Essential Ecommerce Features Every Site Should Have for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
For ecommerce websites, the days before and during Black Friday and Cyber Monday are when all the hard work pays off. With the right preparation, Cyber Week can drive sales numbers at multiples of other times of the year. To get it right, all elements of the website have to work together, from the basic foundations, layout, and copy to the season-specific promotions and marketing efforts.
Cyber Week is high-traffic, meaning sites need to be robust to meet customer expectations for seamless, fast, and secure shopping experiences. Squarespace customers are especially well-positioned to leverage particular tools for high-traffic events. A site that lacks essential features could miss out on sales during this critical period.
These key sales events are moments when professional web designers deliver a lot of value to clients by ensuring that clients’ sites are equipped with must-have ecommerce features to optimize conversions, such as sale-related pop-ups and announcement bars.
That means it’s the perfect time to contact existing clients, or even prospective ones, to offer your services. Cyber Week is an opportunity that most ecommerce brands can’t afford to miss, and you can ensure it’s profitable for both you and your clients.
Optimize the mobile experience
Because most ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, prioritizing mobile-friendliness from the homepage to the checkout page is essential for converting traffic into sales. Squarespace sites have built-in responsive design, meaning sites automatically rescale to different devices. As you design, verify that everything looks as it should on desktop, mobile, and tablet screens. This is especially important if you’re more likely to change defaults, input custom code, and make other advanced changes. Follow best practices so pages load quickly and render properly across all devices. Avoid common issues like overly large media files, excessive content on a single page, and narrow letter spacing. If you find that the site isn’t loading as quickly as you would like, follow these steps to reduce page size for faster loading.
Streamline the checkout process
The worst time to lose a potential customer is right at the moment they’re ready to buy. Your client has spent a lot of effort cultivating enough interest in their product to get visitors all the way to the checkout. Any kind of friction at this stage can lead to the much-dreaded abandoned cart. Perfecting everything from load times to the checkout process itself pays off.
If a visitor has made it all the way to the checkout page, they’re probably ready to buy. Avoid overloading the checkout page with content that can confuse visitors and potentially slow load times during high traffic.
Streamlining is more than creating a fast and uncluttered checkout experience. It’s about eliminating pain points. A couple of things that frequently turn off would-be buyers are surprise extra fees at checkout and excessive shipping fees. Lack of trust is another element that can put off potential customers. Think about ways to eliminate any of the particular pain points that the checkout process might create. Reviews can go a long way to generate social proof. So can offering the site visitor’s choice of secure payment method, for example.
Customize the checkout experience
The best way to streamline a checkout experience is to build a custom checkout form that only requests the information your client needs. If your client sells a single item at a time, consider adding an express checkout feature to expedite the process. Give options like guest checkouts so that visitors can buy what they want without setting up an account.
While some checkout processes can be simple, others benefit from more extensive options like the ability to leave gift messages or give instructions for custom orders. You can also customize the checkout experience to encourage desirable behaviors like reorders (by offering limited-time coupons on subsequent orders) or learn more about which of your marketing efforts are actually driving results with referral surveys. When you’ve finished, run a test order to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, look for potential issues, and verify everything works as it should.
Making navigation seamless
In-person shoppers are accustomed to passing aisle after aisle of potential impulse buys before locating what they came for. Online shoppers, on the other hand, expect better treatment. Make your navigation easy to read by following accessibility guidelines and style it to look great with the rest of your site. A navigation bar as a site header is the most common solution, but other approaches can also be effective, as long as they’re intuitive and clear to visitors.
Use Squarespace’s category and tag features to organize products logically. Look at how other retailers organize common product categories, but consider both your client and their customers in your approach. If your client frequently sells a particular product, or if a certain category makes up a bulk of their revenue, it should be especially easy to find. Use drop-down menus to subdivide categories. Navigation bars are also great places to highlight your client’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale.
Create urgency and scarcity
If a site visitor can consider a purchase forever, sometimes they will. If they know they only have a few days to take advantage of a limited-time deal, they become much more decisive. You can communicate the urgent nature of the site’s deals on the homepage, but you can also build a pop-up or design an announcement bar to do the same. To really create a sense of urgency and scarcity, consider including a countdown timer for the sale, or use limited stock notices. You can learn more about how to make great sale-related pop-ups and announcement bars here.
Brand the sale
One way to make Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales feel special is to brand them. A simple color theme that compliments but contrasts the larger site can draw attention to these special sale elements, while also creating a sense of cohesion and personality.
Build an SEO strategy ahead of time
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will come and go quickly, but you should start laying the groundwork months before. Reach out to clients in advance of the sale season, and give yourself plenty of time to build new site elements. Also consider how long it takes to index new site pages.
In general, it’s best to publish any new holiday URLs at least a month in advance, even if you need to tweak content. Re-use the same URLs next year and follow other best practices for sale-specific SEO.
Personalization with Squarespace marketing tools
Marketing is largely about understanding your client’s target audience. The problem is, sometimes that’s not just one audience. While their customers are composed of different subgroups, each of those subgroups is subdivided into micro-populations at different levels of their marketing funnel. Some have just discovered the brand; some are ready to buy and some purchased months ago. Squarespace analytics can help you understand who these groups really are.
Squarespace’s built-in marketing integrations can help your client deliver personalized content to each subgroup. You can also use the Contacts panel to formalize these audiences into categories. Once you have finished categorizing, you can use Squarespace’s AI to help you with niche-specific copy in your client’s email marketing and related marketing. For Cyber Monday and Black Friday, you can alert mailing list subscribers about the sale with personalized messages, notify them when the sale will soon end, and follow up on abandoned carts for those who may have missed out on the deals.
Marketing efforts won't stop with emails. Make use of all the marketing channels at your client’s disposal to announce their Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales. You can use tools like the Unfold app or Bio Sites to bring the sales to social media.
Get clients ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
A successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale is one where you’ve maximized both traffic and conversions. That means that every part of the campaign should work together, from the foundations of your web design, to the site’s navigation, structure, and marketing efforts. You can help your client stand out by branding sale-related elements with a particular color or palette. Think big with a multi-faceted marketing approach that includes social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and SEO-optimized sale pages.
Finally, don’t be afraid to contact prior, existing, and prospective clients well in advance to help them with their seasonal sales. After a successful sales period, they will be glad you did. Read our guide for a refresher on re-engaging past clients.
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.
