10 Essential Black Friday Tips For Retailers

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10 ESSENTIAL BLACK FRIDAY TIPS FOR RETAILERS
HOW TO DOUBLE YOUR PROFITS DURING BLACK FRIDAY
AND CYBER MONDAY
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Just the words Black Friday and Cyber Monday
might make your stomach turnthe hordes of
people, the start of cold weather, the
post-holiday hangovers. But, as a small business
owner, this is one of your most important times
of the year. Now is when your store can make the
most profits. And the time to start planning for
Black Friday and Cyber Monday is NOW. By
setting up Black Friday deals, and using the
proper Point of Sale system (POS), you will put
your business in the perfect position to double
your sales during Black Friday and Cyber
Monday. Below youll find a list of 10 tips to
double, or even triple, your revenue by taking
these proven steps to prepare your store for
Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
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Last year, around the world during Black Friday /
Cyber Monday (BFCM), shoppers spent billions
more throughout the four-day event at businesses
of all shapes and sizes. Its a fantastic
opportunity for retailers that you shouldnt miss
out on Cyber Monday 2017 was the biggest day in
the history of ecommerce in the US, and
consumers spent 6.59 billion online on just that
one day. So how can you ride the wave of revenue
and sales? To help retailers prepare for the
2018 holiday season, we have outlined the key
steps for a successful holiday season. The
holidays are starting earlier this year. Keeping
your holiday retail game on-point can have some
real rewards. Failing to prepare appropriately,
however, can have long term consequences,
whether its disappointed customers or lost
revenue. If you want to get in on this years
biggest shopping weekend, now is the time to
start planning. Weve assembled 10 tips to
double your profits during Black Friday and
Cyber Monday, and get you ready for a successful
holiday season (and beyond).
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1. Hire Extra Staff
Most likely, youll need to beef up your staff
for the holiday season. Depending on your the
size of your regular staff and your industry,
this could be anywhere from 50-100 more staff
than usual. If you havent already started
hiring for the holidaysdo it now. Yesterday
would be ideal, but you cant go back and change
the past, so just get on it. Time is ticking. In
order to ensure that your seasonal staff is
fully trained and ready to deliver excellent
customer service, you should have your team in
place ASAP. The last thing you want is to put in
all of this effort in so many different ways, yet
simply not have enough hands on deck to handle
the fall out and surge in attention. Remember,
your sales probably wont pick up until after the
fall feast, so youll have extra resources for
training, but not necessarily the revenue stream
to support it, fully. Allow enough time to get
your new employees significant experience on the
sales floor, to the point where they actually
get to be productive, and at the very least, know
their way around. During this time of new and
transitioning staff, having a point of sale in
place to manage your employees is of utmost
importance. Make sure your current POS software
has the features you need to accurately track
employees clocking in and out, as well Any
merchant should ask themselves is my current
POS system ready to handle this?
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2. Reconcile Inventory
This should be a no-brainer, but in order to have
a successful holiday shopping season, you have
to a shop full of fantastic inventory. While
youve likely already planned, and already
ordered, what you expect to sell through the
season, its always important to have a backup
plan. For instance, if this years hot item is
what you are going to run hard, then that is
what you need to focus your advertising and your
promotional efforts on. Lets play what if
What if, this years hottest item sells out
within the week of December. Sure, thats great,
but what are you going to do for the next three
weeks? If this happens, do your customers still
have an incentive to continue shopping with you?
Have you set up any alternatives that can draw
traffic? Or are you a one-hit wonder? This
information is crucial when prepping your store
for Black Friday.
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Running out of the wrong inventory at the wrong
time can cripple your chances of profits.
Nothing is more important during the holiday
season than proper inventory management. Ensuring
that you have alternatives ready to draw
continuous traffic and help your business make a
lasting impression through the season is
necessary for success. If your current
point-of-sale doesnt support inventory tracking
then it might be time upgrade to a more complete
POS system. eHoppers Freedom plan gives you
access to rich inventory controls such
as Purchase order receiving Variants and
serialized items Current stock total views
Reporting on purchase orders
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3. Integrate Your Point of Sale Online Ordering
Do you have a brick mortar and an online store?
