Are you feeling prepared for the upcoming Black Friday? While it may still be August, it's never too early to start thinking about and planning for the biggest shopping event of the year. To help you make the most of Black Friday, we have put together six crucial steps to ensure you have all the necessary information and strategies before the big day arrives.
Step 1 - Evaluate last year's Black Friday performance
Analyzing your website's performance before Black Friday will provide insights into the successes and challenges you encountered. Divide the data systematically into sales, marketing, assortment, pricing, profit, logistics, and staffing categories. Doing this comprehensive overview will help identify areas for improvement, such as popular items that quickly can run out of stock, and reevaluate your product performance as well as product pricing.
For you to analyze your historical data, you will need to make sure that you collect and gather such data. This can be a difficult and time-consuming task. PriceShape can help you manage all the relevant data needed to make the right strategies throughout the year. We can provide historical data from the day you start as our customer. You will need to begin collecting relevant historical data now for you to have data that can be usable for Black Friday.
Step 2 - Set goals for sales and earnings
Establish clear goals for your Black Friday sales and earnings. These goals serve as benchmarks to evaluate your performance and ensure you're on track to meet your ambitions. Could you determine the desired turnover and decide on the earnings you aim to achieve? Setting these clear goals increases your chances of success. Assigning an owner to each goal is an excellent idea to ensure accountability and oversee the progress. Remember, achieving these goals involves multiple steps and collaboration from various team members so you can be ready for a successful Black Friday.
Step 3 - Implement a sales execution strategy
To achieve the goals set in Step 2, you must break them into actionable categories and further into suppliers and marketing. Refer back to the data gathered in Step 1 to base your strategy on collected historical data. Using a pricing tool like PriceShape can help leverage your historical data to provide valuable insights and identify areas for improvement. This data tells you whether certain products are priced incorrectly and how you are priced compared to your competitors. When you use this information, you can refine your pricing strategy and optimize sales execution.
Step 4 - Automate pricing processes
Changing prices can be time-consuming, particularly during high-demand periods like Black Friday. Manual updates also increase the risk of errors. A pricing tool like PriceShape can help with automated pricing solutions and helps you to streamline this process. Automating your pricing allows you to allocate time to determine optimal prices based on historical data, where you can create pricing strategies and rules to categorize products and ensure that your products have the right price.
Step 5 - Develop a strategic marketing plan
Effective product marketing is crucial, especially during Black Friday. With significant competition, it's essential to promote your products strategically. For an e-commerce business, does allocating the marketing budget include looking into Google Shopping? Here, you'll need to invest time and effort into deciding which products perform best and aligning your marketing budget accordingly.
PriceShape can assist you in identifying these high-performance products, maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts. We can improve your Google Feed with price data, letting you allocate your budget to the products where your pricing strategy is set to match your competitors instead of being allocated to products where you are not competitive.
Step 6 - Have a plan B while having a party
Black Friday and Cyber Week are critical for e-commerce companies. Consumers expect great deals and a smooth shopping experience. It's vital to have a contingency plan in case of unexpected events. Anticipating potential challenges and creating a plan to address them will help you when the day arrives. It is a good idea for you to delegate the responsibilities within your team to ensure everyone knows how to handle different scenarios. Consider scenarios like system failures, heavy website traffic, payment method issues, employee absences, or the need for additional stock. Doing this prepares you for the worst scenario, giving you the best outcome.
Why is Black Friday relevant for you?
You might hear claims that Black Friday has faded into the past, but the data paints a different picture, especially for E-commerce businesses. Modern consumers are taking charge of their research process. A staggering 89% of shoppers now conduct online evaluations of products using their mobile devices before finalizing a purchase.
What's even more compelling is the prevalence of mobile device transactions. A substantial 55% of sales in 2022 occurred through this platform, indicating that mobile shopping is rapidly becoming the standard for consumers.
Analyzing consumer behavior reveals that a significant 88% of shoppers engage in price comparisons, demonstrating a willingness to invest up to 2 hours in pursuit of the best possible deal on a product. Social Media plays a pivotal role in influencing these purchasing decisions. This upcoming season, a notable 65% of customers are inclined to shop online, with 36% actively seeking out deals through social media platforms.
As a consequence, retailers must elevate their efforts in bolstering their E-commerce presence and allocating resources to Social Media and Google Shopping Ads.
Data is your superpower
The above section shows that data is your guiding star in strategic decision-making. Leading up to Black Friday, your role involves tapping into historical data to collect valuable insights. This means thoroughly reviewing past Black Friday performance, studying key sales trends, and identifying the products that resonated most with your customers. Also, close collaboration with your marketing, purchasing, and sales teams is essential to decode current market trends and align your offerings accordingly.
Building an effective strategy framework
A great Black Friday strategy entails carefully combining inventory management, product selection, and promotional efforts. You aim to ensure seamless operations, offer attractive deals, and enhance the customer experience. Here, the partnership with PriceShape becomes beneficial.
PriceShape is a tool that provides you with dynamic pricing and analytics insights. In the context of Black Friday, PriceShape grants a competitive edge by providing real-time market data and authorizing you to make informed decisions on allocating your marketing spend on Google shopping correctly. You can strategically position your offerings to attract shoppers by aligning your pricing with prevailing market trends. Moreover, PriceShape's data-driven insights help identify high-potential products for effective promotion on Google Shopping, ensuring optimal allocation of your resources.
Allocate your marketing budget correctly on Google Shopping
Black Friday is perhaps the most financially demanding day for advertising. Therefore, you need to develop a strategic approach to how you want to allocate your marketing budget on this specific occasion. It would have been easy if we could tell you the right strategy for your business, but unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to apply.
You can create early "teasers" for your deals, taking advantage of the cost-effectiveness in the weeks leading up to the event. However, maintaining relevance over an extended period can be challenging, and competitors can swiftly replicate and respond to your advertisements. As Black Friday draws closer, the digital marketing cost tends to escalate.
This is a crucial factor that demands your consideration.
PriceShape can provide data that can help you allocate this budget more correctly. The data guides you in identifying standout products, guaranteeing that your advertising investments yield maximum rewards, especially on Google Shopping.
By implementing PriceShape now, you'll gain a significant advantage for Black Friday. Collect valuable data to inform your decision-making process and make data-driven strategies and goals. With a solid plan, you can also enjoy the festivities and celebrate Black Friday together as a company.
Remember, preparation is key to winning Black Friday. Start early, analyze past performance, set goals, optimize sales execution, automate pricing, create a marketing plan, and be ready for contingencies. With these steps, you'll be well on your way to a successful Black Friday.
