The metrics that matter for your Black Friday marketing strategy in 2021

By Tom Summerfield on September 11, 2020

To say that 2020 has been a disruptive year for retail marketers would be a huge understatement. With e-commerce adoption growing exponentially, the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an accelerator of change across the sector; a seminal moment that has changed the face of retail as we know it – quite possibly forever. 

(Article updated 6 January 2021.) The 2020 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend– traditionally one of the biggest trading periods in the retail calendar – came and went, and will have been make or break for many retailers, with more at stake than ever before.

However, now it’s time to look ahead, and ensure that you’re focusing on building brand loyalty across the course of what will no doubt be another difficult year. To help you get a head start on your 2021 Black Friday plans (that’s right – we recommend starting to plan your Black Friday marketing strategy for 2021 more or less straight away!) we’ve compiled a handy list of some of the metrics that you need to be measuring throughout the year to make the weekend a success. 

Presenting the metrics that matter for your Black Friday marketing strategy in 2021…

Fundamentals: Day-to-day metrics

Lower your bounce rate: Are you driving qualified traffic to your website and dropping them in the right places?

Increase views of pages per session: Optimize the user journey to drive increased traffic across your site.

Drive higher revenue-per-click: Maximize the effectiveness of your website to drive sales. Enhancing your customer’s brand experience will result in more effective traffic.

Lower your unsubscribe rates: Keep customers engaged throughout the year to win big on Black Friday – blanket email campaigns are no longer good enough!

Increase click-through-rates: Drive and optimize more engagement on posts and ads to drive site visits.

More items added to baskets: Affect multiple purchases by providing customers with intelligent recommendations.

Key indicators: Mid-level metrics

Control your trading ability: Optimize recommended products across your digital network, promote margin-rich items and know which items have stock issues.

Increase purchase frequency: With the right nurturing throughout the year, you can ramp up customer spend on Black Friday and beyond.

Increase average order values: Tempt customers to purchase more with intelligence-powered recommendations and a seamless user experience.

Increase customer lifetime value: Drive brand loyalty amongst your customers with personalized comms throughout the year.

Reduce customer acquisition costs: Know who your ideal customers are and reduce CAC by targeting them at the right time, with the right message, via the right channel, and take into account EBITDA contribution by channel.

Strategic: High-level management metrics

An effective channel-mix strategy: Effectively optimize your channel mix strategy over time, ensuring long-term profitability and enhanced customer experience.

Converting one-time users into returning users: Build a loyal customer base who keep coming back for more.

Cost savings: Reduce costs across the business as a result of improving the customer experience. Increased economies of scale and cost savings across the customer journey touchpoints are a result of a far greater experience.

Win in these areas, and you win the Black Friday battle

Hopefully you’re already tracking the majority of these metrics, and exploring different avenues and approaches to help you achieve success across the board. If not, you need to be looking at how you can win in these areas to make your Black Friday marketing strategy as effective as it can be.

At Peak, we’re working with a wide range of retailers to help them shape their strategies for the coming months. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen an increasing number of businesses begin to better understand the importance of their data in driving a competitive advantage. When this data is leveraged by artificial intelligence (AI), it drives smarter decision-making and optimized processes across the business, helping you to positively impact all of the above metrics in your marketing efforts.

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