The Complete Black Friday & Cyber Monday Playbook for Kadence WP Users

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it comes the biggest shopping days of the year: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re a business owner, this season isn’t just about cozy sweaters and warm drinks—it’s an opportunity to boost sales and connect with more customers than ever. 

In 2022 alone, holiday sales reached nearly a trillion dollars, showing just how much excitement (and spending!) this season brings. With so many shoppers primed to find the best deals, the question is: Is your website ready? 

Prepping your site for Black Friday doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re looking to increase online sales, showcase irresistible deals, or ensure a seamless shopping experience, Kadence has the tools to make it happen. 

We’ve put together a complete guide to help you get your site ready and make the most of this year’s shopping events. Let’s dive in.

Preparing your site

For most retailers and ecommerce sites, there is an influx of website traffic during the holiday season. You may have visitors returning for those sweet deals or gift ideas. Either way, you need to be ready to convert as many of those visitors into customers as possible. Here’s what you should do to get started. 

Test and analyze your site

The first step to preparing your website for Black Friday/Cyber Monday is ensuring it’s fast, efficient, and easy for users to navigate and find what they are looking for. 

Start by viewing your website in an incognito window. Browse through your site the way a customer would to see if the user experience is up to par. 

• Does each page load quickly? 
• When you click on each link, does it take the user to the right place? 
• Did you test your checkout process? A smooth seamless checkout is less likely to result in abandoned carts. 
• Is there a way to reduce the number of clicks to purchase to increase conversions? Only ask for the information you need to complete the transaction and make it clear what types of payment you accept to eliminate user frustration.

If you want to take it a step further, you could run a quick page speed test. Google has a great user-friendly tool that will test your website’s desktop and mobile speed. It’ll even provide recommendations for improvement! After reviewing the suggestions, try your best to improve any metrics flagged by the page speed insights tool.

NOTE: If you are going to optimize your site for speed, just don’t obsess over chasing a “perfect” score. It can be easy to get lost in the weeds of trying to tweak every little thing and can sometimes distract you from other more important tasks. Do what you can to improve the user experience overall, but leave enough time to complete all of the other steps in this article as well.

Next, look at your primary site navigation. Is it optimized for the holiday sales season? 

Make sure that holiday offers are prominent, including top-selling items or most searched products. For many brands, the main navigation may look different during the holiday season and may revert afterward. The goal is to create easy and obvious paths for users to interact with sale offers. 

Finally, pull it all together with a site optimization and caching tool. Solid Performance is a free tool that helps you serve a faster website, with optimization and caching. 

Secure your site 

Shoppers need to feel safe making a purchase on your site. Display trust badges, SSL (lock icon), and secure payment icons prominently.

A security plugin can make a huge difference and give you and shoppers peace of mind. Solid Security Pro has everything you need with features such as brute force protection, passwordless login, 2FA, and a real-time WordPress dashboard. And don’t forget to keep all of your WordPress plugins updated!

Layer your security best practices with trusted payment processors, and you’ll have one less worry this holiday season.  

Planning your promotions

Once your website is ready for holiday traffic and sales, you’ll want to create a promotion plan.  

Setting clear goals

Black Friday is a long-standing tradition dating to the early 20th century and has evolved to kick off the holiday shopping season. It’s become the first day in a weekend-long major shopping weekend, culminating with Cyber Monday for ecommerce.

You can track the success of these promotions and your sales season by setting sales targets, inventory limits, and customer acquisition goals. 

• Sales targets: What revenue do you need to hit to consider this a successful holiday season? Set an overall sales target and individual goals for sales people (if you have them). Break goals further into online and brick-and-mortar sales if you have both location types. 
• Inventory limits: At what level will you sell through inventory? Does that get you to sales goals? Avoid carrying inventory past the holiday season when you must sell it at a deep discount. There’s a little magic in carrying just the right amount of product that you will get better at over time. 
• Customer acquisition goals: You should try to generate sales from existing and new customers. For continued growth, the latter is vital. Set a number or percentage of new customers that you want to reach this year. 

