Black Friday BFCM is right around the corner, with only a few days left. But…you still have some to plan and prepare your BFCM campaign to potentially 2x your sales.
That being said, planning and execution are not going to be easy. With more than 5 million eCommerce stores using WooCommerce, you can imagine how tough it will be to stand out from the crowd.
But don’t worry. In this “planning” / “how-to” guide on WooCommerce Black Friday, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know to increase your sales during BFCM 2024.
But whatever you do, you have to Prepare Early!
Why Should You Plan & Prepare for BFCM Early as WooCommerce Store Owner?
Planning and preparing for BFCM early is super important. Execution is one thing, but a first-mover advantage can give you an edge over your competitors. If you can get your BFCM campaign live before your competitors, guess what—you’d be making more sales.
Here are a few reasons why you should start planning and preparing for BFCM early:
You can make more sales if you plan and execute early
Customers start looking for BFCM deals as early as October, and BFCM sales don’t really end until the end of December. So, if you start early and then drag your marketing efforts all the way to the end of December, imagine what your revenue number would look like.
You’ll get an edge over competitors if you start early
BFCM season is super competitive, with hundreds of thousands of brands fighting to rank in the search results. Starting early means you’ll be able to plan and execute your marketing campaigns better by analyzing previously successful campaigns.
You’ll be able to optimize your website to handle traffic spikes
If you’re a Cloudways Autonomous user, that’s something you won’t have to worry about, as your hosting resources can auto-scale as traffic increases or decreases. However, if not, early preparation can help you optimize your WooCommerce store to handle thousands of concurrent users.
You’ll be able to predict demand and manage your inventory accordingly
By planning early and predicting demand, you’ll be able to manage your inventory proactively-meaning…products won’t run out mid sale, and you won’t have to overstock, both of which can help you save a ton of money.
You be able to plan your BFCM marketing campaigns better
If your ads, emails, and landing don’t look different than all the other brands, you won’t be standing out from the crowd. Putting a personalized touch to your emails and creating ads with customer segmentation in mind takes a lot of time. Start early, and you can definitely increase your conversion rate.
Starting early gives you time to test and optimize
With ample time on your hands, you’d be able to A/B to see what’s working and what’s not. Optimization never stops, and that’s something you’ll be doing as soon as you start teasing your customers with your BFCM offers.
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How to Plan for WooCommerce Black Friday Sale?
Maybe, this is your first-ever BFCM campaign, or perhaps you’ve done this before, but the results weren’t as expected. Either way, I’ve got you covered.
Here’s how to plan your Woocommerce Black Friday sale.
Define Your BFCM Sale Goals
While your ultimate goal will be to increase sales, you’ll need to figure out the macro-level goals you’ll need to accomplish to hit the bigger goal.
- For example, is there a certain product in your store that sells quickly—if so…how many units of it can you sell to hit your BFCM sale target?
- Do you need to increase your average order value (AOV) to hit your sales numbers? If so, would you consider upselling/cross-selling or offering buy-one-get-one offers?
- Would acquiring new customers help you achieve your targets or retargeting?
Figure out clear goals and then lay down actionable strategies to achieve them. In the end, you’ll have something measurable, which you can assess and identify shortfalls to improve future campaigns.
Identify Products That’ll Be Part of Your BFCM Sale
Let’s be honest, not every product in your store can be sold at a 50% discount. Something that costs $100 can’t be sold for $50. We’ll it can…but you’d be losing a ton of money if you do.
To maximize your profits, consider figuring out what products sell like hotcakes in your store. These will be products that you know will bring in traffic no matter what. And through these products, you can sell other less popular products.
For example, if you sell shoes, cross-selling related products like socks can increase your socks sales.
In addition to cross-selling, you must leverage trends. Figure out what’s trending and include them in your store. This can guarantee increase in your sales. For example, if you do a quick research on Google Trends, you’ll see that “Wrestling shoes” have recently gained popularity.
Figure Out What Discounts You Can Offer
This all comes down to market research. Figure out what your competitor’s pricing strategy looks like in your niche. This way, you could offer a more competitive price than other brands.
Price comparison sites can help you research prices your competitors have set so your plan better pricing strategy.
But…keep in mind that setting your prices lower than your competitors isn’t enough to help you hit or exceed your expected sales numbers. In addition to keeping your prices lower by offering deep discounts, also aim to increase your average order value.
