Black Friday is one of the most active days for shopping. Starting from Thanksgiving and ending Cyber Monday, potential customers flood eCommerce websites to find the most enticing deals. Some seek discounts to treat themselves. Others need a perfect gift for their beloved ones.
As the pandemic has shown, online shopping is the best alternative for buyers who can’t or don’t want to visit physical stores, wait in a queue, or wander through numerous shelves. The most challenging part is that the competition intensifies in this field. How do you stand out from others and convert shoppers into customers?
Black Friday marketing not only involves directing the hot traffic to the website. It includes ensuring the website meets the customers’ needs and lives up to their expectations. If your site doesn’t meet them, prospects will close the page and go to your competitors. Successful Black Friday marketing can increase your client base and bring you dozens of loyal customers. How? You should consider everything from product page designs to customer support. Let’s look at the possible ways to boost conversions during the festive time.
Three Key Tips for Increasing Black Friday Conversions
1. Evaluate Your Site’s Loading Speed
According to data, one in four visitors abandon the website if it loads for four seconds or more. Poorly performing sites also increase the risk of losing clients forever. The statistics show that 46% of visitors don’t return to the stores with unsatisfactory loading.
Potential customers expect the site to load as quickly as possible. As Black Friday is about the sudden influx of visitors, prepare your website to handle the traffic spikes.
Here I mean uninterrupted work, fast image opening, and responding to clicks immediately. Suppose users search for information on mobile devices during the festive season. They won’t have time to wait for the content to appear as they can open another link on your competitor’s website and get the desired product.
You can check the loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It shows the weaknesses of your page and where to pay special attention. It lets you compare the website speed for mobile and desktop versions and see the Core Web Vitals assessment.
Remember that the website should respond and load fast after clicking CTAs, icons, or a search button. You need to compress images, turn off the unnecessary plugins, or deal with the coding part and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
If you lack coding experience and don’t know how to speed up the store, you will have to seek help from a specialized agency. Furthermore, consider investing in building a progressive web application (PWA). PWAs are a popular and efficient solution to boost online retail websites’ performance and user experience.
2. Focus on Customer Experience
A recent CCW Digital study shows that 65% of enterprises value the customer experience (CX) more than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Why? A positive experience encourages people to stay on the website, interact with the content, and return and share recommendations. The website should be mobile-friendly, follow UX/UI best practices, and offer personalized products. Let’s look at these constituents.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness has become key to providing an excellent customer experience. To prove this point, let’s take a look at the statistics on mobile site optimization:
- A mobile-optimized website has a 74% higher chance of returning visitors.
- 67% of mobile users state the importance of website mobile-friendliness for influencing the purchase decision.
- 61% of consumers rank companies with a positive mobile experience higher than others.
- A poor mobile experience may divert 52% of buyers from purchasing the company’s products.
That’s why the content should adapt the content on the site for mobile devices. Then it will be convenient for the user to view it. The main features of mobile content are as follows:
- Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences);
- Text enrichment with photos, graphics, and videos;
- Implementation of interactive elements.
Smartphone screens are smaller than computers and laptops, so you should ensure that the text will be readable on any display size when developing a mobile version.
See the screenshot from the Overstock site as an example of integrating interactive elements in the mobile version. You can easily control the display of photos with one hand: move them by dragging, zoom in with two fingers, and zoom out with a tap.
Taking UX/UI design into consideration
ECommerce UX/UI design entails the organization of the website pages and elements. These may be navigation, site search, the homepage, product page, shopping cart, wish list, checkout, etc. Well-thought-out UX/UI design ensures visitors seamlessly transfer from one page to another, find the desired goods, and complete a purchase. There are numerous rules to comply with, but some of the most crucial ones are:
- Homepage: It’s the gates to your store. People land on the page and need to understand the business purpose. Your task is to make your brand memorable to encourage people to continue their journey. Place the most important elements above the fold for users to see everything without scrolling down the page.
- Navigation: People should be able to find the needed section. Organize the navigational menu, group items into more prominent categories, and show breadcrumbs to display the path to the product.
- Site search: This functionality helps prospects find the product on the website faster. Employ autocompletion to save users time inputting the request. A case in point is the Chopard store. You insert the phrase and see which products the store sells. Look at the screenshot below to check how autocompletion works on this website.
What if the store doesn’t offer goods in which people are interested? Site search may analyze the used keywords and return similar results to retain consumers.
Product page: Show as many product photos as you can. Provide reviews, trust signals, customers’ photos (user-generated content), and personalized blocks. You may include a product video or AR/VR capabilities to demonstrate the product from all angles or let users try them before purchasing. The product description should also be comprehensive enough to eliminate purchasers’ doubts.
Shopping cart and checkout: That’s where potential customers are closest to completing an order, so nothing should distract them from it. Remove unnecessary fields, display the total cost, and allow for saving items for later. For example, a wish list functionality is an appropriate place to keep products for some time.
Personalization is critical.
Another crucial factor for improving customer experience is personalization. How can you personalize interactions? First, you need to gather clients’ data. Organizations should engage customers through their most-used channels and leverage data on their preferences, objectives, and communication history.
Then, this information can provide insights into the type of content to show users. Here is an example of intelligent recommendations from Anne Klein’s online store based on previous views, orders, and other buyers’ information. You can add these suggestions in emails, push notifications, etc.
3. Leave No Time for Hesitation
Black Friday is a hectic time when products at a reduced price appeal to numerous customers at once. A sense of scarcity and urgency boosts sales due to the fear of missing a discount. Why not specify this fact to speed up decision-making?
You may show the number of items left in stock, the countdown timer, or the number of current visitors watching the page. Don’t overuse this trick or show irrelevant information, as the deceit may cost you more. It may encourage prospects to add the product to the cart before it’s too late—one important note.
There are several tools to integrate a countdown timer into the website. One is the free POWR Countdown Timer which enables you to customize the functionality to engage customers, reduce bounce rates, and boost conversions.
Below is a screenshot from Old Navy. The store includes words like “Hot Deal” in the product description. You can also see a popup at the bottom of the screen saying that specific products are 50% cheaper only today. POWR also offers a free Popup for you to try.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday is among the most sought-after salespeople look forward to across the globe. It means that online retail stores must be in full gear to prepare for the high traffic and increased orders. One of the crucial things here is website performance. Interruptions and delays lower the conversion rate, especially when there are tons of lucrative deals around the corner.
Make time your central focus. Lower the website speed. Remove all the obstacles on the purchase journey, such as:
- tangled navigation;
- improperly working site search;
- excessive checkout fields.
Ensure the website meets mobile-friendly standards. And, of course, make shopping even more fascinating with time-sensitive offers.
About the Author
Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab; a full-service eCommerce agency focused on Magento. Kate has worked on diverse marketing strategies and activities for more than eight years. In her pursuit to bring up top-notch marketing solutions, Kate is constantly exploring the topics of SEO, branding, SMM, PPC, and Magento PWA development.
