What strategies can you use to ensure you get the best ROI on your marketing budget?

 

11.11 is China's second most important shopping day of the year, after Singles' Day. 

According to 2021 reports, eCommerce giants Alibaba and JD racked up around $139 Billion in sales on their platforms. With its rapid growth, many businesses are trying to cash in on this day with their e-commerce platforms by focusing on their marketing strategies and improving customer experience. 

As Baozun uncovered in 2022, despite macroeconomic growth slowing and consumer confidence waning, there was still an observable evolution of shopping behaviours. 

As the GDP decreased from 8.1 percent to 3.2 percent year-on-year, social retail sales also dropped significantly. A 44 trillion yuan total revenue in 2021 compared with only 32.1 trillion by September this year demonstrates the severity of reduced consumption power caused by a lack of consumer confidence. 

During China's 11:11 Sale, it was clear that customers' online behaviours have changed, and this is driven not by economic factors but rather by individual preferences.

In the recent 11.11 promotion, we observed the following trends in products:

• Jewellery, outdoor, haircare, appliances, sportswear, kitchen appliances, and yoga showed high growth potential. 
• Camping/cookout gear, skiing, roller skating/skateboarding/extreme sports, tennis, and tennis shoes grew fast during the promotion. 
• Kids’ shoes, luxury, outdoors, sports shoes & bags, and sportswear grew fast in JD Double 11 GMV & grew by category from 10.31-11.11.
• Accessories, soft shells, toddler shoes, luxury boots, and hiking boots grew rapidly in the sub-categories.
• Clothes are the core category in Tiktok while cosmetics, home, food and beverage also performed well.

Uncovering an array of captivating changes in consumer behaviour, our data from various platforms highlighted intriguing trends stemming from this shopping event:

• Traffic growth has slowed, bonuses are not as prevalent, and retention rates have become increasingly important.
• At the TMALL platform, traffic hit the plateau. Only six categories have grown - kitchen appliances, jewellery, outdoors, haircare, medical devices, and yoga.
• At the JD Mall platform, kids' shoes & outdoors have seen a double increase in traffic while other categories declined.

For many retailers, the digital space has become tricky to traverse as macroeconomic growth slows and consumer spending decreases. As such, it is increasingly important for e-commerce sites to focus on customer loyalty rather than solely depending on new customers.

 

What methodologies worked?

Last 11.11 sale, eCommerce companies innovated with captivating techniques to draw customers and uplift sales. How did they do it? Baozun’s analysis revealed several new trends that they used to boost their business profit successfully:

Expanding reach to new platforms and giving customers more time for a leisurely shopping experience by extending the warm-up period

WanXiangTai extended the sales environment by optimising targets in sales. Instead of targeting consumers who search through brand keywords, they aimed at consumers with a high Target Group Index. This resulted in a cover rate of +230%.

Tory Burch expanded to a new platform - Wechat moments. This helped with precise positioning which attracted young consumers through celebrity elements resulting in +20, 000 interactions and closed-loop sales in Tmall.

Yunbian integrated with different channels like Alimama, Tencent Ad, Jingzhuntong, and Juliangqianchuan to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the brands it serves. The multichannel media data has been fully connected to the data warehouse.

 

Setting up global new product marketing to create new top-selling items

Panasonic used digitalization of brand product group assets by researching new consumer groups such as pioneers and like-minded people. 

After the launch of new products, data were reviewed and optimised, improving its brand power by 5%. Keyword search blocking ensured exposure to a larger audience, thus, making air fryers in the top 10 hot selling list. 
Leveraging cross-domain recommendations to create an omnichannel marketing approach to drive brand value. 

Arc’teryx faced fierce competition. The solution covered content to match search across domains which involved determining the best match of content and words and identifying the quality content, brand, and competitor words as ad placeholders. The keyword search blocking ensured BIG DAY exposure. This resulted in an increased number of daily fans improving to 8%.

 

Engaging with global membership and strategically improving customer retention to ensure sustainable growth

The challenge with Lingyang Chaoxin was intense competition with other luxury and home brands, and how to identify and capitalise distinct customer segments. The brand employed audience analysis from its membership data bank as a solution. 

Luxury brands are often faced with customers who struggle to make a decision. However, this particular brand overcame that challenge. Through targeted reminders sent out to active users, the store entry rate shot up by 9x, resulting in an impressive ROI of 80+

 

Using experiential marketing to be the driving force behind an impressive surge in sales

Livestreaming led the business growth during the 11.11 promotion and matrix layout is a must. The platforms stepped into a new dimension and the metaverse opened a new perspective. 

Top streamers like Li Jiaqi brought a huge volume of traffic bringing over 1000 multichannel networks to join Taobao and enriching its live-streaming ecology. Mid-tier influencers, with an average of 500-5,000 viewers, contributed more in gross merchandise value in the 11.11 pre-sale. Brands like Estee Lauder achieved over 1 million traffic in the 11.11 re-sale. 

In professional sports brands, the year-on-year cumulative brand membership was up to 7%. Live recommendations and commodity matching helped with the high conversion rate as well as the benefits to attract new members such as live-member exclusive price resulting in the increase of the regular members to 8%.
 

Takeaway

The shopping world has changed in ways we likely didn't predict, with eCommerce brands finding new strategies to stay resilient and drive profit. Rather than getting left behind the curve, modern businesses must understand global trends and then invest strategically. This approach can open up entirely new avenues for explosive growth potential - let's explore together.

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