black friday 2023
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Black Friday 2023 is just around the corner, and it’s shaping up to be the biggest shopping day of the year yet! According to a recent study by Shopify, online sales on Black Friday reached a record-breaking $9.3 billion in 2022. This is an increase of 29% from 2021.

This year, Black Friday is expected to be even bigger. A survey by Salesforce found that 63% of consumers plan to shop on Black Friday. This is up from 58% in 2022.

In this blog, we’ll give you everything insightful information about Black Friday you need to know to carefully prepare for the big day along with some “secret” tips to make you gain your goal easier!

Let’s jump in!

I. When Is Black Friday 2023?

In 2023, Black Friday falls on November 24th, 2023. It is the day after the Thanksgiving holiday.

II. What Do You Need To Do To Prepare For Black Friday 2023?

2.1. Things You Need To Do Before Black Friday

Preparation is an important step because if you have a careful foundation, you can gain success easier.

Let’s get started with something you NEED to do!

2.1.1. Plan Your Promotion

  • Start planning your Black Friday promotions early: This will give you time to figure out what products you want to put on sale, how much you want to discount them, and how you want to promote your deals.
  • Consider your target audience: Who are you trying to reach with your Black Friday promotions? Once you know who your target audience is, you can tailor your promotions to appeal to them.
  • Choose the right products to discount: Not all products are created equal. When choosing which products to discount, consider factors such as popularity, profit margin, and inventory levels.
  • Offer a variety of discounts: Not everyone wants the same type of discount. Offer a variety of discounts to appeal to a wider range of shoppers.
  • Create a sense of urgency: Let shoppers know that your Black Friday deals are only available for a limited time.
  • Promote your promotions early and often: The more people know about your Black Friday promotions, the more likely they are to shop with you.

2.1.2. Optimize Your Websites

  • Make sure your website is loading quickly: Shoppers are impatient. If your website is slow to load, they will likely abandon their carts and shop elsewhere.
  • Use a caching plugin or CDN: A caching plugin or CDN can help to improve website performance by storing frequently accessed pages in a cache.
  • Optimize your product images: Large product images can slow down your website. Use image compression tools to reduce the size of your images without sacrificing quality.
  • Make sure your website is mobile-friendly: A significant portion of Black Friday shopping is done on mobile devices. Make sure your website is easy to navigate and use on a mobile device.
  • Test your website thoroughly: Before Black Friday, make sure to test your website thoroughly to identify and fix any bugs or glitches.

2.1.3. Increase Your Inventory

  • Forecast your sales: Use historical sales data and other factors to forecast your sales for Black Friday. This will help you to determine how much inventory you need to have on hand.
  • Order inventory early: The closer you get to Black Friday, the more difficult it will be to get inventory. Order your inventory early to avoid stockouts.
  • Consider using a dropshipping supplier: A dropshipping supplier can help you avoid the hassle of storing and shipping inventory.
  • Have a plan for returns: Black Friday is a popular time for returns. Have a plan in place to handle an increase in returns.

2.1.4. Update Your Shipping Policies

  • Offer free shipping: Free shipping is a popular incentive for shoppers. Consider offering free shipping on all orders over a certain amount.
  • Offer expedited shipping: Shoppers who want their orders quickly will pay for expedited shipping. Offer expedited shipping options for a fee.
  • Be clear about your shipping deadlines: Make sure that shoppers are aware of your shipping deadlines so that they can order their items in time for Black Friday.

2.1.5. Train Your Customer Service

  • Anticipate common customer questions: What are the most common questions that shoppers ask about Black Friday deals? Make sure that your customer service team is prepared to answer these questions.
  • Be patient and understanding: Shoppers can be frustrated on Black Friday. Be patient and understanding with them, and do your best to resolve their issues.
  • Empower your customer service team to make decisions: Give your customer service team the authority to make decisions without having to wait for approval from a supervisor. This will help them to resolve issues more quickly.

2.1.6. Promote Your Deals

  • Use social media: Share your Black Friday deals on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  • Use email marketing: Send email blasts to your subscribers to let them know about your Black Friday deals.
  • Run ads: Run ads on search engines and social media platforms to reach a wider audience.
  • Partner with influencers: Partner with influencers in your niche to promote your Black Friday deals.

2.1.7. Offer incentives for early shoppers

  • Early access to deals: Offer early access to your Black Friday deals to your subscribers or social media followers.
  • Free shipping: Offer free shipping on early orders.
  • Discounts for early orders: Offer discounts for early orders.

2.1.8. Be prepared for technical glitches

  • Have a plan for troubleshooting problems: If your website goes down on Black Friday, you need to be able to troubleshoot the problem and get it back up and running as soon as possible.
  • Have a backup communication plan: If your website goes down, you need to be able to communicate with your customers through other channels, such as social media or email.

