2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Website Checklist By Jenna Erickson, Codal Inc
____________________________________________________________________________________ Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge opportunities for merchants and retailers to make a lot of money. Last year, shoppers spent an average of $ 300 online shopping throughout the weekend. Adobe had stated that $ 5.27 billion was spent online after Black Friday alone (17.7% more than the previous year!). As a web development agency in Chicago, it is our duty to make sure that all of our clients who are participating in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, have their website ready to go! Making sure that your website if functioning properly, as well as having the user experience up to par couldn’t be more important around the holiday season. Below is a checklist to help ensure that these holiday months will be profitable for your online store. Ensure that your site can handle a large load of traffic Depending on the platform that you’re using to sell online, your store can crash if it sees a huge surge of traffic at once. Before BFCM, you must test your server load capacity to ensure your online store doesn’t c rash or break during peak hours. You can use either LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io to test your store. Banner Promo’s and Hero Images You need to make sure that you have some nice graphics and visuals to promote your holiday sales. For every holiday promotion, you should have new banner ad’s to represent those specific sales and promotions. If you work
with an eCommerce web design company, like Codal, than they should be able to take care of this for you. Mobile-Ready Although Black Friday and Cyber Monday is close to an official holiday, most people are back to work on Monday and may be doing their online shopping on-the-go. This means that your website needs to be 100% ready on mobile as well. Touch base with your mobile app design company to make sure that you don’t miss any mobile issues. Tracking Pixels Make sure that your tracking pixels are properly working if you are running Facebook ads, Google AdWords, Twitter ads, etc. Typically, you should be able to do this yourself. H ere is a guide for Facebook pixels, and here’s a guide on how to tag your website for Google AdWords. If you cannot implement this yourself, consider working with your w eb development agency in Chicago to help. Ensuring that every page of your website has the correct tracking pixels, you’ll have a deep understanding of where your users are coming from. From analyzing this data from BFCM, you can make data-driven improvements to your ad’s for the rest of the holiday season. Retarget All Customers The holidays are the best time for you to retarget all of your past customers. You should be sending email campaigns to older customers. When you retarget previous visitors, you are reaching people that may have forgotten about your store.
It is very likely that people you have already sold to in the past will be much more receptive to your BFCM sales and promotions. Set up Heatmaps Implementing a heatmap to your website will also allow you to make data-driven changes to your website for the rest of the holiday season. Knowing where your users are dropping off, and where they are spending a lot of time on a certain page. As a web application development company in Chicago, we are quite frequently implementing heatmapping tools. One of our favorites that we frequently recommend, is HotJar. Now What? Now that you have your Black Friday and Cyber Monday checklist ready to go, it’s time to start planning your marketing campaigns, talking to your development partner agency, and creating those graphics for your sales and promotions. Happy BFCM! User Experience Design | eCommerce Website Development