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It’s almost that time of year again. Black Friday is just around the corner. Retail workers might dread this occasion, but business owners rightfully see it as an excellent opportunity to rack up a large chunk of sales and interest in what you have to offer.
A successful Black Friday promotion requires an assortment of elements. You need the right products and services. You must incorporate an excellent discount that will get people talking and buying. You also have to promote this offer effectively with a collection of marketing tactics.
With so much to do, it can be all too easy to overlook certain aspects. One such aspect is putting together reports and analyzing the results.
Ultimately, you need to learn if you were successful with your Black Friday campaign or if it failed to hit the mark. Otherwise, how will you be able to improve in the future for other such campaigns? This is why crafting reports and following the most suitable analytics is necessary.
If you’re not sure where to start in that regard, we’ve got you covered. Below is our ultimate Black Friday reporting checklist.
As highlighted in the opening, a successful Black Friday marketing strategy is not something you can take lightly. There are various components to put into place for an effective plan that will generate interest, new customer leads, and those all-important sales.
A marketing report may not seem all that significant. After all, Black Friday is generally only a weekend event at most, one that happens every year. Is it really necessary to look at the statistics for something so infrequent?
The answer: Oh yes!
If you fail to measure Black Friday success, this can lead to a lot of missed opportunities. This isn’t simply for Black Friday campaigns, either. It can be for any occasion you decide to run a special sale. Without putting in the work – and learning what did and didn’t work – you will struggle to optimize future marketing campaigns.
Measuring performance during peak sales periods delivers a lot of juicy data. It can help to measure current strengths and weaknesses, mitigate risks and lost marketing dollars, and identify new opportunities. The result: you can better plan your campaigns across the year.
When Black Friday comes around, it is only natural to ramp up your marketing efforts in various ways. After all, you want to capitalize on the extra attention – and additional spending – this event attracts.
Black Friday isn’t simply a one-day promotion. Most campaigns will also incorporate Cyber Monday into proceedings, turning it into a whole weekend of sales and deals to capture the attention of customers. In fact, some retailers even attempt to maximize their conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. numbers by getting everything underway from the start of November.
With the extra opportunities available to boost those profit numbers, retailers don’t slack in terms of advertising. Yes, a lot more money is flying around, but it can’t be shared by every business. It is only available to those willing to go the extra mile, not just with their offers but their promotion.
So, what extra marketing efforts are used for Black Friday?
Typically, you will see regular marketing efforts – such as newsletters and social media posts – being pushed up to another level. For example, there could be a dedicated newsletter for the event or posts on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc., with memorable visuals revolving around Black Friday.
One of the most important tactics, in general, is to build up anticipation. Along with sharing countdown posts on your socials, you could insert a banner with a countdown clock on your website. Emails, VIP early access, popups, time-sensitive deals, influencers – many routes exist that you can travel down.
You must keep track of all your marketing efforts, whichever ones you add to your journey. This is necessary so you can measure and report on them successfully.
When it comes to analyzing Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance, there are various points you need to consider. To make things easy for you, we have listed these points in this handy checklist. Make sure to tick each of these off when you report on your upcoming Black Friday efforts!
The first step involves having a measurement plan. If you don’t have the necessary data available and fail to have the right tools and methods to measure this data, you are already in a sticky situation.
Do you already utilize a measurement plan? In this case, you won’t have to do much work. It is simply a case of taking it and refining it with your Black Friday campaign firmly in mind.
If you have yet to use a measurement plan, there’s no need to worry. We have made a quick list below of what to cover with one:
While this might not seem too daunting on the surface, an ample amount of information and data is required for your measurement plan. As a rule of thumb, the more you put into your measurement plan, the more you’re going to get from it in the end.
Considering this is the foundation for your entire reporting efforts, this is the one area you want to avoid taking any shortcuts.
There are two main reasons to check your current data tracking. First of all, you need to ensure you are tracking all of the necessary digital marketing metrics/KPIs for your Black Friday campaign. If you haven’t got all of the required tracking software in place, it’s time to change that quickly.
The second reason to check current data is to understand your customers before Black Friday. After all, you will struggle to learn much if you’re not comparing your Black Friday-related data with what came beforehand.
