BFCM 2024 Ultimate Guide: What You Should Know and How to Prepare

Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the year’s biggest shopping events, are fast approaching. With shoppers eager to spend, and an abundance of mega sales in both physical and online stores, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to connect with customers, and boost your business.

In this article, we’ll cover all the essential information you need to know to prepare for the busy shopping days. We’ll explain the differences between Black Friday and Cyber Monday – including when they start and how long they last. Additionally, we’ll provide tips on how to get ready for them effectively and stress-free.

BFCM meaning: introduction to BFCM 2024

So, what is BFCM? BFCM stands for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two most popular shopping events of the year. BFCM is highly anticipated by customers because of the major discounts, sales, and special promotions in both physical and online stores. For businesses, BFCM offers a great opportunity to boost sales, get new customers, and clear inventory.

To maximize sales, though, you need to prepare well in advance. Most businesses typically offer attractive deals and savings for both new and loyal customers, so the competition is quite extreme.

Black Friday vs Cyber Monday: understanding the differences

Even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are often referred to collectively given their major discounts, they are two separate events with distinct differences. Each has a different focus, so let’s take a closer look at them individually.

Black Friday overview

Historically, Black Friday originated in the United States in the 60s. Initially, it was focused around brick-and-mortar stores, and buyers would line up early in the morning to get their desired purchase and deal.

Today, Black Friday officially marks the start of the holiday shopping season, with alluring offers on products varying from electronics to cosmetics and clothing. It takes place on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. In 2024, Black Friday falls on November 29.

Cyber Monday overview

Cyber Monday was created much later, in 2005, by the US National Retail Federation as a counterpoint to the Black Friday in-store discounts. The idea was to entice people to shop online from the convenience of their homes, avoiding the Black Friday shopping crowds and chaos. That’s why Cyber Monday offers are exclusively online.

Traditionally, Cyber Monday takes place the Monday after Thanksgiving, which in 2024, is December 2. On Cyber Monday, the discounted products are mainly electronics, software, tech gadgets, and digital products, but in recent years the offerings extend to fashion and other goods as well.

BFCM weekend – how are the two events connected?

In recent years, as the popularity of both events has grown, they have evolved into an extended four-day shopping event known as BFCM weekend. Some businesses even stretch their discounts to last an entire week. In most cases, however, sales and special offers begin on Black Friday, continue through the weekend, and culminate with Cyber Monday.

As online shopping continues to rise, the lines between Black Friday and Cyber Monday are blurring more and more. Many businesses now offer online deals during Black Friday, and some even announce their promotions well in advance of the actual date. This trend is beneficial not only for traditional retailers but also for online business owners.

How to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Given the expected intense competition, eager customers, heavy Black Friday web traffic, and increased workload, preparing for BFCM 2024 is a must for businesses of all sizes and types. Whether you manage a physical store, an e-commerce business, or just a website featuring products or services, follow the essential steps and tips we’ve described below to ensure peace of mind in this busy period.

1. Plan your goals and steps in advance

Before anything else, take time to clearly define what you want to achieve with your BFCM strategy and understand who your target audience would be. This will make it much easier to determine the focus of your BFCM sale. List what your top goals are, for example:

• Maximizing sales on specific products, new collections, or products with limited quantities
• Promoting digital products or services (online courses, consultations, etc.)
• Providing special offers on subscription-based services
• Attracting and acquiring new customers
• Enhancing customer loyalty
• Boosting brand awareness or website traffic
• Building your email subscription list 
• Clearing out discontinued items or excess inventory 

Note that you might have several goals and that’s perfectly fine.

2. Define your offers and sales for BFCM 2024

Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to determine what specific products, offers, or deals you’ll provide. When making these decisions, keep your goals in mind, consider your current capabilities, and profit margins.

For physical product sellers, this involves inventory planning, while for service providers and creators of digital products, it means considering your capacity to deliver your digital goods. Thoroughly consider whether you will offer discounts on specific products or services only – probably using them as doorbusters – or instead have all-inclusive promotions.

3. Prepare your resources and stock up on inventory

Next, ensure you are well-prepared to meet the expected surge in demand and orders during the BFCM weekend. For physical-product merchants, this requires inventory planning: review your sales and inventory reports, analyze them to predict how much stock you’ll need, and contact suppliers to confirm that you will have sufficient quantities of your discounted products to fulfill orders.

