It’s difficult to say when the first use of the term ‘Black Friday’ occurred. Some suggest it was used in the 1950s by workers when calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving. Others claim police used it as a slang term for the crowds causing traffic congestion around Christmas, and others say the first use was in November 1975 to describe the busiest shopping day of the year. The latter is the one that stuck around.
Black Friday is still one of the busiest days for consumers, both on and offline, as they take advantage of the crazy deals and discounts that retailers offer. However, it’s grown tremendously since its beginnings and even has a sister day, Cyber Monday, which has the same idea but focuses solely on online retail offers.
As an e-commerce business owner, it’s crucial to prepare your website ahead of Black Friday, which falls on the 25th of November this year, and Cyber Monday, on the 28th of November. As expert e-commerce web developers, we can help you get ahead of your competitors and make sure your website runs efficiently on these key dates in the e-commerce calendar.
Here are our top 10 tips for preparing your site for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Many of us will understand the panic of leaving the buying of Christmas presents to mid-December and then realising toys have sold out, the sizes you need are out of stock, or prices have doubled since you last checked. However, more of us than ever before are preparing early for the holidays and taking advantage of super sales such as Black Friday, which is why as an e-commerce business owner, you must prepare early too.
Get ahead of the crowds and find out exactly who and what you should be targeting during the busiest shopping time of the year. Get your website ready, conduct keyword research, decide which products you want to spotlight, and organise your advertising campaign.
On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, campaigns build a sense of urgency with wording such as ‘don’t miss out’, encouraging consumers to act fast and be the first to access the unmissable deals. Because of this, having a speedy site is essential for customer experience, especially when it comes to your checkout page. Test your site speed and core web vitals to ensure the best results.
More consumers each year use their smartphones to access Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, so you must ensure your mobile-view website runs smoothly. Monitor your mobile website through Google Mobile-First Indexing to check everything is as it should be and make changes if necessary before it becomes too late and you miss out on crucial mobile traffic.
Showing you’re excited about your Black Friday sales is one of the best ways to get potential customers excited. If you quietly put your prices down and don’t create the buzz around your deals, you make it difficult for customers to know you’re involved with Black Friday at all.
Check your website’s visual and written content and ensure it all reads well and uses your brand’s tone of voice. This includes adding appropriate banners and widgets to make your website stand out and display precisely what you’re offering.
Finally, keep your reviews, product pages, and returns policy up to date, as these are vital pages customers will use during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
One of your main goals as an e-commerce business owner is to keep customers on your website for as long as possible, which you can do through internal linking. A buying guide is one of the best formats for internal links that work exceptionally well during Black Friday. These guides not only provide users with helpful information for their Christmas shopping but also give you a great link-building opportunity. You can highlight products, categories, and brands you wish to push in the form of price guides and product comparisons to help them find the best products.
Spotlighting featured products is a great way to refine your website and highlight why users should stay. If the first thing users see when they access your site is a long list of products, all with various deals and discounts, it can become messy and far from user-friendly. Instead, organise your products and spotlight those to feature in category, brand, or product type to grab the user’s attention.
Ensure you communicate with your target audience by using your social platforms to speak directly with your customers. Track trends in your field, popular products and brands, and stay on top of industry news to discover what your target audience is looking for. Once you’ve done your research, you can begin promoting your Black Friday sales using this information.
As a social media agency, we work with you to build your brand through your social platforms and get your word out there through data-driven campaigns, creative copy and design, and enticing CTAs.
An effective email marketing campaign is essential during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Incorporate a strategy for chasing abandoned baskets and remind customers what they had put in there and which prices have dropped. Additionally, send out any discount codes ahead of Black Friday to ensure customers are ready to go when the day arrives; your customers will be scouring their emails to find the best offers in advance.
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest shopping days, more people than usual should be purchasing from your website. Because of this, you must ensure you’re on it when it comes to customer service. Point customers in the right direction to contact details and ensure your customer service team is well prepared on the day. You should also implement helpful CTAs throughout your website to give customers the correct information and avoid confusion.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all about quick deals and unmissable offers, so creating a sense of urgency is essential. Implement countdown widgets to encourage customers to order before the prices are increased again, and use language such as “don’t miss out”, “hurry”, and “offers end soon” in your copy to remind customers that the offers are only available for a limited time.
If you need assistance with your e-commerce marketing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team and find out how we can help.
