BLACK FRIDAY and CYBER MONDAY - A GUIDE TO NAVIGATING - ALPHA HOSTING & OPTASY
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A GUIDE TO
NAVIGATING
B L AC K F R I DAY
and
CYBER MONDAY
ALPHA HOSTING & OPTASY
Table of Contents
A Complete 3. What is the best way for small-medium sized
businesses to capitalize on Black Friday and
Cyber Monday?
Guide To 6. What kind of promotions are best to run?
Navigating
Black Friday & 7. How soon should businesses start promoting
Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Cyber Monday
8. How should businesses decide on an
advertising budget for Black Friday and Cyber
Monday promotions?
Holiday season is a busy time for ecommerce.
More and more people are turning to online
shopping, and ess people are willing to
face the big crowds and long lines. These
9. How should businesses decide on an
advertising budget for Black Friday and Cyber
Monday promotions?
changes gives businesses like yours a unique
1.
opportunity to capitalize.
What is the best way for businesses to stand
Getting ahead and making a plan can make a out when everyone is promoting Black Friday
huge difference in your business’s success. and Cyber Monday deals?
Throughout this guide, Wayne, Alison, and
12.
Josh will share their thoughts on commonly
asked questions. You will get tips and tricks
How should businesses use social media to
to help your business to navigate through this promote their Black Friday and Cyber Monday
busy season. deals?
13.
Wayne is the Director of Business Development
at Optasy, a web development company. Alison After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, do
is the Marketing Coordinator at Alpha Hosting. businesses just go back to normal, or can
Josh Ward is the General Manager at Alpha they still capitalize on sales?
Hosting. Each brings unique experiences and
15.
ideas to help your business be successful.
Once all Black Friday and Cyber
Monday deals are complete how should
businesses use their experiences this year
to prepare for future years?
21 2
What is the best way for small-medium
sized businesses to capitalize on Black
Friday and Cyber Monday?
WT: To prepare for the 2020 Black Friday, marketers Getting the word out about your business can be
need to examine their online customer experience hard especially when your competitors have bigger
with a fine-toothed comb and test and retest their budgets. If you start advertising your sales earlier
user experiences by channel. They will need to focus with a count down or black friday preview sale, the
their effort on what channels are trending up, and space won’t be so crowded with everyone promoting
what is trending down. And adjust their strategy black friday. Post on social, send emails, put an ad
accordingly. on your site, and let people know that you have an
awesome sale.
AM: Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring a lot of
new traffic online. With the holidays approaching, JW: Ideally you’ve been building a list of clients,
people are shopping online and looking for the best potential clients, people who like your brand/story,
deals. Big businesses tend to get big results on these followers, etc. over the previous part of the year.
days in and out of stores. Oftentimes, small/medium If you haven’t it’s never too late to start. Especially
sized businesses try to compete with these big box when it comes to leveraging social media. Just start
stores, but don’t get the same results. Instead of posting. If you need a little help ramping up your
trying to compete with these businesses you should posting volume this post from Gary Vaynerchuk can
play to the strengths of your business and start be extremely helpful - https://www.garyvaynerchuk.
advertising early. com/how-to-create-64-pieces-of-content-in-a-day/
Each business has unique strengths and weaknesses. Also, make sure not to neglect those that have already
At Alpha Hosting, we pride ourselves on getting to purchased something from you. Start getting them
know our customers. We can use this unique selling excited about your BF/CM sale now. Ask them to
point on our ads to make us stand out from the leverage their social networks to extend your reach.
competition. A lot of our other strengths include The closer we get to Thanksgiving the louder the
our robust packages, free add-ons, and the ability to noise surrounding BF/CM will be. It’s important you
upgrade and downgrade anytime, these are harder don’t wait until that week to start talking about this.
to advertise because they tend to be lengthy. Instead There should be a ramping up of content around BF/
of trying to fit all of that on an ad, pick one specific CM so your audience knows to be looking for your
point to focus on, or drive traffic to a web page that sale. It will help you stand out as things get busier
explains all of that. You can do that by promoting a later.
unique promo, product, or service. Do your research,
and find out what makes your business stand out.
3 4
What kind of
promotions are
best to run?
