SITUATION:
For any business playing in the retail space, mapping your marketing activity to noteworthy days in the consumer calendar is critical in giving you bursts of awareness and revenue.
It’s no different in ecommerce.
While ecommerce does allow for constant bottom of the funnel marketing efforts – you need to ensure that you are constantly refining these noteworthy events for maximum impact.
Black Friday is a consumer shopping day that is rapidly picking up steam in South Africa. Almost non existent 5 years ago, Black Friday has grown into an R87 000 000 shopping day for online juggernauts like takealot.com.
How would this day work for premium adult products, however? In 2017, we thought we’d give it a try.
APPROACH:
We quickly learnt that critical to making the campaign a success was a number of things:
- Including the right products
- The discount
- The duration of the campaign
- The right marketing channel mix
- While a number of retailers allocate stock to the Black Friday bin – we decided to make the special site wide. This would simplify both the consumer experience as well as for the business operationally
- What’s more, we decided on a discount of up to 40% on everything.
- As a method of breaking through the noise – we decided to run our promotion as a Black Weekend special – with the promotion running all weekend
- While our marketing mix consisted of regular activities like email, Adwords and social – we also actively wanted to participate in the groundswell of chatter online surrounding the day
- We leveraged Adwords’ promotion extension as a means of differentiating our ads in the SERPs
- As a value add, we also provided our database with early bird access to the promotion via an email the night before
RESULTS:
Immediately after launching it became clear that Black Friday would play an important part in the brand’s marketing activity going forward.
Results were immense.
- Surpassed our previous best revenue day by 193%
- Surpassed our previous best traffic day by 118%
- Surpassed our previous best transaction # day by 160%
- Our conversion rate increased by 94% over Black Weekend
- Our average basket size did not change drastically
- The Sunday during Black Weekend was easily our best Sunday ever