The Ultimate Black Friday Checklist for Small Businesses

Black Friday is the most profitable time of the year for businesses and nonprofits in many parts of the world.

Naturally, preparing for an event as big as this requires careful planning. I’ve been involved in BFCM preparations for small businesses from various industries, so I know how chaotic this period can be.

But I’ve also picked up some lessons about what typically works during Black Friday and what doesn’t in terms of the one thing that matters most: sales.

In this post, I’ll share a Black Friday checklist consisting of the best strategies and tips that have helped me achieve holiday sales goals for different small businesses.

Black Friday Checklist: Tips for BFCM Success

1. Start Preparations Early

Black Friday has a tendency to sneak up on you quietly. It usually plays out like this: you’re busy with your day-to-day business tasks until one day, you look at your calendar and the startling realization dawns on you – it’s just 1 month until Black Friday!

What ensues is a lot of chaos that could’ve been avoided if you’d started your preparations early.

So how early are we talking?

That depends on the complexity of your business and the target you’ve set for yourself. But there’s no harm in starting 3-4 months early (if that sounds excessive, I’ve seen teams that start thinking about the next BFCM as soon as the last one ends).

2. Analyze Data From the Previous Year

If this isn’t your first time running Black Friday, then you can learn a lot by retrospecting on your previous BFCM campaigns.

This doesn’t have to be very deep or complex. Even if you just pay attention to the broad overview, you can make some very good decisions based on a simple analysis. Some of the specific data that you can look at include:

• Marketing Channel Performance: Tools like GA4 can help you identify which channel (organic search, organic social, paid search, email, etc.) produced the highest conversions for your business.
• Best Selling Products: For eCommerce stores, looking at your best-selling products and product categories from the previous year is a great way to predict which products you can expect to contribute to your overall sales for the upcoming sale period.
• Email Performance: Any promotional emails you sent last year should offer insights into the kind of subject lines and content that resonated with your audience.

These are just some of the easy ways you can use your past year’s campaign performance to inform your decisions for BFCM. Do more of what worked last year and try to change up your strategy for areas that have potential but where you didn’t see the results you would’ve liked.

3. Set a Sales/Revenue Target

There’s an endless amount of complex ways to forecast your Black Friday sales target.

But the strategy I recommend for small businesses is a simple one – try to do better than the total sales and revenue you made last year.

The question is, how big of a revenue jump should you be setting your eyes on? The answer to that becomes apparent by comparing important metrics connected with your business growth this year versus the previous year.

For example, you can look at the percentage increase in your website traffic, the growth in email subscribers, changes in your ad spend, and so on.

Combine that by estimating the growth in traffic and other statistics during Black Friday period (you can look at your industry averages or compare the boost in BFCM versus non-BFCM traffic on your site from the previous year), and you’ll have a definite number you can set as your target for this year.

4. Extend the Sale Over a Longer Period

Black Friday isn’t just about Black Friday. People start shopping — both online and in-store — well before Thanksgiving and well after it, too.

Extending the sale over a longer period gives you a much bigger window to attract more customers and make significantly more sales than what you can expect from a sale concentrated on a single or just a few days.

Consider running a sale through the whole Black Friday week. In fact, in some industries, you can make a bigger impact with 10-day long sale or even when it’s extended through 2 full weeks.

The exact sale period depends on the nature of your business and how ambitious you are. If you’re inexperienced with managing longer sales, you can start small and gradually scale it up as you get more confident next year!

While planning and executing a long sales campaign can be slightly more challenging, the extra effort will be well worth it.

5. Create a Compelling Offer

This one is a no-brainer for a Black Friday checklist. Every Black Friday campaign needs a powerful offer to attract customers to your business or store in high volumes.

Customers expect better deals than usual during this period. That means if you’ve previously offered your product(s) for 30% off, you may want to bump that up to 40%. While this exact percentage bump isn’t a rule by any means, it pays to be a bit more generous (within reason) with your discounts during BFCM.

