As a store owner, you need to ensure that your website is ready to handle the influx of traffic and sales for the biggest sale of the year. To help you get ready, we’ve compiled the ultimate Black Friday checklist for WooCommerce store owners.
From optimizing your website for speed and performance to creating irresistible offers and promotions, this checklist covers all the essential steps you need to take to maximize your sales and profits.
So, whether you’re a seasoned store owner or just starting out, this checklist will help you stay on top of your game and make the most out of the Black Friday shopping frenzy. Are you ready to boost your sales and take your WooCommerce store to the next level? Let’s dive in and get started!
Introduction
Did you know that online commerce has grown substantially since COVID-19? It’s true… a recent survey by Engine found that although consumers are pessimistic, they’re spending up to 30% more online.
This means that now, more than at any point in history, there is a huge opportunity awaiting online store owners in November and December.
In fact, I would go as far as saying that Black Friday is undoubtedly the most important date in the coming quarter for any e-commerce store owner.
In this article, we’re going to take WooCommerce store owners through exactly what they need to know so they can prepare and make the most of this unprecedented opportunity.
Table of contents:
- Know Your Target Dates (Black Friday Is More Than One Day)
- Determine Your Advertising Options
- Get Your Stats Tracking In Place
- Create Bundles Of Products
- Use Better Offers Like BOGO (Buy One, Get One)
- Excite People (And Collect Emails) With A Viral Giveaway
- Use Your Affiliate Program
- New Black Friday Sale Ideas And Trends (Extra Things You Can Try This Year)
1. Know Your Target Dates (Black Friday Is More Than One Day)
When it comes to Black Friday sales, the first thing to know is that the term “Black Friday” means much more than just Friday the 27th of November 2020.
It’s actually a term used to encompass many more days and in fact, it’s often used to refer to the entire sale period at the end of November and early December.
Here are all of the associated sale dates for Black Friday 2020:
- Pre-Black Friday – Monday 23rd November to Thursday 26th November 2020 (Thanksgiving)
- Black Friday – Friday 27th November 2020
- Extended Weekend Sales – Sometimes called “Small Business Saturday” covering Saturday 28th November to Sunday 29th November 2020
- Cyber Monday – An online version of Black Friday occurring on Monday 30th November 2020
- Free Shipping Day – Sometimes also called “Green Monday” on Monday 14th December 2020
It may not be possible to have a sale on all of these days, and depending on your store, your audience, and how much time you have left to prepare you may not want to.
If you’re reading this on the Monday before Black Friday for instance, it’s probably a little late to target them all.
The good news is you can pick and choose which dates you wish to target in particular and there are really no rules saying you have to do them all.
2. Determine Your Advertising Options
Advertising plays a huge role in modern e-commerce and many of us lean on communities accessible via the likes of Facebook Ads and Google Ads to reach people searching.
There are many other platforms you might consider as well though like Twitter, LinkedIn (which is great for B2B stores), Youtube, and more.
What advertising options are you going to use this year to boost your sales?
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- LinkedIn Ads (great for B2B)
- Twitter Ads
- Youtube Ads (great for visually engaging products)
- Private blog & email list advertising
- Influencer campaigns
3. Get Your Stats Tracking In Place
It’s important to track everything that goes on during Black Friday so you can run a “post mortem” on your efforts once it’s all said and done.
In fact, it’s important to track everything anyway all the time so if you don’t have this set up yet, it’s going to serve you well in the future as well.
The first step is to decide what needs to be tracked and what doesn’t. It’s not always going to be possible to keep your eye on everything so pick the things that you think are most important.
I recommend including top-line revenue, coupon usage, the traffic source of known orders, how people are engaging with your popups and other optins on your site, and what your advertising engagement is like.
To track your e-commerce statistics I recommend using Google Analytics. It’s free and comprehensive.
To implement Google Analytics with full e-commerce tracking on your store I suggest using MonsterInsights which will allow you to set this up quickly & painlessly.
Make sure that you test the tracking a few weeks out from your sale dates so that you know its working properly and that you can retrieve the statistics you want.
4. Create Bundles Of Products
One of the biggest missed opportunities with Black Friday is that stores just offer a blanket site-wide deal and think they’re done with it.
This is shortsighted and leaves a lot of money on the table.
To properly take advantage of Black Friday I suggest you take a look at what Amazon does every day of the year… Bundling!
Bundling is a great way to increase the Average Order Value (AOV) which is an important part of making Black Friday work well for your store.
Think of it like asking “What else can I sell to this person? What else do they need if they purchase this?”
Your best source of answers will be your existing sale data. What do people normally buy together already? Use that information to create your sales bundles.
I suggest using the WooCommerce Product Bundles plugin to create your bundles since this will let you gather your products together in the product listing without the headache of having to track inventory separately.
Ideally, you should also create a landing page for your product bundle. This will make it feel extra special and give you more flexibility than just creating a new product.
Use a tool like Elementor Pro to put together these pages quickly and easily because it integrates well with WooCommerce (you can drop in the product add to cart with a block) and also comes with 100’s of pre-designed landing pages that you just have to tweak.
