According to a consumer study conducted by Future Publishing, 76% of US consumers are expected to shop for Black Friday deals this year, with spending estimates at over $158 billion.
Indeed, holiday retail sales continue to rise with no signs of slowing down. This is good news for big retailers with a solid customer base on top marketplaces. But for small retailers, brace yourself for a whirlwind of competition for customers’ attention.
But don’t fret! Half of the battle in the retail industry lies in providing the best online shopping experience. In this blog article, we compiled the best Black Friday customer service tips that have worked with our clients in the retail space. Implement these in your business and maximize your online sales this holiday sale season!
Black Friday Customer Service Tips to Prepare Your Business for the Biggest Sale of the Year
1. Implement live chat support
The upcoming Black Friday Sale will make live chat support the most effective communication tool. Live chat support offers the highest customer satisfaction level by facilitating faster resolution and response times to customer queries.
Did you know that the average checkout page conversion rate is around 10%? This is because customers leave the page when they can’t find immediate support for their product inquiries.
Implementing live chat support is among the best Black Friday customer service tips that guarantee higher conversion rates. Live chat offers real-time assistance to your customers. For example, if customers have not taken action after 30 seconds on the checkout page, providing proactive support makes it more likely for them to convert. This can increase your conversion rate by up to 20% and even reduce cart abandonment.
If it’s your first time implementing live chat in your site, consider outsourcing live chat support to a service provider. They have highly-trained agents knowledgeable of live chat best practices and up-to-date live chat software to help you get started.
2. Design a mobile-friendly website
According to statistics, 79% of smartphone users have completed an online purchase using their mobile device in the last six months. If you’re not designing an intuitive and mobile-friendly website, you’re not giving your customers the best shopping experience during the Black Friday sale.
One way of designing a mobile-friendly site is to keep your web interface clean and uncluttered. This allows your customers to navigate through your product pages easily. A clean and uncluttered web design has non-intrusive layouts, uses a precise and consistent color scheme, and takes advantage of negative space.
Designing your site for mobile-friendliness is not a walk in the park. It involves a lot of consideration regarding the user experience, which requires design expertise. If you want to improve your customer’s mobile shopping experience, you should hire a web designer, who can work dedicatedly on your website. This expert will implement these Ecommerce design tips to create responsive and engaging web interfaces that help increase your conversion rate!
3. Optimize your product pages
Your product pages are some of your biggest revenue drivers during the Black Friday sale because this is where most of your customers will make purchasing decisions.
However, they are often overlooked by many retailers who focus more on checkout pages. Though checkout pages are key touchpoints to pay attention to, they’re only the tail end of the customer buying journey. Customers only reach the shopping cart if your product page has convinced them to do so.
Another reason to optimize your product pages is for SEO. Highly-optimized product pages not only improve your customer shopping experience, they also enhance your ranking on search engine results pages. Here are some of the easy tips you can implement today to optimize your product pages for higher conversions:
- Display eye-catching product photos
- Write compelling product descriptions
- Create clear and organized categories for your products
- Use different types of marketing videos to showcase your products
- Insert relevant keywords into the product copy, page’s URL, and image tags
Businesses that want to maximize the ROI of their product pages outsource their product catalog management to a service provider. In return, they get a full-service team that offers product description writing, product photo editing, and product data management. These retail experts assist them in optimizing their product pages which results in higher conversion and customer acquisition.
4. Launch Black Friday email marketing campaigns
During the busiest shopping season of the year, customers are bombarded with tons of promotional offers. Since you’re competing for their attention, you may also take advantage of launching email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing campaigns don’t just provide upselling and cross-selling avenues. They also improve customer experience by letting customers know about your offers a week before the holiday sale. It gives an impression that you truly understand their unique needs. Sending emails like special incentives or reward reminders increases your customer engagement, leading to higher sales.
According to Adobe’s Digital Insights, the holiday sale season officially starts on Thanksgiving. That means your customers’ email inboxes are already full of promotional emails by Black Friday. With this in mind, you should start sending marketing emails a week before the holiday season.
If you want to focus on your in-house logistics, you better outsource your email support to a service provider. This enables you to concentrate on order fulfillment requests while an email support agent handles all your customer queries.
5. Promote your products on social media channels
Did you know that 82% of online shoppers purchase through social media? This means social media is a force to be reckoned with in terms of attracting prospects and converting them into sales.
Most of your potential customers are probably scrolling through a sea of content on social media. Therefore, you must focus on scroll-stopping content that provides value and entertainment to your audience. Here are some of the best Black Friday marketing tips you can implement on your social media platforms:
- Plan your content and schedule it a week before the holiday season starts.
- Create a custom hashtag for your social media campaigns. Click here to discover a variety of hashtags you can use on your captions.
- Run social media giveaways to improve brand engagement and customer loyalty.
- Feature customer reviews or testimonials to increase conversions.
- Retarget customers who have added items to their cart through paid ads.
- Increase your posting frequency and distribute content across various channels.
While it pays to concentrate on your revenue-generating activities like social media marketing, you shouldn’t forget about your social media customer service too. You must have reliable social media support agents ready to answer any questions your customers may have about your Black Friday sale.
Outsource Your Customer Service Needs to the Philippines
The last quarter of 2022 will be the busiest yet most profitable season for your business. After Black Friday comes Cyber Monday, leading up to the Christmas holiday season. So make sure to scale your operations with the right people and prepare your business for a successful end-of-year!
At ManilaPros, we offer a five-star customer care for retailers. We're a full-service company, so you can count on us to cater to all your customer service needs, from multichannel support up to getting a team of customer service agents who are vetted and certified for your brand.
Book a call with us today to get started.
