Seasonal Sales

In the United States, the most famous of these are Black Friday and CyberMonday. In Asia, shoppers are more familiar with 11-11 and other same-numbered days (12-12, 9-9, 3-3, etc.) Other markets may have their own occasions, unique only to them, like the Freedom and Diwali Sale in India.

No matter the flavor of the sale, the opportunities that they present are universal. Online stores can organize promotions that generate tremendous revenue, win over customers from competitors, and create meaningful brand equity.

Succeeding during a seasonal sale is, of course, easier said than done. For every online store that dreams of a winning seasonal sale, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other stores in their own industry hoping and planning for the same goal. Competition across products, categories, and deal types is intense. Brands naturally try to wield their company assets, such as email lists and social channels, to standout, but often fall short. Such online stores may generate moderate sales, but fail to translate these conversions into lasting growth.

Fortunately, there is a framework for optimizing these seasonal sales. Done correctly, they can be more than just a one-time bumper revenue, but turn into a watershed moment for the brand,  drawing attention from deal-seekers who convert into loyal customers.

Changing Expectations for Seasonal Sales

Most consumers today are well aware of an upcoming sale in their market, be it Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or 11-11. But this was not always the case. These occasions are recent inventions, after all,  designed by the e-commerce industry to generate sales for specific products or categories.

Black Friday, for instance, was created to liquidate stocks to make room for new products.The occasion simply evolved to be the last big sale before Christmas, encompassing nearly all of a retailer's inventory. Now shoppers expect deals and discounts across most product categories, not just those that a retailer would wish to liquidate.

Online stores need to understand how consumer expectations have changed over the years, as this knowledge will help them formulate their seasonal sales strategy. Take the case on Cyber Monday. In 2005, when the idea of it was first conceived by the then still-nascent e-commerce industry in the United States, online stores had the luxury of not participating. Doing so was truly optional, and the choice would not break a business.There were few participating shoppers, and there were even fewer participating stores. CyberMonday, in short, was still a niche phenomenon.

Now seventeen years later, Cyber Monday is practically an institution. Online stores cannot skip the occasion without incurring significant losses to the brand. Such losses are two-fold: One, a business loses out on revenue by not hosting a seasonal sale or not offering a significantly competitive one. Two, the business also loses on potential customers, who will now turn to a competitor in the same category for their purchasing needs — rain or shine, they expect to shop on this day.

These expectations were set by the industry as a whole and through marketplace giants in particular. Platforms like Amazon and Alibaba pressured their online retailers to offer sizable discounts during the seasonal sales. Those that complied were rewarded with on-platform benefits such as greater visibility, co-marketing opportunities, and even financial incentives. These partners drowned out the competitors who made the poor decision not to comply with the top-down directive from the marketplaces.

Platforms like Amazon and Alibaba are so influential that consumers have come to expect the seasonal sales they drove, even beyond their walled garden. No more is this idea apparent than on Shopify, the top website builder for e-commerce stores around the world. For its Cyber Monday Black Friday of this year, Shopify produced US$7.5 billion in sales with an average order value of ~US$105.10.

These numbers should make it crystal clear: seasonal sales can represent a windfall for online stores, so long as they find a way to cater to high consumer expectations for store-wide sales and spend effort marketing the sales event.

Challenges with Seasonal Sales

While seasonal sales like BFCM or same numbered day sales are ubiquitous, resources on how to help online sellers maximise these occasions are few and far between. Most highlight success stories but give little actionable advice on how to translate these feel good examples into meaningful results for their own business.

This lack of resources is problematic, given how big the challengers are for any seasonal sale. These challenges can be segmented across three different areas: benchmarking, acquisition, and conversion, each of which we will detail here.

Benchmarking

Online stores do not offer deals in a vacuum. The quality of any given promotion is compared by consumers with other retailers in a category offering similar discounts. As such, online stores need to benchmark their own deals against what competitors may be offering. To iterate how big this phenomenon is, with the latest release of the chrome browser, any consumer can track price drops from inside the browser itself.

Most online stores take a "mystery shopper" approach to this process. They'll visit the website and social media pages of competitors, examining their deals for the forthcoming seasonal sale. This strategy is not only inefficient, but it's inaccurate. By conducting your industry benchmarking in this adhoc fashion, your online store may overemphasize certain factors, such as the pricing of who you believe to be your nearest competitor, and fail to paint the true state of your category.

