If you ask a random passer-by for the most profitable day of the year, he will most probably name Black Friday in a split second. Up until recently, it was mainly an American tradition, but in the age of global village and universal access to information, such opportunity to increase the income a little bit more will seldom vanquish in a “thin air” of the World Wide Web whether it is among customers or retailers. Shortly speaking – we want to buy things at bargain prices, and sellers want to increase profits.
Black Friday is a Friday right after Thanksgiving, which is officially the opening of the Christmas shopping season. It is an opportunity to purchase many items (including clothes and electronics) at very attractive prices. Shopping often extends the opening hours for the one day a year to serve a large number of customers that scatter throughout the day.
As many other shopping behaviors, Black Friday related madness moves into the net. This also applies to the relatively new Cyber Monday (the name was created in 2005 – this is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, during which the online stores organize huge sales). Black Friday has conquered e-shops and is made itself a home in this new environment. What’s more, it also goes well with the mobile channel.
A Fistful of Stats
As marketing automation experts and online behavioral analysts, we’ve decided to take look at ecommerces Black Friday performance. Since 80% of our customers are B2C companies and online stores we have collected some interesting statistics for the last year:
First – Email Marketing
On this day, our system sent a total of 15 million messages for our customers
The average Open Rate of these messages was 17.92%
The average CTR was 4.36%
Even though the numbers do not seem to be humongous, for comparison, we provide statistics from the normal Friday:
Average OR: 14.30%
Average CTR: 3.22%
This results in an OR increase of 22.45% compared to the average day and a CTR increase of 35.71%!
Second – Sales
Black Friday ended with 270,000 purchases – a 35% increase compared to the regular Friday.
The average value of this purchase, compared with the usual Friday increased by almost three times.
A Few Conclusions
The first suggestion is that through this one day ecommerce solidly climbs up. Every business owner, seller, or marketer should be aware of how much Black Friday magic can do.
A well-designed and precisely targeted campaign can significantly increase already increased due to the mass Friday’s madness gains.
What is more, on this particular day, not only the volume of transactions made, but also their value grow significantly. To set realistic goals and plan a campaign based on specific data, one has to perform the qualitative and quantitative behavioral and transactional analysis. The RFM panel is used to analyze this type of data. Combined with the Digital Body Language analysis, it is a powerful tool to help you use predictive marketing and maximize the value of each customer over time.
It is also important to think about integrating several communication channels – in the end, the purchase journey often leads through all available channels – so do not neglect any of them!
How to Prepare my Ecommerce for Black Friday & Cyber Monday?
This year Black Friday falls on the 24th and Cyber Monday on November 27th. Prepare yourself for the upcoming madness.
Website marketing
Prepare your website for high traffic and automate as many processes as possible. First of all, make sure that each visitor sees exactly these discounted products that interest them. Use dynamic content – pop-ups and recommendation frames, which based on prior behavior will pick up products tailored to the visitor’s needs and interests.
Also, remember about personalized banners – instead of showing random offers, show the ones that will catch visitors’ eyes.
More information:
- A guide through dynamic website content
- A recap – what you can and can not display to the anonymous users
Second thing – real-time support. I bet you will not hire an extra team, nor will you make the IT and debt collection departments to answer questions via live chat to support your customers. First of all, provide the support team with the best possible live chat for ecommerce – which gives you a preview of the customer card, allows you to collect contact information and immediately seds it to CRM (why not use Black Friday to grow contact database?) and allows you to send personalized recommendations with one button. Better give it a try before incoming shopping fever so that there won’t be any surprises.
Also hire … bots! Prepare simple scenarios for collecting data and displaying recommendations, and implement them to a bot that is heavenly patient and can lead at least one hundred conversations at the same time (and do not make any mistake in any of them).
Finally – start collecting permissions to send your website visitors web push notifications. This is the best way to remind buyers and potential buyers that the discounts have already started.
Extras – The ultimate guide to web push notifications
Email marketing
Aside from the standard newsletter that will inform your subscribers about planned shopping bonanza, consider planning a series of self-adjusting messages that will match users’ interests and behavior – dynamic emails. Basically, they are messages sent to an individual recipient in 1-to-1 mode. Such message is generated by the system automatically, in response to pre-defined user behavior or event (for example, user’s birthday).
They’re based on a different philosophy than regular newsletters or bulk mailings. They’re also prepared in a diverse way. You don’t create and send a campaign, but set a rule that defines when (under what conditions) the message will be sent, for example, when a user abandons a shopping cart.
Black Friday craze is asking itself for this solution to make the most of this opportunity, which happens once in 365 days.
It’s a sure bet that you will need a way to save the abandoned cart.
68% of carts are abandoned, so ecommerce marketers love these messages. They convert 621% better than traditional bulk newsletters (case study Be Brave). No wonder! After all you send an offer of a product user is interested in and which she wanted to buy.
Important: don’t hesitate with sending an abandoned cart rescue email longer than 48 hours. You can also send more than 1 message, but test how your audience reacts to it. Nobody wants to get 10 messages reminding about the product we don’t want to buy!
Read also: Our complex guide to abandoned carts
Second – Tailored content – last viewed and complementary product
You can send offers that are based on customer behavior – products they viewed or bought. That way instead of traditional newsletters (or next to them) you can send a set of products suggested for each customer individually.
Important: For advanced recommendations use Copernicus AI & Machine learning.
Extras: – A whole infographics on dynamic emails
A fistful of email inspiration from Shopify
You can choose from a great variety of channels. There are also Social Media, mobile channel and a whole bunch of offline activities. Please let us know in the comments if you want an extra guide to these channels!
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