Published on 20/11/2024

Professionals and online merchants: Five steps to a successful Black Friday!

What is Black Friday?

Black Friday originated in the United States in the 1960s, marking the Friday after Thanksgiving as the start of Christmas shopping with massive discounts. It arrived in Europe in the 2010s, and has become a not-to-be-missed event in France, particularly popular with consumers and retailers as a way of boosting sales in the run-up to Christmas. Consumers now prefer this day of discounts over the traditional sales periods. Every single industry gets involved, including travel, property, high tech, electrical goods, fashion, etc.

A successful Black Friday means standing out among your competitors and claiming pole position in the run-up to Christmas. Black Friday takes place only four weeks before Christmas. It is therefore a crucial time for brands to maximise sales and attract new customers to their brick-and-mortar or online stores.

As November approaches, it's essential that you have a strategy in place for this period. Think about including special offers on your most popular products. Black Friday is actually so important that it can influence market trends for the rest of the year. Don't forget that the following Monday, often called Cyber Monday, prolongs this period of commercial opportunities.

Want to make this year's Black Friday a success? All you have to do is follow these five key steps!

Step 1: Analyse your consumers’ needs and personalise your offer

In the run-up to Black Friday, try to understand your customers’ expectations so you can implement an effective sales strategy. With this in mind, have your marketing team stat to analyse the data you have collected and are able to process. You can then draw on these results to segment and target your e-mail campaigns to ensure that you are making the right offer to the right person at the right time. Personalising your offer in this manner is the best way to entice your customers.

As you can see, it's crucial to understand the trends followed by your audience in order to adapt your offers. The key to a successful Black Friday is to listen to consumers.

Offering a loyalty card can also be a great way of strengthening the relationship with your customers during this period.

Par example, you could promote the following offers:

flagship Black Friday products to your prospective and occasional customers, while also reminding them of the favourites list option;
a brand-new experience to your loyal customers by inviting them to a private online sale the day before Black Friday. They will have more choice and talk about it with their family and friends.

Step 2: Optimise the mobile shopping experience to make your Black Friday a success

Retail sites experience a large increase in traffic during Black Friday sales. You must therefore be prepared for this large influx of visitors. How to prepare for it? By checking two essential factors:

your website’s loading speed
the user experience (UX) on a mobile

One out of two visitors will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. Focusing on the mobile layout of your website will therefore increase your conversion rate. A mobile-friendly UX will ensure a smoother, optimal journey for your visitors and is an excellent way to increase your users’ loyalty.

To make a success of your Black Friday, make sure your site is ready for this busy period.

In conjunction with a mobile-friendly website, Floa’s UX expertise improves your customers’ browsing experience during the final stages of their shopping journey. How? At Floa, we offer an optimised shopping experience that can increase your conversion rate to up to 20%¹.

Step 3: Master stock management to respond to demand

Effective stock management can make all the difference to a successful Black Friday. It’s therefore crucial to manage your stocks properly during this period. Make sure your flagship products are available.

A digital stock management solution is the best option for managing the influx of orders and the restocking aspect during the Black Friday sale, as it helps you avoid stock shortages that can hurt your business just a few weeks before Christmas. This digital solution optimises your flows. You can manage warehouse movements from a single platform and your customers’ orders are dispatched more quickly. By digitalising your stock management, you can fully trace customer and provider orders. Essentially, digitalisation allows you to:

track the location of your products more easily;
prepare orders more easily;
collect the items you need.

Your company can therefore track deliveries more reliably, and, in turn, keep your customers fully up to date with their order status.

Step 4: Choose various delivery methods to make your Black Friday a success.

All e-commerce websites must offer multiple delivery methods to meet the needs of various customer profiles and suit all tastes and budgets. Many online shoppers refuse to pay delivery fees and prefer to abandon their basket. Offering cheap delivery may therefore be the best solution.

Another solution is to offer free delivery for orders above a certain amount, encouraging customers to purchase additional items to exceed this threshold. The option to pay in instalments described in the following section is therefore a real advantage, allowing your customers to obtain free delivery.

Offering them a variety of delivery options can also become a major asset in satisfying the varied expectations of your customers. It can also help you stand out from the competition.

Also consider offering your customers a choice of couriers, such as Colissimo, Chronopost, DHL, UPS, etc. Don’t forget local couriers who may have specific offers for short distances.

Home delivery
This is the online shoppers’ favourite delivery method
Express delivery
24h or 48h delivery (more expensive)
In-store pick-up
No delivery fees
Delivery point pick-up
Cheapest delivery method
Scheduled delivery
This personalised service is the most expensive option

Step 5: Choosing adapted payment methods to make the most of Black Friday

By diversifying the payment options you offer on your e-commerce website, you will have a much better chance of converting baskets to purchases. Payments in instalments and Buy Now Pay Later are becoming increasingly popular and being taken up by all demographic groups.

Combining Black Friday with payment in instalments is a winning combination for attracting customers. It’s extremely important to continue to offer different financing options to satisfy these customers.

The Buy Now, Pay Later solution offers many advantages to your customers:

spreading the cost of a purchase over several months;
the opportunity to make a purchase immediately to take advantage of discounts and pay for it later;
As a retailer or e-retailer, there are also many benefits you can reap from offering your customers a Buy Now Pay Later solution:
higher turnover and greater profitability;
improved user experience;
gaining new clients and increasing loyalty thanks to a 20% higher conversion rate¹

Choose FLOA!

At Floa, we stand out from our competitors by providing a comprehensive solution, a recognised high standard of customer support and multi-award-winning UX expertise.

Thanks to the FLOA solution, your customers can choose to pay in either 3, 4 or 10 instalments², both online and in store. This innovative, flexible and simple payment solution works as follows:

in 3X and 4X, from €50 to €6,000;
in 10X, from €200 to €6,000.

Our payment in instalments solution is a major asset towards making Black Friday a success and increasing your e-commerce sales, and of the five steps discussed in this article, this is the easiest and quickest to implement!

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