It’s that time of year again. Black Friday is right around the corner, and it could well be the most profitable week of the year for your WooCommerce store.
The only question is:
Are you ready?
With the biggest day in the retail calendar fast approaching, use the nine-point checklist below to test your preparedness and identify those critical tasks you still need to take care of before those deal-hungry shoppers come knocking.
Why Black Friday is Critical for WooCommerce Stores
WooCommerce notes that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday period are the busiest time of year for 72% of its merchants, accounting for at least 20% of their overall annual revenue.
Meanwhile, Adobe’s Unboxing the 2023 Holiday Shopping Results report reveals that last year’s Black Friday sales generated $9.8 billion in revenue, a 7.5% year-on-year increase.
In other words, Black Friday presents a massive opportunity for e-commerce businesses like yours to boost profits by a significant margin, and even convert Black Friday bargain-hunters into loyal, repeat customers, proving that the sale season keeps generating value long after it’s over.
Of course, to do that successfully, you’ll need a website that’s fully prepared and well-optimized.
Here’s how to do it:
Prepare Your WooCommerce Store for Black Friday: A 9-Point Checklist
1. Optimize Your WooCommerce Store for Increased Traffic
Do everything correctly, and Black Friday should bring more visitors than usual to your store.
Are you sure you can handle them?
If not, you could be faced with dramatically reduced page load speeds or -worse- your site going offline if the number of requests to access it exceeds your server’s capacity to cope.
Should that happen, you’ve already squandered the profitable opportunities that Black Friday provides.
Seriously, look at the data in the image above and you’ll see that every millisecond matters when it comes to keeping bounce rates low and conversions high. In fact, more than half of your visitors will drop off if your site takes longer than two seconds to load.
In another case study that makes compelling reading for anyone who cares about eCommerce success, Rakuten 24 saw a 53.7% revenue by improving Core Web Vitals.
So, the first thing you need to do is to ensure that your WooCommerce store is performance-optimized. Otherwise, you risk your slowly-loading pages frustrating customers to the point that they leave.
With that in mind, look at:
A. Your Hosting Server
Do you have the resources and infrastructure to handle any traffic spikes?
If you’re at all concerned, look at temporarily scaling up your resources to handle the influx. You can always scale back down again once things return to normal.
B. Performance Optimization
Are you using effective caching plugins like WP Rocket, Lightspeed Cache, or W3 Total Cache to speed up your site by reducing server load and improving load times?
If not, it’s time to make that happen to ensure your visitors enjoy a smooth, seamless user experience, even during peak traffic periods.
What about those large image files that show off your products? Are they being compressed and converted into web-friendly formats like AVIF and WEBP?
If not, you can use beginner-friendly plugins such as Converter for Media, Smush, and TinyPNG to do it for you. That way, you can reduce page load times without compromising image quality, keeping visitors engaged and improving Core Web Vitals at the same time.
C. Real-World Stress Testing
Stress testing involves creating a simulated traffic spike to see how your server would handle an increased demand.
If that sounds complicated, don’t worry.
The likes of Loader.IO and BlazeMeter are all free and relatively easy platforms that you can use to stress test your WooCommerce store.
D. WordPress Backups and Contingency Plans
The key to a successful Black Friday sale all comes down to striving for the best but preparing for the worst.
If your site does grind to a halt, go offline, or otherwise gets derailed by technical problems, it pays to have an emergency plan you can pounce on to get things running again.
At the very least, this means using tools like UpDraftPlus to create a comprehensive backup in case you need to move your site to a bigger server or quickly restore it after an unexpected crash.
At the most, it may also mean:
- Creating a ‘Downtime Communication’ plan – With key messages ready to be relayed to your customers should your site go down.
- Using staging environments – Testing new features, fixes, and updates on a cloned version of your site before rolling them out to the live version.
- Enlisting Outside Help – Consider outsourcing to a WordPress maintenance team that can provide added backup support in case of an emergency.
