BFCM 2022 Ecommerce Guide: Prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday Giveaways & Holiday Sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two biggest sales of the year. With BFCM 2022 promotions and social media contests, ecommerce brands and online retailers can maximize their holiday sales.

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Start planning BFCM 2022 ecommerce marketing including Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022 deals and discounts if you haven’t already started. The holiday season is just about here and ecommerce brands and online retailers have already leaked some Black Friday discounts and offers in order to entice shoppers.

If you’re running a Black Friday Cyber Monday sweepstakes, giveaway, or contest alongside your Black Friday deals, start here. While the majority of 2022 Black Friday Cyber Monday marketing advice focuses on planning your BFCM marketing strategy, customer experience matters more.

For ecommerce brands looking to deliver successful BFCM giveaways and Black Friday Cyber Monday deals, the backend is what counts. From cybersecurity to performance and scalability, Black Friday promotions for ecommerce at scale are driven by martech.

BFCM 2022 Ecommerce Giveaway Guide: Prepare for Holiday Sales

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bfcm 2022 ecommerce guide prepare for black friday cyber monday giveaways and holiday sales blog post title

Read on to learn how to prepare for 2022 Black Friday ecommerce sales, your social media contest, instant win, 2022 Black Friday Cyber Monday deals and discounts, and BFCM 2022 SMS sweepstakes and text marketing campaigns. You also need to start early to find the best vendors to execute your promotions. Don’t settle for a regular holiday sales season when your online store could have record-breaking sales in 2022!

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IN THIS ARTICLE:

  • How do ecommerce stores manage security on Black Friday?
  • When should brand start planning for Black Friday?
  • How do giveaway platforms help brands prepare for BFCM 2022?

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Prepare Your BFCM 2022 Ecommerce Store to Maximize Holiday Sales

For retailers this year, unique BFCM contest ideas and 2022 Black Friday Cyber Monday sales are just the start. There are 4 weekends between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas in 2022. This means that there are many opportunities to keep the holiday excitement going after your Black Friday Cyber Monday deals and discounts. Take advantage of holiday promotions that consumers love. Ecommerce brands should offer even holiday instant win and giveaway promotions until the end of the year.

Black Friday is the biggest opportunity of the year for ecommerce stores and online retailers. A retailer’s goal should be to make sure all of the extra inventory gets sold. BFCM contest ideas help maximize all of the buzz and traffic that brands get on Black Friday. Kicking off the holiday selling season with Black Friday is worth the effort, but it does take a significant amount of planning.

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Scalability: Prepare Your BFCM 2022 Ecommerce Sweepstakes & Contests

Scalability is a core tenant of sweepstakes martech tool selection. In designing a sweepstakes or contest to deliver a seamless experience to 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 participants requires much more than secure forms and giveaway apps. It also requires that the sweepstakes platform be able to adapt the hardware that will accommodate the traffic spikes that occur on Black Friday Cyber Monday.

» MORE:   Sweepstakes Basics: What Marketers Need to Know About Sweepstakes Winners

Scalability ensures that your BFCM promotions deliver a seamless user experience. By building a flexible infrastructure, you can ensure that your ecommerce operations can manage the increased sales volume and traffic spikes typical of holiday sales. Having a sweepstakes martech stack that can adapted to various promotions throughout the year for recurring giveaway campaigns should be a vital design goal for your sweepstakes company and marketing teams.

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Prepare Your Ecommerce Store for Holiday Traffic Spikes During Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022

In the past 3 years, more consumers have been shopping online. This year, BFCM is expected to attract more online shoppers than ever before. While your holiday traffic spikes may result as a result of increased organic traffic. The likelihood is that outside of your ecommerce website, the majority of this Black Friday Cyber Monday ecommerce traffic is going to come from the BFCM social media contests and giveaways that you run.

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Prepare for BFCM 2022 Ecommerce ROI: Run a Black Friday Giveaway Now

However, you have only a limited window of time to make those sales with Thanksgiving weekend lasting from Thanksgiving on November 25 through November 28, 2022 Cyber Monday. This year Black Friday is November 26, 2022. So if you want to maximize the attention that all of your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions get, spend money on paid advertising.

