How to prepare for a successful BFCM shopping season

Black Friday/Cyber Monday is near. That’s the peak holiday shopping period when top brands get 20 to 30% of their yearly sales.

You may aspire to be like them, but in practice, most small businesses fail during BFCM. Why? Because they send traffic to a leaking funnel. Then the ad spend goes up, the campaign conversion rate goes down… and so does your mood.

Where is that heavy leaking funnel?

Your website has areas that stop people from buying. This way people are “leaking out” of your funnel before they buy. But your newly-set BFCM campaign funnel may have them, too.

Your job is to patch these before spending more money on traffic. That general rule is even truer in the high-pressure periods around the holidays.

To increase your BFCM success this year—patch the leaks in advance

Top brands start their preparation up to 3 months earlier.

“Why so early? BFCM seems like a quarter away!” you may ask.

They do this to avoiding crunch-mode work as much as possible. Starting early will help you reduce the “human under pressure” errors like:

• broken product links
• missing product/shipping info on the website
• low product inventory
• visual glitches and more

What should you do?

Gearing up to the holiday, you should first find the leaks in your website and then patch them. Only then should you prepare and test your campaigns. The testing is for the new potential leaks introduced.

September is an ideal time for looking over the past year of data. Check your store for leaks to know what to work on next.

October—once you’ve identified the leaks, a month should be enough to patch them.

November will be the busiest month of all, but that’s inevitable. Create your email and social campaigns. Test the links, test the emails. Inspect the whole campaign funnel. Once you feel ready, it is time to schedule the campaigns.

Do you know where does money leak from your store? Check my BFCM leak guide

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!