Is Your Online Store Ready for Black Friday?

The discounted retail holiday period will be sweeping the nation in just over 3 weeks. However, is your online store optimised to convert the sales? In this article we will explore how you can get your website working smarter for you.

Black Friday takes place on the 29th November this year, with Cyber Monday following on the 2nd December, providing consumers with the opportunity to grab a bargain or two before Christmas.

The UK has adopted the shopping tradition after realising that retailers were missing out to competitors who offered sales after Thanksgiving, celebrated within the states.

Do Your Research

Before plunging straight into discounting every item in your online catalogue, spend the time understanding what products your website visitors are interested in.

To achieve this easily, the Click4Assistance live chat integration solution contains functionality called Hotspots. This allows your organisation to define key pages upon your website. The system records every time an online visitor browses one of these pages, showing individually against each visit. Alternatively, the reporting suite provides you with the total amount of traffic to each of these Hotspots, enabling you to see how popular they really are.

Visitors will make their own journey based on what has influenced them to browse your website, therefore what we may think is a popular page on the website could actually not be the reality. If your Hotspots are unexpectedly low, it is recommended to then review the pages with the highest number of sessions over a period of time so that you can gain an understanding of the full picture. If you use Google Analytics it is easy to access this information.

With limited time available until Black Friday, it is vital that this research stage is done sooner rather than later to give you enough time to optimise your website.

Promote, Promote, Promote

Now that you know what items your visitors are interested in, your company can make a more informed decision of what products to include within your sale. 

There’s the choice of including the most popular items as they have a higher chance of being snapped up and increasing your sales, or if your company has high stock of certain products that haven’t been selling, it’s a good opportunity to try and shift the merchandise. A mix of these is usually a good strategy to benefit your organisation, whilst satisfying your website visitors.

Once your company has decided what items are going to be included within the sale, it’s time to get the word out there. Promote it on social media; there are many groups that report any bargains or ways people can save money, send the administrators a message to make them aware of your deals coming up. This can help you reach an audience who may not have necessary had a reason to visit your site before.

Some newspapers will release a list of retailers who they know will partake in Black Friday sales, there’s nothing to lose with a quick news search to find out which publications wrote such articles during previous years and contacting them to notify them of your intentions. With many articles already written, it is advisable to do this sooner rather than later.

Optimise Your Website

It goes without saying, when a retailer holds a sale online, visitors expect to be able to navigate to an index page which displays all the items within the sale. Your organisation can bring extra attention to your offers with a Promotion, an image that presents on the website after the consumer has been browsing the website for a certain duration or has visited a specific page.

The promotion can be customised to any design therefore it can be tailored to announce your sale and automatically direct the visitor to the index page if they accept the promotion.

Once consumers are browsing your website, they may have questions at any stage within their journey. Therefore your company should be easily contactable to answer these. The quickest way to achieve this is with live chat software, where the visitor is instantly connected to a customer service advisor in real-time.

If consumers are hesitating to make a purchase it can lead to cart abandonment. A way to reduce this is to add a Proactive Invitation onto your checkout page. This works in a similar manner to the Promotion when the invite to chat can be displayed on certain pages after a specific amount of time. Should this be deployed at the right time, it can prevent the visitor from leaving the website before speaking with an advisor.

For an individual browsing your website for the first time, seeing the live chat can subconsciously help them to trust your brand as the communication channel represents that your company is open to talk.

All of this can be achieved within 3 weeks, meaning this year’s Black Friday could be the best yet for your company. For more information regarding our live chat integration solution contact our team on 01268 524628, or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.