The retail industry is competitive, with thousands of online retailers to choose from and millions of products on offer. Savvy consumers expect to be able to find exactly what they want when they put a search term into Google, and their expectations are only set to increase as people become more and more comfortable shopping online. You may be looking to encourage footfall in your physical store or boost sales through your online shop. Regardless, getting your brand in front of the right people online is crucial to any retail business looking to thrive in today’s increasingly digital marketplace. Digital Marketing gives you the power to be seen and heard by thousands of people interested in your product or service.
If you’re a small, medium-sized or independent retailer, competing for visibility online with retail giants like Amazon can seem like an impossible task. That’s why having a solid digital marketing plan in place is so essential for helping you get your retail business in front of the right people.
Every year, the number of consumers choosing to shop online grows, and it’s never been more critical for retailers, even those who rely on physical footfall, to have a digital presence on the internet and incorporate digital marketing into their retail business strategies. It’s not about trying to outcompete international corporations but rather targeting the right audiences to get the most out of your marketing. Your target audience could be local people who live within a certain radius of your store or people searching specifically for products you offer.
By fine-tuning your digital presence through a combination of SEO, content marketing, PPC and social media activity, you’ll be putting your business in the best possible position to thrive both on and offline. Of course, if that sounds like a lot of time and effort, you can always enlist the help of a digital marketing agency. Whether you decide to keep your marketing in-house or outsource it, make sure you’re working towards the right goals. It’s all about creating a seamless experience between your online presence and your bricks-and-mortar store.
Did you know 25% of the world’s population shop online? That’s almost two billion people! Of them, almost two-thirds begin their shopping journey online, even when they end up visiting a physical store. That’s a huge number of people, so how do you make sure you attract the right ones?
Understanding your target audience and what makes them tick is the first step to digital marketing success. You need quantifiable and qualifiable information on your ideal customers to gear your marketing efforts toward them. This information includes:
An experienced digital marketing agency can help you gather this information and build an accurate snapshot of your brand’s ideal target audience. You can use this information to guide your SME digital marketing strategy.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you’ll need to work out how best to reach them within the digital ecosystem. This will be determined in part by your target demographics and business goals and may include a combination of any or all the services listed below.
Serving up ads through Google is an excellent way to get your brand and products in front of potential customers. Whether you want to encourage e-commerce sales or drive footfall to your physical store, the type of campaign you’ll run will differ.
If you’re running a traditional e-commerce website and want your audience to convert into paying customers by buying directly from your website, Google Shopping campaigns are likely the best for you. These ads appear right at the top of the search results and shopping tab, promoting the products on your site visually with a picture and including the price. By running a fine-tuned Google Shopping campaign, you can make sure your products only appear when people search for specific terms.
Of course, if your main goal is to encourage people to visit your store, a Google Search campaign may be a better choice. These ads are displayed at the top of the Google search results page and can be used to target people searching for products like yours in your local area.
However, there’s more to it than simply telling Google you want to run an ad. You’ll need to decide on the best type of advert, specify the target audience, write ad copy, provide images, create a bidding strategy for your business, set budgets, monitor your campaigns, and make tweaks based on the number of clicks and conversions you get.
If that sounds like a lot of work and time, it could be time to ask a PPC agency for assistance.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is vital to helping your retail website climb up Google’s organic search results, which appear right below the paid search result. The higher up the search result page your website is, the more prominent your business will be, which can help drive traffic to your site.
SEO is beneficial to both retail businesses looking to convert visitors into paying customers through their online store and those who want to encourage local consumers to visit a shop in person. It’s all about making sure your website contains the keywords your target audience is searching for (these will likely be the names of your key products) as well as keeping your site healthy, running smoothly and error-free, as Google will penalise unresponsive or slow websites with broken links.
SEO can be highly competitive and is an ongoing process that requires much care and attention. Therefore, it may be beneficial to get help from an SEO marketing agency if you don’t feel you have the time to dedicate to it yourself.
People want to buy from retailers they trust, and content marketing is a perfect way to build that trust. Content marketing involves writing blogs, newsletters, opinion pieces and other customer-facing content. You can use content marketing to target longtail keywords and terms that people search for. These online searches could be questions about products you sell, how to use them or how they can solve a particular problem.
By creating fresh, unique content regularly for your website, you’ll not only satisfy Google’s algorithm, which rewards consistently updated, relevant content, but you’ll establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
An example of a great retail blog would be one that showcases a mixture of how-to guides for your products, informational pieces that delve a little deeper into your industry, and data-driven articles specifically targeting the questions and terms your audience is searching for.
