Put your Black Friday data to work!
The global economy may be turbulent, with inflation stalking the streets and household bills that look like Apollo-era moonshot budgets. But for web retailers, business never stops. And despite economic shocks and post-pandemic blues, last year’s Black Friday shop-fest was still 33% up on 2021. So: while people are understandably cautious, they’re still shopping. So, without further delay, analyse the Black Friday data at your disposal and start planning for your next campaign.
Do you know who gave you your gains?
The problem is, even the most tech-savvy retailers – like those using Shopify to build their stores and sell their wares – have difficulty finding out who their customers really are. (And if you’ve reached this page, you’re probably worried about it.)
We’re not talking about the “Segment X of Customer Set Y” sort of knowledge. We’re talking “Fred Bloggs, golf fanatic, buys 20 top-end clubs a year.” Real knowledge, about real people. (Including Fred’s contact details, too, so you can reach out with offers.)
But when you’re selling through other people’s platforms, most telling data about customers simply isn’t available to you – and platform owners tend to hug it very, very close. Shows how valuable Black Friday data is. But that doesn’t help you, does it?
That’s the reasoning behind our Daily Cards in the Distil App for Shopify. After all, millions of businesses use Shopify, and we wanted to show them how easy it can be to gain insights from this data alone.
Hundreds of customers who’ve installed our App are enjoying daily access to information not normally available, like seeing the split between your active customers and your at-risk ones and the volume of customers (and spending levels) chugging down your sales funnel.
While on the subject: why not log into Distil right now and see those figures for your business? We’ll wait until you get back.
Ready? Right. Let’s see how you can dig a little deeper into those numbers … and use them for your next stage of growth.
Go from aggregated insights … to individual relationships
You’ll notice: our short-and-snappy Daily Cards only go so far. That’s their point: they provide useful bite-size summaries that don’t take all day to understand. Thanks to AI slicing and dicing data from various sources, the Cards let you compare and contrast, see how much business is coming from each customer segment and what you can expect to sell next month.
But however useful, it’s still aggregated data. Nuggets with numbers, not names and narratives.
And that’s why we’d like to introduce the next step. With a big payoff: see what really happened at your store on Black Friday, and plan your next marketing campaign to the customers who really made it a success using Black Friday data analytics.
- 2% of customers keep buying your 5 most profitable items … would they buy more if you offered them the right incentive?
- Half your customers this month will never buy again … would this change if you were able to communicate with them?
- 80% of your marketing budget misses the mark … would knowing your true customers help each £ (or $ or €) work harder?
Now, we can’t tell you what incentives or offers you should use. Or even how to plan your marketing campaigns. But when you take Distil for Shopify to the next level – we call it Full Distil – we can tell you who those people are, and what makes them great, profitable, or at-risk customers. This means getting true value out of your data, including your Black Friday data.
Going Full Distil lets you build one-to-one relationships with customers
The next level adds a huge swathe of functionality to the insights you see in Distil for Shopify today. The Daily Cards gave you a taste, but Full Distil lets you drill down deep into your data, including Black Friday data – seeing in detail which customers bought what, who’s buying the most, who’s at risk of going to your competitor. Making use of data beyond your own web store, mixing and matching patterns across the entire e-tail landscape to give you a far more accurate picture of your customer base.
Accurate enough, in fact, to let you plan email campaigns and CRM programmes tailored to each customer’s preferences and tastes, gathered from their buying behaviour across the web.
Can you say “up-sell and cross-sell”?
Think of the opportunities. That guy who buys ten SKUs each visit, and would buy more with a little relationship-building. The business that restocks your products every month is showing signs of slowing down: you could solve it with a friendly outreach. The customer who doesn’t have the highest spend, but does spend it on your highest-margin items – you can now work on increasing their Customer Lifetime Value.
With deep-dive data from the broader Distil Customer Data Platform, all things become possible. (Well, retail things anyway.)
That’s how you learn from last year’s Black Friday, using your Black Friday data … and apply those learnings to plan your Black Friday this year. In fact, why stop there – why not aim to make every Friday a shopping extravaganza like Black Friday?
And every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday too.
In conclusion: Make every Friday a Black Friday
Of course, the Distil App for Shopify is free. Taking the Full Distil – not free. But incredibly competitive. And if you’re not ready to push the button yet, why not just give our team a call and chat? We’d love to hear from you – and yes, we’re a real business with real people, based in the UK but with an international outlook.