WT: Gift cards, Mystery Campaigns, Send followers to keep up with the sales to find
loyal customer-only offers and sneak peaks, what they are looking for. If your audience is
Alternate deals by the hour, a free gift with more of the “casual shopper” type, constantly
every purchase changing deals could be off putting. Instead
you should run one sale the whole time. Make
AM: Percent off campaigns are the most sure the customer knows when the deals are
commonly run campaigns on BF/CM. With ending and when inventory is getting low so
the majority of companies offering lower they can make sure they have a chance to
rates, we definitely recommend these do you make a purchase.
can compete. But, we also recommend you
add something unique to the deal. Whether If you are selling a service or not a physical
that is XX% off plus free shipping, a free product, upselling can be a big market during
gift(s), or entry into a giveaway, these add- this time. We recommend doing a multi
ons can really make you stand out. month discount to encourage customers to
upgrade now. For example: “XX% off your
You should also take into account timing first 3 month when you upgrade today!”
for these. If you have a bigger following you
can run changing deals that encourage your
5 6
How soon
should
businesses
start
promoting
Black How should businesses decide on an
advertising budget for Black Friday and
Friday Cyber Monday promotions?
and Cyber WT: Starting in Mid September is a great time to get
Monday?
going on your Black Friday, or Holiday promotions
in general. This will build a very steady flow of WT: Analyze your yearly or quarterly budget and time (instead of straight cash) and is well worth
interest in your promotions and build excitement. see what you have left towards your marketing it. As mentioned before think about offering
Start with a low percentage of holiday marketing. efforts for the end of the year. Once you have deeper discounts to those willing to share your
Gradually increase as the date approaches. You an idea on what you have to spend, analyze all content. Consider sending people you know,
should have your holiday marketing in full swing in of your channels and see what areas have been or sort of know, with the most influence some
advance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. performing well in terms of being the best source free samples. Think of it as a budget friendly
for conversions. way to leverage influencer marketing. There are
AM: You should always start advertising early also lots of coupon codes floating around the
for big sales like these. We say start as soon as JW: Hopefully you’ve saved your budget for the internet that will get you $50 to $100 worth of ad
possible! At the latest, you should start promoting larger seasonal events where you’ll get the most spend on Facebook, Google, etc. Typically these
a few weeks in advance. You want the customer to ROI. These seasonal events are also when costs will codes are based on matching your own spend.
make a mental note to check back with your site. go up because competition increases. If you’re low You spend $50 and they give you $50 in credits.
It’s never too early to start driving interest in your on budget this is when you’ll need to get creative. It’s a great way to stretch your budget as far as
brand/products. Building and leveraging your audience costs your possible.
7 8
How should businesses prepare
their site for the increased
traffic over these days?
AM: Make sure your website looks good! When during BF/CM. We’d suggest making the change
people come to your site you want it to immediately at the beginning of November to allow enough
draw them in. Whether it’s appearance or loading time to work the kinks out of the new environment.
time, those first few seconds are essential. If In this scenario you’ll also want to make sure to
you’re a WordPress/WooCommerce user check over plan for that surge. Opt for a slightly larger
out our blog on essential plugins to make sure package than you think you’ll need. There’s nothing
your site is ready: https://www.alphahosting.com/ worse than being dead in the water because of
blog/wordpress/10-must-have-plugins-for-your- your hosting when your sales start to take-off.
ecommerce-wordpress-site/
On the other hand, if you’re with a host that offers
JW: Load Testing - Load testing is the process on-demand scaling (*cough*...Alpha Hosting…
of sending large amounts of fake visitors to your *cough*) you can breathe a little easier. You’ll still
site to see how it reacts. What you want from a want to upgrade and test any scaling capabilities
load test is to see where your site’s page load time beforehand, but the process should be smoother
spikes, or becomes completely unavailable. Then and less painful. Especially if there’s no migration
you know how large a traffic spike your site can involved.
handle based on your existing hosting solution.
Since the purpose of load testing is to crash your Make sure you don’t overlook this part of your your page load times fast. Think of it as increasing tested well in advance of any critical sales days.
site you’ll want to make sure to schedule it for off strategy. If you’re on shared hosting, or under the capacity of your site. Depending on the
peak hours. We recommend working with your powered servers, it will cost you big bucks come application (WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, One additional caching trick for large sales, like
hosting provider and developer to setup, run, and BF/CM. Even a second or two of increased page etc.), you have several options for caching. Most BF/CM, is to turn your most targeted landing
interpret the results of a load test. load time can have huge negative consequences to popular caching plugins (W3Total Cache, others??) pages into static html. Instead of the content being
your conversion rates. Don’t let a more expensive for WordPress and WooCommerce can utilize served by your application, it can just existing as
Scaling - Scaling doesn’t have to be done on- hosting solution stand in the way of your hard Redis for caching. Magento 1 can use Redis as an old school static html file and some images.
