The targets you need to set before black Friday

Estimated read time: 2 Minutes

In our previous insight on how you can be ready for Black Friday 2020 we outlined one of the key steps to ensure you will have a successful Black Friday is to set your targets early. Those targets should be aligned to the business vision. This Insight goes more in depth into their importance and how to leverage them.

Set your vision early

It's important to set your vision and ambition early, this will define your targets and goals for Black Friday. It should be a simple statement like these:

“I want to meet peak volumes with a user experience comparable to my competitors”

“I want to meet peak volumes with a user experience that doesn’t impact conversion rate”

Define your targets based on your vision

A good target statement might look like this: "We should process X orders per hour with a page load time of Y seconds or less". But how do you define what your Y and X number should be?

The way you define Y is based on your business' vision:

1. If you don't want to leave any money on the table, compare the conversion rates with the page load time. From previous engagements, we know the rate tends to drop anywhere between 2% to 8% for each additional seconds delay.
2. If you want to be as good or better than your competitors, benchmark them. Analyse the load time of key pages from your competitors website and identify at what load time you can provide an advantage.

Now that you have Y, how do you define X? By looking at the sales and marketing forecasts. Setting your targets early will help you align the business and IT teams from your organisation.

Measure your targets on a regular basis

Once you have X and Y, your target statement would look like "We should process 6K orders per hour with a page load time of 2 seconds or less".

Now it's the time to start working towards meeting your target. This involves getting your teams aligned to the goals and how you measure them, identifying bottlenecks, speed improvements and technical constraints, and agreeing on prioritising the fixes that will improve them.

Start preparing now!

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