If so, its critical that you have an accurate
handle on your inventory during Black Friday and
Cyber Monday. You need a solution that syncs your
point sale with your eCommerce, so you have an
easy and accurate way to track your stock levels
across all your sales channels. With eHopper,
you can be confident during your busiest times,
that your inventory management is contained in
one place wherever the customer finds your
product and completes a sale. Syncing your POS
with eCommerce provides enormous benefits for
any merchant. Leveraging these benefits is a
crucial step in doubling your profits during
Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Get your store
ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and
maximize sales for all members of your family.
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4. Test to ensure your website can handle a
surge in traffic
You have to get ready for the holiday season, and
one of the most important parts of that season
is Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the time when
you need to be completely confident that your
website can handle any surge in traffic that
your promotions, hopefully, create. The only way
to do this is to test your site before the
rush. Luckily, theres plenty of powerful (and
some free) tools to confirm your site health
ahead of BFCM. Scanning your site with a web
performance tool like Google PageSpeed Insights,
GTmetrix or WP Checkup can quickly show you what
areas of your site to focus on improving. Theres
many things to consider, so these metrics will
be a useful starting point. It might be that you
need to optimize your image meta data, update
your theme or template, or start cleaning up your
database.
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5. Focus on email marketing
Best practices are to start sending emails in the
build-up to BFCM in anticipation of sales. Aim
for an initial announcement email, followed by a
couple of valuable emails designed to keep your
clients product top of mind. Also, consider
offering exclusive pre-sales coupons only for
email subscribers. Try to test out a range of
subject lines in advance. Your clients
subscribers are going to be swamped with emails
around BFCM, so you need to make sure you stand
out. Make sure subject lines clearly state the
offering. Make sure you tailor all outgoing
transactional emails to Black Friday / Cyber
Monday promotions. Encourage shoppers to return
to your clients online store for future
purchases with a time-sensitive discount coupon.
Call to Actions referencing time running out
are particularly effective for holiday season
campaigns. Its always a smart idea to target
shoppers who have abandoned cart or browsed
without buying. Customize these cart abandonment
emails to remind the customer of an item that
was added to their shopping cart, but not
purchased. You can even include a personalized
discount or coupon to encourage the person to
return to your store and complete their
purchase. Make sure you create landing pages for
your clients top sellers and link to CTAs
within promotional emails.
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Always double check that all links work correctly
and are being tracked using UTM parameters. This
way you can analyze where you efforts were most
effective, and generate a cost per acquisition
for all of your sales, allowing you to calculate
your Return on Investment. For merchants who
have a brick mortar store, use email marketing
to drive foot traffic from their online store to
their retail store, such as offering in-store
only promotions. Door-buster sales are another
effective strategy to promote via email
campaigns. These combine the benefits of both
increased foot traffic and time-sensitive
Call-to- Actions.
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6. Boost SEO
It goes without saying that all content should be
optimized for search engines, so that customers
can easily find products and BFCM deals. Its
important that potential customers can quickly,
and easily find your products. This mean both
online and in-person. SEO is crucial not only
for your online marketing efforts, but for your
physical foot traffic, as well. Now is the time
to update your business Google profile. Google
My Business is where retailers can update
canonical data on where your store is, its
hours of operations, and how to contact your
support team with any potential questions. By
not having your business information up-to-date
in search engine listings, you are missing out on
very important, local revenue streams. Tapping
these sources of revenue are what will
ultimately make you successful in doubling your
profits during BFCM. Research product niche
event keywords and terms. These may be different
from the rest of the year. You should also make
sure to write comprehensive product descriptions
for products. The longer the content, the better
chance your client has to rank for target
keywords. Ensure meta descriptions include
target keywords. Meta descriptions should also
entice users to click,by mentioning things like
free shipping or product ratings. Another tip
include LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing).
Add keywords closely related to the product. If
your client is selling blenders, you would add
mixer, juicer, processor to the product
description.
