During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are more people shopping than any other time of year, but the lines are beginning to blur as week-long deals become the new norm. Retailers are faced with an extended rush period that adds layers to what was already pretty daunting tactical planning.
Analyst Predictions for Retailers
“Online shopping is spreading out across the holiday season,” says Tamara Gaffney, Principal Analyst and Director at Adobe Systems, Inc. That being said, Adobe expects Cyber Monday to be the biggest day in terms of e-commerce sales in United States history.
Analysts predict that the UK will account for two-thirds of all money spent in Europe on Black Friday. BT Expedite (now Aptos) reported that UK retailers received 16.5% more orders over the Black Friday period of 2015 than that of 2014, and revenue increased by 19%. However, it also noted that many retailers achieved sales boosts by extending this ‘Black Friday’ period over several days.
Campaign Automation and Predict Are the Way Forward
So, the stakes are high. You’re probably spending more than usual on acquisition efforts too. You don’t want to miss the opportunity to plan now, with a few best practices to take advantage of the rush. One of the ways to ease some of the burden in the crazed weeks ahead is to automate, use all the tools in your arsenal to maximize share-of-wallet and build relationships.
Statistics show that e-commerce customers do buy items at full price during Black Friday week, especially the segment that likes to plan ahead. Leveraging your machine-learned predictive product recommendation tools can work to your advantage, whether it’s business as usual or crunch time during a massive sale. Lead in with sale items, and let the technology do the rest.
Reaching customers via email, mobile, and social media in a synchronized manner allows you to express your brand, help customers learn, and follow your lead to a successful transaction. Use your brand message on social media, drive specific sale items over email, and alert app users about relevant sale items as they pass by your stores.
Additional Tips for Black Friday Week
- Make sure prospects have clear opportunities to “sign up” for special offers to get them into the direct marketing fold, and start early.
- Create seamless, automated customer journeys to structure the content chaos.
- Understand how your week-long automated campaign strategy fits into the mix of all your other automated programs.
- Include Predict recommendations in your email templates wherever possible; recommendations above the fold yield higher conversions!
- Plan orchestrated offers to customers across multiple channels; multi-channel touch increases conversions.
- Leverage geo-targeting to get customers in-store because the up-sell potential is enormous
- Use geo-location tagging to send offers to customers when they are near to, or enter, your stores.
- Show users content that is relevant to their location if you’ve got an app.
Final Takeaways
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now a week-long promotion, and automation is the way forward. Leverage your Emarsys technology and tools to reach customers across channels with a unified strategy, and maximize the user experience with intelligent personalization to help customers find what they need in this peak buying season.
If you are an Emarsys client, contact your CSM today to get advice and best practices for setting up your automated Black Friday marketing.
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