Besides, don’t just limit yourself to discounting the prices of your products. You can craft interesting offers in a lot of ways, such as:

• Free shipping: This is an effective way to boost average order value by encouraging customers to order more products with the money they can save on shipping. You can use the WPForms Coupons and Calculation fields to easily build forms that automatically remove the shipping cost with a coupon.
• Product bundles: Price your product bundles at a slight discount compared to the individual prices of the item to boost sales for a bigger overall profit margin.
• Buy some, get 1 free: Offering something for free is always a strong motivator capable of boosting traffic and sales, so you earn a higher profit by increasing the volume of sales.
• Loss leader: Offer a popular product at a price that’s not profitable in order to attract more customers who buy multiple additional products for higher overall profits.

These are just some of the proven ways that I’ve seen being used with great results by small businesses.

6. Create a Detailed BFCM Campaign Plan

Starting preparations early is only one aspect of ensuring your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns go smoothly. It’s equally vital to create an organized plan for your sale period.

Some of the important details you can include in your plan are:

• The start and end dates of your sale
• The specific details of the discounts and pricing strategies
• Schedules for running your promotional designs and messaging

These are just the basics, but you can develop your plan with as many details as you need to be comfortable and on top of your tasks ahead of the campaign launch.

7. Start Collecting Emails Early

Email consistently outperforms all other marketing channels in terms of ROI. For me, this is more than just a statistic. Email drove a huge chunk of the conversions for us at WPForms during last year’s BFCM campaigns.

The first condition for making your email promotions successful is having a healthy list of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the wider your reach for BFCM promotions will be.

Email signup forms are a great tool for this purpose. You can use these ahead of BFCM to gradually build interest and even provide an early access offer to get more people to sign up.

The best part is that signup forms are very easy to build and design with WPForms Pro.

The native email marketing integrations in WPForms also make it easy to sync your form with any tool, so your subscribers are automatically added to your list and existing automation.

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8. Build Powerful Marketing Emails

A good email signup flow needs to be coupled with a strong email marketing strategy for maximum impact.

Here are a few practices I follow to make emails more impactful:

• Create a full email sequence: If you’re running an extended sale over a longer time period, you need a longer email sequence to match with sale launch emails, reminders, and last-chance emails for maximum reach.
• Segmentation: Create unique emails focusing on different products from your store or different features of a single product based on the past purchasing history of your existing customers.
• Email teasers and sneak peeks: Build interest and excitement in the weeks leading up to BFCM with teasers about your deal, giveaways, donations, and a timer counting down to the sale launch to warm up your subscribers.
• Leverage email automation: Make sure to have automated emails set up for specific behaviors like cart abandonment or viewing specific products without making a purchase. These emails are very effective at boosting sales and reducing losses from abandonment.

9. Use Promotional Website Banners

The Black Friday season produces a natural surge in website traffic. But you only have just a few seconds to promote your best offers and grab their attention by making the visitor aware of your sale.

A website banner takes up a small amount of space on your pages, but it’s impossible to miss. Make sure to prominently highlight your discounts or any other offer in the banner, with a clear CTA that directly points to your product or pricing pages.

You can also combine your banners with Exit Intent popups to reduce abandonment and promote your offer one last time with greater urgency (such as by adding an expiry timer to trigger FOMO in the visitor).

These strategies have always made a noticeable impact for me across various websites by contributing to sales during past Black Friday campaigns–I’m not planning on abandoning them any time soon!

10. Review Your Checkout Process

Checkout experience is always critical, whether you’re in the holiday season or not. But during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s even more important because online shoppers are spoiled for choices and won’t stick around if your checkout is slow, inconvenient, or buggy.

It always helps to think about your checkout from a customer’s perspective. Is it simple enough? Can it be made even simpler?

For example, one powerful way to improve checkout is by offering user-friendly payment methods, such as Stripe. If you have Link enabled in Stripe, customers can fill out their payment details in just a single click for faster checkout.

Options like Google Pay and Apple Pay also add incredible convenience by allowing customers to complete checkout with fewer clicks.

The WPForms Stripe integration supports Link for auto-filling payment details. Plus, users who have Google Pay or Apple Pay enabled can simply use these payment options to go through the checkout much faster.

