At Contentsquare, we work with more than 700 clients worldwide, helping them to give their customers a better experience on their websites, mobile sites and apps. Our customer success team is there every step of the way, giving our clients Black Friday eCommerce tips, insights, and advice for the holiday shopping season and beyond. Whether it's from the platform, their experience with clients, or from previous roles at brands and agencies, the CSM team is an invaluable resource.
And with hundreds of Black Fridays under their belts — from small pure players to corporate giants — they're perfectly placed to give you a fresh perspective on your own efforts.
We spoke to three of our most experienced CSMs and asked: What Black Friday eCommerce tips do you have for brands trying to prepare for the 2020 holiday season?
Suzanne Smulovitch
Senior Strategic Consultant, North America
Number one piece of advice?
"Black Friday is all about working as a team. You need everyone in a room (or on a Zoom!) working together to ensure you are sidestepping issues and maximizing revenue."
Top Black Friday eCommerce tips_?_
PLAN. You can't run a marathon without practice. If you can, run some trial tests and periods ahead of the holiday season. Pick up any bugs ahead of time, see what's working and not working. Don’t just plan a campaign and launch it on Black Friday without road-testing it. You don’t want any surprises on the day!
DON’T BE RIGID. Many companies go into a code freeze during the peak season. Limiting errors is important, but if things really need to change during the holiday season, it’s important to let that happen. But sometimes, the risk of not doing something when you can find a quick easy fix, outweighs the risk of just doing it.
CONSTANTLY MONITOR. Set up all your tracking in order to monitor your site in advance. Know which tests and promotions you'll be running, and what sort of things you'll want to track so you can be aware of issues or JavaScript errors. The more data you can collect, the better. Bonus points if you have an AI tool that can send you alerts.
James Fearne
Lead Customer Success Manager, Northern Europe
Number one piece of advice?
"Not preparing effectively will mean you’re fire-fighting on the day. Make sure you have the right data and you’re prepared to act on it! Also, lower foot traffic in retail stores will mean the importance of digital will have a step change this year. Many will be shopping online for the first time, so it’s also important to consider accessibility when testing and making changes. Plus, customers are savvier than ever with deals, checking the original price, comparing prices, etc. — so often it’s your site experience that’s really differentiating you!"
Top Black Friday eCommerce tips_?_
FAIL TO PREPARE, PREPARE TO FAIL. Have your analytics in place - have alerts, tracking, dashboards set up. A lot of brands go into Black Friday in fire-fighting mode and have to constantly react, rather than those brands who were prepared, who would optimize, test, and be proactive at that time.
DON'T OVERCOMPLICATE THINGS. Sounds silly, but your customers know it’s Black Friday. Don’t overcomplicate the journey and potentially block people from buying. Lots of brands may create a bespoke Black Friday landing page, where previously you would have just gone to a product page. Don’t risk putting users in front of (potentially) useless content for the sake of it. Make sure it’s useful.
HAVE FUN. People are expected to work long hours, and it can be a really stressful time. Have some fun with it. Make bets on your sales targets, buy lunch in for the team, and create an enjoyable and rewarding environment. Make the all-nighters worth it...
Dan Yoffe
Lead Data Analyst, Israel
Number one piece of advice_?_
“The most important thing is to look at the journey to checkout — make sure it’s quick and easy. If your site is at risk of a slowdown from the masses of traffic hitting your site, reducing the length of the customer journey could potentially increase conversion rates during the holiday season - A shorter journey means fewer opportunities for errors to be thrown.
While checkout journeys traditionally begin in the shopping cart, don't hesitate to give customers the ability to get to checkout directly from your product pages for one-click checkouts.”
Top Black Friday eCommerce tips_?_
SPEED. Reduce the number of screens visitors must see before entering checkout to decrease the likelihood of potential errors - that are likely to happen when systems are overloaded.
UPSELL. Review your upsell opportunities around the site to increase revenue. Holiday visitors tend to enter the site looking for a specific product that is on sale - but are much more willing to interact with upsell carousels during this time of year. Think carefully about the places where different segments will be open to upsell — and make sure visitors are constantly exposed to these opportunities throughout the journey to increase ACV.
TECHNICAL ISSUES. Are your errors clear enough? Make sure validation errors are extremely clear to the customer and provide ways for the visitor to recover from them - this will greatly reduce pressure on your customer service hotlines.
COUPONS. Your coupon UX is crucial. Codes should be in prominent locations and if you can apply them automatically, even better. It’s a common source of complaints over Black Friday. If coupons have to be added manually, make sure you give the codes clear names that are easy to remember (BLACKFRIDAY will work better than BLKFRIDAY or BK202093) - increasing the likelihood your visitors will share these with their friends.
Chris Camps is the Global Content Strategy Manager at Contentsquare. Previously a copywriter and a tech journalist, he is now fully immersed in the world of B2B software. He likes Pina Coladas, but always carries an umbrella in case of inclement weather. He thinks the best flavor of ice cream is vanilla, and he won’t hear another word about it.