With all customer segments and sales, consider pairing promotions with upsell and cross-selling opportunities to maximize cart value for each shopper. Small items, inventory you need to move, or deeply discounted products are quick and easy for shoppers to impulse-buy at checkout. 

Remember to use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals in your planning so that you can track results and measure against prior years or efforts. 

Strategizing your offer types

Black Friday promos vary widely, and now is the time to think about what offers, discounts, or special things you may include for your online store. Pairing promotions with past customer testimonials can help turn a casual browser into a shopper. 

Popular options include:

• Deep discounts on specific items
• Doorbuster deals for limited hours
• Extended shopping hours for brick-and-mortar and extended sale windows online
• Social and cultural frenzy for specific, high-demand items to push on social media

Each different promotion should include unique calls to action that encourage immediate purchase by promotion type. Use microcopy for CTAs that’s more specific than “Shop” or “Buy” to encourage checkout. Consider phrasing that creates a sense of urgency, such as “Limited Inventory – Checkout Now.”

If you play your cards well, Black Friday can easily become your most financially successful day of the year.

Timing and countdown timers

Nothing helps convert a shopper like a sense of urgency. A countdown timer can provide this in an unobtrusive way, noting when a sale is about to begin or when a specific promotion might end. 

Countdowns build anticipation in advance of a sale, and enhance the sense of urgency to make a purchase when used on a product or landing page. 

The Kadence Countdown block is easy to configure and can create a sense of urgency to buy now since the deal is only available for a limited time.

Build your landing page

As you plan campaigns that lead to BFCM promotions, a landing page can be the most effective way to organize content and products designed for direct and quick conversions. 

A landing page is any page that your customer lands on when they find your site. Whether this be your home page, your shop page, or your BFCM promo page. A few key things that your landing page needs are inspiration, clarity, and mobile-first design.

• Inspiration: Use beautiful and trendy design styles that are eye-capturing and engaging. When a customer enters this page, they should be compelled to dive deeper into your site. Beautiful, clean design is key.
• Clarity: What are you selling? How will it benefit your customers? Be direct and have clear steps laid out. Don’t leave your customers guessing or you are sure to lose them.
• Mobile-first design: A large number of shoppers will hit your website and online sales from their phones. That experience has to be zippy as well. A fast theme, such as the Kadence Theme, can help. 

A few things to keep in mind as you design a landing page is to maintain visual branding and website design consistency so that the page looks and feels like it belongs to you, while streamlining content to be actionable and specific. (Consider choosing one key product to focus on.)

While every landing page might look a little different, the creation process is similar. Once you know what you want from a landing page, use Kadence Blocks to build a page within your WordPress website. 

Boosting sales with Kadence WP

Kadence WP has everything you need to create optimal landing pages that lead to holiday sales. Don’t forget that all of the best practices you use on your website as a while also apply to Black Friday/Cyber Monday landing pages and product promotion. 

Optimize your landing pages

After creating landing pages, optimize them! The most important thing you can do when creating BFCM landing pages is to stick to a single offer per landing page. 

Visual cues, copy, and direction should be clear and intentional. Don’t try to offer multiple options here. Having more than one offer could confuse users, while just one will help optimize the entire page. Any ads, social media posts, or links to the landing page should directly pertain to the content and offer on the page. 

Add social proof or testimonials to your landing page that support purchases, and consider a popup to help users complete the transaction. 

Finally, all CTAs on the landing page should lead toward the desired conversion. 

Enhance the ecommerce experience with Kadence Shop Kit

One of the most powerful things you can do for your business is create an online experience that is different from all the rest. Anyone can create a generic product page, but when a product page is intuitive and engaging, it stands out. 

Create custom product templates with Kadence Shop Kit to make your product pages really stand out. This is a game changer for WordPress WooCommerce sites. You can build out product pages that actually match your brand and engage with your audience. 

With Shop Kit, you can do so much more than create custom product templates. It also gives you the tools to create stunning product galleries, intuitive variation swatches, conditional cart banners, and tons more. Kadence Shop Kit makes developing engaging and immersive shopping experiences a breeze.