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11. Prepare Your Site for High Traffic

Website traffic often peaks during the holiday season for most businesses. It can be an absolute disaster for your sales if you encounter website slowdowns – or worse – right in the middle of the sale period.

It’s imperative to think ahead and make sure you’re equipped to handle the high Black Friday traffic. There’s no substitute for testing here. There are various load testing tools that can simulate high-traffic conditions on your website and measure the impact.

You can see this WPBeginner tutorial on stress testing for WordPress to learn more about how you can ensure your website is ready to handle Black Friday traffic peaks.

At the same time, you should also use tools like PageSpeed Insights to check the responsiveness and speed of your website. This is extremely important for identifying areas of improvement ahead of time.

There’s a lot more that goes into speeding up your website, but you’ll need to start preparing well in advance to get ready to provide the best possible experience to customers during the Black Friday period.

12. Optimize Your Site and Campaigns for Mobile

Mobile website themes are mobile-friendly by design these days. But that’s only one small aspect of being mobile-friendly. You also need to ensure that your website is easy to interact with from mobile devices.

This can mean checking that all buttons and clickable parts of your website are touch-friendly. I still frequently come across websites with buttons and links that are too small or cramped together for my fingers on a mobile screen.

It’s a common problem with online forms as well. But WPForm’s mobile-friendliness focuses on the end user, making sure they’re perfectly responsive on smaller screens as well.

But while you’re optimizing your website for mobile, don’t forget your other marketing assets.

If you’ll be sending emails, test them on both mobile and desktop devices. The same applies to any website banners and popups you’ll be using.

13. Ensure Customer Support Accessibility

Maintaining the quality of your customers while providing fast response times is one of the most challenging parts of the holiday season. But you can take some measures to prepare your support team for navigating through Black Friday.

First, it’s imperative to have 100% alignment between your customer support team and all other departments. Strong internal communication can go a long way in ensuring your support team has accurate information about the different aspects of your sale, products, pricing, and policies to assist customers.

It can be helpful to maintain a document consisting of replies you can copy in response to common questions, problems, and complaints to speed up your response time. You can also have other notes for your team’s reference, such as your refund or exchange policy, shipping, and so on.

14. Measure Performance for All Marketing Channels

No serious Black Friday checklist can be complete without performance measurement as one of its key items. The only way to learn from your Black Friday sales and improve them for next year is to measure what worked this year and what didn’t.

There are a lot of different metrics you can use to track your sales and conversions. Here are the essential ones I recommend:

• GA4: Google Analytics should be your source of truth for all key metrics like revenue, total purchases, conversion rate, and traffic statistics.
• WPForms Payments Summary: WPForms Payment tracking provides an easy way to view your total sales, refunds, and coupon usage for all transactions performed via forms built with WPForms.
• Email Marketing Statistics: For email campaigns, your marketing tool should provide metrics like open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rate, and even revenue stats (though these aren’t usually super accurate).
• Looker Studio: With Looker Studio, you can combine the data from all your different sources into a single comprehensive report for easy analysis.
• Heatmaps: Depending on how deep you want to dig, you can gather behavioral data with heatmap analytics to see how your visitors interact with your website.

15. Retrospect for Future Improvements

Black Friday is a fairly laborious undertaking, and there’s a lot that goes into planning a successful sale. It’s tempting to simply close the chapter once the sale is over and move on to the next important task for your business.

But you can lose important insights and lessons from the Black Friday period if you wait too long to reflect on it. Instead, try to bring your team together soon after the sale has closed and collectively retrospect on what worked and what didn’t.

This doesn’t mean you should solely focus on the tangible results of the sale in terms of revenue; it’s also a good time to think critically about your workflows and processes to identify opportunities for improving efficiency in your sales planning.

That’s pretty much the “secret” to running successful Black Friday sales, year after year.

Next, Test Your Online Forms

Online forms keep your business growing with lead generation and provide an easy way for your customers to contact you. You can’t afford to have forms that are broken in any way, especially during the Black Friday season.

Just like other parts of your website, it’s vital to test your online forms. This form-testing checklist serves as a quick guide for reviewing the functionality and user experience of your forms.

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