As Black Friday approaches, retail, leisure and travel businesses are preparing for one of the busiest events of the year. In 2023, Black Friday sales reached an estimated £13.3 billion, with an anticipated growth of 7.3% year on year (Citcom). With online sales, bookings and enquiries expected to soar, ensuring that your website is inclusive can be a game-changer, opening the door to more customers, greater loyalty, and enhanced brand reputation.
Inclusivity isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a business necessity. By making your website accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities or backgrounds, you’re setting your business up for success.
Here are 5 ways an inclusive website can help boost your Black Friday sales:
1. Expand Your Audience by Making Your Website Inclusive
An inclusive website means that it meets the needs of people with disabilities, varying abilities, or those who speak English as a second language. Globally, over 1 billion people live with some form of disability (Humanity and Inclusion), and many struggle with websites that aren’t designed with their needs in mind. Simple adjustments such as offering text alternatives for images, providing keyboard navigation, adopting assistive technology and building your website with accessibility in mind can make your business inclusive to people with visual, hearing, or motor impairments. By expanding your audience to include all, you can unlock new revenue streams, particularly during high-traffic events like Black Friday.
2. Build Trust by Supporting Multiple Languages
Black Friday is a global phenomenon! Making your website multilingual is a key step toward inclusivity, as it allows non-English speakers to explore your offers with ease. Supporting multiple languages can reduce friction in the buyer’s journey, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their native language, can easily browse your site and complete purchases. For travel companies, this is particularly important as providing a website in a visitor’s native language can help them feel at home and are more likely to book a trip.
Multilingual support shows you value diverse customers, which helps build trust and foster loyalty. This also enhances your brand’s global reach, making it easier to tap into international markets during the Black Friday rush.
3. Improved Brand Reputation
An inclusive website signals that your brand is socially responsible and committed to serving all customers, regardless of their abilities, backgrounds, or needs. This strengthens your reputation as a brand that values diversity and equality, which resonates with today’s increasingly socially conscious consumers. By making inclusivity a core part of your online experience, especially during highly competitive shopping events like Black Friday, you differentiate yourself as a brand that cares about all customers building goodwill, trust, and long-term loyalty.
4. Boost Customer Loyalty and Trust
Inclusivity is about showing that you value all customers. When people see themselves represented in your website’s language, images, and usability, they feel a stronger connection to your brand. Inclusive websites foster trust and loyalty, as customers appreciate businesses that make the effort to accommodate their needs and preferences.
Statistics show that 84% of consumers agree that a positive experience with a business during Black Friday would encourage them to shop there again (Mintel). Boosting your customer’s loyalty and trust with your brand.
5. Gain a Competitive Edge
During Black Friday, businesses across retail, travel, and leisure are competing for customer attention. An inclusive website can set you apart from competitors who may overlook accessibility and inclusive design. More consumers are choosing brands that align with their values, and inclusivity is a powerful differentiator. A seamless, user-friendly experience, especially for people with disabilities or specific needs, will make your brand stand out, driving positive word-of-mouth, repeat bookings, and loyal customers.
Tools to Help Boost Website Inclusion in Preparation for Black Friday
Recite Me can support retail, leisure and travel businesses of every type on Black Friday with our innovative suite of on-demand accessibility software tools:
Accessibility Checker
The Recite Me Accessibility Checker scans your domains, running 396 separate WCAG-based scans to identify non-compliance features. The user-friendly dashboard provides an overview of errors and where each is located on your site, then generates a prioritised fix queue for what to tackle first for the best results. You can track your progress in real time using custom reports that help identify and plan your next accessibility remediation actions.
Run a free check or book a demo today!
Assistive Toolbar
The Recite Me Assistive Toolbar allows website visitors to customise pages for ease of navigation and comprehension. Suitable for site visitors with various needs and preferences due to sight loss, cognitive impairments, neurodivergent traits, and physical disabilities, users can:
- Have text read aloud using the built-in screen reader.
- Download and save any written web content as an audio file.
- Choose the exact colour contrast between the text and background.
- Change the font type and size.
- Strip away graphics to remove visual distractions.
- Zoom in on any part of a webpage.
- Use the built-in spell-checker and a fully integrated dictionary and thesaurus.
- Access text-to-speech in 65 languages and on-page translation in over 100 languages.
Book a demo today to try it for yourself and learn more.
Georgina Colman, Founder of Purpl Discounts Store told us, “On Black Friday we generally see an increase in website traffic as shoppers search for the best deals. With the Recite Me toolbar on our website, we can support all Black Friday customers regardless of abilities. This results in a decrease in customer service requests during this busy period and helps to improve our brand reputation.”
Online Accessibility and Inclusion Toolkit
This year we published our Digital Inclusion Toolkit that was developed to help businesses make a real difference to the lives of the millions of people around the world who encounter online barriers. The 40 page document provides practical advice covering the complete landscape of online accessibility from how to write an accessibility statement to our top tips for providing an inclusive recruitment journey.
