Business
When is the optimum time to advertise for certain events?
Any quality marketer or business owner will tell you that it’s crucial to carefully time the launch of your promotional material and sales for the best ROI. But what does this mean and how can you advertise effectively? To help, we’ve collaborated up with Cleveland College of Art and Design, which offers a range of course including a digital arts degree, to look at marketing techniques around seasonal campaigns.
Choosing the right time to launch your advertising campaigns
Generally, marketing has a core theme that you incorporate regardless of the time of year. However, there some differences that we’ll look at here.
Firstly, it’s important to start with email marketing and communicating with your current newsletter subscribers. They were kind enough to give you their details, now it’s your duty to give them a ‘head-start’ with an exclusive reminder that your store is starting a sale — make sure you include the date it starts.
If only it were as simple as a single message to attract customers to your products. Unfortunately, it isn’t. So now, you must persevere with gentle reminders. Why not release a discount code for customers to use as ‘exclusive members’ of your newsletter tribe? This will make them feel appreciated and should help to drive traffic to your site or shoppers in-store. After you’ve sent your discount codes, the news that your store will be offering reduced products will travel through word of mouth and potentially get coverage from bloggers and seasonal discount posts by larger publications. We recommend that you start your email advertising around a month before the date of your sale launch, which doesn’t give your consumers too long to wait. According to Custora, 25.1% of Black Friday sales originated from email marketing — showing that this is a beneficial way to attract consumers.
Despite its variety of advantages, email advertising is sometimes tricky. The first step is to schedule your emails to go out at an appropriate time — it’s recommended that this is a time when people are active online, although, you might also need to take different time zones into account. This way, your message doesn’t end up at the bottom of somebody’s inbox. It’s also important to use language which will equal an action such as “Save the date!” or “Add this to your calendar”. Remember that you could create a segmentation for different customers, those who have been loyal and those who are relatively new — the same campaign targeting two types of people in different styles.
Once you’re confident with your email marketing strategy, it’s time to use other platforms to spread your campaign. With 2.07 billion of monthly active users on Facebook, 800 million on Instagram and 330 million monthly active users on Twitter — it would be a mistake to ignore the huge opportunity that comes with social media. When advertising, start organically and reach your current followers. As the date draws near, start paid promotions to increase awareness for the deals that you have. Using influencers is another good way to get brand recognition, however, this is highly dependent on the type of industry you are operating in.
Now, we’re going to take a look at consumer behaviour data for Black Friday and Boxing Day over the years:
Sales: Boxing Day
This event has long been a major sales date in the consumer calendar. Boxing Day sales happen across different British territories, too. However, many people believe that the introduction of Black Friday in the UK has had a huge impact on Boxing Day sales. Similar to Black Friday, the Boxing Day sale craze — once the most popular day of sales — has organically marketed itself into the minds of British consumers. But with Black Friday lurking close by, it would seem that the anticipation for Boxing Day sales has vanished…
When looking at statistics over the course of previous years, there appears to be a decline in interest for Boxing Day, particularly when compared to Black Friday. In 2016, figures showed that 23% of people braved the Boxing Day crowds and went shopping, however, this was a significant drop from 32% in 2015. Is it possible consumers already snapped up the best deals from the Black Friday sales that occurred a month earlier? The research shows that this was the likely cause. Boxing Day sales in 2016 had dipped by 6.7% on 2015’s results. This included clothing stores, where a dip of 3.2% was evident.
Sales: Black Friday
Until recently, Black Friday sales was strictly a US craze — although, it was a major one. However, in 2010, Amazon introduced ‘Black Friday discounts’ to its British consumers, which then had a snowball effect. Now, most retailers around Britain battle for consumer attention — and whether they’re successful or not comes down to their advertising techniques.
The main benefit of Black Friday over Boxing Day as a sales opportunity is its timing — as customers, we’re far more likely to dig in at the sales prior to Christmas than immediately after it when funds are low. November is the new December! Consumers are looking for the best deals that will potentially go towards Christmas presents for loved ones — and that third cousin who buys for you, so you feel obliged to return the favour! Whatever the scenario, Black Friday has managed to market itself organically in the minds of British consumers.
What do the statistics look like? If previous sales numbers are anything to go by, Black Friday is a great success in the UK. In 2016, consumers spent £1.23bn on Black Friday — which showed a 12.2% increase on the previous year. In 2015, £1.1bn was spent on Black Friday in the UK. The day after saw shoppers spend £561m with sales that continued across the weekend. Sunday saw a higher result of spend in Britain with consumers cashing out £676m. Cyber Monday, which has close ties to the Black Friday event, saw £968m worth of shopping. We can also see that the number of orders placed on Black Friday were up by 9% on 2016, according to Ometria. The same source said that revenue increased for companies by 10% over the Black Friday weekend, which shows that this is a great marketing opportunity. In terms of advertising, mass emails accounted for 50% more total revenue than usual!
Digging deeper into the data, we can see that various product departments performed well over Black Friday. Products that sold well included beauty (up 27.5%), electrical items (up 9.3%) and women’s fashion (up 8.3%).
Clearly, timing has a lot to do with the success or failure of a marketing campaign. Remember, once you start advertising, people will become more familiar with your brand and start looking at reviews. Online reputation becomes crucial at this point, as 90% of consumers read online recommendations before visiting a business and 88% of consumers trust online reviews as if they were coming from a friend.
Sources:
http://www.netimperative.com/2016/12/black-friday-uk-stats-12-increase-last-year-lower-forecast/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/shopping-deals/boxing-day-sales-see-drop-9523742
