Category Archives: Blog

Boosting Your Work Efficiency: Practical Productivity Tips and Tricks

Feeling unproductive at work? Sometimes, building structure into your work routine with a variety of productivity techniques can help! There are many tried and true methods to help you boost your work efficiency!

Boosting Your Work Efficiency: Practical Productivity Tips and Tricks

We all face productivity challenges at times. From mitigating distractions to creating accountability, there are many techniques you can use to keep yourself productive and on track to reach your goals:

Effective Time management

Time management is essential to enhance your productivity at work. Effective time management involves the conscious and intentional allocation of time to tasks and activities in a way that maximizes productivity and achieves specific goals. Prioritizing tasks based on their importance or urgency is one way you can manage what you work on. You can also use time blocking to allocate blocks of time to different categories of tasks. When it comes to effective time management, the most important thing to keep in mind is your own personal habits and flow. You want to manage your time in a way that feels natural to you. There are many examples of how you can manage your time at work, but don’t be afraid to tweak those examples to fit your personal situation!

Delegation

For business owners especially, it is important to consider delegating tasks to other members of your team. Delegation is the process of assigning tasks, responsibilities, and authority to other members of your team. When looking over all the tasks you must complete, ask yourself if these are tasks that only you can do. Is this your area of expertise? Are there other members of your team who are better suited? Entrust these tasks to others so you can focus on your more critical workday tasks.

Digital & Physical Tools

Keeping track of all of your tasks and meetings in your head is difficult and unrealistic. Whether it be a digital tool or a physical planner, take some time to document your tasks. You could use digital tools such as Todoist or Google Calendar to document and schedule your tasks. This allows you to not only have a record of your tasks to remind you of what needs done, but also can help make your tasks more approachable. Depending on how you break down your tasks, you can use your digital or physical planner to focus on the tasks that need done today rather than looking at tasks that need completed in the future.

Regular Breaks

Productivity often isn’t achieved by working nonstop. Instead, incorporate breaks into your day. Taking a short, 5 minutes break to drink some water or stretch your legs can help prevent burnout and maintain your focus. Breaks can also improve your overall concentration and creativity!

Regular Reviews & Adjustments

As you and your company change, so does your workflow. Productivity methods that used to work for you may not suit your tasks and workflow in the future. When it comes to boosting your work efficiency, don’t be afraid to tweak your methods and try new techniques over time. Many of the productivity methods you read about don’t work perfectly straight out of the box. Adjust and optimize your time management methods or your tasks organization in a way that makes sense and feels easy for you. As your tasks and obligations change, review and update your workflow to maintain an efficient process that works for you.

Want to learn more?

Want to explore more productivity hacks? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where I share 4 different methods that I’ve used, what they are, and how you could use them in your business!

Complying with Google & Yahoo’s New 2024 Email Requirements

Have you recently been seeing notifications from your email management providers concerning new email requirements and a February 2024 deadline?  Starting in February, Google and Yahoo are implementing strong email security requirements that can impact your emails reaching your clients! Here’s what you need to know.

Complying with Google & Yahoo’s New 2024 Email Requirements

Why is this happening?

Both Google and Yahoo are requiring bulk email senders to up their email security with a brand-new set of requirements. These requirements will affect whether your bulk emails reach your clients or end up spam (or worse, be blocked entirely.) Why are these two major email services doing this?

The main reason why these requirements are being implemented is to fight against spam and malicious emails. In your own inbox, you may encounter spam every day, deleting unsolicited and uninteresting emails without even opening them. At the same time, users and businesses alike have to be on the lookout for email attacks. Emails pretending to be someone else, tailored to look safe and asking for sensitive information: spoofing and phishing attacks like these have become common place.

Google and Yahoo’s new requirements aim to authenticate that it is really your business sending emails to your clients.  Ideally, these requirements will bring down the amount of spam and dangerous emails that we receive in our inboxes, leaving us with the emails we want to see.

What are Google and Yahoo’s new email requirements?

Starting in February of 2024, Google and Yahoo will be start enforcing a set of new email requirements that will push bulk email senders, such as businesses, to make their emails more secure. These requirements vary depending on how many emails you send daily.

If you send under 5000 bulk emails a day, you need to:

  • Have email authentication with either SPF or DKIM.
  • Maintain low spam rates.

