If you missed out on our October 25th meetup, we unfortunately can’t offer you any of the free food and open bar we had (which we always have!), but we can give you a small taste of what went down that night in Hoboken.
Around 100 people came to meet, mingle, and learn from our joint e-commerce event with P3 Media; and it was one of our most successful meetups ever! The night was kicked off by Refersion CEO Alex Markov, who introduced the theme of the event: preparing for Black Friday sales.
Retailers know the importance of Black Friday, but many don’t quite know how to optimize their online stores to capitalize on it in the best way. We wanted to give real-world insight into how businesses can get a jump on this prep by sharing the lessons from our panel of experts who’ve been there before.
Richard Emanuel With Parkfield Commerce was first up to give a top-level overview of preparing for the holiday season, talking about Shopify-specific case studies that smaller merchants can learn from. Including:
- The importance of optimizing for mobile traffic today.
- When business do (and should) start their holiday marketing campaigns.
- Best practices for product pages that will convert.
Next up was Brian Ruther and Francis Fanzilli, co-founders of Cole & Coddle who spoke about their personal experience with Black Friday, including:
- The social media strategy that worked.
- Advertising via Facebook, boosting their viral strategy.
- Dealing with sales expectations and fulfillment.
Then we had Daniel Snow, CEO of Social Cadre who did his best to stress the idea that “as much as you think you’re ready for Black Friday, you’re not ready!” His topics included:
- How to react on the fly with extra help on hand.
- Creating stand-alone deals specific to Black Friday.
- And sharing his own mistakes so we could learn from them!
Finally, hitting clean-up was Katherine Greiner, Director of Marketing at BvGrowth. She illuminated us on topics such as:
- Using your best-selling product metrics to predict Black Friday sales.
- How NOT to get overwhelmed maintaining customer support.
- Being intelligent about the discounts and sales you’re offering.
Whew! If it seemed like a lot, it was! Throughout, we held Q & A’s with the panel, addressing many of the queries from the audience. Then, as more food came out, our amazing experts stuck around to speak one-on-one with many of our attendees to really help them with their Black Friday issues.
It was a great success, and if you want to attend our next one, keep an eye on our Meetup page. We have these meetups every quarter and we’d love to see you there for our next shindig on November 29th. Until then, happy Black Friday prepping!