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Use Social Advertising for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022 Sales & Giveaway Participants

Digital advertising campaigns are the best way to get your ad to the #1 spot in Google, above the page 1 organic search results. With social advertising, paid advertising through Google Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, and TikTok Ads, will drive even more participants to your contest or BFCM sweepstakes so that you can nurture the leads and bring them into your sales funnels.

Using paid advertising to drive traffic to a holiday sweepstakes or contest is much more effective to attract social media followers turned to new customers. This is because on Black Friday Cyber Monday every retailer will compete on the basis of having the best holiday deals and discounts of 2022.

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Prepare for BFCM 2022 Contests & Sweepstakes Administration Tips

To run Black Friday Cyber Monday sweepstakes effectively, you need sweepstakes administration. Offering a free promotion both fans and existing customers can participate in will offer an exciting opportunity for consumers to engage with your brand. Furthermore, a BFCM sweepstakes or social media contest provides a rare opportunity to attract new social media followers, increase brand awareness, and boost Black Friday sales at the same time.

Work with a sweepstakes company that provides a sweepstakes administration services and a sweepstakes platform to manage incoming participants. A sweepstakes administrator is how you get access to the tools that you need to effectively manage web traffic on Black Friday Cyber Monday ensuring that your BFCM sweepstakes delivers a seamless customer experience.

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Performance: Assess BFCM Contest & Online Store Website Speed

When traffic spikes happen during holiday sweepstakes and contests on top of the shoppers looking for Black Friday Cyber Monday discounts, you don’t want your ecommerce site or sweepstakes web entry form to suffer crashes (like these top retailer sites did) because it puts you at risk of losing participants, customers, and sales. A sweepstakes administrator will work with you to ensure that your website developer and marketing agency has designed your sites to accommodate the extra visitors.

Don’t be caught off guard by a heavy volume of Black Friday Cyber Monday website traffic. The best brands that will win with consumers on BFCM deals 2022 are those that can not only handle the increased traffic but maintain a positive online reputation when it comes to sweepstakes participant experience, prize delivery, Black Friday Cyber Monday deal availability.

» MORE:   What Are the Types of Sweepstakes and Contests?

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For BFCM Website Speed Optimization in 2022: Use a Contest or Sweepstakes Platform

Good sweepstakes website performance means that all of the animations, text, videos and other UX elements are delivered seamlessly with pages that load within two seconds. These pages needs to have the best conversion rates to ensure that your maximize the visitor traffic that your giveaway marketing will deliver to the page.

A sweepstakes platform will have optimized pages that are configured to your needs. A sweepstakes administrator can advise you on the KPIs to track during your campaign that are associated with website speed and conversion rate optimization.

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In 2021, ecommerce sales topped $10 billion, marking the biggest Cyber Monday shopping day ever recorded. This year, the volume of sales is expected to be even bigger so prepare with proper website speed optimization. Use a sweepstakes or contest platform, analytics tools, and make sure that your promotion is being carefully monitored by both your sweepstakes administration and marketing teams so that you have real-time visibility into the performance and reliability of your campaign.

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What Giveaway Platforms Do to Prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday Contests for 2022

A giveaway platform will deliver the best performance and conversion rate, which is why sweepstakes and contests that are hosted on scalable contest platforms deliver superior performance over in-house online sweepstakes websites or those hosted directly on the brand’s ecommerce site.

Furthermore, with Black Friday Cyber Monday sales flowing through your online store, it’s better to direct those giveaway participants to another site so that it doesn’t impact the UX of your ecommerce website. In fact, studies have found that even a 0.1-second improvement in website site speed translates to as much as a 10.1% increase in CTR.

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Online Fraud Detection and Cybersecurity: Prepare Your BFCM 2022 Ecommerce Giveaways or Deals Campaigns

Black Friday Cyber Monday sales attract ecommerce cybercriminals who see it as a prime opportunity to steal personal and financial data. With the goal being to extract as much valuable private and financial data as possible, an analysis by Imperva Research found that bots were responsible for 57% of all cyber attacks impacting ecommerce websites.

In 2021, retailers lost more than $20 billion to ecommerce fraud worldwide. Credit card frauds, unauthorized transactions, fake entries, fake return and refund requests are some of the most common instances of financial fraud on Black Friday and during the holiday season for ecommerce. Proper ecommerce security will help mitigate the legal risks that come with running giveaways during high volume holiday season sales days.