Deals made this way may fall to one of two extremes: either they are too aggressive, resulting in little-to-no profit, or worse, not competitive enough, which brings no one through your virtual doors.

Acquisition

Many of the success stories about online retailers operating during a seasonal sale focus on the silver bullet — a clever advertisement, a unique growth hack, or a publicity stunt. Unfortunately, these tactics are not sustainable, even for those businesses. The vast majority of sales will not come from these once-in-a-lifetime campaigns but from tried-and-true marketing channels and assets.

These assets include email lists, SMS lists, and the online store's social media accounts. Most businesses neglect these channels, even though they may be the best driver of any seasonal sale. The subscribers to an email or SMS list of the followers of an official company account, afterall, already have a keen interest in your brand. If they have not already purchased from you in the past, this group may be most likely to do so. The perfect seasonal sale may be just the right strategy to get them to checkout from your online store.

Conversion

Even if you bring customers to your online store after thorough benchmarking and acquisition built around your digital channels, this may not necessarily be a cause for celebration. Some deal-seekers may visit your store but never buy. This is problematic when the average basket size for the seasonal sale is X, but the customer acquisition cost is higher Y and you actually needed Z lifetime value to break even or profit on the shopper.

Your seasonal deals, in other words, were supposed to generate much greater revenue than they did. In this kind of environment, how to convert more visitors to buyers when the nature of a seasonal sale may make customers focus on price and price alone? This challenge may seem insurmountable, but plenty of brands have converted deal-seekers with short attention spans into buyers.

Conquering Seasonal Sales

Fortunately, you don't need a large marketing team to solve the challenges associated with seasonal sales. There are many tools that help online stores address every function needed for a strong seasonal sale

Benchmarking

With the advent of automated tools, no brands should ever do manual benchmarking again. There is a whole category of software that can help you conduct benchmarking at scale, so you get an accurate picture of your entire industry and are no misled by one or two data points.

Most online stores can automatically monitor competitors. This is helpful as not all of your competitors maybe be using the same keywords as your own brand - they may be listing competitive products under different categories. From there, you can set dynamic price rules, so that you are alerted if your products are underpriced or overpriced.

In most cases, it will not be a single product that differs significantly in price, but many. For these instances, it would be impractical to go back to every product and increase or decrease the price depending on whether it's under or over priced.

These are thus Bulk Price Editors you can use to do this task at a scale, configuring your pricing based on a percentage or value based markdown or markup. You can filter by numerous variables, such as everything from product to variants to stock value and rate of selling, to apply the right pricing to a particular category.

Acquisition

Many seasonal sales operate as a flash sale that runs for a limited abount of time. Most same numbered day sales, such as 11-11, are organised this way, with deals lasting strictly for 24 hours and sometimes even less. It would be difficult to run this time-bound sale manually - just imagine trying to individually set prices 25% off for thousands of products in the minutes leading up to the start time for a midnight sale!

Fortunately, the store-wide flash sale tool within Konigle can help you run a flash sale in, well, a flash.

The most basic value of these tools are the time parameters. They can help you set the universal validity of the sale, so that it doesn't accidentally run under-time, which would frustrate your customers, or over-time, which could cause unnecessary losses. These tools can also safeguard against costly mistakes, such as putting items for sale at a loss or offering two separated discounts on an item.

With the time you save on setting these parameters, your team can focus on aligning your corresponding marketing for email, SMS, and social media. You should have at least three communications across these channels: one that annonces the forthcoming deals and encourages people to add products to their cart in advance; another that is shared shortly before the seasonal sale, reminding people that it's about to start; and another that goes out during the sale, advising people that there is X time left for the sale to capitalise on their fear of missing out.

Conversion

To improve conversion rates, you can use charm pricing for your products. Charm pricing is so named because customers are disproportionately attracted to the left-most digit in a price, so there are several ways to set it in an enticing way depending on your brand, industry, and goals. Like with regular pricing, charm pricing would be difficult to do at scale. Fortunately, there are tools like the Charm Pricing Tool from Konigle that can help you adopt a charm pricing strategy that works for your online store, including 9, .99, .95, 0, 5 and more, automatically. Charm pricing has shown to improve conversions by up to 4%, you can read in details about Charm Pricing here.

Beyond the Sale

The reason that many shoppers from seasonal sales don't comeback is simple: While the brand may have offered a financial incentive to shop in the first place, there is no corresponding rewards to shop again. As a result, it's crucial that brands develop a loyalty program. You can launch a general loyalty program, such as an automatic membership for any customers, or even create one with multiple tiers based on how much a customer purchases.

