Analyzing millions of dollars of sales across last year’s BFCM, Tresl’s team of data scientists bring you key insights for your upcoming holiday marketing strategy. Learn the best BFCM 2022 email marketing strategy, backed by data science.
Analyzing over 100 top DTC stores BFCM data revealed fascinating insights we had to share with you.
Did you know, for instance:
Keep reading to find out more!
In this post, we will share the key lessons we’ve learned by investigating millions of dollars of sales spanning across more than 250,000 Black Friday Cyber Monday orders, and what you can do to best prepare for BFCM 2022 for your store, backed by data science.
Tresl Segments was founded by ex-LinkedIn data scientists with a mission of making data science easy and accessible for e-commerce stores. The underlying data analysis for this study was conducted by Tresl’s team of in-house data scientists.
We started with real (anonymized and aggregated) data from a sample of the Tresl database, representing over 100 top DTC stores’ sales across last year’s 2021 BFCM weekend.
Our study represents more than a quarter-million Black Friday Cyber Monday orders across a wide range of store industries including beauty, fashion, CPG, sports and home goods.
With all this data, we also wanted to ensure these insights resonated with real DTC marketers. For 2022’s report we partnered with George Sylvain, most recently VP of Marketing for Fellow with 15 years of DTC industry experience to help guide our analysis and give you some real tangible and actionable takeaways.
2022 has been a tougher year for e-commerce, with many fast growing brands seeing slowdowns in sales, especially in the second half of the year.
Increasing interest rates and energy prices have led to reductions in consumer demand, while brands are suffering a lot of cost pressure and increasing return rates.
Despite that, stores using Tresl have reported YTD revenue 44% ahead of 2021, with the vast majority seeing YoY growth and only a few falling behind last year.
This year, Thanksgiving will be on November 24th, 2022 (vs November 25th, 2021). This means there is 1 extra shopping day between Black Friday and Christmas vs last year. Marketers can look forward to 1 more high-intent sales day, which will likely yield additional sales compared to last year’s shorter holiday periods.
So without further ado, let’s jump into the data – 2021 Data Deep Dive begins here!
So there you have it, 5 key data insights and some takeaways from our 2021 BFCM research, backed by data science. Now, let’s dig deeper on this last data insight because we think it’s one of our most important findings.
Let’s break down these 52% of returning customers a bit further and see when was their last purchase:
The biggest identifiable group of repeating customers during BFCM are the 40% of customers who made a purchase recently, within 60 days of BFCM.
Repeat customers make 52% of revenue but just 50% of orders, which means on average, repeat customers have a higher AOV.
To reiterate, of these repeat customers, we found
Our recommendations based on this data:
For example, if a customer bought a specific product 45 days ago, suggest they buy the same item again as a gift. Include reviews or press clips about the product to make them feel good about their own purchase in addition to its suitability as a gift.
However, beyond just an analysis of the top 100+ DTC stores, we wanted to dig a bit deeper and look into a cohort of only the top performing brands by revenue during BFCM and how they differ from the crowd. What we learned was quite interesting, and we hope can help inform your BFCM 2022 email and marketing strategy.
The top performing stores had 8x or greater sales lift on Black Friday (with some hitting 30x!) vs their prior year daily average.
Compare this to the average store analyzed, which had about 4x lift vs daily average sales.
How did they do this?
Hot take: The average conversion rate was the same in both the best and the worst performing stores. This would indicate to us that Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) work is less effective during BFCM than perhaps it is considered. Prioritizing good deals and strong marketing campaigns would appear to be a better strategy.
Finally, let’s round off this data deep dive into an analysis of newly acquired BFCM customers and our take on how to treat these deal-seekers.
Tresl's analysis shows that only 17% of new customers acquired during BFCM came back to shop at the brand again in the 6 months after Black Friday.
Customers acquired during BFCM had significantly lower ACLV, AOV, ARPU, and retention rates.
In fact, the average CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) was 25% lower for new customers acquired during BFCM compared to the normal average CLV of a new customer.
It is tempting to want to acquire new customers during the busy holiday season, but with CPCs rising across ad platforms, you will likely need to increase bids and target CPAs.
If your store bases your maximum ad bids on the expected lifetime value of a customer, instead of first-purchase-profitability, be warned: these new BFCM customers will likely spend ~ 20% less than your average customers.
Adjust your bids and target CPAs accordingly, and work to improve your retention strategy.
How would you segment and market to new, BFCM deal-seeking customers if you knew they were much less likely to return?
Our Segments app makes it easier to track and market to this cohort over time.
After Black Friday, we will release special prebuilt segments, including "2022 BFCM Newly Acquired Customers".
We recommend sending unique personalized follow-up emails & SMS campaigns to this segment, strategically designed to keep them engaged in the brand. Depending on your brand and what they purchased during BFCM this might look like additional discounts, or more brand story-telling, or even more personalized content.
And that’s a wrap of our BFCM 2021 data deep dive. Thanks for reading. Below, we’ll recap all the important recommendations that we’ve made in this blog post.
Here’s a summary of our recommendations of actions you can take now to maximize BFCM using Segments. For a more in-depth guide, refer to our BFCM Top 5 Customer Segments and Email Marketing Strategies blog post.
1. Connect Segments app to Klaviyo, Mailchimp or Attentive ( if you have not already done so).
2. Link the following Segments to Email and SMS marketing channels. These customer segments are already pre-loaded into the Segments platform.
3. Create additional custom Segments relating to the specific behavior observed in your store. Remember, the top performing stores have the most unique campaigns and most unique segments.
4. Create individual SMS and email campaigns targeting each group with a specific, personalized message recognizing their history with your store.
5. Create special nurturing email flows for post-purchase, especially for those who are newly acquired during BFCM and are therefore more likely to churn.
6. Important for Klaviyo users.
7. Finally, track the performance of each Segment over time inside the Segments app.
Ready to have a massive BFCM 2022? Then don’t forget to also read our latest post 2022 BFCM Top 5 Customer Segments and Email Marketing Strategies, where we cover our our 5 supercharged customer segments built by our data scientists and some of our suggested actionable strategies. See the results for yourself.
Not a Segments customer? We’re offering a special 30 day extended trial! You will have 2x the amount of time to start sending highly targeted personalized marketing campaigns. This is a limited time only for new signups only.
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