Prepare your Shopify theme to promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

November’s biggest weekend is coming up and we can’t express how important it is that you step up your store's game.  Preparing your Shopify store to promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals should be a top priority.  If you don't already know in 2020, Store owners on Shopify generated a staggering $5.1 billion USD in sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday across the world. This is a big reason why you can't miss that HUGE opportunity. Here are the BFCM dates for 2021:

• Black Friday - November 26th 2021
• Cyber Monday - November 29th 2021

Early preparations are the key to succeeding on this important weekend. 

In this article, discover a strategy to maximize your conversions and max out your sales!

Don’t feel like reading? Let our CEO Mark explain to you those tips himself!

Here's what this strategy is all about

The objective of this approach is to develop a banner that will promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. To advertise the coming discounts, one version should be up and running 24-48 hours before Black Friday & Cyber Monday. the other variant will be announcing the ongoing deals on your products for the biggest weekend for E-commerce. Here's an example we made for you:

It's time to get started with the BFCM banner

Step 1 - Duplicating your current theme

In order to prepare for BFCM, we are going to create 2 additional theme variants. Head in the themes section and select Actions > Duplicate. Your duplicates will appear in the Theme library on Shopify! Make sure you do this twice so there's a "before Black Friday" variant as well as one "during Black Friday" season itself (the best time).

Step 2 - Creating your promotion banner

In order to set up your banner, we highly recommend using the Call To Action section. The goal of this promotion is twofold: announce incoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals upcoming but also promote live ones! 

When it comes to finding images or visuals for your BFCM banner, make sure you use the tools at your disposal. In this case, free stock photos can be helpful and there is an abundance of those available but here's a few:

• https://www.freepik.com/
• https://www.pexels.com/
• https://unsplash.com/

Step 2.1 - Add a Call to Action section

Step 2.2 - Customize your add to cart CTA

Here are the elements we opted for the Banner:

• A large header to announce clearly what's coming to your Shopify store.
• An attractive visual to represent Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday.
• One of the greatest features of Booster Theme, the Countdown Timer. We recommend adding one to your Before and During BFCM banner to let them know the time left for the sales. Building up in excitement for your customers.

Step 3 - Publishing the BFCM theme variants

Make sure to publish your "before Black Friday" theme 24-48 hours before Black Friday. When Black Friday goes live, don't forget to publish the "during Black Friday" variant.

Step 4 - Redo this whole process for the Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday follows Black Friday, so make sure you have your Cyber Monday banner prepared as well. Simply redo the same process, but this time adapt it to the Cyber Monday event.

Bonus-tip: Add the Free shipping bar [APP]

The free shipping bar is a great way to increase the average order value of your customers. When they see that you're offering free shipping, people will be more inclined towards purchasing other items from your store and adding them to their carts! It also helps during BFCM since we all want our purchases now instead of later when it might cost us extra money. 

The best location for this app is on the Bottom Bar, this way customers can keep track of their progress toward the free shipping easily and from any page.

Conclusion

Optimizing your Shopify theme for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals is a great way to increase sales. This BFCM banner strategy is easy to set up, but still really effective. Make sure to start on time and test different strategies to see what works best for your audience, there is always room for optimization! Keep improving and best of lucks with your BFCM weekend!