demand or instantly...but it helps if you can. If earned success this holiday season. well. With Magento 2 we’d recommend setting up We’d recommend creating these for your home
your hosting provider doesn’t support on-demand Varnish for caching since it is natively supported. page, BF/CM primary sales landing page(s), and
scaling of any kind, and/or you have to go through Caching - Caching is going to be the thing that saves Your web host and/or developer should be able to maybe even your top category page(s). This is a
a painful migration to upgrade, then you’ll want to your site during a large spike in traffic. It allows the recommend and setup the best caching approach short term strategy and won’t help if those pages
plan well in advance for the surge in traffic you get server to handle much more traffic while keeping for your site. It’s important to get this setup and are intended to change frequently.
9 10
What is the best way How should businesses
for businesses to stand use social media to
out when everyone is promote their Black
promoting Black Friday Friday and Cyber
and Cyber Monday deals? Monday deals?
WT: Consider starting a day early and invent your mean the process should end. Throughout your AM: Social media is an awesome tool to get your customers
own Black Thursday! site you should ensure that they can see the deal excited about these deals. We recommend that in the weeks
and that it correlates to the advertisement that got leading up to BF and CM you either promote a preview or a
AM: Make sure your deal stands out externally and them there. Remind them of the promo codes and count down. When the sales are live, continue to promote
internally. Do your research: see what promotions other promotions. on social media regularly, with relevant hashtags. When you
your competitors have run in the past and keep promote or boost these posts on social media it can give you
an eye out for advertisements that catch your If you don’t have a graphic designer on your team, access to an audience that you normally wouldn’t see, or if
eye. Through this process you can make sure your this is a time you want to hire someone externally. you are retargeting, it will give the consumer another chance
business has a deal that stands out and creative With so many people promoting a similar sale, it is to visit your site.
that is eye-catching. Update your site: Just more important than ever that your ads look good
because a customer makes it to your site doesn’t and stand out.
11 12
After Black Friday and Cyber
Monday, do businesses just go back
to normal, or can they still capitalize
on sales?
AM: Businesses can continue to capitalize on sales with extended promotions, last
chance emails, and onsite advertising. This allows your business to stand out against
other competitors who may have already stopped running their promotions. Instead of
just running Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, run the full weeks surrounding them
(for example: Black Friday Preview Week or Cyber Week). November and December
are big spending months, don’t limit your sales to 2 days, when there are 2 months of
opportunities.
JW: This is a great point. Make sure to think of BF/CM as a ramp up to the next 45 days.
You’ll have the entire month of December to ride the wave of increased ecommerce
activity. Continue the momentum offering last minute virtual gift cards, post Christmas
sales, and new years sales. It’s increasingly a digital world, but some of the “traditional”
retail strategies still work well.
13 14
Once all Black
Friday and Cyber
Monday deals are
complete how should
businesses use their
experiences this year
to prepare for future
years?
AM: Gather all your data along the way! Make
sure your ad tracking is set up in Google Analytics
or your ad tracking platform. Find out which ads
worked and which didn’t. Do a deeper dive on who
converted and who didn’t. All of this information
will allow you to plan better in the future.
Also, take a look at other companies and
competitors. If you get a Black Friday email from a
company that isn’t a competitor, but it really drew
you in, see if you can adapt it to your business next
year. Prepping for BF/CM can be overwhelming. I believe strongly
you’re the best person to champion your brand. When it comes
Screenshot things you love, save your data, write to the technical stuff, the things outside your wheelhouse, it’s
yourself notes, and next year you will be even more never a bad idea to ask for help. Optasy and Alpha Hosting
prepared than this year.
would love to chat with you about where you’re at heading into
JW: I’m a big proponent of doing a post mortem this holiday season. We can expand more on what we’ve talking
after a large event or campaign. Once all the activity about here and give you guidance on all things development and
and stress has passed the honest reflection is web hosting. We’re here to help you get the most out of BF/CM.
valuable. Celebrate what went well, figure out Email josh.ward@alphahosting.com to setup a meeting.
how to fix the things that went poorly, and identify
the opportunities you missed along the way. The
assessment will help you throughout the year, not
just for the next BF/CM.
15 16
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