Black Friday, the last Friday in November, is one of the biggest shopping days of the year and over half of Black Friday shoppers are NEW consumers, which means that a single week of the year could be your biggest growth opportunity.
Promoting a great offer on Black Friday is only the beginning of the journey and shouldn’t be the only time you connect with these customers. I want to show you how to optimize a great digital customer experience to build long-term lasting relationships with your consumers and ride the hype long after the first sales.
Why is Black Friday so important for your eCommerce business?
Data has shown that online sales in Europe grow by an average of 300% on Black Friday in comparison to other days of the year, and in the Nordic countries, online sales grow by more than 600%!
Deals are satisfying, FOMO drives spontaneity and consumers are in spending mode. Offers and price reductions are key players, but there’s real psychology behind the customer experience.
We need to start looking at Black Friday as more than a temporary sales surge: it’s also a great way to drive brand awareness, social media engagement, website traffic, and most importantly customer loyalty. For online retailers, it’s arguably the most important date in the calendar.
This begs the questions; are you really making the most of this opportunity? Are you increasing conversion or only traffic? Are you maximizing your consumer lifetime value? How do data and CX play into this?
How do you turn Black Friday consumers into long-term customers?
I would argue that Black Friday customers are taking a different customer journey than your other customers. Let me explain …
Typically, your customer will come to you after a period of consideration and comparison, and during that process, you have multiple touch-points to solidify trust in your brand, including blogs, reviews, social media presence, etc. Their purchase is led by product, people, physical evidence, and process. This journey lays a foundation for a long-term relationship with your brand.
On the other hand, Black Friday purchases are more strongly led by price and promotion. Purchases are driven by spontaneity and deal-seeking, and time-limited offers encourage an attitude of one-time purchases. So, how do we change it?
It boils down to the hidden sales cycle, micro-moments. It’s about using data: behavioral, contextual, content, product, transactional, and customer data, to bring the customer journey to life and spark positive emotion in the interaction.
Further reading: How to influence your customers with digital experience beyond eCommerce.
Two actions guaranteed to strengthen your digital experience and capitalize on Black Friday sales
1. Personalization, personalization, and more personalization
Shoppers have too many options and little patience on Black Friday. Make sure to convey your most important messages to the right people at the right time.
72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging. *Source, SmarterHQ
Hyper-personalization extends beyond the actual purchase and should consider experiences across the entire customer journey. You need to identify your customers' micro-moments e.g., what they want to know, where they want to go, and what they want to do and buy.
Hyper-personalization combines data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation to create unique interactions. It also involves your human touch to ensure the top brands, categories, and products that you want to promote have some dynamic embedded into the content displayed, rather than only putting trust into single channel algorithms. By making sure you make the most of data from your existing customers, you can provide a more relevant experience for your new visitors as well. Making sure that every micro-moment is relevant, is just as important as them being personalized.
2. Deliver an Omnichannel experience strategy throughout the build-up, live, and post-event.
Customers today are making use of an increasing number of channels for a range of purposes, including to browse, to buy, and of course to request support. You can no longer simply try to funnel customers into the catch-all channel. Unified experience means offering your customers a multi-channel, unified experience at EVERY available touchpoint.
According to Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers are omnichannel shoppers. For a great example of omnichannel Black Friday marketing, read this case study on Lir Chocolates.
The ability to build relevance in your digital sales channels will do wonders for your conversion rates and sales. However, the relevant unified experience is just as important post-conversion as pre-conversion.
With the possibility to offer specialized solutions, features, or apps that are relevant to each customer based on the data you have on their profile, you will drive long-term loyalty and improve customer margin instead of only optimizing towards the first order. Again, make sure you make the most of the data you have about your customers already!
But of course, delivering hyper-personalization and highly relevant omnichannel experiences is typically a distant goal for many of us. The lengthy integration projects needed to combine the right data are simply impossible when you’re strapped for developer resource and time. So, what’s the solution? How can you get there quicker and start capitalizing more than ever before on your promotions?
Unlocking and unifying your data is the secret solution
- Find a better way to unify your data and make it more accessible to your digital teams.
Use your data to increase relevance for customers. Just being able to connect your product data to your customer data to build relevance in your digital sales channels will do wonders for your conversion rates and sales.
To begin delivering a unified experience, you must look for better ways to combine and utilize your data. Our CX Technologist, Larre Ländin, explains this perfectly in much more detail here. - Reduce time and money spent on lengthy integrations. Time to market must be reduced to leverage these customer opportunities.
It has never been more vital to be able to execute opportunistic experimentation and adapt fast enough to new digital experiences.
Lengthy integration projects can be a buffer to success in this area, due to time and resource restraints, which is a real shame for the business. Unlocking this data with an Experience Data Platform is the key to success.
Having instant access to product, price, stock, and customer data make your marketing and digital teams’ data autonomous, less reliant on development, and able to act quickly to test new concepts and adapt to changes in the market. This is a massive game-changer in terms of how fast you can go from idea to deployment.
… Introducing an Experience Data Platform
An Experience Data Platform serves as a data layer laid over the top of your existing data systems. It connects data from any backend system (ERP, PIM, CRM, etc) and makes unique data sets instantly available through real-time APIs, for any frontend, channel, or device. Reducing the reliance on integration and development to empower your digital teams when strengthening customer experience.
Strengthen your CX and make this Black Friday count!
Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform that supports retailers and brands to build relevant digital experiences and applications at rapid speed. Occtoo’s Cloud-Native platform makes it easy to access and unify enterprise data from backend systems such as CRM, ERP, PIM, etc. and combine it with behavioral and contextual data to create relevant digital experiences that can be deployed in any channel or frontend in real-time at a global scale. Occtoo was founded in 2019 and is certified by the MACH Alliance.