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Black Friday Checklist: 10 Ecommerce Tactics to Dominate BFCM 2024

Black Friday Checklist: 10 Ecommerce Tactics to Dominate BFCM 2024

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Last Updated:  
October 29, 2024

The biggest opportunity of the year for DTC brands is just around the corner: Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024! 

Last year, shoppers spent $9.8 billion online on Black Friday alone. Cyber Monday was even bigger for online shopping, with $12.4 billion worth of products purchased from online retailers. 

For over 11,000 brands using Triple Whale, 60.51% of all purchases were made by new customers during BFCM 2023, with new customer revenue making up 75.63% of all sales.  

READ MORE | BFCM 2023 Retrospective Report

While BFCM is a huge event, it can also be more than a little chaotic for businesses to manage. To stay ahead of the game, we’ve prepared a checklist for brands to get prepared and execute a marketing strategy that helps you capitalize on the opportunity ahead. 

  1. Extend the sales period
  2. Reward your loyal customers
  3. Invest in your top sales channels
  4. Launch email campaigns early
  5. Offer easy returns
  6. Provide personalized customer support
  7. Offer buy now, pay later options
  8. Benchmark your performance to set goals
  9. Make sure your site is mobile optimized
  10. Implement retargeting strategies

1. Extend the sales period beyond just BFCM weekend

Many brands have learned that extending the sale beyond just BFCM can bring great success. This can either mean starting a sale early or extending it beyond Cyber Monday. Whichever route you choose, you need to ensure you are advertising it accurately, clearly, and with enough time to generate the sales you’re hoping for! 

The National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics discovered in a survey that 56% of shoppers in the United States took advantage of sales ahead of Thanksgiving, or other promotions. 

Depending on your store’s target demographic, it may be more important than you’d expect to get started early. A survey from Justuno found that 37.09% of Millennials plan to start their holiday shopping before November. The best way to take advantage of this behavior is to have sales ready to go ahead of the big event (hint: that means now).

2. Reward your loyal customers

There will be a few one-time shoppers during the BFCM period; there always is. But BFCM is also a fantastic time to reward your long-time, loyal customers with exclusive access to early deals. 

The benefits are rewarding loyalty during BFCM are twofold: 

  1. Customers feel like they’re getting a special, exclusive deal
  2. Brands get to capitalize on early shoppers, ensuring they’ve got sales in the bag ahead of time

READ MORE | What Makes a Loyalty Program Successful? A 4-Point Checklist

A loyalty program, set up with the help of platforms like Yotpo or Okendo, can help provide a vehicle for offering rewards points, perks for referrals, friends and family sales, and exclusive sales you can offer customers on your subscription list. Additionally, creating an opportunity for loyal customers to use points to snag BFCM deals is a fantastic method for making them feel like they’re getting more bang for their buck!

3. Invest in your top sales channels

The busy BFCM period isn’t time to play around with new advertising channels – it’s time to invest in the channels that have been bringing in the sales throughout the year. With integrations through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, multichannel selling makes it possible to reach customers in multiple locations, and many marketers find success by diversifying their offerings across multiple channels. A multichannel strategy “maximizes reach and reduces platform dependency”.

The best way to monitor sales across multiple channels is with Triple Whale, and we’ve built boards specifically designed to master BFCM sales: 

  1. BFCM Mission Control Board 
  2. Hourly Performance Dashboard

BFCM Mission Control Board

The BFCM Mission Control Board should act exactly as it sounds: your anchor in the craziness of BFCM. It’s full of useful widgets that cover everything you’ll need to keep track of during the event. It should be used to, first and foremost, take a look at your metrics from last year to set goals for how you expect to perform in 2024. 

Hourly performance dashboard

What better way to analyze your performance to stay quick with your decision than with an hourly performance review? Here’s an easy way to see cumulative revenue, cumulative contribution dollars, and total revenue, hour by hour, throughout the day. 

As you’re spending money, you’ll have a clear view of your top line metrics. As you are running ads, you can analyze performance and understand which of your ads are performing well to iterate and improve on them. 

4. Launch campaign emails early

Planning and launching BFCM emails early is crucial to a successful season. To ensure you’re set up for success, try the following tips: 

Capture emails easily: Make it easy and obvious for visitors to sign up for your email list, with email collection fields, sign-up pop-ups, and enticing copy that drives visitors to subscribe. Offering early access to sales is a great option, here!

Personalize the email campaigns: Personalization is more than putting their first name in the email subject line (although you should do that, too). To get really personal, you should use the information collected about your customer through zero- and first-party data (using Triple Whale) to create segments that send relevant content specific to where each customer is on the purchase journey. According to Hubspot, segmentation of email campaigns alone can increase revenue by up to 760%!

Image: HubSpot

Set up abandoned cart emails: BFCM is a big “window” shopping moment, which means customers are likely to abandon their carts. In 2023, nearly 77% of customers abandoned carts on average. When you set up automated cart abandonment emails, you can help capture some of those sales. 