You need to understand your customers’ behavior, conversion rates, bounce rates, etc., from the get-go. With this in-depth insight, you can then see how the data changes when matched up against your Black Friday campaign.
Obviously, the intention is for all positive stats to gain a significant jump, but you won’t know if that is what happened unless you do a before and after comparison.
Black Friday is over. You have thrown everything at your marketing efforts. You have (hopefully) racked up extra sales compared to the norm. Now it’s time to analyze the results and see just how all of that effort translated into dollars.
The first place to start is by seeing if your campaign objectives were met. Understandably, these objectives differ for each business. Examples include:
Regardless of the objectives you’ve chosen for your Black Friday campaign, measuring them is crucial. You need to see if, from a general point of view, you produced the results you hoped to achieve.
Not only do campaign objectives differ in terms of the goal type, but also the figures you hope to hit. For instance, one company might be thrilled with a 10% increase in sales numbers, whereas this would be a disappointing figure for those targeting a 50% increase during Black Friday.
Certain objective types are also typically easier to achieve. Take the goal of increasing the quality of leads. This can be a tricky proposition when the volume is generally the aim of the game. In comparison, reducing the sales cycle can be relatively simple when you factor in tactics like scarcity and time-sensitive deals for Black Friday.
Whether your campaign objectives were easy or difficult to attain, they are the basis for learning about your marketing tactics. For example, if you didn’t achieve your main goals, this highlights an issue with your promotional approach. While that’s bad news in the short term, it is better to discover this now so you can refine it for future marketing campaigns.
Even if you skyrocketed beyond your original objectives, there’s still plenty to learn from the available data you have.
One of the most important eCommerce takeaways from any reporting checklist, Black Friday or not, is to measure the performance of your marketing channels.
Yes, you may have achieved your objectives. However, which areas were most responsible for this occurring? What marketing platforms were not pulling their weight? These are the types of questions that require answers if you hope to refine your campaigns.
Let’s say you used three different social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. Based on the data you have gathered, 50% of leads from social media were gained through Twitter, 40% with TikTok, and 10% via Facebook. These numbers can be construed in various ways.
First of all, it suggests that Twitter is a winning formula for your marketing efforts – and minimal changes, if any, have to be made to this channel. TikTok is also producing healthy results, although there is room for tweaks and improvements. The Facebook percentage, on the other hand, may indicate that it’s time to place fewer resources in this area and focus on more productive, profitable avenues.
When you track all your marketing channels and learn which are working and which aren’t, you have the knowledge to make the changes required to this side of your campaigns.
Google Ads will likely be part of your Black Friday marketing strategy. If so, it’s also probable this will eat a big chunk of your marketing budget, and that is why their performance must be tracked.
The most important metric in that regard is conversion tracking. You may first want to know how many people clicked your ad to see if this was effective in enticing potential customers. Yet the main aim is to see these clicks turned into sales or other valuable actions, which is where conversion tracking comes into play.
With conversion tracking, you can learn which keywords, markets, copy, etc., are hitting the mark with your ads. This supplies you with a greater understanding of your ROI, giving you the knowledge required to make more informed decisions about your ad expenditure. Movinf forward, you will find this is especially vital for your future marketing campaigns. Boosting your ROI from these ads ensures your budget is being spent the right way and you can see great results from it.
If you decide to receive any expert SEO consulting, any agency, ours included, will tell you the significance of tracking and measuring the competition.
After all, the competition is not just there to reduce your sales numbers and market share. They are also a vital source for learning more about your audience, what makes them tick, and what type of promotional tactics are getting them through the virtual door for their Black Friday campaigns.
There are various tools available that allow you to gain an in-depth insight into your competition. You can analyze everything from website visitor numbers to marketing strategies. It can reveal paths that you never previously considered for your own campaigns.
With your Black Friday campaign, internal reporting is essential. That is true. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t overlook the importance of paying close attention to external factors. Your competition can be an information goldmine, and you can use all of this collected data to improve your future efforts. The best thing is that they will have done all the work. Always keep a close eye on your competition, especially when it comes to big marketing campaigns like Black Friday.
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