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Black Friday Cyber Monday Ecommerce Security Checklist

Preparing your ecommerce brand, online store and giveaway promo campaigns for Black Friday and the holidays now will allow you to review and update your ecommerce security and BFCM backup plans before it becomes necessary to use them.

Make sure that you follow these general best practices for cybersecurity, during your Black Friday ecommerce sales, namely:

  • Regular patches and updates, data backups, internal ecommerce security best practices
  • SSL encryption all pages and extra security for checkout, sweepstakes entry pages that collect personally identifiable information (PII)
  • Upgrading to digital asset management tools for managing user-generated content (UGC) permissions
  • Make sure your giveaway plugin or sweepstakes platform secures sweepstakes entry forms against common web form security threats, namely cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, customer data breaches, cross-site request forgery, SQLi attacks
  • CAPTCHA, 2FA on login pages, eligibility and age verification on entry forms
  • Geolocation, spam filter tools to block spam giveaway entries
  • Leverage AI systems for fraud detection, anti-malware, and vulnerability identification
  • Firewall, threat detection & monitoring tools
  • Strong user names and passwords
  • Keep transactions secure with new payment trends, such as mobile wallets, mobile payments, and contactless card payments
  • Payment gateways that are fully compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and have conducted audits for standardization (ISO 27001)
  • Make sure that your ecommerce store provider and giveaway app offer the DDos protection of Cloudfare and other content delivery networks (CDN)
  • Physical security protections for prize fulfillment and inventory management, prize indemnity insurance
  • Train consumers on how to avoid social engineering attacks (e.g. suspicious emails designed to trick users into phishing traps)
» MORE:   Sweepstakes Administration Questions for Marketers

The best way to avoid issues is to make sure that you have industry-leading fraud prevention, identity theft protection, and a martech stack consisting of vulnerability-free tools to help prepare your ecommerce website’s security for increased traffic for Black Friday and the entire holiday seasonal sales rush.

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Ecommerce Platforms Help Retailers Prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday

If you are running a contest for your Small Business Saturday promotion, a contest or sweepstakes plugin that can connect with a secure ecommerce store platform, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or Squarespace, is highly recommended. Retailers may consider this option for Black Friday ecommerce popup shops and temporary online spaces for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022 promotions through Thanksgiving week or Thanksgiving weekend.

By making sure that your giveaway promotion and ecommerce website is protected, you can ensure that customer data is secure, increase the legitimacy of your ecommerce website, and help mitigate the legal risks that arise from storing the PPI of your customers and giveaway participants.

Many giveaway platforms run on solutions such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, as well as, specialized web hosts for scalable giveaway campaign and ecommerce store functionality.

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Running a Black Friday Cyber Monday Sweepstakes? Hire the Right Team

If you want to build your own contest and sweepstakes promotions using more customizable tools, make sure that you still get help from a sweepstakes administrator and sweepstakes attorney in drafting your Official Rules, designing your contest strategy, and for advice on how to prepare an ecommerce site for the BFCM 2022 heavy volume traffic, Thanksgiving weekend shoppers, while delivering comprehensive cyber security and fraud protection.

Sweepsify can help you plan how you will handle your backup plan for your sweepstakes, contest, and other giveaway promotions by connecting you with top vendors. Prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022 to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

Finally, try this 2022 update how to prepare for BFCM checklist:

  • Run tests and generate reports of each of your ecommerce site pages, giveaway web entry forms, SMS shortcodes and entry workflows
  • Make sure that you have stocked the necessary inventory, can set products, services, discounts and deals live at the right times
  • Make sure that your website navigation, Official Rules, and contest entry pages, and opt-in pages are easily accessible so that consumers can find everything that they need
  • Make sure that you have complied with all sweepstakes, contest or giveaway promotion legal requirements
  • Make sure both you and the sweepstakes administration, sales, and marketing teams all have backup plans in place for anything that might go wrong

Managing your ecommerce and online sweepstakes promotions for your retail brand is just the start as most sweepstakes, contests, and giveaway campaign during Black Friday Cyber Monday have offline elements. This year, retailers estimate that in-store sales will see a boost with retail foot traffic expected to rise 34.4% this year during BFCM 2022.

Once your Black Friday website, inventory, entry forms and giveaway campaigns are ready for the increased traffic during the 2022 holiday season sales, you can start your sweepstakes marketing. Get to work and good luck because Black Friday is almost here! 🥇

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