It is, indeed, the most wonderful time of the year, especially for retailers keen on catapulting themselves towards or beyond their 2024 financial goals.

For retail brands at this time of the year, the rewards are extremely high, but the pressure is extremely high as well.  Brands rely heavily on Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), and missing the boat on big returns can be devastating for a brand’s long term trajectory.

The good news for brands is that there are a slew of improvements that can be made between now and the biggest spike in online traffic on Thanksgiving weekend itself. If done well, these improvements can pay dividends well beyond the holidays.

In anticipation of this critical time period, we’ve outlined a list of key initiatives that can turn your Black Friday Cyber Monday worries into huge wins:

1. Optimize site performance and stability

Load time and page performance are among the main reasons people leave sites.  If your load time and page performance are poor, especially on mobile (i.e. more than 4+ seconds), customers will walk –period.  There are a number of strategies that can produce significant savings in performance and load speed, including but not limited to: 

• Minifying JavaScript/styles
• Removing unused code
• Lazy-loading images below the “fold”
• Optimizing the abundance of 3rd party scripts and apps
• And compressing/serving images in next-gen formats
• Reduce the overuse of popups and modals and have an easy way to hide them

All of which can shave off valuable seconds from your load time, improve your site’s performance and stability, and drive higher customer satisfaction and engagement.

You can utilize tools such as Shopify’s Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, and Page Speed Insights, all of which can measure site performance. You can also utilize your agency partner or individual analytics expert who can interpret the results and work to implement fixes in your code to improve performance. We can’t recommend this enough, as page speed and stability are among the top reasons why people leave ecommerce sites.

2. Lead with unique brand experiences, not just discounts

Discounting alone isn’t going to cut it anymore. Customers want to feel something about a brand and their products if they’re going to invest, especially in a year that has been marked with volatility and dramatic swings in economic sentiment, and seeing retail brands investing much more in their brand and brand story. 

Consider Patagonia’s campaign “Don’t buy this jacket”, placed in the New York Times on Black Friday itself back in 2011. The provocative campaign was meant to reinforce Patagonia’s mission to make the planet healthier than they found it, and to encourage customers to think deeply about every purchase they make before actually making a purchase. Thirteen years later and we’re still talking about this campaign, because it’s so perfectly tied to Patagonia’s mission.

What is your brand’s mission? Think about how you can tie your mission to a campaign, an event, a VIP experience, an on-site easter egg, a full screen site takeover, or anything else that isn’t a discount — but rather a call to take up your brand’s mission — in order to invite customers to become a part of the movement.

Done well, an interaction of this type can have impact for years to come, building emotional resonance and connection with customers who will sing your praises to the rafters to everyone in their network.

3. Take advantage of existing, on platform channel expansions

Many ecommerce platforms have extensive reach into sales channels such as POS (Point of Sales), B2B, Social, Product Feeds, and more. Especially for brands on Shopify Plus, it’s worth reviewing your platforms’ sales channel extensions to see if you’re taking full advantage.  

By setting up these platforms (i.e. turning them on in Shopify and promoting them to customers and B2B merchants appropriately), you can establish both short and long term revenue opportunities for your brand.

Every sales channel is work and can potentially dilute your brand equity, so each should be treated with care and attention. That being said, if you’ve been waiting a long time to open a particular sales channel, leaning into BFCM pressure can be a strong incentive to get those channel(s) live.

4. Utilize previous years' data

By looking at sales data from previous years, you can start to identify trends that can help you better sell to customers visiting your site this holiday season.

For example, let’s say you noticed that products under $50 sold the most in Q4 in previous years by far. You can test the hypothesis that most people in Q4 are buying for others, and you can merchandise products under $50 more frequently during this time period with messaging focusing on gift giving versus buying for oneself.

What do your previous years’ data sets suggest, and how can you use this data to prioritize focus?

5. Look for quick path-to-purchase wins

Oftentimes, there are easy unlocks for the path-to-purchase for customers sitting right under our noses. A methodology we implement here at Verbal+Visual is to identify the top 3 customer pain points, and then backtrack them to the site experience to implement preventative measures. You can do this through user testing, identifying common customer service complaints, and/or looking at your analytics and making informed hypotheses about areas of friction on the site based on drop off points and heat mapping analyses.

For example, let’s say that through the site data you see customers frequently buying two of the same items in different sizes, and then returning one.  From this, we can hypothesize that customers don’t know exactly what size will fit. That means that the product sizing information and/or process is not effective enough.  

If this is the case, consider inserting a tool tip directly on the cart when a customer adds two of the same products in different sizes. We did this for Andie Swim, and saw a drop in returns while also minimizing environmental impact and giving customers a more positive overall experience – a people, product, planet triple win!

6. Transparency and accuracy for shipping

By showcasing dates of arrival ahead of the cart page, i.e., on the PDP, customers looking for visibility on arrival dates can be assured that their gift purchase will arrive on time.

Going one step further, you can also introduce urgency by showing the number of products available in stock. If less than X (typically X is between 3-10 left in stock), customers can know that there’s limited quantity and may be incentivized to complete the purchase quickly, without bouncing off the site.

Of course, all of this needs to be accurate.  The worst thing a brand can do is not meet delivery expectations. Making sure that delivery dates are, at worst, accurate to the day, and at best arriving earlier than the estimated date, will be a source of customer delight.

Metafields are one way to power this functionality, as we have done with Revelry and Jonathan Adler with strong impact. Shop Promise is another great way to display this information at checkout.

7. Plug and play 3rd party wins

Last but not least, with limited time between now and the holidays, finding 3rd parties that plug in nicely with your platform in a matter of minutes, even if you’re implementing them temporarily for the holidays, can be a huge win! Just be sure to select applications and 3rd parties from trusted Shopify partners, and with a significant number of verified customer reviews —this ensures site stability, and stress-tested applications built to perform well under load.

Some examples include: 

1. Checkout Blocks - customize your checkout from additional upsell modules or static content modules with quick drag and drop configurations. 

2. EG Auto Add To Cart - create a seamless Gift with a Purchase experience quickly and easily.

3. Visually.io - leverage extensive pre-built modules and A/B Testing capability to maximize the profit.

Each of the above will help the customer journey / path to purchase, are fast to install, and can be up and running in less than a day.

In Closing

It’s never too late to make site improvements for Black Friday Cyber Monday, until it’s too late of course.  If it’s prior to November 15th, you’ve got time. Hop to it!

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If you’re currently seeking outside help, please reach out to us at hi@vpv.co and we would be able to provide a complimentary and custom tailored set of BFCM recommendations to the first 10 brands who reach out.