5. Offer easy returns

When customers are shopping for gifts, they need to know they can make a return without a hassle. A survey from Happy Returns found that 87% of shoppers said free returns were an important part of their purchasing decision. 

Your return policy should be well-communicated on your store’s website, and clearly showcased on the shipping, FAQ, and product pages. Simplify your returns by using an integration like ShipBob or ShipStation, with a bonus that all of your shipping and returns will be tracked within Triple Whale as well! 

6. Provide personalized customer support

Customer support should be accessible, with self-service options available as well as direct phone or chat support (if you have the capacity!). Ensuring your potential or existing customers can ask questions about products and get answers immediately will improve your conversion rate! 

BFCM can be a hectic time, and quick response times can put customers at ease. Utilize customer support platforms like Gorgias which use AI chatbots to give customers access to instant answers, which saves time for your front line agents while still making it possible to access a real agent if they need to. 

7. Offer Buy Now, Pay Later options

In 2024, the economic pinch is felt worldwide, and many customers might need to make budgeted choices with their gifts for the holiday season. Offering a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) option on your DTC site can benefit both customers and businesses for a few reasons:

Larger purchases: BNPL allows a customer to make a purchase for an item of higher value without the immediate financial burden, which can lead to higher average order value (AOV) for the business itself. 

Impulse purchases: the flexibility of BNPL can encourage more impulse purchases, which are common during BFCM sales (especially if the offer/deal is compelling enough!).

Competitive advantage: Many customers will comparison shop during the BFCM period, and if the BNPL option on your site enables them to make a flexible purchase over a competitor that isn’t offering BNPL, you’ve won that customer. 

Attracting younger demographics: Younger consumers tend to prefer the flexibility of BNPL, with 70% of Gen Z using it for purchases less than $100. Having the BNPL option available can ensure you’re capturing the customers who prefer that purchase method. 

To make sure your BNPL option is set up for BFCM success, ensure you partner with reputable BNPL providers like Klarna, Afterpay, or Affirm - this way, you’ll have a seamless integration and trusted experience for your customers. 

8. Benchmark your performance to set goals

In an unpredictable period like BFCM, it’s great to see how peers in your industry are performing. Triple Whale’s BFCM Mission Control Board includes benchmark metrics so you can compare metrics like AOV, ROAS, CVR, MER, and more to other businesses in your industry. This way, you understand if you should pull back or invest more in certain ads. 

You can also evaluate your performance over BFCM 2023 to use that as a standard/starting point for how you plan to market your products during the BFCM 2024 season. One way to do this is using Moby: an AI-agent similar to ChatGPT that’s trained on your business. With the ability to analyze data within a few seconds, you can ask Moby questions to understand how your business performed during BFCM last year, to allow you to make better-informed decisions about this year’s BFCM. 

Ask Moby: “What were my top selling products over BFCM 2023?” to get an idea of which products were flying off the shelves last year. Chances are, they will be just as popular this BFCM, so you can create a marketing plan that centers your top products for 2024. 

9. Make sure your site is mobile optimized

Unsurprisingly, more and more customers are choosing to shop on mobile devices versus desktops. In 2023, a record 79% of ecommerce traffic during Cyber Week originated from mobile phones. Additionally, mobile purchases during BFCM 2023 saw 72% made from mobile devices compared to 28% from desktops. 

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile browsing and purchasing, you’re simply leaving sales on the table. You should ensure your mobile experience is intuitive and that it’s easy to make purchases, in addition to being mobile responsive. 

The next step would be to create a full mobile app for your shopping experiences, possible with a service like Tapcart. Since an app gives you the ability to send push notifications to engage customers directly, which will help you stay top of mind with customers this holiday season. According to Tapcart’s 2023 BFCM Consumer Shopping Trends report, push notifications are 181.5% more likely to elicit a purchase compared to digital ads, and 94.9% more likely to elicit a purchase compared to SMS. 

10. Implement retargeting strategies

With Triple Whale’s Pixel, you can track the behavior of visitors to your site, including content like pages viewed, purchases, add to cart, and the ad that directed the customer to the site in the first place. Not only does this allow for transparency and accuracy of your ad conversion data, you can use the events tracked to create robust retargeting efforts for the visitors that didn’t make a purchase. 

Using Sonar, you can transfer data back to Meta using the Conversions API (CAPI), which includes conversions missed by the Meta web pixel, detailed customer information, and corrected conversion values to improve platform reporting and budget allocation. You can then use the enhanced insights to create more tailored and targeted campaigns from the more complete record of events, leading to better retargeting campaigns on the platform side. 

Conclusion

As Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024 approaches, it's crucial for DTC brands to be well-prepared to capitalize on the biggest sales opportunity of the year. By following the tips outlined in this checklist, you'll be equipped to extend sales periods, reward loyal customers, optimize your top sales channels, and much more. 

Remember, early planning and strategic execution are key to navigating the chaos of BFCM and achieving your sales goals. Embrace the insights from last year's performance and implement the strategies outlined here to maximize your success this holiday season. Happy selling!

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