Prepare your online store for BFCM success: Expert tips from Riess Group

Miriam Saslove | Last updated on September 30, 2024 | 3 minute read

With Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) quickly approaching, we’re wasting no time in sharing the next installment of our blog series! Each post includes valuable tips and tricks to help eCommerce merchants prepare for the most popular shopping weekend of the year—a prime opportunity to boost your organization’s revenue, brand awareness, and more!

At Rewind, we’re proud to work alongside agency partners who share our vision and support our mission to help eCommerce merchants protect their store data and grow their business. Partners always bring a wealth of knowledge based on real-life experiences—from strong email marketing campaigns to major data loss incidents, they’ve seen it all! That’s why we’re so excited to share their expertise in the weeks leading up to BFCM.

In the first installment of our Q&A series, we chatted with Mike Riess. He’s the owner of Riess Group, a premier Shopify Plus agency that has been designing and building online stores for some of Shopify’s top brands since 2007. 

Read on for his insights!

What are your top three tips for eCommerce merchants who are preparing for BFCM?

1. Don’t make customers think: If customers are confused or have to do too much math to understand what the offer is, it will hurt your conversion. If you have a great offer you’re sending by email saying 40% off this hat, show the final price after savings in the email. 

 2. Keep your offers consistent: Someone who sees an offer on a Facebook ad should see that same offer, not a different one, when they get to your site. Avoid running too many different promotions at once if you want to make the biggest impact. 

 3. Finish changing your site and testing it well in advance: Make it a hard rule that anything that’s planned to be done to your site must be completed and tested at least a week prior to BFCM; don’t try to make big changes or set up complex promos without enough time to properly test them. 

Why is it important to implement a strong backup and recovery strategy ahead of BFCM?

If something happens and you need to recover quickly, that’s a bad time to realize you should have had backups for your online store in place. Every minute counts when you’re recovering from an issue!

What are some of the most common errors you’ve seen that led to data loss for eCommerce merchants?

9 times out of 10, bulk data imports are the cause of data loss. It can sometimes take days to reconstruct the data manually if a backup and recovery solution isn’t in place. That’s why it’s integral for merchants to back up their online store data so that when they run into any issues, they can quickly recover in a matter of minutes.

How can merchants maximize their email marketing efforts during BFCM and the holiday season?

Build a great flow in Klaviyo and do A/B testing to make sure your subject line is optimized, your content is strong, and that you pair your email efforts with SMS when the customer doesn’t open the email or doesn’t finish their purchase.

Prepare your online store for BFCM

You have enough to worry about leading up to BFCM—don’t let data backups be an added stress on your to-do list.

Rewind’s automated daily backups help protect what matters to you, from a single email campaign to an entire store. Whether it’s a software conflict, malicious attack, or an innocent mistake, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that you can recover your data in minutes.

For more info about how data backups can be your secret weapon this BFCM, don’t miss the first installment of our BFCM blog series! More to come next week…


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Miriam Saslove
Miriam Saslove is a chronically online storyteller based in Montreal. She loves books, concerts, coffee, and helping brands foster engagement and awareness through impactful multi-channel content. Also puns.