The Annual Shopping Season: How to make the most of Black Friday and the Christmas Shopping Period

Have a clear goal in mind for the holiday shopping season

Key to maximising sales over Black Friday and the run up to Christmas and New Years is ensuring that you have a clear goal set for your campaigns. Using data from previous years can help inform your decision making, whilst making sure that your planned campaigns for this year will be feasible based on product availability, discount strategy and revenue targets will help to set you up for success.

You should also plan out your promotional budget for the holiday season, to ensure you have the headroom to manage additional volume. The Black Friday weekend will also have an effect on how your ad spend should be reduced, with more sales potential for evenings and weekends, in addition to customers shopping while they would typically be working during weekdays.

Make sure your Product Feed is optimised

If you’re running PLA campaigns, one of the most important things you can do is ensure your product feed is up to date, with the correct product information and images. With 85% of shoppers surveyed by Google believing that product information and pictures are important, this is a key area where you can stand out against your competition. 

One of the most important elements of your Product Feed during this time will be the ‘sale_price’ attribute - this will inform both Google and your customers about all of the great offers that you have available and can be the difference between a customer clicking on your advert instead of your competitors.

Make sure your website can handle lots of traffic

It’s easy to become caught up in the excitement of preparing new campaigns, and overlook the underlying functionality of your website and customer fulfilment.

The impending holiday season is also a good reason to revisit existing website functionality, and to test the experience for your visitors. This includes relatively basic tools such as site search, ensuring that no sales are being lost by empty results pages, and checking for any navigational errors, such as 404 Not Found messages for missing pages or broken internal links.

It’s also a good time to check the full customer journey to ensure data capture, sales and abandonment emails, and any remarketing or retargeting efforts are all correctly implemented to make sure you can capitalise on the largest shopping days of the year.

The return on this investment not only applies during the sales period, but also has important results on consumer loyalty and return purchases in the future, as a seamless buying process is key for ever-more impatient online customers.

Create a seamless experience from in-store to online

A recent Google survey found that 56% of in-store shoppers used their smartphones to shop or research items while they were in a store. Demonstrating a seamless link between your online and physical process will be important to retain loyal customers, and ensure that your competitors don’t get the sale ahead of you by having a better online presence.

Be mindful of delivery times

Do you offer free delivery? Shout about it! Delivery can be the final piece in a frictionless customer journey to purchase. It's also helpful to remind customers that deliveries may be affected due to postal delays.