2.2. Things You Need To Do During Black Friday

Alongside your pre-planned Black Friday 2023 Shopify marketing strategies, you must also conduct a comprehensive checklist to ensure your store is ready for the influx of customers.

2.2.1. Run Flash Sales and Promotions

Black Friday is known for its doorbuster deals and massive discounts. Take advantage of this opportunity to run flash sales and promotions on a variety of products. You can offer deep discounts on popular items, bundle products together at a discounted price, or offer free shipping on all orders.

2.2.2. Create A Sense of Urgency

You can encourage customers to act quickly by creating a sense of urgency or use countdown timers, limited-time offers, and scarcity tactics to make shoppers feel like they need to buy now to get the best deals.

2.2.3. Highlight Your Best Deals

You need to keep your best deals deep within your website by creating a special Black Friday page or highlighting them on your homepage, which makes them easy to find. You can also use banner ads and social media posts to showcase your top deals.

2.2.4. Offer Free Gifts And Surprises

Add an extra touch of excitement by offering gifts and surprises with purchases is also important. This could include a free product with a certain purchase amount, a bonus gift for early shoppers, or a surprise discount at checkout.

2.2.5. Extend Your Customer Service Hours

Be prepared for an influx of customer inquiries on Black Friday. Extend your customer service hours and staff up to handle the increased volume. Offer multiple channels for customer support, such as live chat, phone support, and email.

2.2.6. Track Your Sales And Inventory

Monitor your sales and inventory closely throughout Black Friday, which will help you identify which products are selling well and which are not. You can then adjust your promotions and inventory levels accordingly.

2.2.7. Analyze Customer Behavior

Use analytics tools to track customer behavior on Black Friday. This will help you to understand which products are popular, which promotions are effective, and which areas of your website need improvement.

2.2.8. Use Social Media To Engage With Customers

Social media is a great way to engage with customers on Black Friday. Share your deals, run contests, and interact with shoppers in real-time. You can also use social media to gather feedback and improve customer service.

2.2.9. Optimize Your Website For Mobile

A significant portion of Black Friday shopping is done on mobile devices. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate on a smaller screen. You can also use mobile-specific marketing campaigns to reach shoppers on their smartphones.

2.2.10. Prepare For Post-Black Friday Returns

Black Friday is also a popular time for returns. Ensure you have a plan to handle an increase in returns. You can also offer extended return policies to make it easier for shoppers to return items.

NOTE: DON’T OVER-DISCOUNTS

Don’t over-discounts mean you shouldn’t give customers too good or too low discounts because the lower discounts are not enough incentives and the greater discounts make customers confused: Are products really good? So, the perfect discounts need to be between 11% to 33% (based on the survey of Persuade Internet Users in Canada in Sep 2016 ).

2.3. Things You Need To Do After Black Friday

After Black Friday, online store owners should focus on several key actions to assess their performance, manage customer relations, and plan for future sales events. Here’s a post-Black Friday checklist for online store owners:

2.3.1. Analyze the results

You need to spend some time reviewing your sales data and seeing what worked well and what didn’t. This will help you plan for future sales events and improve your overall marketing strategy.

2.3.1.1. Analyze sales data

Based on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales data, you can identify trends and make changes to improve your business in the future.

At a glance, your sales data shows which products are in high demand (your bestsellers). You may have some idea of which products these are, but regularly checking the data can reveal surprises.

Another important metric is traffic to individual product pages. If a product receives a lot of attention but disproportionately few sales, it means something is preventing customers from buying it. You may need to lower the price or offer other incentives.

In addition to product performance, your sales data can also reveal subtler insights, such as the best time to sell. Based on this information, you can offer special services during peak hours or plan better deals, such as flash sales.

2.3.1.2. Segment customer

In addition to optimizing product selection and marketing campaigns, you can also use customer data to build better relationships with your customers.

By segmenting your customers into groups based on their similarities, you can tailor your content and marketing campaigns to their specific interests. This is particularly useful for email marketing.

For example, in a segment of female customers, you can send them an email to introduce a new collection of women’s clothing. 

By the way, for some companies, segment customers can be divided by gender, age, etc. If you’re an international company, you can segment customers by country and send them warm wishes for national holidays.

2.3.2. Follow-up with customers

After customers order successfully, you need to set up thank-you emails automatically to your customers for their support and let them know about any upcoming promotions. You can also use this opportunity to collect feedback and learn more about what they’re looking for from your store.