2. Create Irresistible Black Friday Deals
Now that you’re confident your WooCommerce store can successfully accommodate them, it’s time to entice that influx of customers with Black Friday deals they can’t afford to miss.
Here, you can use plugins like Discount Rules for WooCommerce or WooCommerce Smart Coupons to offer different types of discount details including:
A. Deep Money-Off Deals
Save the 5% and 10% offers for other seasonal sales throughout the year. This is the time to really stand out with deals ranging from 25% – 50% off.
This is certainly a good option for clearing out surplus stock or shifting slow-moving inventory, but we’d advise you to proceed with caution here. Remember, the goal is to make money, so if you’re going down this route, check that your deal isn’t going to cost you more than you make.
It works particularly well for digital products and services, too. Just look at Hostinger’s 85% Black Friday discount as a way to really get customer’s attention during the sales.
B. Bundled Products
Here’s where you can make the most of WooCommerce’s bundling and upselling features to accomplish two things at once:
- Improve the perceived value of your offer in the eyes of customers.
- Raise your average order price.
For example, Instead of just buying a t-shirt from your apparel store, for $40 customers can choose to get the t-shirt, hat, and gym bag package for $60.
Or perhaps you’re a WordPress plugin developer. Instead of simply discounting one plugin, offer a complete package at a discounted rate.
If you’re using this option, remember to make it clear to customers how much they’ll save by purchasing a bundle. If that shirt, hat, and gym bag package would cost $120 when bought separately, that’s a great opportunity to promote a 50% off sale for the entire package.
C. Free Shipping and Extra Perks
Go beyond the usual discounts and really win over customers with special bonus offers such as free shipping, further discounts on their next over, or even freebies.
Selling physical products? Give away promotional merchandise such as tote bags or stickers. People love getting free stuff, and it certainly won’t hurt if the free stuff you give them promotes your brand.
Selling digital products? Look at sweetening the deal on your Black Friday offers with free templates, guides, eBooks, or anything else relating to what you do.
Whatever you go for, the key thing here is to deliver offers which strike the right balance between genuine added-value for your customers and cost-effectiveness for your business.
3. Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversion
Now comes perhaps the most important Black Friday checklist item of them all.
After all, when you’ve done all that work to ensure optimum WooCommerce performance and entice customers to it with a bedazzling offer, do you really want customers leaving because your product pages fall short?
Of course not, especially when optimizing those pages for maximum conversions is a relatively simple process.
Look at:
A. Product Descriptions
- Are they up-to-date to reflect the latest features or variations?
- Do they offer enough information to help customers make a purchasing decision without dragging them down into boring, non-essential details?
- Are they compelling and engaging to the point that customers will be dashing to the ‘Add to Cart’ button faster than you can say ‘I need this!”
If not, you’ve got some work to do between now and Thanksgiving.
The trick here is to describe a pain point or problem your audience can relate to, and show them why your product is the best option to solve that problem.
Don’t just list features. As much as it may sting, people don’t care about your features. They care about what those features can do for them.
For example, rather than ‘These shoes are made with high-quality leather and a 3.5-inch heel,’ go with ‘Elevate your look and enjoy all-day comfort and confidence with the perfect heel.’
Notice the difference?
It’s not that you’re overlooking key features, but rather linking them to tangible benefits your audience can imagine themselves enjoying with your product.
B. Keywords and MetaData
- Are you using relevant keywords you can confidently rank for?
- Are those keywords suitably and appropriately placed, not just in your on-page copy, but in your titles and meta descriptions as well?
If you’ve already got a lot to do to prepare your store for Black Friday, now may not be the time for a complete SEO audit.
However, it’s certainly worth picking out those products and landing pages tied into your Black Friday and evaluating which keywords -if any- you’re using.
Here, you may want to use an SEO tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs.
Enter a term relating to your product and look at the suggested keywords.
What you’re looking for are keywords that generate high enough traffic (volume) to make them worth pursuing yet are easy enough to rank for (Keyword Difficulty), so that you have a fighting chance of competing in search results.
