There are so many moving parts during any promotional period, but few bring the stress that Black Friday and Cyber Monday do for our industry.
Here are 5 things to double check going into Shopify Super Bowl:
- Links: Whether it's links in your email campaigns and flows, links for your landing pages for your ads, or even your holiday-specific site navigation, copy, paste, and open every link you can.
It will take 30 minutes, record a Loom while you do it so you can revisit anything that's broken without forgetting anything, and get it fixed ASAP.
It's best you have more than one person on your team do this. Small team/solo operator?
Send your site and content to your friends and family - their input may be more valuable than folks who see the content every day. - Ads In Review: If you haven't gotten your sales-specific ads through review yet, we highly recommend doing so now. Platforms like Meta are notorious for having longer than average review periods during the holidays and the last thing you want is missing a forecast because you couldn't get the right ads to your audience in time.
Get your ads through review, turn off the campaigns/ad sets, make sure they're ready to rock on game day. - Discounts: Whether you're powering your promotions through discount codes or automatic discounts, make sure they work like you're communicating to your customers.
Whenever possible, make it as easy as possible to get whatever promotion you're offering.
The reduction in Customer Service requests will be a meaningful stress reduction during the sales period.
If you're selling pre-bundled SKUs (ex. shampoo, conditioner, lotion in at discounted price), consider using Replo's handy "add multiple items to cart in a single click" feature to reduce complexity for the customer and your inventory management. - Sales-Specific Themes/Pages: Make sure your sales-specific themes and pages are fully functioning and configured to your needs.
The last thing you want is to launch a theme or page and realize that you didn't update placeholder content or link a button.
If you have periods of little-to-no traffic on your site (ex. middle of the night), it's worth trying to launch the theme live to makes sure everything is working well (doesn't work the same for larger brands, which have different testing protocols to begin with). - Team Readiness: The wildest part of BFCM is the unknown. Shopify might go down unexpectedly (like it did on Monday).
An email might not get scheduled.
Inventory might get depleted sooner than forecasted because something goes viral.
Anything can happen.
The only way through it is to expect the unexpected, and make sure everyone on your team is ready to handle what they are in place to handle.
Your agency is watching the ads. Your CX team is ready to handle inquiries that could result in more sales or fewer returns/chargebacks.
Your fulfillment team is ready to get orders out in a timely manner.
Check in with your people, remove any blockers they may have that would prevent them from doing their job well, and ensure everyone is ready for the ride.
That's a lot of stuff to check, but having gone through this ourselves over the last decade, we know that it's always good to take another look.
You're going to crush it!
If you need any help, feel free to reach out to Replo Support with anything you may need.
Even if it isn't related to landing pages, if it's related to ecommerce, we can help you with our network of operators!