Acting as an excellent primer for Black Friday – especially this year, as both Singles’ Day and Black Friday take place in lockdown for UK consumers at least – it is important to get a handle on what worked and what didn’t.
We have seen here how Singles’ Day has impacted UK retailers this year, as well as offering some ideas as to how to capitalise, in a general sense, but what lessons can be learned and applied ASAP to this year’s Lockdown Black Friday?
Where are they and what do they want?
First thing you need to look at is where your Singles’ Day sales came from. Data overlays of who buys what, from where and when will help paint that picture for you.
Data mining will also help you to match what they bought against where they are, as well as how ‘bargain hungry’ they appear to be. This will help shape how you offer discounts and what you discount in different markets as you roll out your Black Friday strategy to target these Singles’ Day customers.
Where they are and what they buy will also determine how you create and distribute your marketing materials around Black Friday – from language and ‘cultural appropriateness’, even down to the channel you use.
Assessing how mobile the Singles’ day buyers are, as well as looking at how they also used live video streaming – a very popular add-on offered by AliExpress over Singles’ Day – will also shape how you reach out to overseas consumers.
Lessons for the UK consumer base
The biggest lessons that Singles’ Day can teach on Black Friday is around what people bought. Singles’ Day has the unique position of selling things as ‘revenge purchases’ – where shoppers spoil themselves in revenge of being dumped – but aside from that, the key areas that Singles’ Day selling well were Luxury, health and beauty products.
This is something that can also translate to Black Friday, but it also shows that there is a gap among shoppers for discounts on electricals and gadgets that have not yet been satisfied in the run up to Christmas.
Tapping into each of these sectors, with marketing and the right offers, is a key way retailers can build on Singles’ Day for Black Friday.
Technology trends
The other important areas around what worked on Singles’ Day that can be translated into Black Friday are some of the more novel ways in which consumers were both marketed to and how they purchased.
Chinese consumers are very much mobile, and have a penchant for purchasing through mobile channels, not least using WeChat instant messaging.
This sort of conversational commerce will soon be standard here in the UK too, with more retailers starting to see the benefits of using WhatsApp to communicate with shoppers on the platform of their choice.
Chinese shoppers are also driving the uptake of video commerce, with live video streaming shopping being highly popular – and a central plank of how Singles’ Day drives customers. This too is going to be hitting ecommerce in the UK.
Together, these two trends are likely to be things that become important to ecommerce in 2021 – they will be the customer service and experience differentiators that a crowded market needs – but Black Friday will be an ideal chance to start to look at how they work, how popular they may or may not be and to whet the public’s appetite.
