Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the web, and it’s no surprise why. The toolkit has a ton of features that make building your store quick and easy, including everything from inventory management to customer service chatbots.
Black Friday sales are coming up, as well as Cyber Monday and Holiday Season, and if you’re a store owner or developer in the e-commerce industry, you’re probably feeling the pressure to get your store ready for Black Friday.
We want to help you make sure your Magento website will be ready for Black Friday traffic by providing 10 things to do before Black Friday sales!
Black Friday is just a few weeks away, and if you’re not ready for this most important day of the year for your business and online shopping, here are 10 things you should do in your Magento store.
1. Black Friday marketing strategy
Start with planning your marketing strategy and preparing your messages for the upcoming online shopping.
- Check your product inventory levels – make sure you have enough stock of popular items.
- Make sure your prices are competitive with other stores. Keep track of prices from competitors in order to stay competitive.
- Make sure all products are shipped by November 30th.
Marketing campaigns
There are a few ways to market your Black Friday sales on Magento.
Decide on a marketing campaign that suits your needs:
- discounts,
- coupons,
- sale prices.
In addition, you can offer various promotions and deals throughout the month. For example, free shipping for all orders + an extra 20% off products in your store! And since this is one of the most important days of the year for marketing, you may want to consider adding shipping and handling offers.
- Create multiple marketing channels – including email campaigns and Facebook ads with retargeting.
- Plan advertising budgets and decide which channels to use for the best results.
- Update social media profiles and think about promoting your store on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using the Call-to-Action hashtag #BlackFriday along with images of seasonal bargains to entice shoppers.
- Set up email campaigns to send customers emails about discounts
- Update and verify your eCommerce data in Google Shopping. This includes items, manufacturers, categories, promotions.
- Create an abandoned cart campaign – at this time you can expect 64% abandoned carts, strengthen your strategies in this area.
Be sure all channels and communication are consistent and will not confuse existing and new customers. All information on site should help customers act and navigate to build a unique User Experience. You do not want to disturb the client from purchasing products in your store.
Still, you have enough time to make a UX audit to check thoroughly if all functions are working smoothly and fast enough to satisfy customers. It shows that clients with little time expect an especially effective purchase process. If you want them to stick with you, and not with the competitors, fulfill the expectations or die.
2. Optimize your Magento website content for Black Friday sales
To be sure all your products are visible for clients and can be reached easily at SERP (Search Engine Results Page) check your page structure and revise the product description for search engine optimization.
The right way you can do this is:
- Using the Universal Data Feed module to optimize product information such as titles, descriptions, and images.
- Updating product descriptions with keywords to show up higher in search engine results pages (SEO).
- Getting all internal links working correctly on your webpage, so customers can quickly and easily find what they need.
- Set up a dedicated landing page for shoppers who want to shop early or look at deals before Thanksgiving.
Check your site’s indexing
When you don’t have enough pages indexed in Google, you will see a message about how few results were found. This can be caused by duplicate content or poorly optimized URLs. There are many tools that can help with this, including Google Search Console.
3. Prepare Magento store for Black Friday
So you’ve created a plan that’s going to help you tackle the Black Friday sales. That doesn’t mean the day will go smoothly, so it’s important to set some expectations for yourself. Be prepared for higher than normal sales volumes, which could lead to an increase in errors or customer support requests.
There are a few things that you should do to make sure your Magento store is secure during the extra traffic.
Analyze performance
Once you’ve created your approach, check how well your store has performed over the past few months to see if there are any areas that should be improved before the day is out to make it perform at its best during traffic spikes.
You may have experienced disturbance last year because of insufficient server space and performance.
Server update
Investing in server space is a good opportunity to make improvements as you approach peak trading seasons. This way, your business can make the most of these periods of high demand and increase revenue, avoiding downtime due to too much traffic or other issues caused by an overloaded system.
Providing your store with more server space is a great way to get ahead for upcoming busy times! You may predict that when there’s just enough space on the servers you’ll be able to handle all that extra business without downtimes, which means even more profits at the end of the season – so let’s invest now before the heat starts up again!
One of the best server solutions for Magento eCommerce is Amazone Web System AWS. This hosting allows you to get stability, reliability, and speed enough to handle the extra traffic during the holiday season.
4. Analyze your eCommerce Speed
The speed of your webpage can affect both conversion rates and customer satisfaction. You’ll want to run a Google PageSpeed Insight audit of your eCommerce.
Remember, not only do users expect your website to respond fast but also search engine measures UX metrics like Core Web Vitals and ranks your e-commerce based on their results.
You can read more about Core Web Vitals optimization for Magento in Ebook.
5. Get your Magento store Mobile Ready
This includes making sure your eCommerce is responsive to smaller screens, that it properly displays which products are on sale in the mobile app version of your store, and that it’s fast loading.
Black Friday is a popular time to shop for deals, and the majority of traffic will come from mobile devices. Customers enjoy shopping on their mobiles on that day because it is easier and requires less commitment.
To ensure that your online store can handle this type of heavy load, make sure everything’s optimized for mobile so you don’t lose potential customers who use their phones as their primary browsing device!
6. Maintain security of Black Friday Sales
Make sure that your site is secure and can’t be hacked. If Black Friday brings a lot of traffic, it can also bring unwanted guests looking to take advantage of the high-volume day. Make sure you have strong passwords as well as security patches installed on all software.
Eliminate errors and downtime
If Black Fridays are a normal occurrence, it’s important to keep contingencies in mind. If there are errors or downtime that day (which is more likely than any other time), find out who to contact and how quickly they can respond so that customers are still satisfied with service levels even during the busiest day of the year!