If you send over 5000 bulk emails a day, you need to:

  • Have both SPF and DKIM email authentication.
  • Implement a DMARC policy.
  • Create messages that pass DMARC alignment.
  • A one-click unsubscribe option in your messages.

What happens if I don’t fulfill the requirements?

Starting in February 2024, bulk email senders who do not fulfill Google & Yahoo’s requirements will see an impact on their overall visibility. Your emails to clients and subscribers may be marked as spam or worse, be completely blocked from their inboxes. Not complying with these requirements can be detrimental to your marketing and general business communications with your clients.

What do I need to do?

To ensure the deliverability of your business emails, take some time to do the following:

Check if you are compliant with current email requirements

For some of you, it’s possible that you already have implemented these requirements and have maintained a good email reputation. Check your email domain and see if you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up already. Check your messages and see if you have a one click unsubscribe option and verify your current spam rate. Below are some tools to help see what your current email domain has:

  • https://mxtoolbox.com/ – with the help of this tool, you can check if your email domain has SPF, DKIM, and DMARC running successfully by toggling through search options. You can also select “Blacklist” to see if your email domain is found on any major email blacklists.
  • https://www.talosintelligence.com/Find out about your email domain’s general reputation as well as your email volume within the last month.
  • https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/ – Google’s Postmaster Tools can show you how Google sees your email domain! Delivery errors, spam reports, and more can be discovered with this tool.

Document all of the applications that current send emails for your business

Now more than ever, you need to have a list of all the applications you use to send bulk emails to your clients. This includes:

  • Email service provider, like Aweber, ConvertKit, MailChimp, Flowdesk, etc
  • CRMs
  • Ecommerce and Web applications such as Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify, Kajabi, WordPress, etc.
  • Etc.

Look through each of your applications and see how to comply with the new requirements

Many of us have received notifications from our applications about these upcoming email requirements. For each application you are using to send emails, read their documentation on how to make sure you are compliant with their software tools. Each application will be different, so each may have a different process.

For some of you, this may be easy if you only have a handful of applications sending emails for you. For others, it may be harder the more applications you have, or if you are juggling multiple domains. Have your tech provider help you through this process or, if you don’t have someone competent in email services, feel free to contact us for support.

Need help?

Still confused on how to meet these new requirements and want help? Contact us and we can help you through it!

5 Steps to Maximize your Social Media Marketing

Do you feel like your social media marketing is going nowhere? Unsure of what more you can do to make the most out of your social media platforms? Today, let’s explore some tips to maximize your social media marketing strategy.

5 Steps to Maximize your Social Media Marketing

Successful social media marketing is an ongoing process that requires patience, consistency, and a good understanding of the platforms you are using. To maximize your social media reach, you need to:

Choose the right platform

To maximize our social media marketing, you need to prioritize the platforms that will work best for you. While using multiple platforms is great to reach different audiences, identify which platforms your target audience is most active on. Those are the platforms that you will want to put the most work into understanding. Take time to research what your platforms want to see and how to use their features to reach your audience effectively.

Optimize your profiles

One section that may be under utilized in your social media platforms is your profile. Make sure that you complete your profile with quality image assets, good descriptions, and relevant links and resources for your audience to explore. It is also important to make sure that your social media platforms maintain the language and visuals of your brand. Your social media platforms are an extension of your business and should be consistent with other user-facing content.

Create compelling content

To keep your audience engaged, you need to be posting valuable content on your social media profiles. To keep your social media walls interesting, use a variety of content types, such as images, videos, reels, info-graphics, and text posts. The content you share should provide value to your audience. Share expert advice, inspirational quotes, and entertaining, relatable stories that keep your audience coming back!

Engage with your audience

Beyond just posting content, social media is all about creating engagement. On your social media platforms, you want to encourage your audience to interact with your posts. Whether it be through likes, comments, shares, or so forth, encouraging an open dialogue between you and your customers can help you better understand their needs and wants and create a closer community. Ask questions in your posts and reply to those who answer!

Be consistent

Like any marketing effort, the key to success is being consistent. Even if your posts aren’t getting the kind of engagement you want, don’t give up! Continue posting content regularly and test out new content to see what your audience wants to see. Developing an audience that is engaged takes time, so give your content ideas time to reach your audience before assuming that it just won’t work.

Want to learn more?

