How can real-time data give you the edge on Black Friday?
With Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) soon upon us, we thought it’d be a good idea to take a look at how real-time data can help bump up your conversion rate and avoid embarrassing mistakes during the busiest time of the year for ecommerce sites.
Last year, $3.34 billion was spent online on Black Friday. There’s no time to mess up on Black Friday — every hour, and every minute counts. So having information in real-time is essential if you’re going to have a chance of spotting and acting on anything while it’s still relevant.
Why is real-time information critical on Black Friday?
Black Friday is usually an intense time for ecommerce stores — you have a fixed window of time to acquire customers and convince visitors to spend their hard-earned money with you rather than your competition.
Offers and deals are available to consumers everywhere — and it’s hard to predict what anyone will do until the day starts.
Agility is critical — especially for smaller stores — to ensure you’re not out-competed on Black Friday. If you’re not agile, you risk wasting traffic and losing potential customers to other stores and sites offering better discounts and more attractive offers.
1. Identify your best and worst performing products
When consumers flood ecommerce stores for Black Friday, how you react to this influx of visitors is measured in seconds. Sales often peak in the period from 7.30am to 10.00am local time.
If you can understand product performance, transactions and traffic sources within seconds, you can identify your most popular products (or least popular) and respond accordingly.
You’ll know exactly what to boost on social media or to include in a midday newsletter. You can figure out if there are products to pull because they’re out of stock, and can rearrange your homepage to more effectively boost the products performing best.
2. Respond to customers more quickly using live chat
You wouldn’t run a physical store without any staff on hand to answer customer questions and give assistance — especially not on the busiest shopping day of the year. So why would you run your online store without giving your visitors easy access to your team to ask questions?
Live chat enables you to be there to answer any questions consumers have about specific products. Where it can really help on conversion is in the checkout process – you don’t want to see abandoned carts simply because visitors couldn’t find an answer to a shipping or billing query.
Obviously you want to primarily cover your bases by offering great FAQs and help information, but live chat is the perfect accompaniment to make the buying experience as easy and fast as possible for your customers.
Real-time data becomes helpful here so your team can grab all the info they need to assist visitors easily. Key information such as the page the visitor is on, the traffic source they came from, and their geographic location will help get problems resolved much faster.
3. Ramp up server capacity during traffic spikes
A good problem to have, but still a problem nonetheless – is gaining too much traffic for your website to handle.
Picture the wave of emails and tweets coming in as Black Friday hits. The last thing you want your visitors (and potential customers) to see are 404 errors, and pages taking minutes to load.
If you’re on a hosted platform like Shopify then you hopefully won’t need to worry too much about traffic spikes taking you down. If you’re hosting your own store, though, it’s a good idea to see how much traffic you can handle.
LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io are handy tools to test the load your site can handle. Be sure to check them out before it’s too late!
You can use real-time analytics on your site to constantly monitor for spikes, and see your traffic building before it reaches tipping point.
You can also spot if part of your site has crumbled under load, or visitors from a particular region have suddenly disappeared. These insights can give you precious minutes to dedicate extra resources, which may prove crucial to keeping your online store snappy, and your customers happy.
Get ready now!
Don’t wait until Black Friday is over before learning lessons — you can now prepare to change as the environment does and be as responsive as possible.
As with many things in life, the sooner you prepare, the more confident you can be for the day.
Many consumers are already on the look out for what to spend their Black Friday budget on, so get your plans together and batten down the hatches for an exciting road over the coming weeks!
An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the GoSquared Blog as “How can real-time give you the edge on Black Friday?”
