Black Friday: less than 24 hours to go!

If you run an ecommerce site as part of your business, and are participating in this year’s Black Friday event, we hope that you have now completed your planning and preparations both in house and with your site hosting and server, as Black Friday is tomorrow!

That being said, there are still a few preparations you can make in the last 24 hours before your promotions start that will help you, your business and your customers make the most of this day for your website. Let’s take a look at a few different ways you can help your Black Friday sales reach their maximum potential tomorrow.

Social Media Posts

Firstly, you want to be reminding all of your customers that Black Friday is tomorrow and that your business’ ecommerce website is taking part. The best way to do this with just hours to go is to utilise the power of social media. It’s fast, cheap, and will reach the largest audience possible in such a short space of time. Keep ads short and to the point, highlighting your most attractive offers and sought after products. Your ad needs to be enticing enough to convince customers to make a mental note of returning tomorrow. You may wish to run a paid ad for the day to reach maximum coverage, and perhaps extend this ad throughout Black Friday, or however long you are running your promotion for.

Your website hosting provider

If you are running one or more Black Friday promotions on your ecommerce website, we recommended a few blogs back that you let your hosting provider know well in advance so hopefully you’ve already done that! However it still would be a good idea to get in touch with them today to remind them of your plans and to ensure that any preparations that have been pre agreed are being implemented and maintained on their side.

Your disaster recovery plan

Today is also a good time to run through the plan that you have put together in case of an emergency resulting from increased product demand and traffic. Make sure all the relevant people in your organisation know what to do in the event of something going wrong. Make sure everyone has the documentation and contact details that they need, and make sure everyone is clear on what their own role is in an emergency, whether this is the site slowing, the site going down altogether, or a struggle to cope with demand for a certain product, or indeed several products. Anything you can do today that is going to minimise any sort of panic from happening tomorrow will be helpful. Not only does this include making sure your staff are well informed on the procedure if something goes wrong, it also means making sure your business is staffed adequately to cope with the expected extra demand too.

If you would like to take some time today to read back through our previous blogs relating to black Friday and suggested preparations and courses of action, you can find them all here:

Black Friday: Your last minute preparations checklist

If you wish to give any feedback about this blog, or you want to discuss your future requirements, and how CWCS can help you in times of increased traffic get in touch with us here.

If your site is already hosted with CWCS and you wish to run through your Black Friday preparations or ask any questions about these, simply log in to your online customer portal and raise a ticket with our support team.

We hope that whatever your organisation is planning for Black Friday, that it is a great success. Hopefully the blog series we have run on Black Friday preparations has been of some use to you, and we would welcome any feedback, positive or negative, which you can leave here.