November is just around the corner, which means only one thing for eCommerce businesses and shoppers around the world: Black Friday discounts!
This article is all about helping you plan data-driven marketing strategies that’ll boost your online sales and offer your eCommerce shoppers a memorable shopping experience. Throughout the week of Black Friday – also known as Black Week – customers all over the world are bombarded with push notifications, emails and ads… so why should they choose to shop with you? And why limit yourself to offering discounts on Black Friday?
We’ll also take a look at Cyber Monday – another great opportunity to put some specific workflows in place that’ll recover carts that were abandoned over the weekend and improve conversion rates.
Next, we’ll share three workflows that you can use before, during and after Black Friday to automate processes within your eCommerce. Currently, Connectif is helping more than 1,800 companies around the world and the strategies listed below are valuable recommendations that have come straight from our partners.
Pre Black Friday: invite your most loyal customers to an exclusive club
Instead of aiming to attract new traffic to your website, this strategy focuses on rewarding users who have already proven to be valuable.
If these customers are used to shopping in your store, why not invite them to a club where they receive offers, discounts, and early bird access to sales?
Segment the audience according to customer behavior
The key to this strategy is to segment your customers according to their previous shopping habits. To do this, you’ll need to use the RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) model and assign points to each customer group according to the following categories:
– Recency: how much time has passed since their last purchase
– Frequency: how often they tend to shop in your store
– Monetary Value: the average ticket price of their purchases
As a result, you can classify your audience with a High, Medium or Low RFM and send them personalized communications based on this rating.
In this case, you can offer High RFM customers exclusive access to pre-sales: as well as offering them some real value, by focusing on your most loyal customers you’ll also make it more likely that they purchase.
Workflow to invite your customers to an exclusive club
This workflow includes a verification condition to determine whether a contact belongs to a segment with High RFM, which includes regular customers. If so, they’ll receive an email invitation to join an exclusive club with unmissable discounts. Low and Medium RFM customers will receive the same email two hours later.
This workflow was implemented by our Data First Partner Numéricco
This is a much higher-performing strategy than a bulk mail-out to your whole database: it increases the likelihood of pre-Black Friday sales and surprises your customers with a series of exclusive discounts.
Black Friday: increase sales prospects during the checkout process
Your customers have already opted to make a purchase in your eCommerce site – can you go a step further and convince them to spend more? To increase the order value, you can implement a strategy based on the average spend of each client and what they’re likely to spend on their next purchase. By showing them products that match their taste or are related to their current cart, you’ll be more likely to increase their average order value on Black Friday.
In this case, we recommend using the RFM methodology to effectively segment your audience. In this strategy, the RFM analysis will be necessary to understand your customers’ average spend over time and to personalize your sales communications based on this.
Segment the audience according to your customers’ average ticket value
If the current value of the cart is less than the average spend, with the Connectif algorithm you can offer products that are directly related or similar to their current purchase, without interfering with their customer journey.
If, on the other hand, the current value is similar to the customer’s average spend, you can recommend generic products from the medium-low price range, which won’t be an unaffordable outlay. As a result, they’ll be more likely to add the products to the cart and increase their average spend over Black Friday.
Workflow to increase cart value during the payment process
The workflow below shows how Connectif can help you to improve conversions and increase sales by recommending products that relate to the current cart value during the checkout process during the Black Friday period.
This workflow was implemented by our Data First Partner Dateator
Once you’ve verified the average spend of each customer in your eCommerce site, the workflow analyzes this information and proposes particularly relevant products in real time that could be added to the cart.
This strategy could be even more effective during Black Friday if the related products have a discounted price.
Cyber Monday: recover abandoned carts and boost your sales
A popular Black Friday strategy for many eCommerce brands is to extend their Black Friday discounts to the following Monday, a.k.a. Cyber Monday.
On average, 7 out of 10 online users abandon their carts without making a purchase, and these lost sales can be frustrating when you’ve invested significant resources in attracting traffic to your website and making the user experience as rewarding as possible.
To avoid a dent in your ROI, we recommend implementing a Cyber Monday strategy that allows users to recover the products they left in their cart on Black Friday.
Dynamically segment customers who abandoned their carts on Black Friday
For this strategy, we recommend that you use the dynamic audience segmentation offered by Connectif to quickly identify all the customers who abandoned their cart on Black Friday.
Once you’ve established a data range (corresponding to the start and end of your Black Friday campaign), you can send personalized communications on Cyber Monday before the sales end.
Workflow to recover abandoned carts
In the workflow shown, you can see how to send an email to all the contacts who have added products to their cart on Black Friday but haven’t yet made a purchase.
This workflow was implemented by our Data First Partner Trilogi
Remember that Connectif provides you with various channels through which to reach your target audience – you can customize SMS, push notifications, emails or pop-ups to use for this strategy.
The idea here is to offer the same discounts on Cyber Monday that users found on Black Friday. What’s more, by applying a “FOMO” strategy, you can decide to limit these discounts to just 48 additional hours, thereby creating a sense of urgency and increasing the likelihood that the customer will make a purchase.
Drive customer loyalty on Cyber Monday
After they’ve taken advantage of some enticing Black Friday offers, many shoppers keep looking for more exclusive discounts on products they’re interested in. Although abandoned Black Friday cart recovery is popular approach, it can be equally effective to use a parallel strategy to re-target users who purchased during the sales period.
The goal is to maintain the contacts who chose your brand while the sales were on and to turn them into loyal customers. As well as boosting sales on Cyber Monday, this can also help to build long-term relationships.
Give it a go!
Identify customers who purchased during Black Week
The first step in this strategy is to identify customers who made a purchase during the Black Friday period. Once you’ve created the different customer segments, you need to find out the types of products they bought and how much they spent.
This is key to contacting them again with new limited offers – we’re going to send personalized communications with products that are related to their last purchase at a special price. Unlike in the previous strategy, where we wanted to reach people who had never purchased so offered them a discount with a longer period of validity, this time we’ll use the “FOMO” technique. This creates a sense of urgency and need for a shorter period – the prices we’ll show are valid for just 24 hours, i.e. during Cyber Monday only.
The end goal is to increase sales and to incentivize customers to make additional purchases on Cyber Monday. By offering them products related to their previous purchase at attractive prices for a limited time, the aim is to increase conversions and the average order value
Workflow used on Cyber Monday to convert your customers into repeat purchasers
In the workflow below, you’ll see how to send a push notification to all the users who made a purchase on Black Friday. The message will suggest products related to their last purchase at an irresistible price.
Conclusions
At Connectif, we want to help you turn your eCommerce platform into a powerful marketing automation platform. That’s why, whatever your approach to Black Week, we always recommend creating a personalized strategy based on solid, reliable data and intelligent automation processes that guarantee results, even after the campaign has ended.
How does Connectif help you boost sales during Black Week?
In this article we’ve shared just a few of the endless opportunities that Connectif offers to marketers. What’s more, to help prepare for Black Week with some proven, effective strategies, all of our clients have access to a library of preconfigured workflows.
If you’d like to find out more about how Connectif can help you on your journey to success, request a demo today. We’ll be delighted to show you the results you could enjoy from day one.
