E-Commerce marketer to holiday sales season, “You’re the cheese to my macaroni”
E-commerce brands make the most revenue during these year-end holiday sales like Thanksgiving, BFCM, X-mas, and New year sales.
Just to show some numbers, 186million US shoppers purchased during 2021 BFCM sales, spending an average of 311 USD each.
From the above numbers, we see that the Holiday season and Fashion e-commerce marketers share an inseparable relationship.
But is it easy to grab our market share now?
Even though there were huge sales happening during the holiday season, the average ROAS during the BFCM’21 week was 2.49 but the ROAS was 3.43 during the same week of BFCM’20. There is a 38% decrease.
Along with thousands of marketers across the globe, we too have browsed down the online reports and blogs on how to prepare for the 2022 holiday season sales and which makes the marketers a little anxious.
Drawbacks in the 2022 year-end sales for the e-commerce marketers
We have been speaking to quite a lot of e-commerce fashion marketers in the last 2years, unlike the internet blogs, we found a few common threads of issues every one of them faces are,
📌 Retargeting audience size has reduced by 60%:
After the iOS’14+ updates and other privacy regulations like GDPR & CCPA, Facebook and other advertising platforms’ access to iOS user behavioral data is severely limited.
With the limited user behavior data collected, the majority of the businesses’ retargeting audience size has drastically reduced beyond 60%.
📌 The new normal: Facebook custom audience match rate is very low:
Along with the decrease in the retargeting audience size Facebook’s custom audience match rate has decreased below 25% which is the new normal now.
The below image is our client’s Facebook custom audience match rate when they decided to run a retargeting ad campaign personalized.
From the total audience size of 2 Million, Facebook could match only 25% of the total audience size.
With a poor match rate, the whole retargeting ad campaign performance has crumbled & the ROAS hit the rock bottom.
Now or never – Start collecting first-party data now
It’s time for us to realize and accept the fact that the problem isn’t with the marketers but with the advertising platforms — as their operations have changed with the course of events like the iOS’14 update, Google privacy update, and other privacy laws.
To nail it down, the advertising platforms are no more your website visitors’ data host but just an advertising tool.
And marketers need to start collecting their own customer behavior data i.e. first-party data and use advertising platforms for advertising only.
But what do we mean by first-party data?
When we say first-party data, we simply don’t mean the zero-party data which are email id, demographics, first name, and last name.
Yes, Anonymous website visitors are also first-party data
Generally, 98% of the website visitors are anonymous visitors. They could have landed on your website via any of the marketing channels like Google ads, Facebook ads, social media memes, newspaper ads, television ads, organic search, etc.
The majority of the anonymous visitors could be your high intent mid-funnel audience who can be nurtured and pushed to the bottom of the funnel.
From the known and the anonymous visitors, we collect certain information from both. Along with the first name, email id, and demographics, we also collect Browser ID, Click ID, IP address, User-agent, Facebook ID, Google ID, etc of both anonymous and known users.
The power of first-party data
Let’s say, for the BFCM sales, you want to run a retargeting ad campaign for the users who added a few items to the wishlist in the last 4months.
Now, with the above uniques parameters collected from both known and anonymous users, marketers’ can pull the match rate beyond 80% easily.
Check out the below audience segment of one of our e-commerce clients with a total audience size of 2.15Million and using first-party data we could match beyond 80%.
By activating the anonymous website visitors’ data, even 1-2% of conversions can scale up the revenue and increase the bottom of the funnel audience.
Fashion industry audience segments for BFCM and X-Mas sales
No two users are the same. And when it comes to fashion and clothing brands, users have various thoughts before making the decision to purchase.
By taking a cue from these user behaviors, we can make very tight and personalized audience segments & push them for the sale.
Advanced audience segmentation for the 2022 holiday season
Yes!! there are some standard internet famous fashion audience segments. But what we rather think is we can segment the audience even more efficiently with the first-party data.
📌 What the internet says vs what the internet doesn’t know
Talking about what the internet says, the following are the mandatory audience segments every fashion marketer needs to have,
- Coupon lovers
- Indecisive buyers
- Loyal customers
- Cart abandoners
But these are the generic audience segments for the fashion marketer to focus on.
The users’ may not be in the same mindset or headspace 2 months before and now. And therefore, targeting them in a generic way with a generic messaging may not encourage them to make a decision.
Rather you can segment the users based on their behavior and add specific timelines. Also, you can reactivate the sales audience of the previous year and bring them back to the funnel.
📌 Reactivating audience segments you can utilize for retargeting
✔️ Bring the previous year’s X-mas and new year sales audience back to the funnel
✔️ Bring the previous year’s BFCM sales audience back to the funnel
✔️ Bring back the one-time buyers who purchased 1 year back and re-activate & nurture them.
✔️ Users who visited the candles and decoration lights page 270days ago. (or any other specific product)
✔️Users who have products on the wishlist 270days ago
📌 Mid-funnel audience activating segments
Imagine if you’re selling business wear & casual wear products, you will have visitors checking out your products for a certain period of time. In general, these visitors reside in the mid-funnel segment and you can build micro-segments based on their behavior and run retargeting ads with discount coupons/ offers, etc.
However, users will be waiting for holiday sales to happen so that they can buy the items at a discounted price.
✔️ Users who added business wear alone on the wishlist in the last 30/60 days can be retargeted.
✔️ Users who have their cart value higher than usual can be segmented and retargeted with free shipping coupons or any other discount coupons
📌 Few sample audience segments you can create are
✔️ Segment the user who has more than 5 products on the wishlist
✔️ Users who have products on the wishlist but have not added them to the cart in the last 60days
✔️ Users who have added to the cart but have not purchased in the last 60days
✔️ Users who have visited the product details page more than 3times in the last 90days.
Check out how India’s leading Fashion brand activated the mid-funnel audience and implemented first-party data strategies and improved the custom audience match rate by 3X
📌 Holiday Landing page or product page visitors audience segments
X-mas and the new year sales are final sales of the holiday season and the intent of the user to make the purchase is really high towards the end we can make the most of it if we can optimize the funnel and target the users via personalized ads an.
For example, you have an exclusive holiday season landing page for clothes and cosmetics. And let’s see how can you retarget them based on their behavior,
✔️ Users who clicked on the hero section CTA can be segmented and redirected to the products page
The next section would be category wise-discount CTA.
✔️ Users who clicked on women’s fashion wear “40-60% flat sale” can be redirected to the women’s tab of discounts.
The next section would be about the combo offer or purchasing the whole look
✔️ Users who clicked combo of purchasing the whole fashion look can be redirected to the combo page which will be the higher cart value at the end of the day.
📌 Upselling and cross-selling techniques for fashion marketers
Shop the look
✔️ User who adds the top-wear to the cart can be cross-sold with the whole look which are the enhancers for the item in the cart.
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✔️ When a user is adding a tee or shirt or a shrug to the cart, the user can also be shown with the other products similar to the cart item.
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✔️ Based on the purchase history, and items in the cart, when the user adds a dress, you can also suggest the items which might interest the user to check out.
