Black Friday is the day when the American shoppers go crazy and seek the best of shopping deals and discounts. And past history has suggested that shoppers prefer online shopping above the brick and mortar stores. Therefore, merchants need to get their online stores ready for the big shopping day. Magento being the best eCommerce software gives the shop owners with a Magento store an edge over the rest of the online stores.
Having said that, the good thing we would like to remind is that even if you have a Magento store, there are very many ways in which you can customize and update it to get the best performance in the busy sales period. This is to make the store ready and functional for the overwhelming amount of orders, which would be the case with the Black Friday. And to save your server from crashing or to get the site giving the same output, you need to make your Magento store ready for the coming Black Friday.
M-Connect Media has been researching and implementing various methods to make a fully functional online store that can pull heavy traffic and huge ROI. Our experienced team of Magento experts suggests here some of the tried and tested tips to prepare Magento store for the shopping season.
Find here, important tips to get your Magento store ready for the Black Friday:
Research to predict the load on the D day: The first thing to get ready for the big shopping day is to know the kind of load it will put on your site. For this, you need to study the number of visitors on a non-holiday period. You can use Google Analytics or any other management tools to get the statistics for the previous month, past week or past one day.
This will help you gauge the average number of visitors that come on your site on a daily basis. From this data, you can assume the number of visitors expected on the actual Black Friday. You can get an estimation of the conversion rate and the amount of traffic expected at midnight or during the entire day. From this, you can check whether your store is ready for this kind of traffic or not. If not then take the following steps to make the store ready.
Boost your Magento store’s performance: Well, this is a must as slowly loading website or disconnected buying process is a big turn off for the customer. So, make sure that your store is ready for the traffic and the orders. Go to Magento Connect store and find extension to handle the unfathomable traffic and optimize your site’s performance. If you get a free solution then great or else you need to invest in a Magento service for site optimization but, it is worth the investment.
Make sure that you – reduce the page load time, increase the pageviews, lower bounce rate, reduce abandonment and optimize to increase the visitors.
Simplify the check out process, if it’s not: Statistics suggest that shopping cart abandonment rate is 69%, which can be really harmful for any online store. To avoid this, you can make check out process easy and even offer deals that do not change during the check out time. This means, extra delivery charges mentioned at the end of check out would result in abandonment or even a complicated check out process may put off the customers.
You can reduce the six standard Magento check out process to a single step process. This will boost your sales.
Hoot for mCommerce: Your online store should be mobile ready. According to the statistics, 34% purchases were made through mobile devices on the Black Friday 2015. This is a big percentage and you cannot afford to miss out on such a big chunk of the shoppers. Make your site responsive, bug free and appealing on the mobile gadgets.
Social media integration: Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ can be big crowd pullers for you. Make sure that your site has social sharing buttons so that people who purchase can immediately share and create more conversations, which in turn can get you more potential customers. Also, do not lose any chance to promote your special deals on the social media pages. In short, get people talking about your deals, store and service.
Update customers about the Black Friday offers: You need to make the publicity right. Much before the sale, people should know about your store and the special deals. For this, put a catchy header of banner suggesting the Big Friday sale. Special icons or designs that give away the deals and shopping benefits should be added to your store. Anything that grabs customer’s attention and bring them on your site should be done without an iota of delay.
Use of specially designed Magento Black Friday template or Magento Bigsale template can also help revamp your site and get it ready for the shopping season. Promotional banners and social media campaigns works wonders to update the customer.
Give a personal touch through content: And the last thing that would certainly increase the sale by 5% to 7% is to give a personal touch to the customers. Adding their first name personalization technique has given excellent sales in the past. Emails mentioning customer’s name and a personalized message have also been a big crowd pulling technique in the past couple of years. So, make sure that your site gives a personalized feel to the customer.
Get more tips and Black Friday 2016 trend information: Holiday Sales Marketing & Sales Improvements Guide.
That’s it! These tips would work wonders if you apply them in the best possible manner. It’s time to apply these tried and tested formulas and welcome banging customers on the Black Friday. All the Best!
M-Connect Media
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