Don’t forget to use Product Badges to highlight key product details, such as low stock, on sale, or promoting special attributes. The feature gives you full control over the appearance and placement of badges, helping you enhance the shopping experience and improve product visibility in your store.

Create promotional blocks with Kadence Blocks 

You can help lead website visitors to promotional content and landing pages from within other parts of your website with sale banners, calls to action, and urgency indicators, too. 

These elements can help repeat customers gain familiarity with current promotions and offers and even lead to higher cart values!

Kadence Blocks allows you to use Hooked Elements to add content in different areas of a page, with unlimited customization options. This makes creating sitewide banners a breeze! Check it out for yourself with this live training video. 

Try conversion tools with Kadence Conversions 

In addition to promotional blocks, you can implement conversion tools throughout your website to help drive shoppers to key products. 

A simple reminder as a visitor moves through the website can help them find items that are most in demand or that drive your sales funnel.

Plus, shoppers are used to popups, announcements, and special offers. Those elements can sometimes convert when other opportunities do not. 

Kadence Conversions is a no-code WordPress block that lets you create all of these items with ease. Use it to increase sales, collect leads, and connect with visitors in more meaningful ways. Plus, it offers ready-made designs that you can drop in and use right away!

Promoting your Black Friday deals

What good is a sale if you don’t have customers? Spreading the word is everything when it comes to having a successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself when thinking about marketing your sale:

• What are you selling?
• What is your sale?
• Who is your target audience?

Once you know the answers to these questions, it’s time to get after it. Here are some marketing tactics to consider. 

Social media

Don’t downplay the power of social media. That’s where the people are, so you should be there too. Don’t just post about your sale; engage with your audience. Like, comment, DM – whatever it takes to create connection. 

People want to feel seen, like your sale was catered specifically for them. This is why it’s so important to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and speak to them like you would want to be spoken to.

Email

The other marketing tool that can be your most effective is email campaigns. An engaged email list is your power tool. 

The first step here is getting customers to open your email. When crafting your marketing email, you will want a powerful subject line. Based on conversion rate research, words like “just,” “wonderful,” and “upgrade” are the most effective when added to your subject line. 

Once the email is opened, engaging content, beautiful photos and enticing content is what will keep your audience engaged. Then, to finish it off you will want a killer call to action and be sure to have an obvious button that links directly to your shop or landing page.

Advertising 

Finally, consider adding online advertising to your promotional mix to help reach a targeted audience that’s most likely to engage with your brand or buy your product. 

Advertising tactics could include social media advertising, search engine ads, or even traditional media buys. The most important consideration for product advertising is meeting potential customers where they are and advertising on channels and platforms they are most likely to use.

Tracking and analyzing performance

Your Black Friday Cyber Monday work does not end with a customer purchase! One of your biggest marketing assets is tracking and analyzing performance to see if you met goals and what you can learn for future campaigns. The work you do after the sale will set the foundation for a better campaign in the future. 

Go back to the SMART goals you set for BFCM campaigns and compare them to actual results. 

• How do actual numbers compare to goals? 
• What was your overall return on investment for campaigns?
• What worked well?
• Where are areas of opportunity in the future?

Many of the numbers you need to create baseline reports are available in Google Analytics. This is a free tool that you can set up on your website if you don’t have it already. 

Take a little time to reflect on these metrics and start planning for next year. While results and numbers are fresh, it is a good time to create starter goals for future campaigns. 

Crush your sale goals with Kadence WP

We hope this is your best Black Friday Cyber Monday ever. By preparing your site for traffic early, planning campaigns with intentional goals, and setting a promotional plan, you can set the groundwork for a strong holiday sales season. 

Kadence can help. Kadence Shop Kit gives you the ability to customize your shop experience to drive sales, Kadence Conversions can help you create flows that lead on-site visitors to promotions, and Kadence Blocks has elements and tools that make building landing pages that much easier. 

Get the full bundle of Kadence products today to supercharge your website and holiday campaigns!