What is The Key to Black Friday Ecommerce Success?
Black Friday Sales
How We Achieved 396% ROI over Black Friday Weekend
So, what is the key to success on the busiest online trading weekend of the year?
PLANNING!
That’s the short to the point exact answer.
The “Black Friday”/“Cyber Monday” hype has been known in the UK for several years now with no view of slowing down, so capitalising on this as an online retailer should be marked in the ecommerce retailer’s diary well in advance.
A quick look at Google Trends over the last few years you can see a distinct pattern of when people will be looking for a deal. It’s a no brainer.
With many many ecommerce clients under our wing we saw varying levels of success jumping on the black Friday bandwagon, and those that did, and did it well, reaped the rewards.
Ecommerce Sales
The key to the winners of this increase in traffic were simply the ones that had the fortitude to plan. What were potential visitors looking for, discounts, and then they shouted about it on the website and within all their ad campaigns.
With this client we talked about it in September, what the goals were, what was the hook and the offer. We then scheduled in the work on new banners and images for the site well ahead of time. We looked at the pricing and were able to create specific discounts within the code of the site for all products simply, and then ensure it was highlighted across all pages. From there we also setup an email chain to go to all current clients stating that there would be discounts on these days (that email campaign alone converted at 39% which is incredible compared to industry standards).
On their ad campaigns we also ensured that we added various promo extensions and additional landing pages added to the site links. This was to ensure that we would gain a high amount of real estate on the google page that would gain a high click through rate. It would all be seen front and centre across their ads that there was a discount available. We added to the keyword strings, high converting KW we just copied & added exact match terms with black Friday [black Friday ……….. ]
Within the landing pages we made it obvious that all purchases would receive a discount. Now let’s not think that the % discount was so unbelievable that we were operating at a loss, it was a simple 10% across the board, so there was a tiny loss of margin for a massive increase in traffic and ultimately sales.
The Results
Now if any of you run AdWords campaigns you will know that average conversion rates vary from 4% (OK) to 8% (good) & 12%+ (great). over this weekend we saw an incredible 29.81% Conversion rate!!!!
This equated to 397% ROI.
We gained similar results for all our clients who had the fortitude to plan & take advantage of this increase in searches as well as, it seems, a need to buy on these days.
Black Friday / Cyber Monday are just 2 of the many days that we know people are online and looking to buy. If we plan well in advance what we know people will be looking for we can match their query online and offer them something that will convert right away. Christmas is coming up, then Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter weekend, wedding season (did you know highest wedding related searches are in January?) Halloween & more are all days/events you can predict and exploit to increase sales revenue.