C. Images and Video
- Are you using high-quality images that showcase your product in the best possible light?
- Are those images the right size and format?
- Do they have alt descriptions containing relevant keywords?
- What about video? Is there time to create a captivating product demo that helps customers imagine themselves using your product?
Here’s another way of phrasing all those questions:
Is the media you’re using of the absolute best-quality?
If not, it’s time to upgrade them before the Black Friday rush.
Consider hiring a professional product photographer to shoot your wares in a way that really captures people’s attention.
Use AI tools like RankMath to quickly fill-in missing alt tags with accurate, auto-generated descriptions.
If image formats and compression are a problem, break out Smush or Converter for Media to help with that problem.
When it comes to video, don’t worry if your budget won’t stretch to a large-scale production. Most of the time, that’s not even necessary.
You can shoot 4K video on most modern iPhones these days. Meanwhile platforms like Canva, Adobe Spark, and even the Microsoft Clipchamp editor on your Windows PC all offer free video editing tools with professional-quality templates that you can use to create high-quality video content on a small budget.
4. Promote Your Black Friday Deals Early
- Are you telling customers about your deals early and often without being overly excessive or pushy?
- Are your promotional assets (ads, graphics, etc) on point?
- What about landing pages? You do have a well-optimized landing page ready to go, don’t you?
Time is of the essence here.
While there’s a good chance you’ll land some impulse buyers during the sale, many shoppers plan their Black Friday purchases in advance, doing the necessary research to make their money go further.
So, with the clock ticking, you should be promoting your Black Friday deals as early as possible.
To do that:
A. Make The Most Of Your Email Marketing Tools
As soon as the Halloween decorations come down on October 31st, start by delivering advanced notice of your sale directly to your mailing list.
The good news is that it doesn’t even matter if you haven’t figured out what your deals are going to be yet. In fact, play things out properly, and it could even work in your favor.
You could, for example, send one email in early November to let customers know that there’s a special offer coming their way they can’t afford to miss.
Tell them that you’ll be revealing more details in future emails or social media posts, and watch your engagement rates rise as eager customers hunt for information on the big sale.
B. Use Social Media Strategically
Use social media yourself? Then you already know how crowded the conversations can get on your favorite platforms.
Every feed features a plethora of images, reels, and other content types, all desperately competing for eyeballs and engagement. So, if you’re going to drive traffic from your company socials, you really need content which:
- Has a solid chance of appearing in organic algorithms – Meta has been busy placing an increasing priority on reels – short video clips up to 90-seconds long that are designed primarily for smartphone users.
Use this type of content to attract organic views, engagement, and traffic from Instagram and Facebook. - Compels users to stop scrolling – Just because you’re in their feed doesn’t mean users will check out your content, especially if there’s something more entertaining above or below it.
With that in mind making your content visually striking and highly engaging right from the off to grab attention before users scroll by. - Repeat key sales messages at different times – That Black Friday deal you posted at 9 AM may not be seen by users who don’t log on until the evening. In fact, even if they are hanging around at that time, there’s no way to guarantee that every single one of your followers will see every single post.
So, repeat them.
That doesn’t mean bombarding audiences with sales messages every hour, on the hour. Do that, and you’ll probably annoy your audience more than you’ll entice them.
However, strategically timed sales messages spread out over a few days or weeks can increase your chances of reaching different segments of your audience, ensuring your deal doesn’t go unnoticed. - Invest in Paid Advertising – One advantage of social media advertising over traditional PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on search engines is that social platforms offer unique opportunities to really zone-in and target hyper-specific audiences.
For example, say your apparel brand caters primarily to diehard CrossFit fans. Using targeting options, you could narrow down your audience to people who follow popular CrossFit athletes, have engaged with CrossFit-related content, or belong to CrossFit groups on social media platforms
Or, perhaps you sell digital downloads such as workflow templates for small businesses. Here, you could target entrepreneurs, small business owners, or people who have shown interest in productivity tools or project management software.