Much like SEO, content is a long-term investment that needs ongoing attention. It will require someone who’s got the time to write engaging content in a consistent tone of voice with your specific customers’ best interests in mind.
If you struggle with time, you can use a freelancer or a content marketing agency. You can have a professional writer take care of your online content, so you can focus on running your business.
It’s no secret that people spend a tremendous amount of time on social media, and you can tap into those markets with both organic social media and paid social media. When we say organic, we’re referring to any activity your business makes on social media platforms that you haven’t paid money to have placed in front of people. These posts reach wider audiences through engagement, shares and reactions. On the other hand, paid social media works a little bit like Google Advertising, where you choose a demographic, budget, and other metrics that help get your social ads in front of relevant audiences.
We’ve written a lot about social media, from how to grow your business on Instagram to creating the perfect Facebook advert – two great articles for retailers. When considering your overall retail digital marketing strategy, the important thing to know is which social media platforms your audiences are using most regularly. Be most active on those platforms. Make sure all your organic and paid social media branding aligns with your website and physical branding, contributing to that seamless experience across social media, your website, and your physical store.
Strong digital marketing for retail businesses will require a combination of the above. It’s a balancing act, and knowing where to invest your time, effort, and money will depend on your business goals and target audiences.
As a digital marketing agency that specialises in SME digital marketing, we help retailers both local and nationwide build and maintain an online presence and turn that visibility into actual, tangible sales. If you’re interested in knowing more about what we do here at SQ Digital, have a read of our case studies to understand the types of retailers we’ve had success with, in recent years. When you’re ready, contact us to find out more about how we can help your retail business succeed online.
In the UK alone, revenue from online retailers is growing significantly each year. In September 2021, a value of £1.99 billion was attributed to UK online retail sales – a huge value demonstrating the need for retailers to be present online. However, simply having a website isn’t enough anymore to increase customer reach; with growing demand, the competition is fiercer than ever.
The biggest hurdle for the success of an e-commerce website is user experience. If an e-commerce website design lacks a ‘good’ user experience, additional online marketing efforts are likely to fail. As digital marketing experts, we often identify the website as the limiting factor of potential marketing campaigns.
User experience is being used in the e-commerce industry more than ever and represents more than you might think. To define a user's experience, we must consider their physical, auditory, and visual interaction with a website, in addition to their emotions, perceptions, psychological responses and the context of its use, as well as much more. And that is before, during and after their interaction with your website’s interface.
That sounds like a lot to consider, and it is! There’s no hiding the fact that when it comes to understanding people's needs, there is no one size fits all approach, especially when different industries and audiences are thrown in the mix. Fortunately, there are some constants we can focus on to help provide a good user experience for retail websites. These centre around usability (how easily the customer interacts with the website interface) and understanding customer expectations.
The customer expectations we refer to are the top-level needs that transcend product and industry. A report by Nielsen Normal Group (world leaders in research-based user experience) outlined convenience, speed, assurance, accuracy, options and experience as the main expectations for online e-commerce customers. You can start to see how these expectations are met when you look at the websites' of the most successful UK online retailers.
The UK leading online retailer for 2021 was Amazon. When you look at the website, you can see it meets present-day customer expectations very well through its usability. It's worth pointing out that these large companies are successful due to well-thought-out business models that meet customer expectations in parallel with their websites. This includes in-store pickup, easy returns, downloadable apps etc., all of which require extensive and complex infrastructure, time and money. However, when it comes to their e-commerce websites' there are many lessons to be learnt that are relevant to all online e-commerce businesses, from the very small to the very large.
If you have fast-loading web pages it will stop people from leaving your website in frustration. Users expect immediate information and page loading. Unfortunately, the people who view your website may well have experienced other websites with faster page loading speeds. This previous experience will reduce patience and increase the necessity for you to also improve page speed. On top of that, there is increased focus, not just on speed but also on the loading experience. As SEO experts, we would refer to these elements as Core Web Vitals, but it simply means how smooth does the page load?
Think about buttons moving during the loading time and accidental clicks or images loading after you've started reading text, making you scroll back to where you were. These are all examples of bad usability and page experience.
Mega menus are large menus organised in one view with categories and products shown together in logical groups. The below example from Asos shows an excellent example of a rectangular mega menu that allows the user to see all their options in a top-level category they are interested in.
Mega menus are an excellent choice for e-commerce websites because they give the users the information about the largest number of options efficiently.
