A Black Friday Checklist To Prepare Your Business

Black Friday was once an opportunity to take advantage of a couple of discounts at a handful of stores. It has since become a permanent fixture on our retail calendar, and involves more than just a few in-store deals. 

In short, it’s bedlam out there – heightened by the addition of Cyber Monday – and your business is about to plunge into serious sale season. Don’t get us a wrong, this is a great opportunity to make more sales, boost earnings, and draw in new clients. But only if your business is prepared to deal with these periods of increased retail traffic. 

If you’re concerned that your business isn’t equipped to help customers transact easily or are simply eager to make your operations more efficient, then check out these tips to prepare your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Here are some tips to prepare your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

#1 Review Your Inventory

It’s crucial to assess your inventory before Black Friday and the Christmas season to make sure you have enough of your most popular things. The last thing you want is the wrong inventory data driving poor decisions around what to keep stock of, causing slow sales.

There are plenty of inventory management tools, like Zoho Inventory, inFlow Inventory, and Sortly. What’s also worth considering is a point of sale (POS) solution that can give you better control of your inventory.

#2 Rethink Your Current POS

Speaking of investing in a smart POS… It’s crucial to accept as many payment choices as you can during the busy holiday retail season. If your business doesn’t currently have a reliable POS, it’s time to think about improving your system. 

A few benefits that the right POS system can offer:

• Reporting and analysis features, providing insights into sales, profits, customer purchases, and expenses in real-time. 
• Accounting software embedded into your POS solution helps you create balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, and analyse this data to review business decisions. 
• Real-time sales recordings gives you better inventory control, alerting you to low stock, what’s flying off the shelves and what isn’t selling.
• A single back office allowing you to track and record data across multiple locations, preventing inconvenient and cost-heavy tasks and reducing employee theft. 
• Increase customer satisfaction by providing service tailored to the customer, including a personalised sales history, predictive shopping lists, discounts, and customer rewards.

#3 Blast Your BF Offers

While a lot of Black Friday spending is impulsive, now that it’s a recurring event, more consumers are making lists and setting their budgets in preparation. If you want to catch their eyes and get in on their spending plans, you need to promote your sale.

We’re talking about leveraging email and social media with catchy subject lines or headlines and clear, short copy to highlight what products are on sale.

Here are 3 free marketing tools you can use:

1. Buffer: An intuitive and streamlined social media management tool that offers actionable insights so that you can achieve meaningful engagement.
2. Canva: With pre-formatted templates you can create nearly every visual asset that your business needs, from social media banners and marketing posters to gift certificates and various documents. 
3. MailChimp: This all-in-one email marketing platform allows you to send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers at no cost, and comes with many handy features, including easy-to-use templates, advanced analytics, and one-click personalisation.

#4 Consider Your Connectivity Solution

Your connectivity service absolutely needs to keep your business up and running, making it vital that you have the right solution to support your operation. You can review our guide on how to choose the right connectivity service over here, where we talk about the different connectivity options and which is best for your size and type of business.

Of course, you also need to consider a contingency plan for when your connectivity is inefficient, succumbs to a cyber attack, or loadshedding knocks your system out. The alternative is inconvenienced customers may choose to shop elsewhere, as well as the possibility of transaction errors, weakened security, increased data loss, and customer privacy breaches. 

All of which results in lost profits.

Consider our Fixed LTE-A Solution – which proactively monitors the status of your Primary and Fixed LTE-A Backup Link, aggregates your backup data usage across multiple sites, and seamlessly connects over to the Huge Connects Fixed LTE-A network as a backup link when your Primary Broadband Access Link fails or is temporarily unavailable. 

Essentially, our Fixed LTE Backup solution will, among other things, re-establish your Internet connection when there’s a disruption.

Excitingly, it is fast, cost-effective, and reliable.

Ready For Success?

Navigating Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday sales may feel particularly stressful due to the recent unstable economic environment that we’ve all experienced, inventory problems, demand variations, and changing consumer behaviour.

Any investments you make into the tools and strategies listed above will improve your chances of a successful end of year sale season. Importantly, our team at Huge Connect are on hand to help you choose and implement a useful, customisable POS and connectivity solution that supports your business.

Want to get ready? Let’s connect.