C. Build a Dedicated Landing Page
Finally, look at creating a Black Friday landing page to improve conversion rates by creating a streamlined user experience focused solely on your offer.
Make this landing page the destination for all your promotional activities, whether that’s on social media, through email marketing, PPC, or something else entirely.
This gives you an opportunity to really sell your offer above and beyond the product page by adding:
- Social proof in the form of customer reviews or testimonials
- Videos and image galleries
- Countdowns and limit availability announcements to create urgency.
Don’t forget about that compelling Call to Action (CTA) too. You’ll need that to be clear, concise, and compelling if it’s going to do its job in driving customers to the checkout.
Better yet, look at incorporating the checkout right into your landing page to remove those remaining obstacles that lie between a potential customer and an actual sale.
Discover an easy method to achieve this by checking out How to Set Up One-Page Checkout in Your WooCommerce Store.
5. Simplify the Checkout Process
22% of shoppers abandon their carts due to confusing or overly long checkout processes.
So, adding one-page checkout to your landing page wasn’t an option, the least you could do is check:
- The number of fields in your checkout forms – Fewer fields means customers spend less time filling out forms. Speed up this process by stripping out any fields that don’t provide you with the essential information you need to process an order.
You can use WooCommerce extensions such as WooCommerce Direct Checkout or Checkout Field Editor to reduce your checkout form fields. - Whether guest checkout is enabled – Do you really need every customer to make an account before hitting the ‘buy now’ button? Sure, it may help boost your mailing lists, but is it worth losing a few subscribers if enabling guest checkout means more cash in the register?
- The payment methods you offer – Reduce checkout friction even further by letting customers pay using their preferred methods. If you’re stuck offering PayPal as the only way to pay, you’ll lose out on customers who either can’t or simply don’t want to use PayPal.
Instead, we recommend expanding the number of payment methods using a free plugin such as WooPayments.
Adding the option to pay with credits and debits cards is better, but you’ll really open the door to more potential sales by adding digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google.
If you really want to go all out here, you could even consider using DePay Payments or Coinbase to accept cryptocurrency through WooCommerce.
6. Drive Sales with Urgency
Don’t be afraid to tap into some good, old-fashioned FOMO as a way to drive customers to the checkout.
If you haven’t already, grab a plugin such as Sales Countdown Timer for WooCommerce so that you can add timers to your store which count down the number of days or hours until your sale ends. The Fear of Missing Out on a great deal is very real, and these times can persuade customers to make a faster purchasing decision before it’s too late.
If you don’t have time for that right now, think about lowering the number of units available and use the Stock Management in WooCommerce to highlight your limited supply.
Again, this creates a sense of urgency. If customers see that you only have five items left in stock at a significantly lower price than usual, they know they need to act fast to avoid missing out.
7. Test Every Element Before Going Live
Do not go driving traffic to your Black Friday deals before you’re confident that everything works correctly.
You already stress-tested your site’s performance and server capability in Step 1, but now that you’ve added landing pages, media, testimonials and other elements, it’s time to test it again.
How have your Black Friday optimizations affected site speed?
Hopefully, the impact will be minimal. If not, you’ll find the solutions you need in our 11 foolproof ways to speed up WordPress.
Once you’ve done that, you also need to test:
A. Cross-Device and Browser Compatibility
Does your store function perfectly on both mobile and desktop? If not, you have some responsive design issues to tackle before you can launch.
Otherwise you risk the kind of poor user experiences that drive customers away, meaning missed sales and your opportunity for success going up in smoke.
Don’t have a myriad of different devices on hand for testing? Consider using the testing tools in either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
On Chrome, right-click the page, then enable the device toolbar by clicking on the icon next to the Elements tab.
You can do the same thing in Mozilla Firefox, except you’ll find the Toggle Device icon at the bottom of the screen.
In each browser, you can then select from a menu of different devices to test how your site looks and functions in each one.