Want to push your social media marketing and email list growth efforts to the max? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we welcome back Tracy Beavers, award winning business and sales coach, as she shares the hidden and often overlooked opportunities that we should be capitalizing on in our social media marketing!

Crushing Procrastination: Strategies for Business Success

Sometimes, setting goals or establishing deadlines for tasks at work just isn’t enough: procrastination still creeps in. Overcoming procrastination is a common challenge for many business owners. Today, we will go over some strategies to help you stay on task!

Crushing Procrastination: Strategies for Business Success

Having set goals, prioritizing your tasks, and maintaining a schedule are all essential steps to getting a task done, but there are other techniques we can use to push ourselves to complete our business tasks on time.

Eliminate distractions

Your workspace can be full of distractions that stop you from staying on task. To start, your workspace should be cleaned of clutter. This includes both your physical and digital work spaces. On your desk, you should have the items you for your current task in reach so that you don’t have to get up and down. Your computer desktop should be similar, your tools, applications, and files quickly accessibly and easy to find. Another common distraction we should avoid is irrelevant notifications. Silence unrelated notifications and alarms on both your computer and mobile device so that you aren’t getting pulled away from your task for unnecessary messages.

Set realistic deadlines

Setting deadlines is important, but you should set them mindfully. Some tasks will be routine enough that you have a good understanding of how long it will take you to do. New tasks, however, can be harder to assign a timeline to. Realistic deadlines should set aside the time you need to complete a task with a little wiggle room for the unexpected. When setting a deadline for a task, take time to determine whether or not the tasks can be broken down into smaller bites. Bigger projects can be overwhelming to get started due to their complexities. By breaking up a big project into smaller tasks and assigning them clear deadlines, completing the project can feel more approachable.

Reward yourself

While it may sound silly to reward yourself for completed tasks, having a reward routine when working on tasks can positively reinforce productive behavior. It can be as simple as letting yourself eat a cookie, or as exciting as celebrating your success with your co-workers. Either way, giving yourself a reward for finishing small and big tasks can encourage you to stay on track to complete future tasks.

Accountability partner

Having someone else to hold you accountable for the completion of work can help push you to stay on time. You can share your goals with an accountability buddy. An accountability buddy should be someone you trust, such as a friend, mentor, or business partner. Together, you can share your current goals and check in on each other’s progress, encouraging productivity.

Use time Management techniques

When you find yourself at a loss on how to stay focused at work, you may want to consider looking into known time management techniques. Techniques such as the Pomodoro Technique (working for a set amount of time, then taking a short break) can help maintain focus and prevent procrastination. There are a variety of time management techniques out there to explore! When trying a new technique, make sure to try it for a decent amount of time before deciding if it’s working. After some time, compare your task completion, general focus, and mood to how you were doing before you started a specific time management technique. You may need to tweak current techniques to fit you and your business better!

Want to learn more?

Looking for a time management technique to keep you on task and completing your goals? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we dive into effectiveness of The 12 Week Year!

Building Tomorrow: Setting your Business for Success in the New Year

Reviewing and reflecting on your business progress is essential to improving it over time. With the new year coming up, now is a great time to go over your business wins and struggles and prepare a game plan for the future!

Building Tomorrow: Setting your Business for Success in the New Year

While the new year isn’t the only time you should review and reflect on your business, it is a common time to do it. When thinking back on your business, check where your business stands now:

Look back on your goals

Whether you have yearly reviews incorporated into your business year, or you have finally got some downtime to look over your business, the first step to reflecting on your business is taking a look at your goals. What did you want to accomplish? How many goals did you reach or even go beyond your expectations? How many goals fell off somewhere along the way? Creating goals to look back on is an effective way to measure your online shop’s success as well as establish next steps.

Read through customer feedback

When measuring how well your business did this year and what areas it struggled in, reviewing customer feedback from the year can help. Let’s say you released a new product this past year, how did customers react to it? You can also look back on any campaigns you ran, such as holiday sales. Did your campaign planning and marketing successfully engage your customers? Did they enjoy your event? Note any areas where customer feedback was extremely positive or extremely negative and analyze what really worked or didn’t work in those cases.

Give your website a checkup

It is always a good idea to check up on how well your site is performing. Changes may have been made to your site during the year, or perhaps an update or two are overdue. Overall, you want to take note of any maintenance that needs done to your site so you can plan it out effectively. While looking over your site, also take a moment to come up with any ideas that can improve your site. Are there pages where the user interface could be better? How is mobile looking? Is your site feeling slow? Plan out your renovations and set solid goals for how many of them you want to see done in the new year.

