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The countdown to Black Friday is on, with shoppers gearing up to grab a bargain and retailers making the most of what is predicted to be the UK’s biggest shopping day of 2018. This shopping phenomenon spread from the US and is now a major date in the UK’s shopping calendar, spreading over the weekend to include Cyber Monday. It falls on November 23^rd (the day after Thanksgiving) and in England the focus for shoppers is mainly online. A whopping £1.4bn was spent on online sales in the UK on Black Friday last year - up some 11.7% on the year before. So if you’re an online retailer we’ve put together our top tips for making the most of this shopping frenzy.

Plan ahead

If you market your products well and offer a great price and shopping experience you could sell a lot more than you’d bargained on, so make sure you have enough stock to fulfil orders.

You also need to make sure you build up interest across your marketing channels in advance. Create strong and compelling messages with good quality images across your digital marketing channels (e-newsletter, Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc) and schedule content to go out on the day itself.

Offer a great shopping experience

Customers abandoning their cart is a huge frustration to online retailers, but an effective website with a simple, intuitive shopping cart experience can reduce cart abandonment enormously. Don’t miss out on Black Friday traffic by having a poorly designed shopping and checkout experience.

Make sure your website is mobile responsive

Many Black Friday sales will be done via mobile, so make sure your website is mobile responsive. If your online shop is not easy for users to navigate whilst using a mobile or tablet, they may well lose interest and go elsewhere.

Track results

Don’t forget to see what worked and what didn’t. Use tracking codes and look in Google Analytics to see where your buyers came from and what devices they were using. A well designed website will allow you to quickly and clearly look at your online shop’s statistics, reports and view recent trends for specific products and your website as a whole. This data will be useful for your next promotion and will help you make decisions on where to promote your products and how successful your website was at giving buyers a good user experience.

We hope this guide helps you get the most out of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday long weekend. Whilst some smaller, independent online retailers may decide not to join in the Black Friday fervour, these tips should help your website and future marketing campaigns perform better. If you need help with your web design contact us here at Spartan, the eCommerce experts.