Your Last-Minute, But-Not-Too-Late, Plus You’ll-Wish-You-Did-This Black Friday Ecommerce Checklist 🛍️

We made a down-and-dirty Black Friday checklist (and titled it appropriately). Here’s a link to the Google Doc version so you can “Make a copy” of it for yourself or your team.

If all you do is cross-check it with whatever you’re already doing and you catch one thing ... well, then there’s nothing greater I could hope for!

1. Onsite offers

Scour your pop-ups, banners, and visual merchandising apps (including personalization) then kill anything that’s not related to your holiday offer.

If you’re updating manually on Black Friday, make a list and have someone not on your team check it twice.

2. Browsers + devices

If you thought Apple was the bane of your advertising existence, just wait ‘til iOS devices start messing up your text and visuals onsite. Or worse, your pop-up + cart-to-checkout process.

Go incognito on three different mobile OSs the whole way through.

3. Gift cards

Govalo’s Essentials Plan is free for the rest of the year. Oh, and you can easily add it to sold-out products 🤑

4. Shipping rates

Nothing kills conversion rates like bad shipping-rate rules. In particular, test any new products or bundles synced to your fulfillment as well as shipping-related SKUs (like a carbon-offset fee).

5. Email and SMS flows

Turn off — or disable through Smart Sending — evergreen sequences, especially your welcome series. If your abandonment series has editable text, remove any incentives and add holiday shopping language instead.

EXTRA POINTS: Update your transactional emails with custom holiday templates + a “hidden” offer 🎁

6. Plain text emails

For your final sends on Black Friday and Cyber Monday … make them simple, clear, and urgent:

“This [deal] ends at [specific time or countdown]. Click here for [holiday lander or best-selling collection].”

7. SMS on those days too

Stagger your texts so they aren’t sent at the same time for redundancy. Ensure the copy isn’t repetitive from one SMS to the next since (unlike emails) they display in a thread.

Lastly, using the format “X hours left” works like gangbusters.

8. Holiday ads

Load and pause all your Black Friday ads to get them approved now ⏰ like … right now. This goes for social as well as your shopping promotions in Google Merchant Center.

9. Evergreen ads

Unless they feature a lower-than-your-holiday-sale discount or offer, leave your evergreen campaigns on. 

🤯 Evergreen ads are often, surprisingly, the best-performing ads during Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

10. Evergreen ads (BONUS)

Add holiday-offer-only sales copy — description, headline, etc. — to top-performing evergreen creative for the additional lift!

11. Lifetime budget campaigns

Duplicate your campaigns and swap the budgets from daily to lifetime. Leave the duplicate campaigns turned off.

If you see massive success with any one particular campaign, you’ll be able to turn on those duplicates without disturbing your current performers.

Scale. Scale. Scale.

12. Payment methods

Few things crush Black Friday excitement like a declined credit card … in your ad account 🤬

Clear your present balance and have a second MC or VISA on backup — AMEX has a higher probability of blocking a charge from Facebook than the others.

13. Account spend limits

If your account is newer, you might have a spend cap. And not even know it. Contact Facebook support directly to increase your spend limit before the big day(s).

14. SEM preparation

Schedule your Google ads and extensions to turn on … and turn off!

If your sale ends Cyber Monday, set ‘em for the next day. If you use the day itself, they’ll turn off and not run when it matters most! Google is particular on dates and times.

15. SEM day-of

If your conversion tag is anything but last-click attribution, then data will be too delayed to take action.

Solution 💡 Monitor Google Analytics for spend and revenue pacing. This is a far better day-of indicator for whether to push or pull.

16. Performance tracker

Making decisions within Facebook Ads Manager is a bad idea post-iOS 14. Instead, use this pre-built hourly tracker set to 1-day click via ADmission and using Supermetrics.

If you’re an ADmission member already … you can watch the full, step-by-step video tutorial here.

17. Customer service

Make sure your CS team knows your offers and has thoroughly reviewed your landing pages for common concerns. 

They’re often the best equipped to tell you how your offers may be misinterpreted because … they’ve seen a thing or two.

18. Emergency communication

Don’t wait for an error or mistake to start building a communication plan. Have a text-based email template already set up that you can easily customize and send in the case of a site outage, broken coupon code, etc.

19. Go-live and take-down checklist

Make it available to everyone … but assign each task directly through a RACI chart:

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Consulted
• Informed

Always remove content promoting an offer before removing the offer itself.

20. Get drunk on eggnog …

Then, do everything all over again. Don’t drink alcohol? No problem. Get some kids to throw stuff and yell at you.

Either way, you’ll accurately simulate the actual holiday shopping experience!