The family is gathered, the turkey is roasting, there’s a crisp chill in the air . and you’re sitting at your desk panicking about all the things that could go wrong with your Black Friday sale. The best way to deal with that overwhelmed sensation? A checklist. We put together 20 must-follow tips in the only Black Friday, Cyber Monday checklist you’ll need for ecommerce holiday success. 2022 Black Friday Checklist We made this list, checked it twice. Now it’s time for you to take all of our advice . 1. Kill Your Usual Onsite Offers Scour your pop-ups, banners, and visual merchandising apps (including personalization) then kill anything that’s not related to your holiday offer. If you’re updating manually on Black Friday, make a list and have someone not on your team check it twice. In the below examples, Cubcoats’ 50% BFCM offer is GREAT . but the popup brings your attention to the standard 10% discount. Similarly, Fulton’s BFCM BOGO deal is only visible in the small top-bar, whereas the evergreen 10% off popup steals the screen. Big brands and DTC darlings aren’t immune to cross-offer mistakes either. Even Ruggable confused its visitors with competing 15% and 10% offers. 2. Test Various Browsers & Devices If you thought Apple was the bane of your advertising existence, just wait ‘til iOS devices start messing up your text and visuals onsite. Or worse, your pop-up and cart-to-checkout process. Go incognito on three different mobile OSs the whole way through. And if you’re not sure where to start, check your site’s analytics to understand your most used traffic sources. 3. Set Up Gift Cards Catch indecisive gifters with a product everyone loves — gift cards. Bonus points: use a platform that automatically adds the gift card option to sold-out products. 🤑 4. Optimize Shipping Rates Nothing kills conversion rates like bad shipping-rate rules. In particular, test any new products or bundles synced to your fulfillment as well as shipping-related SKUs (like a carbon-offset fee). Free shipping can tip the scales, especially in a competitive marketplace, for both conversion rate and AOV. 5. Edit Email & SMS Flows Turn off — or disable through Smart Sending — evergreen sequences, especially your welcome series. If your abandonment series has editable text, remove any incentives and add holiday shopping language instead. EXTRA POINTS: Update your transactional emails with custom holiday templates and a “hidden” offer 🎁 6. Use Plain Text Emails For your final sends on Black Friday and Cyber Monday . make them simple, clear, and urgent: “This [deal] ends at [specific time or countdown]. Click here for [holiday lander or best-selling collection].” 7. Stagger SMS texts Stagger your texts so they aren’t sent at the same time for redundancy. Ensure the copy isn’t repetitive from one SMS to the next since (unlike emails) they display in a thread. Lastly, using the format “X hours left” works like gangbusters. 8. Get Your Ads Approved Load and pause all your Black Friday ads to get them approved now ⏰ like . right now. This goes for social as well as your shopping promotions in Google Merchant Center. 9. Keep Your Evergreen Ads On Unless they feature a lower-than-your-holiday-sale discount or offer, leave your evergreen campaigns on. Evergreen ads are often, surprisingly, the best-performing ads during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. 10. Holiday-ify Your Evergreen Ads Add holiday-offer-only sales copy — description, headline, etc. — to top-performing evergreen creative for additional lift! 11. Switch to Lifetime Budget Campaigns Duplicate your campaigns and swap the budgets from daily to lifetime. Leave the duplicate campaigns turned off. If you see massive success with any one particular campaign, you’ll be able to turn on those duplicates without disturbing your current performers. Scale. Scale. Scale. 12. Check Your Payment Methods Few things crush Black Friday excitement like a declined credit card . in your ad account 🤬 Clear your present b...