Why your Christmas strategy needs to be more than just Black Friday

Black Friday Article

Black Friday has without doubt dethroned Christmas as the golden trading period of the peak Q4 period. This has encouraged consumers to pull a high volume of sales forward by a couple of weeks in with the promise of a cut price deal, but we shouldn't be discounting Kris Kringle, Baby Jesus and the January Sales just yet.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday will most definitely give you your best trading days of the year, but there is still plenty of sales demand in December to take advantage of. We see across our client base more revenue generated in the December run up to Christmas than BFCM.

We’ve summarised some easy-to-implement and highly impactful actions that can be put in place in less than 60 minutes each that we use on our campaigns that will help to deliver fantastic performance for BFCM and the whole Christmas trading period.

Be present through to Christmas rather than focusing on Black Friday

Traditionally BFCM has been about one-off heavily discounted sales promotions. This works great for a brand that has built a highly engaged community over the long term. Not so much if you need BFCM to generate new customers.

We now see more brands jump onto Black Friday earlier, with a more sustainable lower discount offer. This provides two benefits:

Consumers have time to discover and research brands they haven’t heard of before.
Brands get a longer period to optimise campaign activity which removes the reliance on one day of sales dictating success or failure.

Black Friday will more often than not provide a peak in sales, It doesn’t need to end at Black Friday. It’s the starting gun of the Christmas season. Data from Reddit show that conversations on their platform about gifting begin as far back as October and scale up all the way to Christmas. There’s plenty of time to take advantage of this if you haven’t already.

For our clients, we start our push early in November and maintain this through Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the final guaranteed Christmas delivery dates.

How did that work for us?

Black Friday - the single highest sales date, but only 7% of the Revenue across the campaign period.

Black Friday through Cyber Monday - 15% of Revenue.

Post Cyber Monday through to 21st December - 35% of Revenue and a higher profit margin than BFCM.

View our successful Black Friday campaign with Stone Refurb.

There are still plenty of consumers looking to buy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These consumers are great potential customers as they have less expectation of a huge discount whilst maintaining a high level of purchase intent, ultimately providing more profitable sales.

Plan your budget phasing over a longer timeframe through to Christmas to ensure you are still in market and able to capture the attention of these consumers and focus this budget around the campaigns that have been your higher performers throughout the year that are relevant for Christmas gifting rather than focusing only on new campaigns with Black Friday & Cyber Monday messaging.

Using data to plan strategically

One of the biggest benefits of Digital Marketing is its measurability compared to above the line advertising. This measurability is also one of the largest limiting factor on scaling activity.

It’s not uncommon to hear from clients that there is no budget cap as long as the ROAS target is hit. Measuring digital activity like this is great, but doesn’t take into consideration the complexities in user journeys and the role of different channels in influencing the final purchase.

You can look at implementing an attribution model, but the Cost:Benefit of this is marginal for the time and investment needed. A much quicker and effective model to use is the Marketing Efficiency Ratio, which looks at the overall performance of a brand’s marketing efforts.

MER will help to build the ‘big picture’ and provide the flexibility to scale up spend and campaigns by reducing the focus of specific channel level ROAS data.

It’s an incredibly simple metric of Total Revenue / Total Spend = MER.

The bigger the gap between Revenue & Spend, the higher the MER. Scale up your spend in a channel and see how that impacts MER. If it goes up, spend some more!

Efficient conversion rate testing - get the most from your site

When looking at the factors to drive growth, most people will automatically look to increase ad spend and criminally overlook improving the conversion rate of their website. Positive findings can be found in an incredibly short period of time and what seems like insignificant changes can have a huge impact on the ability of a site to drive more conversions.

With time short ahead of the Christmas period, focus on high-value pages to get high volumes of data quickly. Compare your pages vs. your competitors and look to see what they have that you don’t. Is your price a smaller size? Do they show a 5-star rating for the product and you don’t? Set up a simple A/B test without any need for web developer resources and when you have a positive result, roll it out as a personalisation with 100% of traffic on that page directed to the winner.

Bundles of joy - give the people what they want

The joy of Christmas for many is in the giving of presents and seeing the happiness their gift brings. Think about what products you have that will work best for gifting and look at how you can package these together to create the ultimate gift which increases the basket value.

Usually, you would try to communicate to the consumer how your product helps to solve a problem for them and meets their needs. When it comes to gifting, we need to tweak this slightly and form messaging about why this product or bundle would make the perfect gift.

For the purchaser, you’re taking away the stress of finding the perfect present. Make it easy for them to purchase and tick this present off their shopping list.

Using these actions will help you to impact all 3 of the key levers of scaling revenue - generate more traffic, improve conversion rate and increase basket value. Let us know how you get in with this and if you’d like to find out more on how we deliver award-winning eCommerce campaigns, drop us a message and we’ll organise a catch up over a coffee.