A Marketer’s Black Friday Sweep-up
The Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush is over, but now the real evaluation begins. Are you looking at the right metrics to measure success?
What to do now?
So now that Black Friday AND Cyber Monday are over, you can take a sigh of relief, right?
Not a chance. Promotions may be done but now it’s time to take stock and work out how it actually went.
It might have felt busy. It might have seemed as if lots of orders were coming in, and that comms engagement metrics were high, but are you looking at the right numbers to see what really happened?
Dropping the vanity metrics and understanding the real value is a subject that Hive has long since been passionate about. We know, based on countless client experiences, that the internal value of the marketing function increases exponentially when the reporting changes from clicks and opens and starts to talk about revenue, customer insights and trends within a business.
One such example is the impact of customer returns. In this earlier article, we discuss how returns should impact your metrics and marketing decisions. A point especially key at this time of year when many marketers are engaged in planning and budgetary cycles for 2024. Revisit that article to unpack how returns change what marketers should do, especially around big promotions like Black Friday.
What else should you analyse?
Equally of concern when looking at the success (or not) of large-scale promotions such as Black Friday, is the Cost of Acquisition (or CAC, customer acquisition cost); where the cost to compete in such a short and competitive time period can be excruciatingly high. One way to make the cost of acquisition count for your business is to put as many tools in place as you can to ensure that the new customers that you do win: hang around for longer, make more purchases, and at an increasingly higher price point.
Some such activities could include setting up ‘welcome’ email marketing journeys for new customers, as well as creating journeys for existing customers who take advantage of promotions. But depending on the purchase type or value made during Black Friday, and therefore the segment they are assigned to, you could target customers with dedicated ‘bargain’ or high value customer journeys. Not to mention reactivation journeys for customers that hibernate after a specified elapsed time period after making said purchase/s. To get many more ideas about the types of email journeys that you could run – download our eBook about RFM analysis and segmentation.
In order to determine if the activities that you put in place are working – marketers need to know the Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) of their regular customers in the first place vs. the CLTV of customers won through Black Friday promotions.
Only then can they decide if new customers won through promotions such as Black Friday – actually pay dividends for an organisation over the lifetime of the customer or not.
Good luck with your reporting!