Research your Industry

As the year draws to a close, it’s important not only to look back on your business, but other businesses in your circle as well. Have any of them undergone major changes? Have your competitors shifted over the year? Also dig into your industry as a whole. From technological advancements to regulatory updates, research any potential hurtles that your company may have to compete with, as well as any emerging opportunities.

Want to learn more?

Need help reflecting on your business? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast for a guided reflection on your business with Carrie! In this episode, Carrie shares her own process of reflecting on her business wins and struggles.

Digital Cleanup: 5 Steps to Start De-cluttering your Desktop Screen

Having a clean workspace is essential to your productivity and efficiency! This includes your digital work spaces as well. Cleaning up your digital workspace can seem intimidating, especially since you can’t always see everything that needs to be cleaned up. One of the easiest ways to get started with digital cleanup is to start with the area you see every day: your desktop screen.

Digital Cleanup: 5 steps to Start Decluttering your Desktop Screen

How to Start De-cluttering your Desktop

Your desktop screen is like your digital desk. While a physical desk has planners, sticky notes, pens, and other resources to organize your workday, your desktop is often the next stop in your work routine. Just like cleaning off your desk, there are a few easy ways to get started with cleaning up your desktop screen.

Organize Your Files

One common habit many of us may have is saving files to our desktop screens when we aren’t too sure where they should go yet. It’s easy to access at the moment, but after a few months of doing this, you may find that there are way too many files cluttering up your screen! Take the time to organize these files. Put the files in their appropriate folders and sub-folders, or, for those files that don’t have an existing folder collection that suits them, create a new one. Take your time to organize them in a way that makes sense to you so that you can find them easily in the future!

Delete Unnecessary Files

When looking through files on your desktop, determine if you still need them. Many files you download to either your desktop screens or your downloads folder tend to be temporary assets that you may not anymore. Delete those files once you are sure they are unnecessary.

Backup Important Information

When it comes to important files or folders of information, you may consider backing them up during your digital cleanup process. This could include backing up important work files and folders to a cloud storage system like Google or One Drive. While your desktop is your main area of work, there are risks to storing important information only on your desktop computer. In case your computer dies, your files get corrupted, or you accidentally delete something that needed, a backup will ensure that your most important files are safe.

Review your Auto-Start Programs

Depending on your computer’s startup settings, you may have applications that are set to automatically start when you turn on your computer. During the digital cleanup process, review these applications. Do you still use them? How often? If you find some applications that you have been closing out the moment they turn on, or you just don’t use them every day, consider editing your startup settings to turn off those applications. If you find that you don’t use some of those applications at all, you may want to delete them entirely!

Want to learn more?

Digital cleanup should be part of your work routine. After all, the cleaner your digital environment, the more productive you will be! Listen to our most recent eCommerce Made Easy Podcast to learn more about steps to add to your digital cleanup routine, as well as how often you should consider de-cluttering certain parts of your digital workspace!

SEO Essentials: Harnessing the Power of Short-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords

To enhance your online presence and drive targeted traffic to your online shop, your site needs to effectively utilize keywords. Two important types of keywords to incorporate into your business are short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords.

SEO Essentials: Harnessing the Power of Short-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords

What are keywords?

Keywords are the words that users use when searching for your products and services. Some users will type very few words while others will be much more specific and lengthier with their search criteria. These two different search criteria can be broken down into short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Short-Tail Keywords

Short-tail keywords are short, generic terms of usually one or two words. If a user were searching for fitness advice, for example, a short-tail keyword they could use could simply be “fitness.” If they wanted to be a bit more specific, they could search for “fitness blogs.” Short-tail keywords are words that have very high search volume since they are inherent to many products. However, short-tail keywords are also highly utilized by your industry, making them highly competitive to use.

The benefits of short-tail keywords

Despite the competition surrounding short-tail keywords, they are an important asset to your SEO strategy. Short-tail keywords are great when building awareness and visibility around your company. General keywords are used by broad audiences, so using short-tail keywords allows your company to be exposed to a large audience. Short-tail keywords are a great way to expose your brand to new potential customers.