2.3.3. Optimize your shipping and fulfillment processes

With the influx of orders during BFCM, it’s important to make sure your shipping and fulfillment processes are running smoothly. You also need to consider hiring extra staff or outsourcing your fulfillment to a third-party company.

2.3.4. Prepare for another holiday season

BFCM is just the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Make sure your store is ready for the increased traffic and orders by updating your website design, adding new products, and offering special promotions.

IV. Some “Secret” Tips for For Preparation Journey

4.1. Tips To Enhance Website Performance

In today’s digital age, website performance is more important than ever before. A slow-loading website can frustrate visitors and lead to lost sales. According to Google, a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.

Several factors can affect website performance, including the size and complexity of your web pages, the quality of your web hosting, and the number of visitors to your website. However, there are also some things you can do to improve your website performance, even if you have a limited budget.

Firstly, you need to optimize images. Images can take up a lot of space on your web pages, which can slow down your loading times. You should make sure that you always optimize your images by resizing them and compressing them without losing too much quality.

Secondarily, using a caching plugin is also important to increase the website performance. A caching plugin can store static copies of your web pages, which can be served to visitors more quickly than dynamic pages. Moreover, you also need to minify your code. Minifying your code removes unnecessary whitespace and comments, which can make your pages load faster. 

Another way to enhance web performance, you can also use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN can store copies of your static content on servers around the world, which can improve loading times for visitors in different locations.

4.2. Tips To Increase Sale

One of the best ways to increase sales is to offer discounts and promotions. People are always looking for a good deal, so offering discounts and promotions can be a great way to attract new customers and encourage existing customers to buy more. However, it is important to target your discounts and promotions to the right people and make them easy to redeem. You should also use urgency and scarcity to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Another way to increase sales is to make it easy for customers to buy. This means having a simple and easy-to-follow checkout process, offering a variety of payment options, and saving customer shipping and billing information.

You can also increase sales by upselling and cross-selling. Upselling is offering a customer a more expensive version of the product they are interested in while cross-selling is offering them complementary products. For example, if a customer is buying a new phone, you might upsell them to a more expensive model with more features, or cross-sell them a case, charger, or screen protector.

Finally, you can increase sales by providing excellent customer service and building relationships with customers. Responding to customer inquiries promptly, resolving customer issues quickly and efficiently, and going above and beyond for your customers are all great ways to build loyalty and encourage repeat business. You can also build relationships with customers by getting to know them on a personal level, providing them with personalized service, and running loyalty programs.

4.3. Tips To Make A Better Marketing Strategy

4.3.1. Launch Black Friday marketing campaigns early

Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, and it’s important to start planning your marketing campaigns early. This will give you enough time to develop creative ideas, create high-quality content, and test your campaigns before Black Friday arrives.

You can follow some tips here. First of all, you should start planning your campaigns at least 6 weeks in advance, which will give you enough time to develop a comprehensive strategy and create all of the necessary materials. Moreover, you also need to announce early for customers about your deals for Black Friday. This will build excitement and anticipation among your customers and give them time to plan their purchases. You can announce your deals on your website, social media, and in email marketing campaigns.

Besides, running teaser campaigns on social media is also a necessary tip. In this tip, you can share sneak peeks of your Black Friday deals, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and other engaging content to generate excitement and anticipation for your sale.

Last but not least, you can use email marketing to keep your subscribers informed about your Black Friday deals and promotions. This email marketing can include updates on your deals, early access opportunities, and other important information.

4.3.2. Boost Black Friday Via Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to improve their digital presence and reach a wider audience. With over 4.2 million active users, it is a fruitful place to advertise and create profitable Black Friday campaigns that can boost customer engagement, generate leads, and build sales anticipation.

Sprout Social reports that the conversion rate for Black Friday 2020 via social media was higher than in 2019, with total messages about Black Friday increasing by 175% year-on-year. This is a significant number of online shoppers to ignore, especially as social media is a real-time platform, making it thrilling and demanding to plan a Black Friday social media marketing campaign.

Consumers expect brands to be responsive, so it is important to tailor social media posts before, during, and after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to maximize sales. Additionally, advertising on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok should not be overlooked, as today’s customers spend a significant amount of time scrolling through their newsfeeds.

V. Conclusion

Black Friday isn’t a one-time event; it’s a chapter in the ongoing narrative of your business. The insights gained, the experiences shared, and the challenges conquered all contribute to the evolution of your online store. With each passing Black Friday, you refine your strategies, elevate your customer experience, and pave the way for even greater achievements.

As the Black Friday curtain falls, it reveals not an ending but a continuation—a journey into the future of e-commerce where opportunities abound, and success is a constant companion. So, here’s to the triumphs of Black Friday 2023 and to the limitless possibilities that await in the chapters yet to be written.

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