to send out abandoned cart emails, but if you have a WooCommerce store, you can use an inexpensive native WooCommerce extension called “AutomateWoo.” It lets you define different triggers and the actions to perform when a certain workflow is triggered.

Source: WooCommerce

Offer Rewards to Loyal Customers

Rewarding loyal customers gives customers a reason to keep engaging with you long after the BFCM buzz has ended. Send personalized emails reminding customers of their points balance and special perks, encouraging them to shop again.

You also offer tiered discounts to customers who buy more than one product to encourage them to buy more. You can also offer referral discounts or give your email subscribers early access to your Black Friday deals.

Check out this example from REI Co-op:

Source: clevertap

Start Your BFCM Campaign Early & Extend It Till December

As I mentioned earlier, people start searching for BFCM deals as early as October, and BFCM is no longer a week-long shopping experience.

What I mean by this is that if October, November, and December are three months when people shop for the holiday season, why not start your sale early with a narrative that goes something like: “Why wait for BFCM? Avoid last-minute shopping and get 30% off the entire store…”

This allows you to subliminally influence your customers to purchase early, avoiding last-minute shopping during the holidays. When the actual BFCM sale period approaches, you can focus your marketing efforts on promoting BFCM deals offering greater discounts.

The benefit of this approach is that you don’t focus all your efforts on generating as much revenue as possible from a single BFCM week. Instead, you segment your campaigns to generate more revenue throughout the season.

Of course, there are more ways to prepare for Black Friday from a marketing perspective. But what we’ve covered so far is enough to accelerate your marketing efforts and drive increased conversions.

Black Friday Performance Optimization Checklist

Now that we’ve completed the marketing checklist…let’s shift our focus to the stuff that matters most behind the scenes: performance optimization efforts.

Things like website speed, products being displayed properly, and your website not crashing due to increased traffic—all this is crucial to ensuring your customers get to purchase products from your website.

Optimize eCommerce Store Speed for Fast Load Times

E-commerce stores with optimized pages for speed are more important to search engines. Not only do they rank them faster, but users also love it.

Core Web Vitals and SEO complement each other, and to improve your website speed, you must set the foundation right. I’m talking about getting web hosting that is optimized for speed. Cloudways-managed WooCommerce hosting guarantees 99% uptime and offers autoscaling capabilities to ensure your store always stays online.

To further improve your eCommerce store’s speed, you can implement caching on your server and platform hosting your store, such as installing caching plugins like Breeze or W3 Total Cache in WordPress.

You can also use CSS and JavaScript minification to reduce file sizes for faster page loads. For even better performance, integrate a CDN like Cloudflare to distribute content globally and reduce server load. Cloudways offers built-in caching and Cloudflare Enterprise add-on to handle high traffic seamlessly.

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Stress Test and Prepare Your Store for High Traffic

Optimizing your website speed is one thing, but ensuring your website can handle traffic surges during the sale is another.

To test and prepare your site for BFCM, you can use a tool like Loader.io to stress test it. Run a series of tests to see how your website performs when hundreds of visitors access it simultaneously.

To give you an idea, we ran a stress test on one of our sites, which simulated 250 visits per minute. As you can see from the screenshot below, our site loaded in 365ms which is an excellent result.

According to stats, even a 0.1% increase in website speed can result in a 10% increase in conversions. This just goes to show how much website speed matters.

Optimize Servers to Handle High Visitor Traffic

Website crashing is pretty common during sale periods. Since most ecommerce stores are unable to handle an unprecedented surge of web traffic during sale periods, they end up crashing.

Keeping this in mind, ask yourself: is your online store ready to handle Black Friday web traffic spike?

To manage the traffic head-on, you need a cloud hosting solution that allows you to scale server resources as needed. But scaling in anticipation can be costly as you never know how much traffic you can exactly expect.

In this case, Cloudways Autonomous is ideal as it offers true autoscaling that can automatically scale resources up and down depending on traffic.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

In 2024, more than 59% of users use mobile devices to browse online. So if you’re not optimizing for mobile users, you’ll miss out on sales. According to Think with Google, 58% of smartphone users prefer businesses with mobile-friendly websites..

But what if your site isn’t optimized for mobile?

