The e-Conomy report from Google/Temasek was titled “Swipe up and to the right: Southeast Asia’s $100 billion Internet economy”. Most strikingly, eCommerce has overtaken Online Travel as the biggest sector of the internet economy in Southeast Asia. This growth has been turbocharged by shopping festivals. In fact, Alibaba set another record in selling goods worth more than $38 billion for the Singles Day in 2019. Nowadays the Shopping festivals are considered “one of the most important growth drivers” for eCommerce in the region.
In the past, there was Black Friday and Cyber Monday – mainly driven by US eCommerce players. Alibaba pioneered the Singles Day (11.11) and broke sales record year after year. Nowadays the number of online shopping festivals have multiplied: There is 9.9, 10.10, Singles Day (11.11), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 12.12 and Christmas. And all of these shopping festivals are happening in the last quarter of each year. Essentially a year-end boost for anyone operating in the eCommerce and advertising space.
Leverage a 3-steps Strategy to Win
So how can you benefit from these shopping festivals? One of the best-in-class approach is to use a 3-steps strategy to benefit from the surge & interest in online traffic. Google recommends that you put it in phase 1 Prospecting, followed by a push in phase 2 to boost sales with the actual event date happening and close it with phase 3 of re-engaging with the audience for this.
Case Study: 4.9x Growth in Revenue with a multi-channel 11.11 campaign
Thanks to an insightful meeting with Google in early October we were reminded about the power of 11.11 (Singles Day). So we started to plan our Singles Day campaign which incorporated the 3 phases with a variety of hooks (=offers) so we can get the maximum out of the singles day campaign. I was writing previously about the 6 ingredients for eCommerce success. There I highlighted the “focus on unit economics”: we ensured that we keep our unit economics in check while running our multi-channel campaign.
So the Sén Natural and FALCON Agency team came up with the following plan:
As you can see from the plan, we used a variety of channels and activities but made sure that the key messages are aligned. As always, the devil is in the details (incl. setting up a conversion framework and daily optimisation of creatives & ad sets). But to get a sense of how our creative assets looked like you can get a feeling of the campaign below.
This has been our animated banner for prospecting. We used it on the one hand to acquire leads and to create specific Singles Day audiences (for our upcoming conversion and re-targeting ads). Click on the image below to view the prospecting ad:
We also adapted our landing page accordingly so that there is no break of context for the end-consumer. Might be obvious but still some brands forget to align their online marketing activities and messaging with their landingpages.
From the 08th November up to the 12th of November we went live with a variety of conversion (and re-marketing) ads promoting the exact offers for 11.11.
Conversion driven ads that were running on paid social (Facebook and Instagram). Click on the image below to view the conversion ad:
We also adapted our ad text on search and added a variety of generic search marketing keywords
Enough of the look & feel. Let’s talk numbers. We compared our eCommerce performance with the same #of days of the previous month (Nov 8 – Nov 12 compared to Oct 8 – Oct 12). Do note that we were running with a similar media spend and our multi-channel “always on” campaigns.
We created a new channel grouping for our 11.11 campaign which can be seen as (Other). As you can see most of the additional traffic was driven specifically from the 11.11 campaign. Interestingly the performance of all other channels improved. Look at the Conversion tab for Paid Search (Google SEM), Organic Search (Google Organic), Email, Social (FB/IG), Direct and referral.
As written before we made sure that our unit economics are in check so that we are not loosing money with the 11.11. campaign. Getting to the results: they were impressive. Our comparable revenue increase by 4.9x and the number of transactions by 4x. On top of these metrics our eCommerce conversion rate improved by 88.91% and our average order value increased by 17.19%.
Speaking with a variety of FMCG brands I have heard that they are sometimes concerned about the high discounts and how much all of these platforms are loosing with the seasonal campaigns. We wanted to show though that if you plan the seasonal campaigns pro-actively, using a multi-channel & 3-steps Strategy and keeping your unit economics in check you can (i) increase revenue, (ii) improve conversion rate and (iii) increase your avg. order value at the same time.
Let me know how your 11.11 campaign performed and what challenges you were facing. Also in case you need a partner for future seasonal campaigns connect with the digital marketing experts from FALCON Agency.
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