I also recommend introducing a floating header bar with a countdown timer to indicate to the user that this is a limited-time offer. You can do this with a tool such as OptinMonster (it also lets you create lots of other popup optins as well).
The benefit of using a tool like OptinMonster is that it can target just those specific pages you tell it to and you can also set a timer to increase the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) factor.
You should also advertise your product bundles on the most trafficked page on your website: your home page.
I love how Clear Dog use product bundles to encourage new people to try a variety pack of dog treats on their site:
Lastly, can you create unique ads for your bundles? Nothing converts better than a targeted ad with a specific offer. Bundles are a great way to get attention on a profitable offer.
Mix up your regular ads with ads for bundles and see how they go.
5. Use Better Offers Like BOGO (Buy One, Get One)
BOGO is the common name for “Buy One, Get One” style offers.
BOGO offers are incredibly popular in the offline world. You will see these when you walk through your local shopping mall – fashion stores love them!
That’s because they’re not only more appealing to customers, they are more profitable for the store too.
What would you prefer as a store owner?
Standard 30% off coupon deal
– 1x $100 pair of Jeans (discounted to $70 after 30% off)
– Minus $30 cost price
– $40 profit margin
A standard coupon for a “30% off deal” would take 30% off the revenue meaning its $70 profit margin would get reduced to a $40 profit margin.
BOGO (Buy 2 get 1 free) deal
– 3x pairs of Jeans are $300
– Minus $90 cost price ($30 cost price each)
– Minus $100 as 1x product is free for the deal
– $110 profit margin
Each time the customer takes the BOGO deal you make a $110 profit. I’ll take that any day of the week.
How To Implement BOGO Deals In WooCommerce
Advanced Coupons is the plugin you need to enable BOGO offers to work in WooCommerce. It lets you easily use coupons to give customers the option of a buy one, get one style deal. You can even do it on the free version!
Follow the same steps as you do with Bundle offers and you’ll find that BOGO deals can be incredibly successful for you:
- Decide what BOGO deals can you run for your products
- Create OptinMonster optins boxes to feed traffic to product pages with BOGO deals
- Post your BOGO deals on your homepage (temporarily until the sale finishes)
- Post about your BOGO deals on social media
- Create unique ads for your BOGO deals
6. Excite People (And Collect Emails) With A Viral Giveaway
Viral giveaways are a great way to get attention and if you’ve never used one before then Black Friday is a fantastic time to test it out.
To set up the giveaway I recommend using the RafflePress plugin. It gives you the option to have people enter and then earn additional entry points by completing certain actions.
You can of course run your giveaway as a simple Instagram post, but doing it this way will:
- Bring them onto your site so you can capture their email; and
- Allow you to better control the viral spreading
Once you have your giveaway set up and ready to go on your website I suggest promoting it by:
- Sending an announcement email
- Scheduling a reminder email to your list
- Create social posts and boost them
- Using social media stories
- and allow extra “daily” entries for a massive viral boost
7. Use Your Affiliate Program
When it comes to Black Friday sales an active affiliate program can be worth its weight in gold.
If you haven’t built your affiliate program yet, then a tool like AffiliateWP is a nice quick way to get one up and running before Black Friday.
Affiliate programs work by you giving your affiliates a percentage of each sale they refer. Make sure you set this level appropriately to ensure you cover your costs and still make a profit.
Your affiliates can be bloggers, other stores, or even professional affiliate marketers.
Affiliates will require some resources in order to promote you and your products. At a bare minimum, you should give them files like your logo, popular product images, etc.
For Black Friday (and other sales as well) you can give affiliates more specific resources like graphics, cut & paste emails, and holiday prep checklists which will make it easier for them to promote you to their audience.
If you really want to incentivize them you could host an affiliate competition (eg. most sales referred win a bonus). If you make the prize something really desirable, many affiliates will bend over backward to achieve it.
8. New Black Friday Sale Ideas And Trends (Extra Things You Can Try This Year)
There are always lots of things to do when it comes to preparing for a sales season like Black Friday and I hope this checklist has helped you get some of it under control at least.
If you’re looking for even more unique ideas to try, here are some things that I thought of for people who want to make the most of it:
- “Going Live” on socials on the day of the sale
- Extended offers (offer extended for 24 hours!)
- Cross-promo with other stores
- Add urgency & scarcity to offers (limit time or quantity, use countdowns)
- Customize offers based on customer’s purchase history (especially people from the last 3 months)
Good Luck On Your Black Friday 2020 Campaigns!
Want to download this blog post as a checklist to follow? Drop your email on the right and we’ll send you a link to get it in a convenient/printable Google Spreadsheet!
Keen to go even deeper? Check out this epic WooCommerce Black Friday playbook which goes into several interesting strategies so you can dominate Black Friday in your niche.
Like with any kind of promotion, you’ll get out of Black Friday what you put in. To make the most of Black Friday you need the right tools to back you up and that is what Advanced Coupons provides.
From the whole team here at Advanced Coupons, we wish you success for the rest of the year 🙂