Well, studies show that 90% of visitors bounce from mobile sites that take over 5 seconds to load. That’s why your website must be mobile-responsive and fast at the same time.

Several factors can impact your site’s mobile performance like:

• No mobile caching
• Unoptimized images or animations
• Too many installed plugins

To check if your site is mobile optimized, you can test it through tools like:

• Google Lighthouse
• Google Mobile-Friendly Test
• GTmetrix

To optimize your site, you can implement mobile caching, image optimization, and lazy loading. You can also minimize render-blocking resources, use a CDN, and enable Google AMP for faster mobile loading times.

Create a Plan B in Case Things Go Wrong

Running an eCommerce store, you can run into unpredictable hiccups. Malware attacks, for example, are pretty serious threats that can take down your website, costing you a ton financially.

This is why it is very important to have a plan B for when things go wrong. For instance,  regularly taking backups of your site can help you restore your site and resume normal operations without affecting your BFCM sales.

All in all, what I’m trying to say is that your eCommerce store can encounter any unforeseen issue. You just need to have a backup plan ready.

At Cloudways, we understand this. This is why we offer automated and on-demand backup features so our customers can restore their applications if any issue arises. Cloudways also offers a Malware Protection add-on that detects and removes malicious code from an application’s databases and files.

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Audit and Improve Your Checkout Experience

Sometimes, simple is better. Believe it or not, 17% of shoppers leave their carts due to a complicated checkout experience. So…it is super important to create a flawless checkout experience that requires minimum form fields to speed up the checkout process.

You must simplify your checkout process, especially on mobile devices. To do this, consider offering payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay and traditional credit card options with autofill features.

You can also further enhance the checkout experience by offering customers an option for buy-now-pay-later (BNPL). This alone is proven to increase conversion rates by 20% to 30% on average.

You should also consider showing prices in customers’ preferred currency and being transparent about any additional costs, like taxes. This can significantly reduce friction and lower cart abandonment.

Ensure Website Security

On average, 30,000 websites get hacked daily. So website security isn’t a joke. First things first, make sure your site has a valid SSL certificate installed. This will not only ensure Google ranks you in search results but also prevent spamming and hacking attempts as data between you and your visitors stays encrypted. Cloudways, by the way, offers free SSL certificates.

Aside from SSL certificates, your website needs a suite of protection, which Cloudways offers. We offer a Web Application Firewall, Two-Factor Authentication, real-time monitoring of your server and application, and a lot more.

All this ensures your website stays protected, especially during BFCM when you can’t afford even a minute of downtime.

Ensure Your Site Works Properly on All Devices and Browsers

Remember how I mentioned earlier that you should optimize your website for mobile devices? Well, you also need to ensure your website works well on different screen sizes and browsers.

Laptops, tablets, and smartphones, you must test to ensure your website is working properly on different devices. The same goes for popular web browsers.

To ensure you’re not shooting in the dark with your optimization efforts, you should use Google Analytics to determine exactly what devices and browsers your visitors are using to access your site. This will allow you to optimize your site accordingly.

Assess and Aim to Grow Your Conversion Rate

Bringing customers to your site is one thing, but getting them to convert is another. This is where you need to invest your time in conversion rate optimization (CRO). To increase your conversion rate during BFCM, you must first benchmark your current conversion rate.

To find your sales conversion rate, you can take the total number of conversions, divide that by the total number of visitors, and then multiply the number you get by a hundred to get the conversion rate percentage.

You can also use a tool like a free conversion rate calculator from Upwork, which does the same thing I talked about earlier.

Once you know your position, you need to conduct market research to determine the standard conversion rate in your industry. For example, the average conversion rate of the pet care industry is 3.65%.

Then you can set a benchmark that you’d want to achieve during the BFCM. Remember that even a 1% increase in conversion rate can significantly increase sales.

Figure Out What Worked, What Didn’t & Come Back Strong

BFCM is an amazing time not only to increase your sales but also to learn from your mistakes. We covered a lot of tips in this blog, from marketing to performance optimization, but none of them can guarantee 100% results. Some strategies will work for you, and some might not.

So at the end of your BFCM campaign, it is important to reflect. Assess what went right and what didn’t. This way, you can plan better for future campaigns to achieve better results.

If you think I missed adding any important tip, let me know in the comments, and I’d be glad to cover it.