Long-Tail Keywords

Long-Tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that are usually three words or more long. To use our fitness shopper as an example, a long-tail keyword they may search for could be “exercise routines for beginners” or “workout routines for beginners at home.” Overall, long-tail keywords are much more niche than short-tail keywords. The search volume for long-tail keywords is low, but due to their specificity, they have less competition surrounding them. This results in long-tail keywords attracting higher conversion rates.  

The benefits of long-tail keywords

While short-tail keywords expose your brand to new users, long-tail keywords are a great way to enhance your online visibility and connect with users at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Since long-tail keywords have less competition, you can use them as opportunities to become the go-to store for certain products. You can also use long-tail keywords to meet buyers where they are. Users that use long-tail keywords are often shoppers who are further along in their shopping process. They have an idea of what they want, so becoming more specific in your keywords can help guide those users to the products they are looking for.

Want to learn more?

Want to further explore keyword strategies that can boost your SEO? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we discuss how to conduct keyword research as well as what keyword opportunities you should consider using on your site!

Customer Trust: Setting Clear Expectations with Transparency

Clarity in communication is fundamental to establishing and maintaining customer trust. It sets the foundation for positive interactions, customer satisfaction, and long-term relationships between you and your customers. What areas of your website can you work on to set clear expectations that result in happy customers?

Customer-Trust-Setting-Clear-Expectations-with-Transparency

Misunderstandings, miscommunications, and unrealistic expectations are all recipes for customer disappointment. That’s why it’s important that your online shop creates an experience that ensures customers understand exactly what they can expect from a product or service. When looking over your site, the following areas should be straightforward and easy to understand:

Clear Language

From your customer promise to your product descriptions, the language you use to explain to your customers what you sell and what your products & services could do for them should be clear. Speak to your customers in words and contexts that they understand. Instead of using industry jargon to talk about your products, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and speak from their perspective. What are the things they would want to know about your products, services, and overall business? Sharing the answers to this question in words that your customers use themselves is a key step to creating customer trust.

Clear Prices

A customer could be thrilled by what your product promises to offer, but if the price isn’t what they expected, they may start to doubt your company. When it comes to the prices of your products and services, hidden fees can leave a bad taste in your customers’ mouths. Be up front with any extra charges your customer may run into when purchasing your products and services. From shipping fees to increased charges due to a project expanding beyond the original scope, make sure those charges are shared up front and are located in multiple places on your site during the shopping process.

Clear Process

When it comes to purchasing your products, it should be easy. Browsing products, requesting a quote, scheduling a call, and checking out should all be steps that contain clear visuals and language that make it simple for customers to do. Another aspect to keep in mind is returns: how do customers go about returning a product or requesting changes to the project your team is working on? Having this information in the purchasing process is important to keeping your customers in the know!

Want to Learn more?

Want to explore other areas of your site that are key to establishing customer trust? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we discuss how you can create an authentic and transparent customer experience with just a few tweaks to your site!

Decoding Success: Metrics That Matter for Promotional Event Evaluation

For some of you, you have just finished up with Black Friday and Cyber Monday! However, while your shopping deals may have ended, it is not yet time to push your campaign aside. With your completed promotion, it is now time to measure its success and refine your campaign for next year!

When it comes to determining if your promotional campaign was a success, you need two things: goals and metrics. Your goals should reflect what a successful promotional campaign looks like to you while the metrics you track should give that goal measurable numbers. There are many metrics we can consider when figuring out a campaign’s success as well as many ways to track them. Some metrics we can track are:

Traffic

One metric that is always useful to track is traffic: how many people visited your site during your promotion? Traffic can be a great way to measure how well your marketing efforts & special deals attracted users to your site! Tracking traffic can be done in multiple ways. In terms of the number of users who browse your site during your promotion, you can measure “sessions” with analytics tools such as Google Analytics 4. Sessions let you not only see how many people visited your site, but can also give you a glimpse of how long users stayed on your site as well! If you have set up your marketing materials to track clicks, you can also look at those numbers to see how many people decided to check out your deals!

Engagement

User engagement is a great way to track what your most effective content was during your promotional campaign. Overall, tracking engagement means tracking how users engage with your content. This can come in the form of clicks, participation in polls, social media likes, shares, comments, and so forth. With the help of social media & email management tools, for example, you can collect engagement data and compare your marketing material: what did users interact with the most? What received the least interaction? By taking note of what your customers like and don’t like, you can create even better marketing materials next year!