Developing a proprietary loyalty program could cost significant time and capital. Again, tools like the customer-based pricing within Konigle enable online sellers to start a loyalty program with a few short steps.

As you can see, these tools enable online sellers to define their loyalty program and what benefits it provides them. For instance, an online store could create a VIP tier for customers who spend more than US$1000 within the brand and give them a perpetual 10% discount to any item from their store for a certain period of time. This kind of loyalty program augments the customer lifetime value, ensuring you generate profit from all customers, including those who first bought via seasonal sale.

Having just the right amount of inventory for a promotion is both an art and a science. In spite of your best efforts in trying to predict demand for inventory, you may still run out of stock. The ability to bring back visitors when the item is back in stock while also capturing their interest via email or phone number is another use of this tactic to implement.

If a customer were to visit your store during a seasonal sale or even during a regular business period and a product is out of stock, the "Notify me when available button" will appear. Using this option, the customer can sign up with his email or mobile number, and he will receive a corresponding alert when the item is back in stock. In this way, you can build your email list, which can then be used to promote your loyalty program, so you can bring that customer back again and again, increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

Further Inspiration for Your Seasonal Sales

 Case study

Background

During the COVID-19 lockdown in India, there was one artisanal cheese maker who made a bold move and decided to take their business online. Thanks to this decision, they were able to amplify their reach, and within no time at all, these creative cheesemakers managed to amass thousands of loyal fans—an astonishing feat.

However, though they had created a vast customer database with immense potential for running profitable growth tactics such as running promotions or new product launches, actually implementing them took a backseat due to sheer lack of availability on the part of the founders—how familiar does that sound?

The Ultimate Commerce Assistant

The store was recommended Konigle—the ultimate commerce assistant to help them run profitable growth tactics without needing multiple software subscriptions or spending time doing manual work. Powered by Konigle's assistance, they implemented a VIP program on their store in minutes, where they setup customer-based pricing to reward their best customers without the need of any loyalty program software or app. Then, they went ahead to capture lost demand with a Back In Stock Alerts flow, which they activated on their Shopify Store in minutes.

The 12.12 Windfall

The icing on the cake was when they were able to run a one day only 12/12 storewide promotion in minutes using Konigle and added an additional 8.3% of their annual sales in one day. This phenomenal result is testimony to the windfall opportunities seasonal sales bring.

If we analyse closely, although the business has ardent fans, they need a consistent push to act, and if they are not able to do so, the business loses out on profitable revenue. It is here a solution like Konigle that makes it ridiculously easy to implement profitable growth tactics, comes in handy, and captures this revenue and profits.

Important dates: Your Cheat Sheet to sale opportunities

Global

Southeast and East Asia

• Lazada Birthday Sale (Mar 27)
• Shopee Birthday Sale (Dec 12)
• Singles Day (Nov 11)

India

• Diwali (Depending on the Indian calendar, between Oct and Nov)
• Republic day (Jan 26)
• Freedom sale (Aug 15)

Mexico

• El Buen Fin (weekend before Mexican Revolution Day - 3rd Monday of Nov)

Australia

• Click Frenzy
• EOFY - End of Financial Year (Jun 30)

Takeaways

1. Benchmarking

To set attractive deals for a seasonal sale, you can use tools to benchmark competitors, which will help you get a more accurate picture of whether your products are overpriced or underpriced, so you can markdown or markup as needed.

2. Flash Sales

Another great tactic are short-term, time-bound price drops using tools such as the Konigle Flash Sale tool, which makes it very easy to run a flash sale with different variables for validity, pricing, and more, freeing up time that you can then spend on aligning marketing activities across email, SMS, and social media.

3. Charm Pricing

Bringing visitors to an online store is not enough; increasing the probability for the visitor to buy is important. Having all products charm priced, which leverages the fact that people are more easily influenced by the left-most digit in a price, is an underrated tactic that keenly improves conversions by up to 4%.

4. Loyalty Program

Even if a visitor buys during a seasonal sale, it's not a guarantee that the visitor will ever comeback; it's therefore important to create a loyalty program that gives them financial incentives to become a repeat customer.

5. Back in Stock Alerts

Bringing back a visitor interested in an out-of-stock product is an important tactic to capture demand and increase sales. The added benefit of this tactic is that it helps increase an online store's marketing list. The tactic has shown to increase margins by up to 10%.