Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) mark some of the biggest sales—and profits—every year across e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores throughout the country. Even with all hands on deck, businesses find themselves stretched to the limit to deliver incredible experiences for their customers that will keep them coming back after the sales are done.
Being prepared for BFCM with the right tools is essential for a successful sales week. With over $9.8 billion dollars spent online during Black Friday 2023, having the right e-commerce marketing tools implemented ahead of time can help you capture conversion from your target audience and maintain top-tier standards throughout their entire experience.
Your Essential E-Commerce Toolkit
Let’s jump into the perfect e-commerce marketing toolkit to boost your sales during BFCM. We’ve narrowed it down to 11 essential tools that you should invest in to maximize reach, growth, and conversion—before, during, and after Black Friday.
Attract and Engage Your Audience
The best strategies are only as good as your visibility—and without being seen, your customers won’t ever know what you’re offering. These e-commerce marketing tools are a phenomenal aid for boosting your visibility, driving list growth, and increasing traffic to your online business to prep your customer base for BFCM.
SEMRush
SEMRush provides an incredible toolkit to understand how your audience’s search habits can drive them to your website. Whether it’s helping you pinpoint the best keywords to drive organic traffic to your site or providing a comprehensive overview of your competitor’s SEO strategies, SEMRush provides incredibly valuable insights into your SEO landscape. For example—you can use its keyword research tools to identify a high search volume query that you can then incorporate into your product page to rank higher in search results.
Getting ahead of organic traffic patterns and driving your brand higher on SERP ahead of BFCM is an excellent way to maximize your reach and lead potential buyers directly to the product they are looking for.
JustUno
JustUno is a powerful tool to maximize your e-commerce marketing reach while preparing your customers for an upcoming sale. When timed appropriately, you can drive awareness about your upcoming sale while capturing emails to keep your user base engaged with your brand. With the information about your sale at the forefront of their thoughts, customers are more apt to hop on to your email list to stay informed and be the first in line to make the most of your deals.
Gatsby
Gatsby is an amazing e-commerce tool to turn Instagram followers into email subscribers—and with JustUno, Klaviyo, Shopify, and other integrations, your SMS and email lists grow seamlessly. Gatsby’s automation tools can help direct traffic from social media directly to your site with keyword-specific responses to help drive product-specific landing pages or increase signups ahead of BFCM.
Yext
Especially useful for brands with brick-and-mortar locations, Yext works with over 200 publishers to keep your business’s information up to date to boost your local SEO rankings. With consistent information across a variety of online directories, you’ll be able to see an increase in search engine rankings along with increased engagement both online and in-person. This is one of the most important e-commerce marketing tools for any business that offers in-person shopping.
Convert and Retain Your Audience
You’ve increased your visibility and boosted your email and SMS subscriber lists—now it’s time to find the proper e-commerce marketing tools to maximize engagement and drive conversion. With your audience aware of your BFCM sales, adding these products to your e-commerce toolkit can help you keep your customers engaged and retained while capturing sales.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an incredible marketing tool for both email and SMS strategies. Using segmentation, automation, and evergreen flow sets, you can keep your customers engaged with detailed A/B testing and a massive array of data for tracking deliverability and the effectiveness of flows and campaigns. Keeping your existing list engaged will help your brand stay at the forefront of your customers’ thoughts—and help keep them informed of your upcoming sales.
Recharge
Recharge helps manage subscriptions, which maximizes retention while maintaining consistent revenue. Now your recurring orders can remain seamless—both for you and your customer base. When it comes to BFCM, creating opportunities to capture future revenue with an easy-to-use integration like Recharge can help you get even more out of every single conversion.
Optimizely
Knowing what your customer base responds to is an integral part of the conversion rate puzzle—and with Optimizely’s extensive A/B testing and personalization features, you can make data-informed decisions to identify high-converting content ahead of BFCM—and display that content prominently when it’s time to set your sale live.
Delight Your Customers
Converting potential customers isn’t the endgame—keeping them coming back is vital. These e-commerce marketing tools can help you provide the best customer journey to keep customers engaged, keeping them on board for future news and sales from your brand and driving recurring revenue.
Wonderment
Wonderment’s comprehensive shipping tool offers a unique upsell opportunity post-purchase. With shipping and tracking information comes an added personal touch—you can create opportunities to link relevant products to existing customers to keep them coming back and engaged with your brand, even post-BFCM.
Stamped
Stamped brings your customers’ voices to the forefront with product reviews and ratings—and new customers get an opportunity to hear from your existing clients before making a decision. Using Stamped reviews to identify pain points and address them before BFCM gives you an opportunity to improve processes and identify opportunities ahead of a big sale.
Gorgias
Georgias is an amazing e-commerce marketing tool for automating CX with the help of AI. With huge increases in traffic during BFCM, getting ahead of your customers’ needs and eliminating frustration ahead of time will drive retention drastically. Although you may not have extra help during a huge sale week, you can automate up to 60 percent of your customer support with your own data and integrations.
Bring Your E-Commerce Toolkit Together with SmartBug
Identifying your top tools for your e-commerce playbook is the first step in your approach to BFCM; learning how to integrate them seamlessly into your strategy is next. We’ve put together a guide to help you put your toolkit to use and make the most out of your sales this year.
From visibility to retention to conversion, these e-commerce marketing tools will help your business through the busiest week of the year and keep customers coming back for more long after. When you’re ready to bring it all together, we’re here to lend a hand.
