Preparing for Black Friday

Preparing for Black Friday

Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, even for eCommerce stores. Whether you exist solely as an eCommerce store or have an eCommerce store as an addition to your brick and mortar store, you need to start preparing for Black Friday. If you prepare efficiently, it will be an excellent day for business. Here are some things you should do.

Start Advertising Promotions At Least Six Weeks in Advance

Some of the best social media campaigns have been the ones that build up the excitement. They don’t just give the information a day before or a week before. They build it up for weeks at a time. So for Black Friday, you should look at starting to build the excitement about six weeks out if you can. Any time after that is good.

Don’t Advertise Promotions Every Day

Even though you’re building up the excitement weeks in advance, you should not advertise promotions every day. That’s a great way to actually turn customers away. And as exciting as you may find it to share that you have found a great new all in one POS or some other technical component for your eCommerce business, you should instead focus on offering valuable information and posts that connect with your readers.

Prepare for Increased Traffic

If you handle your promotions effectively, then you will have increased traffic. Consider all of the different components of your site. Look to the average number of customers that you receive in a day. On Black Friday, that number could triple. Using various website analytics, you can analyze how your site will cope with this. You probably won’t have to follow Amazon’s example and get three or four separate servers designated exclusively for the holiday traffic, but you may need to switch to an independent server if you have not already. Run the tests and find out how your site will cope. Then make the transition. Just be sure to make it before mid November so that you have enough time to work out all the bugs.

Stockpile Content

Putting out high quality content becomes even more important in the week leading up to Black Friday.  But here’s the catch: you won’t have enough time to get the content developed. You’re probably going to be busy handling other aspects of the Black Friday sale and putting up other promotions. You’ll also want to spend time with family and friends. So start developing the content in advance.

Preparing for Black Friday is an important step for any eCommerce store. Make sure that you start advertising at least six weeks in advance, but remember that you shouldn’t advertise them every day. Make sure that your site is ready for the increased traffic. It could easily triple, particularly if your marketing techniques are successful. You should also make sure that you stockpile your content to make sure that you have plenty of content to put out during the week leading up to Black Friday.