It’s beginning to look a lot like…the busiest time of year for retailers. You’ve likely been preparing for weeks already for the (hopeful!) onslaught of customers, right? It’s probable that you’re already feeling overwhelmed, and the fun hasn’t even truly begun yet. But what if we told you we have a few secret weapons that’ll make this time of year a little easier for you? Here ya go: the automation tools you need to rock Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
Automation Tools You Need to Rock Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Social Media Scheduler
Social media is imperative, but it’s a total time suck on a good day. Spending time worrying about your social media during the busiest weekend of the year is definitely out of the quesiton. Look into scheduling tools like around.io and social autopilot.
Bulk Label Printing
The goal of Black Friday & Cyber Monday is to get a lot of orders, right? Well, that means a lot of shipments. Shopify knows your time is precious. You definitely need to streamline the process.
Bulk label printing with Shopify will help you rock this holiday season. You can print multiple orders at the same time. So, now you can fulfill several orders in less than 60 minutes! Trust us, when those holiday orders start to pile in, you’ll be thanking the Shopify shipping gods for this automation.
Out of Office Emails
The last thing you need to be worrying about during the craziness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is your email. Whether it’s your personal account letting friends know you’re swamped with work or your business account telling customers you’re busy getting out the orders, an “out of office” email is the way to go!
Be sure to plug your store and your product in your personal ooo emails. For your business emails, you may want to include a link to your FAQ page and encourage your customers to follow along with the craziness on your social channels.
Text Expander
So, let us guess. You find yourself typing out the same messages over and over again. It happens. It seems like the same information has to be shared constantly across emails, social media, text messages and customer inquiries.
Why don’t you do yourself a favor and save some time with text expander. Here’s what you need to do:
- Identify your best replies to common questions, your most-used email replies, and your most-sent social media replies
- Add them as text snippets in TextExpander
- Set a custom keyboard shortcut that will trigger that phrase
Zapier
Okay, this may be our best kept secret. Did you know that with Zapier, you can automate practically anything? This little ninja works its magic to get apps to work together all by yourself. No need to hire a fancy developer for the job.
For Black Friday/Cyber Monday specifically, you should focus on setting up zaps that will eliminate some of the most time-consuming tasks from your to-do list.
Consider creating zaps for:
- thank you messages
- to-do list updating
- social media monitoring
Automated Customer Emails
Shopify has your back when it comes to keeping your store communications running smoothly. You know in order to create an awesome customer experience, you need to keep them looped in to all the things like their purchases, shipping info, etc.
Shopify has built in-customer notification emails for everything from fulfillment updates (like hey! your order shipped!) to those pesky password reset emails. That’s right, Shopify has all of these totally set up for you, but you can customize them however you want.
Need a little help getting your online store ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday? Get in touch! We’re Shopify Experts!