For example, you offer a 25% discount on shoes which you normally sell for $50. This will brown your AOV down by $12.50.
That’s a lot if you ask me!
Keeping in mind the same example, how can we lower our AOV to just $5 instead of $12.50?
Well, through cross-selling and upselling, of course. Encourage people to buy multiple products instead of one. Or get them to buy more expensive products than the ones they already added to their carts.
You can also consider offering bundling discounts and tiered discounts and pair them with other BFCM marketing ideas.
Figure When to Begin and End Your Black Friday Sale
As I said, people start looking for BFCM offers as early as October, so starting an early BFCM sale can be a good decision. Or you can start on the actual Black Friday day and keep your BFCM sale live for the week—Monday to Monday.
Personally, I would take a segmented approach, starting my BFCM marketing campaign in early October as a pre-Black Friday sale. Then, I would focus all my efforts on the actual BFCM sale in November. Finally, I would run an extended sale that would end in December.
How to Prepare for WooCommerce Black Friday Sale?
Now that we’ve closed the planning chapter let’s discuss how to prepare for the WooCommerce Black Friday sale. This would involve figuring out marketing and optimization strategies you start executing to avoid last-minute hassles.
Bundle Products to increase sales and AOV
Remember how I mentioned pairing related products together to increase sales and AOV of less popular products, yeah…you should definitely consider bundling products for your BFCM sale.
For example, you can pair a phone case with a screen protector to create a bundle. This can attract more people to purchase since they’d get a better value.
There are WooCommerce extensions that can help you save time manually bundling products by automatically grouping products that can be sold as bundles. For example, WooCommerce Product Bundles extension.
Source: Koh
Allocate Your Black Friday Marketing Spend
This is super important to maximize your ROI. If you overspend… you’d have to take out your marketing spend from your revenue, and that’s never pleasant to see at the end of your campaign.
So…setting a marketing budget is important. A rule of thumb is to spend 5% to 10% of your total revenue on marketing. It is also important not to put all eggs in one basket. Distribute your marketing budget across multiple channels like paid ads, email marketing and social media marketing and SEO for BFCM campaigns.
Offer Pre-Black Friday Deals to Existing Customers
If you make people feel special, they’ll want to purchase you again. A great way to do this is to offer your existing customers early access to your BFCM sale. You can leverage your email marketing list to reach out to loyal customers. That said, to maximize your sales, you’ll have to create a sense of urgency in your emails.
Highlighting the offer and using time-sensitive messaging, such as “limited stock available,” can create FOMO and encourage customers to act on your early bird offer.
Check out this example from Postable, where they’ve perfectly executed this strategy:
If you want to broaden the scope of your early bird sale, you can offer discounts to not only your existing customers but also to anyone who’s browsing your site pre-Black Friday. To do this, you can use WooCommerce push notifications. There are many push notification extensions available for WooCommerce, so the choice is up to you.
Source: WooCommerce
Prepare Your WooCommerce Store for High Traffic
If your marketing efforts follow through, your traffic will spike during BFCM. And to ensure your store handles traffic like it should, you need to stress test it before your sale goes live.
To test and prepare your WooCommerce for BFCM, you can use a tool like Loader.io to stress test it. Run multiple tests to see how your store performs when hundreds of concurrent visitors access it.
Also, have a backup of your site in case your store crashes. Taking backups can help you restore and resume normal operations without impacting your BFCM sales.
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.
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Improve Your Checkout Experience
Checkout is the final stage of your customer’s journey. If you lose them at this stage, it is going to cost you in terms of sales. This stage has to be absolutely frictionless. WooCommerce does a great job already at this by offering a one-page checkout extension that…as the name suggests, allows customers to complete their order purchase from a single screen.
As far as optimizing the checkout experience goes, make sure to show customer product prices in their local currency. Also, show any additional costs like taxes to give them a complete cost breakdown.
Ummm..what else? Oh yeah! Also, consider offering your customers the option to buy now, pay later (BNPL). This tactic alone can help you increase your conversion rates by 20% to 30%.
Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
We discussed this earlier, and the only way to reduce cart abandonment is by making the checkout process as frictionless as possible. During BFCM, cart abandonment rates can increase by up to 75%.