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If you find yourself rushing to catch up in time
for BFCM, the good news is that eHopper
Omnichannel plan includes online marketing, with
emphasis on search engine optimization. We make
sure that people can find your products on the
internet. You must show up in search results,
otherwise you are leaving money on the table.
eHopper eCommerce handles all of this for you.
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7. Offer hassle-free returns and refunds
The return policy is one of the most important
for any store, but never more so than during
Black Friday and Cyber Monday (link to that other
article). If you clearly demonstrate to
customers how easy it would be to return an
item, and specifically how long that process will
take over the holidays, then you greatly improve
your chances of making a sale. eHopper POS can
handle refunds and voids for online orders via
the point of sale.
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8. Reward loyal customers
You are collecting data all year long through
your POS and online store, Black Friday and
Cyber Monday is a great time to reward the
loyalty of these customers. A proven way to
reward loyal customers is with a loyalty program.
This is a great way to engage over time, which
will serve to drive future sales and many return
visits. This not only provides stickiness, but a
loyalty or rewards program can add direct extra
value to the customer experience your online
store provides. eHopper POS offers marketing
box features that let you develop a loyalty
program. This means that as your customers make
purchases, the POS software automatically
updates their reward progress whether they are
online or in-person. Its not too late to begin
gathering valuable information about your
customers that you can use to increase retail
sales during the holiday season.
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9. Update/streamline your support process
Much like web traffic and return policies, your
support team is something that needs to be
prepared for a significant increase in traffic
and time over Black Friday and Cyber
Monday. Whats the most common pain point for
shoppers during the holiday season every year?
Lines. All the time. Everywhere. From long lines
of cars waiting to get into the parking lot to
long lines at the counter, its no wonder that
consumers have holiday burn out long before the
actual holidays arrive. As a retailer, you can
help break up the frustration that shoppers feel
by providing them a service that is remarkably
different than what theyve come to expect. One
of the key observations made by Psychology Today
is that when people are occupied, waiting feels
less like waiting. For retailers, theres two
easy ways to help solve this problem. The first
is to provide alternatives to the standard line.
By leveraging mobile registers, you can provide
your guests with a unique shopping experience to
meet them on the sales floor. This gives the
customer the opportunity to browse while theyre
waiting and check out when theyre ready. When
mobile registers are used in addition to
stationary ones, you can reduce wait times by
half. A great option for a mobile register is
the Poynt terminal. You could even use an iPad
or Android tablet to increase your range and
speed up sales throughout your store. During the
holiday season, shifting to a mobile POS
solution can greatly help your efforts to double
your profits during Black Friday.
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10. Convert seasonal shoppers into year-round
shoppers
You are going to get a lot of new visitors to
your store and website during the holidays. Its
important to have a plan in place to convert
these one-time seasonal customers into year-round
customers that bring you repeat business. Make
sure you reach out during the holidays to touch
base and entice these users with offers if they
return after the holiday season. If there is a
way to convert these shoppers into revenue
sources for other holidays, not just black
friday this year, then that is something you have
to consider.
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Omnichannel retail
If this seems like a lot to take on, especially
in a rush before the Big Day, dont fret
perhaps an integrated solution like the
Omnichannel plan from eHopper is what you need.
By syncing your point of sale with your online
ordering, you create an omnichannel retail
strategy. eHopper offers an Omnichannel plan
today that includes everything any small
business needs to be confident they are putting
themselves in the best position to maximize
sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The
best part, eHopper handles it all for you! The
hosting, the security, the inventory
synchronization, SEO and email marketing
capabilities get it all with one low monthly
fee. If you want to scale up for Black Friday,
and do so QUICKLY, packages such as the
Omnichannel plan are a great option.
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About eHopper
eHoppers complete business solution incorporates
a full suite of products and features, including
an integrated eCommerce and online ordering
platform, payments including EMV, split payments,
mobile payments, 5 cents rounding, inventory
management, employee management, and
localization options for front and back of
house. eHopper is ideal for a wide variety of
small businesses including quick- service
restaurants, cafes, bars or any other retail
business seeking a total business solution to
streamline operations and increase sales.
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For more information visit
ehopper.com/guides/10-tips-double-profits-black-fr
iday-cyber-monday/