Just like any of your sales channels, you’ll need to optimize your mobile app for the upcoming BFCM if you want to drive more sales for the biggest sales season of the year.
Don’t know where to get started yet? Don’t worry! Here’s a preparation checklist that OneMobile experts have compiled for you.
1. Choose a BFCM-dedicated theme
First thing first, we’d highly recommend using our purposely built BFCM theme– Doorbuster (in case you haven’t). The theme has bold, contrasting colors and is built with UI-UX design and conversion rate best practices in mind.
Instead of dragging and dropping everything from scratch, switching to a theme dedicatedly optimized for BFCM would save you tons of time and effort.
The best part? When you switch to Doorbuster, all your custom designs and styling configurations will be automatically migrated to the new theme, allowing you to immediately pick up where you left off.
2. Prepare a push notification calendar
Did you know that push notifications have a much higher open rate and click-through rate than email messages? Therefore, if you want to drive traffic and sales to your app during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you’ll need a well-thought-out push notification calendar in place.
For example, you can use OneMobile’s push notification scheduling feature to automatically send push notifications to your app users 1 week before BFCM, 3 days before BFCM, Black Friday Eve, Black Friday morning, Black Friday afternoon, etc.
💡Pro tips:
- Use BFCM push notification templates : Our team curated tons of push notification templates for you to choose from, including those for BFCM purposes.
- Personalize your message for different segments : Besides sending out push notifications for all app users, try personalize your push notifications for some “special” segments. For instance:
- Inactive users who haven’t visited your app for 15 days
- The users who visit your products without checkout
- Users who have added products to their wishlist
- What you name and define it!
3. Create a loyalty rewards program for BFCM
According to a recent report, a loyalty and reward program would work much more effectively on mobile apps than on websites. Therefore, if you want to boost your customer retention and drive more sales for the upcoming BFCM, it’s highly recommended that you integrate a loyalty program to your mobile app.
You can use OneLoyalty– an omnichannel loyalty app that works seamlessly across channels: your Shopify store, Shopify POS, and most importantly, mobile apps built with OneMobile.
🔎 Quick fact: OneLoyalty is a solution developed by the same talents who developed OneMobile. So, we make sure OneLoyalty works with OneMobile more seamlessly than any other loyalty solutions on the Shopify App Store.
A few ideas on how to rock BFCM with your loyalty program:
- Offer your customers more points for shopping during BFCM
- Allow your customers to check in daily to earn points
- Gamify your loyalty program with a spinning wheel
4. Create excitement with a countdown timer
Consider adding a countdown timer on your app’s home screen and product screen to create a sense of urgency, urging your customers to make more impulse purchases.
Simply search for Event countdown timer black, drag it onto your home screen, and product screens, and configure your countdown timer settings (when do you want it to start counting down and for how long)
Ideally, we’d recommend putting the countdown timer at the top of your screens to trigger your app users’ curiosity.
5. Leverage sales elements
Besides countdown timers, you can try to add several sales-driven elements to your app. Here are some other sale-driven elements you might want to add to your mobile app to improve its conversion rate:
6. Build a BFCM-exclusive mobile screen
Another tip on how to prepare your mobile app for BFCM is to build a dedicated screen featuring your BFCM deals. You can use this screen to feature your time-limited discounts, limited editions or whatever promotions you have in mind.
💡Pro tip: After creating a dedicated BFCM screen, we recommend setting this screen as the default home screen so when customers open your app, your hot deals will be the first things they see.
7. Display your BFCM products in different layouts
Don’t forget to put your products front and center with OneMobile’s product blocks. However, featuring your products in the same layout from “top to toe” might bore out your customers. Therefore, we suggest differentiating your BFCM products with something different.
Just search for “product” or “collection” and you’ll see tons of ready-made product blocks in our block inventory.
8. Recommend trending searches on your search screen
One mistake we noticed that OneMobile clients usually make is not making the best out of your search screen. What we actually mean by that is, that when your customers make a typo or search for a product that doesn’t exist, many would show them a “No products” result.
While this is fine– why don’t you optimize your search screen to increase your product visibility and time spent on your app?
💡Our idea: Add trending search phrases + Recently viewed products below the search result section. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for, they can explore your other popular offerings or jump right back into the products they are likely interested in.
9. Optimize all screens
If you want to truly prepare your mobile app for BFCM, you need to optimize all your existing screens, not just home screens or product screens.
Like in the example above, the search screen is usually neglected by many merchants even when this is still a very important touchpoint between you and your customers.
Hence, make sure that you optimize all your screens, including:
- Home screen
- Product detail screens
- Cart screens: Cart screen with items & Empty cart
- Search screens: Search default, Search results, No search result
- Customer account screen
- Any custom screen you created
10. Localize your mobile app
And last but not least. If you do international selling or plan to expand your business globally, we’d highly suggest localizing your mobile app for the upcoming BFCM.
This is because BFCM is now not just an American thing. In recent years, the BFCM concept has spread worldwide, with various countries adopting “Black Friday” sales or creating similar events tailored to their local customs.
So, if you want to drive more sales from your international shoppers, you should definitely localize your mobile app as well. And for that, we’d highly recommend Transcy to instantly translate your app into 135 languages and 168 currencies.
Good luck with your mobile app customization!
If you want to unleash your mobile app’s full sales potential for the upcoming BFCM, you need to start optimizing your mobile app right from this moment. And for that, we hope this blog post can give you some ideas on how to turn your mobile app into a sale magnet.
Alexandre Le
Content Specialist
“I'm Alexandre Le - a marketer with 5+ years of hands-on experience in the eCommerce industry. I want to use my expertise and personal perspectives to produce insightful blog posts that help online store owners to launch, run, and scale up their businesses successfully.”
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