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a lot like engagement, but instead of simply engaging with your content, leads would be users who connected with you in some way. A lead could be a user who subscribed to your newsletter or social media channels, or a user who downloaded a freebie. Leads are valuable to you because they are interested customers who want to continue receiving information about your products and services, even beyond your current promotion. Track what content led to the leads you received to better understand what your customers want to see!

Sales & Quotes

Of course, during your special events, sales are a must have metric when evaluating your campaign’s success! Tracking sales can help you learn a few things about your campaign’s effectiveness, such as what your most popular products are, how effective past lead generations were at nurturing conversions, and even how well you are encouraging customer loyalty. Ideally, when tracking sales during your campaign, you want to compare those sales to your normal sales numbers: do you see an increase in sales? Compare your sales increase with the goals you set for your promotion event and see how you fared!

Customer Feedback & Surveys

As your campaign comes to a close, asking your customers for feedback is a great way to gain insight into what your customers want and to spot areas of opportunity. Through the use of surveys, you can collect poll results for things like customer satisfaction concerning your products, website, customer service, and more. You can also offer the opportunity for free-form feedback, such as product reviews, that can lead to quality social proof and insight into ways you can improve your products and shopping experience.

Want to learn more?

Figuring out whether or not your promotional campaign was a success can be difficult, even with data to consult. Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we dive into how to refine your promotion with a positive and realistic mindset.

Navigating Black Friday: Essential Tips for Online Businesses to Thrive in the Shopping Frenzy

With Black Friday & Cyber Monday rushing upon us, it’s time to review your strategy! When it comes to preparing your online business for a successful shopping campaign, there are a few steps you can take to not only draw customers in but stand out amongst the competition!

Navigating Black Friday: Essential Tips for Online Businesses to Thrive in the Shopping Frenzy

When it comes to major shopping events like Black Friday, standing out online can be difficult. Afterall, in a sea of online businesses, how can you make your deals and website more enticing than the rest? When reviewing your Black Friday strategy, there are a few key tasks that you should pay special attention to:

Offer Irresistible Deals

Shopping events like Black Friday are all about deals! Crafting an irresistible deal requires a deep understanding of your customers’ wants and needs. Once you determine the products and services your customers love, there are a variety of ways to apply attractive discounts to them. Bundle deals, buy-one-get-one-free promotions, limited-time offers, or even time-limited products are great ways to create enticing deals that you share exclusively during your shopping event. With any deal, make sure that the value of your discounted offerings is clear and easy to understand to further make it stand out.

Check & Optimize Website Performance

Major shopping events often result in unusually high traffic for online business owners. Both old and new customers will be browsing your special promotions and deals, so one of the first things you should do to prepare is check your site’s health and performance. Make sure your site is ready for heightened traffic: this includes checking your site’s speed and responsiveness. Afterall, a slow site can lead to frustrated customers and lost sales.

Re-visit your Site’s Mobile Experience

Many customers during major shopping events will be browsing and purchasing products on their phones. On top of making sure your site is optimized for speed and responsiveness, making sure your site’s mobile experience provides a seamless shopping experience is imperative to keeping potential customers on your site. This is especially true for mobile checkout! Optimize your mobile checkout process to minimize friction and encourage quick and easy purchases.

Create a Marketing Plan

Ideally, before any major shopping event such as Black Friday, you and your team should create a marketing strategy. From social media to online advertising, plan out and create your marketing content to create excitement around your upcoming special deals. On both your social accounts and in your email, consider sending teaser emails and posts in the days leading up to Black Friday. If you have different tiers of customers, tailor your marketing material towards their needs and wants, creating anticipation around the deals you created just for them!

Provide Excellent Customer Service

During such busy times of the year, there is going to be an influx of new and old customers. It is important that you and your team are prepared to provide any customer service they may need. From being active on your contact channels to making sure that your deals, shopping information, and return policies are clearly stated, you want to create an experience that customers remember positively. Beyond providing assistance for customers who run into trouble, reaching out to customers post-purchase just to check in with them is also a great way to show that your business cares about the service you provided them, which can lead to good reviews and repeat business.

Want to Learn more?

Looking for more insights on how to make your Black Friday and future shopping event successful? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we further explore how to stand out during these highly competitive times of the year!