Top Ten Tools to Help You Make the Most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the most important holidays for ecommerce shop owners. These two days are crucial to increasing sales and often result in returning customers long after the deals are over. 

To help you make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), we’ve compiled ten tools that will make this your most successful season yet. 

1. MailPoet

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. With an effective strategy, you can get customers excited about your sales, follow up with them after purchase, and connect with people who didn’t quite finish the checkout process.

You can get ahead of the game by reaching out to potential and returning customers with relevant information about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Are you planning to offer free shipping over $50? How about 40% off all clearance items? Whatever your deals are, letting your customers know early will drum up excitement and have them ready to go once the clock strikes 12:00. 

But sales opportunities don’t stop once the holidays are over. Create follow-up emails with suggestions for additional products, requests for product reviews, and questions about the customer experience. And go ahead and set up abandoned cart emails with free shipping or discounts to encourage interested shoppers to complete their purchase.

MailPoet is a great, easy way to implement all of these strategies. It syncs seamlessly with your WooCommerce store so you can send emails based on purchase history and customer activity. Plus, you can take advantage of powerful, pre-built email templates and drag and drop customization — all available for free up to 1000 subscribers!

2. Google for WooCommerce 

BFCM is the perfect time to reach new customers with discounts and deals that will encourage them to try your products. But how do you connect with the right people and get on their radar?

With the Google for WooCommerce extension, you can easily connect your store to Google Merchant Center and launch smart shopping campaigns. This puts your products in front of potential customers on Google Search, Google Images, Gmail, YouTube, Google Shopping, and the Display Network (a database of more than two million websites and apps). This is a great way to reach both new and returning customers, especially for the holidays.

3. WooCommerce Pre-Orders 

Selling out is excellent for you, but it’s not so great for customers who came late to the party. But with WooCommerce Pre-Orders, shoppers can order items before they’re available. They’ll still be motivated to purchase thanks to BFCM discounts and you can continue to make sales, even while waiting for more inventory to come in. It’s a win-win! 

The extension enables you to:

• Set dates and times for when your products are back in stock 
• Automatically charge for orders on a future date (such as when an item is available again)
• Email customers who pre-ordered products
• Cancel pre-orders if necessary 

4. LiveChat for WooCommerce 

With all the chaos during Black Friday, an unanswered question about a product could result in lost sales and unhappy customers. But integrating LiveChat for WooCommerce is an easy way to stay in touch with shoppers for the duration of their time on your site. 

The extension provides absolutely everything you need to best serve customers during the holidays. You can quickly see the products they have in their cart and information about their previous orders. Notice that you have a lot of shoppers who don’t quite make it through the checkout process? Automatically start chats after a preset amount of time that nudge them to purchase. 

5. PayPal

It’s no secret that customers love having the option to pay in interest-free installments. And offering the ability for them to do so is even more important during the holiday season, when they’re making bigger purchases.  

The PayPal extension allows your customers to pay in either three or four installments, while you’re still paid upfront. This provides shoppers with the options they need, without putting you or your business at risk. 

To encourage customers while shopping, you can add Pay Later messaging, letting them know that they can pay in installments and making them more comfortable with larger purchases. In fact, businesses that add this type of messaging have seen their average order value increase by as much as 56% — imagine how much that could mean for your business during the holiday rush! 

6. Product Recommendations 

During your own shopping experiences, you’ve most likely had items recommended to you based on what you’re looking at or have in your cart. You’ve probably also purchased one of these items before — batteries for a toy, a larger size candle, or matching socks. That’s the power of product recommendations! And that’s also a power that you should harness for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

One easy way to do this is with the Product Recommendations extension, which allows you to:

• Create upsells and cross-sells in bulk instead of entering products one by one across your entire store.
• Promote specific products based on popularity, ratings, and more.
• Recommend products based on context like the current category a customer is viewing, their cart contents, or their location.
• Add product recommendations to your shop page, category pages, cart and checkout pages, product pages, and more.

You can also create powerful rules that let you customize recommendations to your exact specifications. Do you have a clothing boutique? Promote items that complete an outfit. Do you offer free shipping over a certain dollar amount? Recommend products that will push a customer’s cart above that number.

Or, if you’re not sure what to recommend, let the extension do the heavy lifting for you. Its algorithm views orders to create product relationships and can even adapt to trends and seasonal items — perfect for BFCM sales.

7. Product Bundles

Product bundles are groups of products sold together, and they’re an incredibly powerful sales tool. There are a variety of different ways you can create bundles, including:

• Products that are often bought together, like a bike with a bell, basket, and wheel lights.
• Gift sets, like a box for dog lovers that includes a bandana, collar, toy, and bag of treats.
• Customizable packages, like a set of kitchen tools that enables customers to select the color and style of each individual element.
• Subscription packages, like a monthly coffee box that allows customers to choose the four flavors they get with each shipment.

As you can see, the options are endless! Think through the types of bundles that your particular customers would most benefit from. You can even make them exclusive to Black Friday and Cyber Monday to encourage more purchases. Or, discount them as part of your larger holiday sale.

Want an easy way to create and manage them? Try the WooCommerce Product Bundles extension.

8. WooCommerce Waitlist 

When an item sells out for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you don’t want customers to still be able to purchase it, but you also don’t want to miss out on valuable sales. One option is to accept pre-orders, as we mentioned earlier. Or, you can use the WooCommerce Waitlist extension to notify customers when a product they’re interested in is available again. 

Not only does this encourage shoppers to purchase from you rather than go to a competitor, it also helps you understand which items are most popular. And you can turn it on with just a few clicks, no code required.

9. Google Analytics

Are you trying to figure out where to place your ads or what products to push for BFCM? Google Analytics can help with that. Instead of spreading yourself thin trying to market on every channel this holiday season, learn which ones are currently driving the most traffic to your site and focus on those. 

You can also gain much-needed insights into which products your customers are interested in, and what step in the purchase process you might be losing sales. All of these important metrics will show you what you need to change in order to maximize holiday purchases.

New to analytics? See the key Google Analytics metrics you need. 

10. Smart Coupons 

This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, give your customers even more reasons to purchase from your shop with the Smart Coupons extension. This extension equips you with everything you’ll need to jumpstart your sales using discounts, credits, coupons, and vouchers by extending the default WooCommerce coupon functionality. You can:

• Create fixed amount/percentage discounts.
• Bulk generate and send out coupons.
• Issue coupons based on product purchases.
• Fine-tune and customize discount rules to your exact requirements.

Smart Coupons even allows you to toggle free shipping promotions on and off. For example, you could reward the first 100 purchases with free shipping and quickly switch back once you’ve hit your mark. 

Implementing the right tools will help you take seasonal discounts to the next level, increase your sales, and save you time and effort all at once. And remember, it’s never too early to get started on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing strategies. Now is the time to begin implementing these extensions to get the highest return possible this holiday season. 

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Luke Marr