15 Powerful BFCM Strategies to Boost Sales in 2024

“Strategizing your way to anything can increase the possibility of higher positive results, that is why BFCM Strategies are important.”

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM Sales)— are undoubtedly the biggest sales week of the holiday season. That is to say; your store should stand out from other eCommerce businesses for a seamless BFCM buying experience.

The 5-day period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday is the biggest holiday sale season in the United States, with over 200 billion USD up for grabs. Black Friday and Cyber Monday (in short, BFCM or Cyber Week) can become a weekend bonanza for online retailers all over the world if they plan it correctly.

Which Is A Big Deal For Your eCommerce Store? Black Friday Or Cyber Monday?
There are a lot of considerations if this question pops in. For instance, last year’s consumer product demand, revenue generated online, and customer spending Index. While Cyber Monday is more tech-focused, Black Friday remains more about ‘general’ shopping. However, as a store owner, consider both a win-win day.

So, your eCommerce store should be ready to welcome all those customers coming to you. And if you are reading this blog, you are bound to apply some great BFCM strategies for better sales in 2024

15 BFCM Strategies To Prepare Your Store For Cyber Week 2024

How can online retailers make the most of this? What should their BFCM strategies should be to achieve unexpected big sales?

First and foremost, do not make BFCM 2024 marketing a hit-and-trial campaign; this will generate little money. The easiest way to maximize your benefit is to enhance your online store with multiple carefully planned BFCM Strategies.

Handling Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year may be incredibly challenging with an uncertain economic situation, supply chain issues, and changed consumer behavior. But, ‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.’ So, start planning ahead of time and keep the sales running long.

To get off to a good start and avoid last-minute scrambles here is what you can do:

1. Keep Track Of Your Stock

Festive shopping will dominate eCommerce stores over the upcoming holiday weekend, making it crucial to implement effective BFCM strategies to ensure smooth operations. Moreover, a few hurdles like keeping backup stock and tracking out-of-stock items are necessary to avoid things getting out of hand. It becomes annoying when customers who are looking for products don’t find their choices.

Hence, in the first place, don’t let the stocks run out. Keep a backup of everything. But, if you do, here is what can help:

• Make sure to redirect shoppers to other related or similar product pages of your store.
• Mark the item as ‘temporarily unavailable’ and add product suggestions.
• You could also collect the user’s email addresses and notify them of the product being restocked.
• In the case of WooCommerce plugins and extensions, plan all major updates before the holiday season begins, preferably start scheduling the updates by the third quarter.

You don’t want people purchasing out-of-stock products that will eventually redirect the homepage after checkout, or late delivery, terrible experience, and customer feedback. Create contingency plans for any mishap. There could be some issues with your inventory arrival, website, or shipping agency. Just be ready for the worst and hope for the best.

2. Optimize Store For BFCM Sales

Store optimization isn’t a one-day process but requires several preparations beforehand. The eCommerce holiday sales calendar for 2024 might not be coming close to Black Friday, but it is always advised to plan ahead and implement effective BFCM strategies to be on top of your game.

Product categories in eCommerce stores play a crucial role. Make sure you have categories for everyone like a parent, family member, friend, or college. Also, introduce categories for pets, sports lovers, make-up mistresses, work-from-home, medicals, gym freaks, featured products, foodies, etc., on your eCommerce store.

When you deliver your products with customer satisfaction, there is no harm in showing off. Pull the attention towards your product reviews. Encourage users to share more reviews along with images.

Check out the reviews for the plugins developed by the WP Swings team:

3. Shipping, Refunds, And Locations For BFCM Sales

Mentioning the incorrect or continuously changing shipping dates due to various reasons is also a deal-breaker during the holiday season. Many users are time-sensitive, especially when it comes to shipping goods to their loved ones.

Avoid losing sales over something as minor as unclear or missed shipping dates—effective BFCM strategies include clearly communicating delivery timelines to ensure a smooth customer experience.

It is crucial to have a dedicated refund and exchange policy in place before the peak festivities start. This is among the first steps to win your customer’s trust. How will you do this?

Do you ship to countries other than yours? If yes, then outline the various delivery date cutoffs based on the country in which your customers reside.

4. Navigation, FAQs, Live Chats, Images & GIFs

Holiday graphics add a festive spirit to your eCommerce store. Adding some visually appealing elements to your BFCM strategies is key to attracting attention and enhancing the shopping experience during the busy holiday season.

Use holiday-themed banners to draw attention to your promotions, holiday landing page, shipping dates, etc. Images, videos, and GIFs are the most engaging media. Use good-quality compressed images to reduce load time.

Your navigation should work seamlessly for everything. Use a Product Filter for WooCommerce to facilitate easy product sorting for your customer.

However, you cannot possibly include all questions. What you can do is add a live chat option on your eCommerce store to interact with your customers instantly. Solve your customers’ queries and generate leads. Here is an example of how a live chat should look,

5. BFCM Sales Landing Page

A page for Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales serves as a central hub with one mission: to highlight your best offers and promotions.

Creating a dedicated offer page that consolidates all the current deals on your platform is an essential part of your BFCM strategies. You can redirect visitors from various sources, such as social media, email, Google ads, and search engine results pages (SERPs), directly to your BFCM landing page.

This way, everything related to the event is in one place, making it easy for customers to see and act on your offers.

Now, you have two ways to set up your landing page. Either code/design your web page manually or get a Black Friday template and quickly optimize your store for the BFCM marketing campaign.

Depending on how early you start optimizing your eCommerce store for BFCM sales, you can also create a pre-launch page. Creating a coming soon page:

• It gives you a headstart in BFCM marketing.
• Helps you build your BFCM sales-ready audience and grab their attention.
• Gives an idea of what your BFCM offers will be all about.