But let’s say you still lost many customers despite having an optimized checkout page. In that case, you can run abandoned cart email campaigns. Such campaigns have an average conversion rate of more than 10%, and they’re inexpensive to run.
As soon as a customer abandons their cart, an automatically triggered email with an enticing offer can bring them back. To do this, you can use email automation tools like Klaviyo, or for a more native experience, you can use a WooCommerce extension called “AutomateWoo.”
Optimize Product Descriptions With “Black Friday” Keywords
This strategy is very simple to implement. You simply need to update your product descriptions with relevant BFCM keywords. This way, when people search for a specific brand or product followed by a modifier like “Black Friday deal (s),” your products should appear for their queries.
Here’s an example of BestBuy’s Black Friday optimized meta tags:
Make Sure Your WooCommerce Store Loads Quickly
If your store doesn’t load fast, search engines won’t rank it in SERPs. Google, for example, considers speed to be a major ranking factor. So…I guess you can say that core Web Vitals and SEO complement each other.
A good web hosting can offer fast load times and zero downtime. Not to brag, but our managed WooCommerce hosting guarantees 99% uptime.
Implementing caching can also significantly boost loading speeds. This is something that can be implemented on both the server side and in WooCommerce itself. For example, you can install caching plugins like Breeze in WooCommerce.
Minifying Javascript and CSS can also help boost speeds, and integrating a CDN like Cloudflare can distribute content globally to reduce the load on your server.
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Build Your Email List Before BFCM
Did you know that email open rates can increase by 44% during BFCM?
Before BFCM arrives, you must build a sizable email list. Your list should be filled with leads primed and ready to purchase from you on Black Friday.
An easy way to build an email list is by offering incentives to your customers in the weeks leading up to the sale. For example, “Register to get early access – up to 75% off”.
Here’s an example of this strategy from WodBottom. Check out how they advertised offering 75% off to new subscribers.
Use Countdown Timers to Create Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency during Black Friday can help increase your conversion rate. Fear of missing out (FOMO) can force indecisive customers to make a purchase.
For example, you can reinforce “time” and “discount” in your messaging, like “50% off deal ends 25th November“.
Source: coxandcox
Sales Countdown Timer for WooCommerce can help you add countdown timers to your product pages, homepage, and even emails. This extension can also display the quantity of products left in stock, further reinforcing a sense of urgency.
Use Promotional Banners to Advertise Your Deals
The best way to advertise your BFCM deals in your store is to use a global banner. This ensures that your visitors are reminded of your offer no matter where they are on your site.
Check out how we’ve used a global banner on Cloudways:
Exit intent popups are also great to advertise your offer. You can set them up to be triggered when visitors are about to leave and present them with an offer they can’t skip.
Splash Popup for WooCommerce can help you easily create exit popups that can reduce cart abandonment.
You can also use side banners to advertise your offer. Check out this example from LOFT:
Create a Black Friday Social Media Campaign
Last but not least, you can use social media marketing to hype up your BFCM deals. Social media platforms can get you a lot of attention 👀. And when you have all eyes on you, your products will sell without you even having to hype them up.
A great way to use social media to market your BFCM offer is to host interactive social media events. For example, get people to participate in fun challenges to win free stuff. You can host live Instagram sessions and get people to participate to win a gift.
Tag-a-friend contests are great examples of this strategy. They can get your products and offers in front of people who are unfamiliar with your brand.
Check out this example from Glossier:
Source: glossier
Assess Your WooCommerce Black Friday Strategy & Come Back Strong
When BFCM is finally over, you’ll get a chance to figure out what went right and what didn’t. It is time to learn from your mistakes and prepare a better strategy for the future.
In this blog, I walked you through the reasons for planning your WooCommerce Black Friday campaigns early and how to plan and prepare your WooCommerce store to potentially 2x your sales.
We covered all the basic but tested WooCommerce marketing and performance optimization tips in this blog, but if you think I missed adding any important tip, let me know in the comments, and I’d be glad to cover it.
Abdul Rehman
Abdul is a tech-savvy, coffee-fueled, and creatively driven marketer who loves keeping up with the latest software updates and tech gadgets. He's also a skilled technical writer who can explain complex concepts simply for a broad audience. Abdul enjoys sharing his knowledge of the Cloud industry through user manuals, documentation, and blog posts.
