How We Tackled a Daunting Black Friday Period
Black Friday loomed as a daunting prospect for both retailers and marketers alike this year.
What were the concerns surrounding the event?
With the country in the shadow of a cost of living crisis, and the media flurry surrounding this, retailers were preparing for a quieter than usual Q4 – particularly compared to previous years during the pandemic. Sales in October and November were sluggish, forcing many to launch their Black Friday sales a week early, or slash prices even further to unprecedented levels.
So, knowing how to approach the event from a strategy POV was going to be a tricky affair.
What did we do?
We made it our mission to combat all concerns surrounding Black Friday and ensure maximum success for all of our retail clients. We knew that there would be challenges with Meta and Google pushing for more automated learning, therefore we decided to scale up Paid advertising and spend across channels to ensure we had…
- Established campaigns and machine learning
- Boosted remarketing lists generated to retarget during Black Friday
- Increased brand awareness, impression & market share ahead of the competitive period
This was a risk to retailers because we saw high engagement rates & increased traffic, but lower conversion rates due to users holding out for sales. That being said, we knew that this was the best approach to maximise visibility and sales during Black Friday.
The way we saw it, we had to play into Meta and Google’s hands, allowing them to learn from our audiences, campaigns & data ahead of the curve. Following this, we were able to hit remarketing and lower-funnel keywords hard during the event to make sure we used those warmed-up audiences well.
Here’s what we did:
- Launched over 1,500 Black Friday ads for retail clients
- Remarketed to October & November engagers & web visitors across PMax, YouTube, Display, Social Media, Search, & Shopping
- Used Conversion Optimisation to decrease Cost Per Sale and increase the volume of sales
The Result!
No Black Friday blues around here! We couldn’t be more thrilled with what we were able to achieve:
- ROAS increased by +81%
- Revenue exceeded targets by +46%
- Cost per sale reduced by -7%
- Conversion rates increased by -76%
From our strategy, we saw one retailer’s ROAS increase from 14 to 38 in just 3 hours of their sale launching. Another retailer’s conversion rate increased by +200%, with their revenue increasing by +272% in just 24 hours! Furthermore, several of our retail clients that decided to launch Black Friday a week early saw a +75% increase in Conversion Rate and +105% increase in Revenue WoW!
All-in-all, we achieved HUGE success for our main e-commerce retail clients on Black Friday, and exceeded revenue targets overall by a whopping 46%!
Get in touch if you’d like to hear more about what we did, or if you need some help with your strategy for future retail sales and events!