Now, It is very easy to get overwhelmed during the festive season. There is so much to do with so little time. Having an eCommerce Holiday Checklist comes in handy in such situations.

6. Leverage Video Marketing

Videos on the landing page to increase the conversion rate by 80%. They are more engaging, memorable, and less time-consuming. There are three types of videos that you can include on your landing page to make it appealing and engaging for BFCM sale.

Leveraging videos for your BFCM marketing campaign will make you stand out from those sellers who don’t realize the importance of video marketing for their online store. You can use various video creation tools for hosting, creating, editing, and managing videos.

7. Countdown Timer For BFCM

A countdown timer for BFCM deals or product launches induces excitement. Include the time that remains to make the sale live or for the product to sell out. Instill urgency in your customer’s mind with a countdown timer. This is a powerful element of your BFCM strategies, especially when you’re aiming to create a buzz around limited-time offers.

The countdown time can be set based on hours, days, or weeks, based on the inventory you have in your stock and the approaching event. So, boost your online sales during the holidays with an urge for profitable purchases. Now, how will you incorporate this countdown timer into your website?

We have a solution for this as well the — WooCommerce Order Bump Plugin

The Countdown Timer Feature will let customers act fast and make a purchase—as they are concerned that your WooCommerce upsell products might not be offered in the future.

8. Offer Early Bud discounts (Hosting Pre-BFCM Sales)

Like last year’s BFCM sale is all set to start early and last longer than the previous year. To make the BFCM Sales a great success for your store, it is crucial to create awareness and hype about this sale. There are different ways of doing this, but the most interesting and effective way is to host a pre-festive or an early bud discount.

It is also important to note that the majority of the customers start their holiday shopping before the actual festivities start. With large percentages of shoppers planning to start making purchases before November even begins!

To capitalize on this market store owners should consider the early bud discount marketing strategy.

9. Stress Test Your Website

Holiday sales tend to increase traffic to eCommerce stores. That is to say, test whether your eCommerce store can handle a surge in traffic to avoid breaking down your site. Downtime on a website is equivalent to posting a sign on your front door urging customers to visit the competition.

Therefore, stress tests your website before the big weekend as an important part of your BFCM strategies.

• Test your store’s load capacity.
• Check your eCommerce store on different browsers.

10. Mobile Optimize Your eCommerce Store

The mobile responsive store is ‘on-the-go.’ Mobile accounted for 52% of paid search click share in 2024. Hence you can lose a considerable chunk of eCommerce revenue due to non-mobile responsiveness.

Users prefer the comfort of shopping via their mobile phones and some of them come to your store via social media. If you fail in this, you might as well not use social media marketing too.

• Make sure your images and videos are also mobile-friendly.
• Carry out a mobile-friendly test.

11. Create A Sense Of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

Simply providing offers will not work anymore. It has recently become a forcing medium to convert more shoppers quickly. Work with FOMO bfcm marketing. Show how fast your stocks are running out and users need to hurry to grab the best deals.

• Use urgency phrases in your headlines, phrases, titles, and text.
• Use the loss aversion strategy to induce pain.
• Place and display limitations.
• Use deadlines.
• Create flash sales.

12. Focus On Lead Generation

Make the most out of your BCFM sales by capturing as many emails as possible during this festive period. The email IDs that you collect during the peak festive season can be utilized during the times when your business is running low on customers and sales.

There are many ways to do this, some of the popular ways are,

• Hosting giveaways.
• Implementing loyalty programs.
• Hosting competitions on social media platforms, and many more.

13. Retargeting Past Customers

Retargetting customers is a concept that almost all marketers know, as it is such a crucial marketing technique. But if you’re new, we got you!

It is equally important as it is to create new ones. If you’ve already installed a Facebook Pixel on your website, now is the time to put it to use. It helps in

• Evaluating cross-device conversions.
• Optimize delivery for people most likely to take action.
• Create a Custom Audience for website visitors.
• Know about your website traffic.

Customers who have previously purchased from your store can also be retargeted. Because existing customers are often easier to reach and market to than new customers.

Do you know what else helps in retargeting users? Email Marketing Campaigns.

14. BFCM Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing, although one of the oldest but most efficient ways at every occasion and event. You can run your BFCM email campaigns and harness its benefits. It cuts through all the other holiday buzz and provides a personal touch for the user.

• When you have any announcements to make or promotional emails, you can’t just send text and expect conversion.
• Plan and start your BFCM email campaigns early.
• Send VIP emails to your best customers.
• Re-capture the user’s attention by sending follow-up emails.
• After your BFCM sale is over, send another email inviting users to revisit your store off-season too. You can also include surveys.

You can adjust ad spending based on your budget. Just remember, spending on social media targeting has more chances of amplifying reach. However, investing in search engine ads will target users who are already hunting for products. Therefore, these are closer to conversion.

15. Track Competitors

Keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing efforts to get new ideas for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales. Additionally, keep checking their social media handles. But, don’t get too inspired. Always keep room for your creative ideas. Set up Google Alerts to find out which websites are discussing them.

Subscribing to your competitors’ email lists is an easy method to stay on top of what they’re doing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can gain a good understanding of their bfcm marketing strategy and adopt any suggestions on your own.

Final Check – Are You Ready For BFCM 2024?

This article presented with simple BFCM strategies to boost your online store sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Please do let us know in the comments if you find this article helpful in making your eCommerce store BFCM marketing and sales-ready. I hope all your doubts are clear regarding Black Friday eCommerce strategy or Cyber Monday marketing campaigns.

Here is the crux of this article in the form of an infographic.