Important considerations are that the menu should never drop below the fold (that is no matter which screen size the user is on, they shouldn't have to scroll). It's also important to ensure that the mega menu appears no quicker than 0.5 seconds once hovered over. If the user is heading for the search bar but briefly passes their cursor over the main navigation, they don't want a rapid succession of large menu dropdowns to interfere with their intentions.
Using a search bar with excellent predictability, speed of suggestion, the forgiveness of spelling mistakes and other intelligent features is another must for an e-commerce website. Below you can see the search menu for Amazon. Even with one letter, the search function makes suggestions to show the best-matched options as the user types.
This speeds up the time from the user looking for the required product or category to finding it. Similar to the mega menu, it is important that the suggestions dropdown does not disappear below the bottom of the current screen for the user to avoid unnecessary scrolling.
Nothing will put your online customers off more than missing or inaccurate information. Finding out an item is unavailable after trying to purchase through the cart is a huge inconvenience and a waste of their time. The in-store equivalent would be a shop assistant asking a customer to wait 10 minutes while they retrieve the product for them, only for them to return after 10 minutes without it and not apologising (your website can't soften the blow as a person can). The same goes for delivery details, which is why successful e-commerce websites encourage location detection before the user starts adding items to the cart. Argos.co.uk does this well, encouraging the user to select their preferred delivery time and store, in the case of in-store collection:
If you have any product detail errors, we would recommend you prioritise addressing them. The worst example of inaccurate information would be incorrect product dimensions or descriptions. There is no excuse for these kinds of errors, and it would be no surprise if an e-commerce business failed because of it.
Making sure your website is accessible to all users not only means you capture the largest possible audience, but it is an ethical must as well. It is essential you don't exclude any users from being able to experience and interact with your website. This doesn't just apply to people with sensory or physical impairments but also users on different devices, internet connections and so on. So on top of ensuring your website design is accessible, it must also be responsive under a wide range of conditions. Knowing if your website meets these requirements can be tricky but your website design and development team can give you this information.
Our web design team created the responsive web design that you can see above for one of our retail clients, Roccia. Making sure your website works on all devices, for all users, is vital.
The checkout stage is crucial to get right because your website has already done all the leg work. Losing people at this stage is like running a marathon and then stopping before the line. On the flip side, it is the easiest stage to develop to see the most significant customer retention and sales improvements.
Offering sign-up options can help return customers speed up purchasing, and it can be used to increase your email marketing list. However, you should always provide guest check out options to cater to all audiences. The stage you present these options is also crucial. You can do this before the purchase stage or after, where sign-up at the end is optional (and the sign-in option is ever-present in the navigation). Both can work; however, the latter will reduce the purchase process by one step and can be preferred by customers.
In addition, if you use an external payment site, make sure you have wording on the page to explain what will happen to the user. They need to trust the website at every moment. Other tips for a well-thought-out checkout process include making the product details (especially price) visible at all times, so the user has no doubts about what they are buying, and ensuring any errors in filling out fields are clearly displayed.
Use high-quality images to attract and engage your audience. Use them as a wow factor, with many different angles and zoom options. Show images with the item in use vs not in use etc. The product image is the only way the user can interact with an item before purchasing. Having a high-resolution photo that is flattering (you might need to consider improving how the images are taken in some cases) with a very detailed alternative description for those relying on auditory descriptions, is a must.
You can see the image and image carousel available at Banks Lyon above. There are images of the front and back of the watch and a third image that lets the customer see its packaging. The images also have a zoom function on hover, increasing the visible detail shown. It is essential to use high-quality images that don't impede page load speed and experience.
There is a reason everyone says content is king in online marketing. Content is your narrative with the user, it is how you walk customers through your website, pointing them in the right direction. For an e-commerce website, its purpose is multifold. Product description information must be detailed and answer all of the user's questions. Include things such as size, material, weight and functional metrics. For more technical products having downloadable data sheets and specifications are all very helpful. For online clothing retailers, the content should include size guidance (even if a link to a size guide on another page) and information on where items are produced. There is no such thing as too much information with a good layout and structure.
Through website traffic monitoring tools, such as Google Analytics, you will see the volume of traffic coming to your website and whether the proportion who purchase is low. Identifying industry-relevant benchmarks, such as average checkout abandonment rates and conversion rates, and then cross-referencing with your own data, can help you know if something is wrong. Once you know there is something wrong, the hard part is working out the sticking points.
We use a user behaviour tracking tool called Microsoft Clarity and A/B testing to improve website user experience. If you need any help improving your e-commerce website, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our web design experts. We are well versed in building WordPress websites designed with the end-user in mind.