For creators of digital products and service-based businesses, the preparation process might involve creating additional content or digital products in advance, updating existing ones, creating bundled offers, ensuring your site can handle the traffic, etc.

4. Update your content, descriptions, and design

Once you’ve taken care of your inventory, take time to review your website content and design. Update any outdated information, including sales pages, product descriptions, menus, categories, and anything else that needs a refresh. Ensure your website content is compelling and valuable to your audience.

Before BFCM 2024, update product prices that will go on sale. Prepare descriptions, sales announcements, offers, homepage banners, and other promotional graphics that you will need for your website, social media, or newsletters. Have everything ready well before the BFCM weekend so you can make any necessary changes and be prepared to upload them on time.

5. Check & optimize your site speed for the Black Friday web traffic

Another crucial step when preparing your website for BFCM is optimizing its speed and ensuring it can handle the expected high traffic so that this doesn’t cost you sales and annoyed website visitors.

• Check current website speed: Ensure your website loads in less than 2 seconds, as sites that need more time to load are typically considered slow and risk driving visitors away. You can test your site speed with various online tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, and if you’re on WordPress, you can use our Speed Optimizer plugin, which, besides speed testing, will also equip you with all the essential optimization tools seamlessly.
• Make sure you’re hosted on a high-speed infrastructure: Having a reliable web host that provides you with a fast hosting infrastructure is extremely important for optimal performance. It directly influences critical factors such as server performance, the way traffic is managed and allocated (especially important when you expect huge traffic spikes during events like BFCM), network latency, caching implementation, CDN systems, and much more.
• Assess if your website can handle the Black Friday web traffic: Prior to BFCM, it’s useful to review your website’s daily resource usage, such as CPU seconds and program executions. Also, analyze your website traffic stats and try to find information for previous periods when you’ve had sales or special offers. In doing so, try to estimate if you’ll need more resources and possibly a larger hosting plan in order to prepare your website for the Black Friday traffic.

• Optimize images: There are several simple yet effective ways to optimize your website images and improve their loading speed. First, only use images that are necessary – avoid cluttering your site with unnecessary ones. Reduce image size and ensure they aren’t larger than their display dimensions. Save them in the WebP format, which offers strong compression while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, you can implement lazy-loading, which delays image loading until they’re about to enter the user’s view.
• Implement a content delivery network (CDN): If your website has visitors from different countries and continents, don’t miss using a CDN. It will store cached versions of your site’s content across multiple data centers worldwide, so when a new visitor comes, they will see the cached version from the closest location to them, ensuring optimal performance. As a SiteGround hosting customer, you can enjoy a standard CDN for free with every hosting plan, and for a limited-time only our Premium CDN at 50% OFF, which can significantly boost your website’s speed.
• Use caching: This is another powerful method for improving your website’s loading time by storing copies of its content on the server temporarily. Some web hosting companies offer this service as a built-in solution. At SiteGround, for example, we have SuperCacher, which offers three different layers of caching: NGINX Direct Delivery (for static content), Dynamic Cache (for dynamic content), and Memcached (for object caching). When enabled on top of the static cache, Memcached and Dynamic cache can lead to a website speed boost of up to 5 times!

6. Enhance website security and prevent bad bot traffic

Ensuring website security is just as important as optimizing speed, especially in periods with expected high traffic. If your website gets infected with malware or goes under a DDOS attack, it could go offline, resulting in lost sales and even damaged client trust. Here are some quick and easy tricks that you can do in advance to guarantee your website safety during BFCM. 

• Choose a secure web hosting service: Make sure you’re using a secure hosting provider with robust server infrastructure and solutions, such as DDOS protection, server monitoring systems, and backups. At SiteGround, we’re proud to provide clients with all of those essential features, including even more, such as an AI anti-bot system, Web Application Firewall, as well as the latest and most secure software versions, including the default PHP 8.2 and the latest MySQL 8.
• Keep your software and plugins updated: To avoid making your website vulnerable to attacks, remember to always keep its software, plugins, and themes updated with the latest stable versions.
• Add an SSL certificate: If you haven’t already, installing an SSL certificate is a total must, as it encrypts and secures sensitive website data such as IDs, passwords, credit card numbers. It also verifies your website’s identity and is needed if you want to meet the requirements of search engines that flag unsecured sites.
• Use strong passwords and implement two-factor authentication (2FA): Keep in mind that both you and your users should create strong, complex passwords. Also, add an extra layer of security for your website admin accounts. With 2FA enabled, your login will require one additional step before anybody can access your website admin account, making it much more secure. If you’re on WordPress, don’t skip adding 2FA with just a click using our free Security Optimizer plugin.

