How to Implement Effective Pop-ups and Announcement Bars for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales
Black Friday and Cyber Monday can feel like a feeding frenzy. Consumers are ready to buy the best deals, but they’re also inundated with offers and promotions from every brand they encounter.
With the competition so fierce, ecommerce websites have to work hard to stand out. When done right, pop-ups and announcement bars are the magical ingredients that make the most of the moment. When done wrong, they can disrupt conversions, damage your client’s brand, and even decrease long-term SEO performance. Effective pop-ups and announcement bars highlight special deals, create a sense of urgency, and increase conversion rates. Poor ones frustrate visitors, driving them away in the process.
Understanding how to design and deploy these elements effectively can make your clients’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns big successes. And Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren't just opportunities for your clients either. They’re perfect occasions for designers and other web professionals to reach out to past clients, or even prospective ones, to offer them services that make the most of these important sales holidays.
Understand your clients’ goals
Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be make-or-break events for many businesses, not just those selling products and services online. With that in mind, your strategy will have to start with your clients’ primary objectives. Get clear on what they want to accomplish. Is it increasing conversions, reducing bounce rates, acquiring new customers, or driving some other specific action?
Ideally, clients can articulate a clear and thoughtful goal to you directly, but some may need some help settling on a strategic plan. If they sell simple, low-cost products, increasing average order value and acquiring new customers over the sales period may be appropriate goals. If they offer a luxury product or a service that requires a large financial commitment, giving potential customers the right discount to nudge them into buy mode may be the right goal. If the client runs a service or subscription-based service, a strategy around referrals may be the best approach.
These goals will dictate both what kinds of deals your client should offer to site visitors and how you craft your overall design strategy. Pop-ups and announcements should be part of a larger Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategy, which ideally includes laying the groundwork for strong SEO performance specific to their promotions.
Design eye-catching announcement bars
The goal of your design strategy is to grab a visitor’s attention and make them glad you did. To strike the right balance between attention-grabbing elements and brand consistency, follow professional standards when building your announcement bar.
With an emphasis on legibility, design accessibility guidelines provide an excellent starting point. It doesn’t matter how eye-catching your materials are if customers can’t actually read them. Luckily, high contrast between text and background is both eye-catching and accessible. Easy-to-read typography is too. Ideally, once you have a visitor’s attention, it’s the deal that should do the talking. To pick a color that stands out while complementing your client brand’s palette, consider referencing a color wheel. In general, colors on opposite ends of the color wheel make good compliments. Learn more about choosing impactful color combinations for websites.
Visitors’ eyes are naturally drawn to the upper portions of the page, particularly when they’re looking for deals. But if you feel the announcement bar needs extra help drawing attention, consider including a scrolling animation on the page. If it’s in line with the client’s brand, employing humorous copy can also be an effective way to draw attention and inject personality into your announcement bar, as long as it is still clear and concise.
Craft effective pop-up messages
Compelling copy drives action. Within the limited space of a pop-up, every element needs to point visitors toward a specific call to action. As you create your promotional pop-up, use visual hierarchy—ordering and sizing elements by importance—to lead your visitor toward the goal.
Your design decisions should enhance readability and meaning. If you choose to use a background image in your pop-up, verify that it doesn't create visual confusion. Pop-ups must be ultra-efficient to be maximally effective. The default text within existing Squarespace pop-up templates offers a sense of how concise and clear the message should be. There's no room for elements that don't meaningfully contribute to the goal of getting the visitor to take action.
If you’re attempting to reward visitors for joining a mailing list, try rewarding them with an exclusive discount or deal in their welcome email or SMS message—aside from whatever background promotions the client is running. An effective call to action can be as simple as directing visitors to the client’s limited-time deals. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales don’t last forever, so create a sense of urgency and scarcity. Countdown timers can inform visitors of how many days, hours, and minutes remain for them to take advantage of the special offers. Highlighting limited quantities can also prompt action before it’s too late.
Timing and frequency
In addition to controlling copy and visual elements, you dictate when, where, and how often pop-ups display. You can opt for a pop-up to display as soon as a visitor lands on the page, or have the pop-up trigger after a fixed time delay or a particular scroll position.
To determine how and when your pop-up should trigger, consider the action or behavior that the pop-up is intended to drive. If you want to direct site viewers to your client’s Cyber Monday sale, you'll want to catch visitors relatively early in the process.
Pop-ups don't need to be limited to the initial landing page. Exit-intent pop-ups, for example, are a great way to salvage last-minute conversions. Consider what might cause a customer to leave a site after considering a purchase and try to address them directly in exit pop-ups. Some common objections include extra fees at checkout, shipping fees, or a lack of financing options like Afterpay. Every element of your pop-up design should relate back to your client’s goals, and that includes your choices on timing and frequency.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are opportunities to catch customers when their purchase intent is high. Where a conservative pop-up strategy may wait a full 30 days to resurface a pop-up, the sales will be long gone by that time. A higher-than-usual frequency is often justified when you are offering special deals.
Pro tip: Many consumers will still be in shopping mode after the sales end, and some may regret that they missed out on deals. Consider addressing these consumers after the retail holiday. Pay special attention to abandoned cart analytics, and make use of the emails your client collected. Consider ways that personalizing emails can address specific situations.
Consider the user experience
During retail holidays, shoppers not only expect sale offers, they’re often actively hunting for them. That doesn’t mean, however, that more is better. Judicious pop-up use that pays attention to page space, frequency, and timing often provides the highest ROI.
When pop-ups are too intrusive, visitors may speedily click out of them before they read a word. Worse, they may leave the site altogether. If your pop-ups have this effect, they're also likely to negatively impact the SEO performance of your site. Full-screen pop-ups that take over the entire page are aggressive, so they’re justified only by true, can’t-miss deals.
Because these limited-time pop-ups and announcement bars will be new to the client’s site, it’s vital to perform due diligence to ensure that they are mobile-friendly and render properly across different devices. As you do this testing, think about how these elements impact the shopping experience. Consider A/B testing different designs and placements for optimal results. Test them yourself, but if you have the time, visitor volume, and budget, consider trialing different options in real time before selecting the one that's performing best.
Implementing effective design elements for holiday sales
For many brands, Black Friday and Cyber Monday account for a significant percentage of their annual sales. This means the right pop-up and announcement bar strategy can be a lifesaver for these companies. As a web designer, you can help them avoid the pitfalls of bad pop-ups that disrupt sales and frustrate visitors. When you settle on the right elements to effectively convey special deals and create a sense of urgency, you can help make the difference between a bad year and a great one.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
