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This year’s Black Friday weekend has come and gone, and whilst the gifting season isn’t quite finished just yet, some initial learnings from Black Friday have already emerged.
Due to reduced consumerism last year, we found that the chaos of last year’s Black Friday was muted by the UK’s cost of living crisis. The predicted, post covid return to form actually took another year to hit, and the chaos has returned with a vengeance in 2023, with over 9 billion pounds spent online over the entire cyber month, per adobe analytics.. And so, whether it was for our clients or just looking from the outside in, here’s what we found from the busiest retail day of the year. Speaking of…
Consumers are wiser than ever, be it to trends or to individual deals. In fact a Which? survey found that 98% of deals from Black Friday in 2021 could be found throughout other times of the year too. 2022 saw the number of sales made on Cyber Monday eclipse those made on Black Friday for the third year in a row, spending 11.3 billion on the Monday compared to only 9.13 billion on the Friday. So, learning from this, we actually saw an increase in the number of brands setting boundaries that allowed them to flex their ad spend with demand, or extend how long their deals were up for, so that they didn’t miss out on any sales over the entire weekend.
Similarly, the peak spending period is no longer confined to just one weekend in November, it extends well beyond, which has offered valuable opportunities for brands to take advantage of. For example, last year Google reported that 30% of Q4 Sales were made in the final few weeks of 2022, and we predict that this is going to be even more so this year. After all, this has been the first Black Friday in five years with a full 30 days between it and Christmas day. Add to this that most people’s payday fell after Black Friday, it would be no surprise if brands leaned fully into their December deals and placed slightly less priority on Black Friday.
So, for those small businesses that didn’t get many sales over the Black Friday weekend, don’t give up hope as hopefully, you at least got a lot of new eyes to your site.
As the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday has been regarded as the beginning of the American shopping season as far back as 1952. Considering that not many outside of America actually celebrate Thanksgiving, the idea of a Black Friday deal actually being designated to this day is challenged more year on year.
As the lines of when Black Friday deals start and end continue to blur, many brands have started their “Black Friday” deals the week before, and some, such as Savage X Fenty, allowing access for VIP Customers as early as the first of November. Furthermore, brands such as TheProteinWorks didn't even bother with limiting such an early deal purely to VIP customers and branded the entire month of November with a “cyber month” discount.
However, for many customers, the day after the fourth Thursday of November remains the designated “get my Christmas shopping sorted day.” And so, for those running an extended Black Friday deal, that began days or weeks before the date itself, it was imperative to highlight that the deal was still running on November 23rd, with messaging such as “last day of our deal” or “last chance to get x% off.”
One of the issues of introducing longer deals like this is a lull between it going live and the Black Friday day itself. Our client, P&Co, combatted this lull this year by introducing daily incentives, be it a sticker pack with orders over a certain amount or a free patch included with every order, and, in turn, saw that this dip in conversion rate reduced significantly compared to previous years.
The saying “preparation is half the battle” gets overused, but it really did ring true here. This year, we found that clients that had their branding and campaign for Black Friday finished before September had a much easier time than the brands who may have left Black Friday branding until the initial murmurings of the date were a few days gone.
This early preparation allowed for these clients to map out when they wanted their deals to start and how they wanted to divvy up their ad spend. It should come as no surprise that many of these brands then hit most of their Black Friday goals before the day of.
Similarly, the ways in which a number of brands decided to handle Black Friday meant that they would need significant changes from a web development perspective. This is not something you can simply implement and pray that it works, it requires significant testing and support. So, getting the initial versions of the wireframing or unique Black Friday functionalities implemented before September, was required to truly capitalise on this period too.
Omnichannel has been the ultimate buzz word in eCommerce for some time now. And whilst it might not be the best route to go down for some brands, from a pure retail perspective it certainly has its upside.
For those somehow out of the loop, omnichannel shopping is where your eCommerce business sells not only on your native eCommerce site, but on channels like Amazon, TikTok-Shop, wholesale sites such as asos, and in a brick and mortar store if applicable.
Last year saw in store shopping rise by 12% compared to 2021, and online by 14%. However since last year there have been some major shake-ups, as social commerce ran rampant. We even experienced this first hand, with one of our clients selling on TikTok-Shop. Naturally, they saw massive benefit, with it making up a large portion of their sales.
Brands are trying to be where the consumers are, and younger consumers are on TikTok.
But, you should approach selling on TikTok-Shop with some trepidation, as only a few days before Black Friday, hundreds of independent businesses were rightfully shut down, due to selling copyrighted products. We can’t predict what the state of TikTok-Shop will be in 2024, but if it emerges as something that fits your brand image, younger generations will snag it up.
Ethical consumerism, both from an environmental and personal perspective, has been a growing counter-cultural trend over the past few years. In fact the “buy nothing” app, which was initially born out of Facebook communities, celebrated its second anniversary on this year’s Black Friday.
With this has come a number of brands who openly embrace such a mentality, refusing to engage in the typical Black Friday cost cutting. Brands were typically met with one of two responses, acceptance despite initial disappointment, or frustration. Most customers could see through the “counter culture, anti consumerism” veil that these brands may have put up if it wasn’t an existing tenant of the brand’s identity.
For example, Adanola, a loungewear brand, came under significant flack for announcing that they would not be running any Black Friday deals. Fans of the brand were angry, as the brand has notoriously low stock, meaning that they couldn’t get products even when there wasn’t a rush to get them.
However for fashion brand, Patagonia, it has become a point of anticipation to see how they rebel against the typical frugality of Black Friday every year, as it perfectly lines up with their brand identity, and it’s refreshing to see such a large brand value their ethics over their economics.
Every Black Friday is different, but if there’s one thing this year has taught us, it’s that there are a growing number of customers who are tired of the Black Friday concept, and so you should think carefully about how you choose to present your brand over the period. From a pure retail perspective, whilst Black Friday may have fallen slightly more in line with other holidays in terms of the amount of sales made, it can still be a fruitful period for your brand if you play your cards right, and get them all on the table with enough time to spare.
To stay ahead of the retail dates for 2024, order a copy of our retail calendar here.