Check for expiring passwords or expired sessions
Review all memberships, and if they’re due to expire, make a note of it. You’ll also want to change any passwords that are due to expire.
Update your SSL certificate
You may want to update or renew your SSL certificate before the Black Friday sales. It’s important to do this in the weeks leading up to the rush time because it will help keep sensitive information from being intercepted by people who may try to hack your site during high-traffic periods!
Make customers feel safe
This is one of the most important steps a store owner should take. It’s crucial that your customers feel secure with their transactions and data as they proceed to checkout. Consequently, ensuring that you have an SSL certificate installed on all eCommerce pages where customer information is collected (including contact forms) versus many other things like marketing strategies and even how much goods you offer for sale at one time matters!
Persuade the hesitant
Without this high level of security, your business may miss out on some key opportunities, such as increased sales revenue from prospective buyers who do not want to give out personal information online because it could be stolen by fraudsters, leading them to identity theft schemes.
But if these potential customers see that they’re shopping securely, the chances of them making a purchase are higher than ever before.
7. Magento store check-ups
Check blacklisted IP addresses or blacklisted country lists
These will trigger a warning when something is blocking the proper connection of page loads from your site. You’ll want to make sure blacklisted IPs are not blocking your site!
Check if Magento extensions are blacklisted
It can be easy to forget that a certain extension is blacklisted, so you should periodically check the list of blacklisted modules and compare it to what’s installed in your store.
Backup your website before Black Friday sales
This includes your site files, database, and any third-party integrations.
Employ proper backup management to prevent a time-consuming environment rollback. Having an up-to-date Snapshot is key because it allows you to save the state of your Magento environments at any given point in time, which can be crucial if something goes wrong with your deployment and requires restoration.
Enable compression on your website
This reduces the size of all downloaded elements and can help your visitors with faster loading times. It will not affect the display of your content, but it will make Black Friday sales much easier!
Check all of your system peripherals before Black Friday began
It may not happen often, but Black Friday can be a strain on your system. For this reason, make sure that all peripherals that are crucial to your website’s efficiency, such as monitors and printers working properly.
Complete the checkout before Black Friday sales
Finally, one important thing to do before Black Fridays is complete any checkouts that might have been started but not completed during regular business hours before Black Friday.
You want to make sure your store is as prepared as possible for high volumes to help you complete a sale from someone who might be in a hurry to get out and buy discount deals!
8. Restart your website
This will allow you to optimize things before Black Friday sales hits to check everything nevertheless sometimes the situation some changes need to be made during the rush period.
Deployments at this time of year can be difficult for many reasons. You might need to push changes into production, which means your customers will experience downtime as the site is being updated and improved on their behalf without any interruptions from visitors during these busy days.
Zero downtime deployment
One way to ensure a smooth transition between versions is to configure the Magento store with zero downtime deployment best practices; by doing so, you ensure that the live customer experience is not interrupted while upgrades happen behind the scenes!
9. Test your site for Black Friday
Are you so excited for this year’s peak season when your website will be flooded with millions of visitors? Don’t worry!
Functionality testing is a good step to validate how it might hold up against expected site traffic. Panda Group has some recommendations from this process that will reveal any deficiencies you may have.
Automated performance testing
Automation testing is a way to ensure that your Magento store continues to receive orders. We’ll take care of the entire process from start to finish, so we can make sure everything goes smoothly for everyone involved. We perform automated Magento testing using Selenium, Python, and Selenoid, which is more efficient, less time-consuming, and more budget-sensible than the manual ones.
Testing is the only way to ensure that your store will be able to serve all potential users without crashing or slowing down during the peak shopping hours of the holiday season.
More on Magento testing before Black Friday please have a look at Prepare for the Black Friday Performance Test.
Testing improves UX in online stores
Testing can help you avoid costly online issues and build trusting relationships with your customer base, ensuring reliability at any time of day or night no matter how busy it is for them!
Remember to document revealed deficiencies and communicate with other departments within your organization for an action plan!
10. Monitor Your Website
Tracking traffic can help you find out what’s working well for your customers and identify where improvements need to be made. This will also help identify what changes are needed for future Black Fridays events.
Online stores Data Tracking
The holiday season is a hectic time for any online retailer. There are so many numbers to keep track of, and sometimes it feels like you’re just spinning your wheels in the mud.
It’s easy to get lost in all this data while trying not only to keep an eye on what is working in your store but also to plan for next year’s sales as well! One way that can make this easier is to use Google or other tracking tools that give you a clear picture of how effective your store was during the holidays.
That way, when planning future campaigns, there will be more information available about current sales and conversions, instead of guessing blindly! Statistics are your business resource for identifying trends and succeeding in your digital store.
Picture the scene permanently
You’re doing everything to keep up with your Magento shop. Suddenly, something goes wrong: a certain sales promotion does not work as expected or an issue arises that needs immediate attention. What should you do?
Testing automation helps minimize the risk of mishaps on Black Friday, but it’s also important that you know how to react if something goes wrong.
Best Practices system
This is a time when having systems in place and following best practices can be helpful when these issues arise. Each period of high traffic gives an occasion to learn and improve your e-commerce structure and functionality.
Observe, make notes and get conclusions for the future. This way, you will create your own code of best practices, making your digital business more effective and successful.
Conclusion
We hope you have found this blog post helpful and informative, with tips and solutions to increase the success of your eCommerce business. If you want to learn more about how to change your Magento store from average to the best, get in touch with our team of certified Magento Professional experts today.
With years of experience working with Magento stores on a global level, we can help prepare your business for the holiday season, Black Friday – Cyber Monday – Christmas!
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