How to Prepare Your Shopify Store for Black Friday 2019: A Month-by-Month Guide

Black Friday is on 29 November and will be bigger than ever.

Last year, Shopify merchants collectively made over $1.5 billion in sales. Clearly, this means that Black Friday is becoming more and more unmissable for ecommerce stores worldwide.

But don’t assume that you should prepare only for Black Friday and nothing else. 

According to 2017 statistics, even though Black Friday was the most popular in-store shopping event in the U.S., Cyber Monday had 15 million more online shoppers. 

This could be a sign that Shopify merchants should stop preparing for Black Friday alone, and that they should instead distribute their efforts across Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the following holiday season. 

Naturally, this would require more meticulous planning and preparing. So this year, we want to give you a detailed, month-by-month guide on ways to take advantage of the biggest shopping season of the year. 

Here’s how to prepare your Shopify store for Black Friday 2019 (and Cyber Monday). 

September: 

September is the ideal month to review your website and plan changes, especially if you want to renovate your site in order to maximise conversions. 

• Review how well your products are selling. It’s important that you have a clear idea of what your best-selling products are, so that you can effectively calculate the stock you will need. 
• Check that your Google Analytics is working. Click here for instructions on how to do this. Once you’ve done it, review your online performance over the past 12 months. What search terms do people use the most when they are searching for you? 
• Make sure your site is mobile optimised. After all, 66% of purchases from Shopify stores during last year’s BFCM were made on mobile. 
• Plan your marketing strategy. Use a mind-map and calendar to help you decide which channels are you going to use to promote your products and when. Are you looking to launch some Facebook ads, or podcast ads? Now would be the time to allocate a budget for it. 
• Increase your e-mail subscriber base. Even though social media will play a crucial role in your success, e-mail marketing remains king. According to Shopify themselves, it was the highest converting channel in 2018. So, the larger your pool of subscribers are, the better you will be able to maximise your conversions. (If you’re looking for an alternative to Mailchimp, we've written about it here).
• Give your website a new look. At this time of year, all Shopify stores should start planning changes to their website in order to reflect the upcoming holiday season. You might want to customise your landing pages, or introduce a completely fresh bespoke theme. We are an international team of web developers, Shopify designers and marketers, so get in touch if you’d like some help.

October: 

October should be spent implementing your e-commerce strategy, but it’s also time for you to make sure that the UX of your website is smooth as possible.

• Update everything - from your ‘About Us’ page, to your testimonial page and even your social media bios. If your latest testimonial on display was from a year ago, this can be a turn-off! 
• Make your website as SEO-friendly as possible. Using the data you gathered in September, make changes that will benefit and entice your target audience. You might also check your site speed - this might make or break your customer’s decision to buy.  
• Install any additional Shopify apps required. 
• Execute your marketing plan. Prepare, design and schedule all your ad campaigns, e-mails and social media posts. 
• Consider creating ‘gift guides’ for your customer. This is especially important if you have a wide array of products that caters to more than one type of person. It would limit the amount of scrolling your customer has to do. Plus, having new dedicated pages for some of your products will make them more important and valuable to your customers. 
• Website tweaks and changes: even if you have your store mostly ready, you might feel like you want some help making your website 100% perfect for Black Friday 2019 (and the following holiday season). Contact me to optimise your store, so you can focus on other matters. 

November: 

You should spend this month checking everything for one last time, before you launch your marketing campaigns. Even though it may seem like there isn’t much to do in November, you need to be monitoring how people are responding to your efforts at promoting your products at all times. Be flexible and be prepared to change things as you go along. 

• Test everything - apps, pages and payment systems. 
• Give your scheduled social media posts a final look. While it’s important that you have your posts ready beforehand, at the end of the day, social media can be extremely time-sensitive. You might change your mind on the way you want to deliver your message. 
• Launch your e-mail campaign. Starting from the beginning of the month, start building some hype for your sale with some e-mails. 
• Launch your paid marketing campaigns.

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