Preparing Early for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

E-commerce brand owners there know the importance of optimizing their discounts for BFCM - and if you’re reading this, you’re obviously doing some prep on your promotional strategy. At Intelligems, we always advocate to test your promotional offers before the big day, so that you know what works and can extract maximum benefit going into the holiday.

We've already discussed how to optimize your strategy in this blog post. In this post, we want to talk a bit more about why you should be doing this offer testing - and some of the data points you should be trying to understand while running this test. We'll talk about why you need to test your before BFCM, what to look for when testing, and what metrics you should care about.  

1. Making sure you're finding the right balance between total sales and margin

• All of your customers are going to be expecting a deal, which is why you're going to give them one. But, that doesn't mean you should be giving away money for free and guessing the right numbers for your discounts.

• It's in your best interest to be scientific here and find offers that appeal to your customers that also work for your business. 

• Let's think about an example: say you're testing a 15% off vs. $20 off vs. 25% off offer. You want to know which one is the most effective, so you want to split test these options (which is possible with Intelligems!). Here are the metrics you would likely want to look at when comparing them:

  • Conversion Rate

  • Revenue Per Visitor

  • Profit Per Visitor

• It's almost certain that the steepest discount will give you the highest conversion rate, but you need to check vs. margin that it actually makes sense for your business to run that promotion.

• You can also get more creative on offer types here. See what resonates with your customers - offers like gift with purchase or tiered discounts can provide a strong customer incentive while having better overall margins than a flat discount.

2. Estimating sell-through and ensuring adequate inventory

• Obviously, there are a ton of factors that will go into your total demand, but seeing how much different offers boost your "natural" conversion rate can give you a sense of what kind of uplift you should expect.

• What products are selling the most? What about the least? Will your current top sellers still be the same during a different season?

• When you put an offer out, you can also see if your product mix shifts. This means that maybe people buy your more expensive products at a significantly higher clip when you are running your sale, and you potentially want to have more of those on hand.
  
  

3. Understanding how to merchandise your offer

• Maybe this has to do with how you're advertising your promotions on-site.

• With Intelligems, you can experiment with different methods.

• This includes pop-ups, banner bars, showing prices as already marked down, using a promo code or automatically applying the discount, using progress bars, etc.

• This finetuning comes down to figuring out what boosts your conversion rates for the given values - and looks a little different for everyone depending on who your customers are.

4. Seeing how different offers resonate with different groups

• Not every customer is going to have the same reaction, but by running a test, you can accurately measure how these different segments react.

• Maybe this means AB testing your Klaviyo campaigns to see which one gives you the best conversion rates. 

• Maybe you should be running a different offer for returning customers (like something that encourages them to stock up on a product they already have or to "complete the set" for products they already own) than you should new prospective customers (this segment needs to be incentivized to try your product for the first time).

•  This kind of personalization can be extremely powerful when powered with a data-driven strategy, which is possible to execute at scale with Intelligems before the big holiday.

As we said before, forming the right strategy for your discounts means finding the right balance between your offer, its merchandising, and your audience. However, it takes time to find the perfect offer strategy. In fact, as your strategy becomes more robust, you should actually have several combinations in your back pocket for different audiences, events, etc.

This could look like something for Facebook offers, something for your new customer flow, something for engaged VIPs, something for dormant customers – the list goes on. When used correctly, discounts are an incredibly powerful lever to help you maximize profits; don’t wait to start perfecting your BFCM strategy, start testing now.