Don’t just stick to devices either. Consider the web browsers your audience uses most often.
You can get this information from Google Analytics by going to User – Tech – Tech Details.
B. Checkout Process
While diving into your device and browser testing, play close attention to the checkout process.
- Are there functionality errors that may prevent a sale?
- What about friction points? Is there anything that could be further tweaked to maximize conversions?
If not, you’re good to go. If there are, get them fixed as soon as possible. After all, you’ve come this far now, the last thing you want is to fall at the final hurdle.
C. Coupon Codes
If you’re using coupon codes to track, manage, and promote your Black Friday deals, you’d better be sure that they work.
Complete a couple of test purchases for each discount code to ensure they work without any problems.
8. Prepare Your Customer Support Team
So, your sale is live, your deals are a hit, and customers are flocking by in their droves.
Some will have important questions they need answering before they can make a buying decision. Others will take the buy first, ask questions later approach.
Either way, you need to be ready with the answers you’re looking for.
To do that:
A. Brief your customer support team
Think about the kind of questions users might have and prepare documentation that support staff can use as a reference guide.
Giving the support team all the information they need up front reduces response times and ___, meaning a better overall customer experience.
B. Use Live Chat Tools For Instant Support
Look into WordPress plugins such as Tidio, which can allow you to set up real-time live chat support on your website. This can be great for answering customer queries instantly, guiding them through the purchasing process, and resolving issues without them having to leave the page.
C. Update Your FAQ Section
You can avoid some support requests altogether simply by adding common Black Friday-related questions into your FAQ page.
9. Plan for Post-Sale Engagement
Congratulations, your big discount sale was a roaring success. Products flew off the shelves and profits are through the roof compared to the rest of the year.
Here’s the thing:
The benefits of Black Friday sales don’t end the day after Thanksgiving. They don’t even end a few days later on Cyber Monday.
Cross the following items off your checklist, and you’ll keep reaping the rewards long-after the sale is over.
A. Create Follow-Up Campaigns
Turn one-time Black Friday bargain-seekers into long-term loyalty customers by sending follow-up emails with offers related to their recent purchases.
Taking advantage of your email marketing tool’s in-built features will be a big help here.
For example, you can use the automation tools in MailChimp or Constant Contact to re-engage automated sequences in the days or weeks after Black Friday.
Likewise, audience segmentation features will help you with targeting specific groups of customers based on their previous purchases, browsing behavior, or other data, making it easier to send highly personalized offers.
B. Ask For Feedback
Send out a survey to gather feedback on your customer’s shopping experience during the sale.
This won’t just give you valuable insights into what you can do better for next year’s holiday sale, but right throughout the year.
If there’s one expert tip we could offer here, it’s to offer incentives.
Customers are far more likely to spend time filling in a survey if there’s something in it for them, such as a discount or other reward.
C. Introduce Loyalty Programs
If you’re not already a loyalty program for your store, set one up with a plugin such as WooCommerce Points and Rewards.
Loyalty programs encourage repeat purchases by offering loyalty discounts, exclusive deals, and other special offers, all of which can turn those passing Black Friday buyers into long-term customers for years to come.
Preparing Your WooCommerce Store for a Successful Black Friday: Key Takeaways
As Black Friday gets ever-closer, there’s no better time than right now to start preparing your WooCommerce store for your most successful holiday season yet.
Although the nine steps above provide a wealth of practical advice, each step ultimately helps you complete the three main areas you need to get ready:
- Your WooCommerce Store – From optimizing server performance to handle traffic spikes to compelling product descriptions that capture customers’ imagination, ensure every aspect of your site is on-point.
- Your Marketing – Pick a Black Friday deal that works for you and go all-out to promote it through email, social media, PPC and more.
- Your long-term follow-up plan – Turn random Black Friday bargain-seekers into long-term customers by sending follow-up emails with related offers.
Running out of time? We’re to help. Talk to UnlimitedWP today to discover how our white-label WordPress services can get your brand Black Friday ready.