7. Prepare your customer support

Once you’ve addressed your website speed and security, it’s time to focus on your support service during BFCM. Providing adequate support to your website visitors is quite important as customers nowadays expect quick responses to their inquiries, especially during heavy-traffic events like BFCM.

Regardless of whether your business has a dedicated support team, adding a visible, clear, and helpful FAQ section is crucial. It can significantly reduce the load on your support team, and improve overall customer experience. Try to give a thorough response to all popular customer questions, including product details, shipping and delivery info, return policies, etc.

For those managing customer support, whether as a dedicated team or if you’re handling it yourself, make sure to increase availability for BFCM-related requests. Consider increasing your support hours or incorporating live chat or AI-driven bots to help you handle routine inquiries.

8. Plan your Black Friday marketing efforts

To make the most out of your BFCM sale, set aside time to think and prepare a well-planned BFCM marketing strategy. The earlier you start building the anticipation, the better the results you can expect. For your marketing strategy, consider focusing on and using the channel that is traditionally most effective for your particular business.

Typically, email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your upcoming BFCM sales. To make your offers more relevant and personalized, segment your email subscriber list for precise targeting. Consider sending teaser emails well in advance of BFCM, which will help you keep your brand top of mind. Here we’ve gathered the most effective practices that you can use to write the best promotional emails.

Your presence on social media is also critical during BFCM, especially on the most popular and effective platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Start generating buzz around your special offers with countdowns, a sneak peek of your top sales, and think about partnering with influencers if you want to reach a specific or wider audience. Don’t miss also using social media ads to further promote your deals with clear, compelling, and urgent ad copy. 

Another powerful way to increase sales and drive traffic to your website during BFCM, is through leveraging blog content. If you have a blog, start writing informative and engaging articles that highlight your BFCM deals and the value of your products or services. 

For maximum impact, consider preparing a series of blog articles leading up to Black Friday with shopping tips, product information, and hacks that could attract potential buyers and build anticipation. Be sure to share each blog article via social media and email to reach a broader audience. To make your BFCM marketing efforts really work, write compelling content, use multiple channels so that you can reach a bigger audience, and take advantage of paid advertising once the sales begin.

Conclusion

The most intense shopping days of the year are coming lightning fast, so start preparing today to make the most out of your sales during BFCM weekend. Set your goals and utilize the tactics that you think will be most effective for your business. We hope BFCM 2024 will be your most profitable sales event yet!

Black Friday & Cyber Monday FAQ

Is Cyber Monday better than Black Friday?

When it comes to the number of sales and which of the two events performs better, this greatly depends on the industry, the type of  business, and customer preferences. If you own a physical store, then Black Friday might bring you better results, as it’s associated with in-store shopping. On the other hand, if your business is solely online, then Cyber Monday might be more advantageous. We’d definitely recommend utilizing both events given that the line distinguishing them has blurred more and more in recent years.

How long does BFCM last?

Traditionally, Black Friday starts in the US on the Friday (November 29) right after Thanksgiving, and lasts a full 24 hours. In recent years, though, most retailers have begun extending the shopping event throughout the weekend up until Cyber Monday, which falls on the following Monday. As for when Cyber Monday ends, most deals will end late Monday night (December 2), but some merchants will extend the deals until Tuesday and beyond.

How to increase sales on Black Friday?

To increase sales on Black Friday, start preparing early and announce your promotions in advance to build anticipation. Advertise them using multiple channels so that you reach a wider audience, and be sure to highlight their value, benefits, and limited quantity. Verify that your website is fast and secure enough to handle the traffic surge and volume of orders. And last but not least, create legitimately attractive discounts and bundles, rather than deceptive ones where prices are raised beforehand and then lowered on Black Friday to appear discounted.