For e-commerce, Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the biggest weekend of the year and it’s quickly expanding into the days surrounding the holiday weekend. Some retailers offered deals as early as Thursday night when stores opened, while others like REI chose to #OptOutside instead and encouraged spending the day not shopping.
No matter which direction retailers took their campaigns, one thing is certain, BFCM 2018 was the biggest one yet.
At Justuno, we saw some pretty astounding numbers this BFCM — like an increase of 23.6% in online spending by the end of Friday — that indicate the remainder of the holiday season will be just as record-breaking.
Let’s dive into the numbers and break down how promotion performance compared during Cyber Five (Black Friday through Cyber Monday) to outside the holiday season.
Ungated promotions
As predicted during our Holiday Heroes webinar series, ungated promotions with a prominent offer displayed were the way to go. During BFCM, Justuno clients saw a 16.63% conversion rate with ungated promotions.
Normally, we recommend ungated promotions for general website messaging or free shipping.
But during BFCM, the primary goal is to convert as many visitors as possible — not capture more emails — and the best way to do this is with ungated promotions.
Keep in mind that customers are coming to your site with an expectation: deep tiered discounts, free shipping on all orders, etc. — and they want it without having to do anything extra.
Meeting customer expectations is the number one way to close sales and it becomes even more critical during the increasingly competitive holiday season.
Countdown timers
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Most shoppers understand that BFCM deals aren’t going to last very long and that “limited time offer” frame of mind is part of the frenzy behind BFCM shopping.
At Justuno, we regularly recommend adding countdown timers to amplify urgency and achieve higher engagement and conversion rates. Countdown timers work well during the rest of the year but become even more compelling during this compressed time frame.
On average, promotions with timers had a 13.86% engagement rate during Cyber Five. That’s a massive jump from the 8.6% average our users see during the rest of the year.
By leaning into the “this weekend only” mentality, Justuno customers converted a whopping 22.67% of countdown timer engagements to sales!
Center pop-ups
A classic promotion, the center pop-up, was another hugely successful type this year.
On average, these promotions have an engagement rate of 5.56% during the year. However, over BFCM, these center pop-ups saw 17.03% engagement and converted at almost the same rate.
That’s more than triple the usual rate, which is a testament to the power of this tried and true pop-up style.
Spin-to-wins
One of our favorite and most popular promotions, the spin-to-win converted at an unbelievable rate of 23% on average — 19.35% for desktop and 26.64% on mobile!
While those are compelling conversion rates, they don’t tell the full story.
During the rest of the year, spin-to-wins average a 13.3% opt-in rate. During Cyber Five that rate dropped by half to around 6.5%.
What gives?
All of the Cyber Five spin-to-win offers were gated! As we mentioned earlier, you should not be focused on list-building during these shopping days. During BFCM, competition is high and any additional effort on a visitors part may drive them to a competitor.
So leave those locked spins for the remainder of the year!
However, these BFCM spin-to-wins weren’t a total loss. While they did have a lower opt-in rate, the traffic that did engage converted at a super high rate. This signals that even though the gated promotion discouraged some visitors, it did drive more qualified leads.
The spin-to-win is a great example of an already high converting promotion that can maximize sale potential by capitalizing on increased BFCM traffic.
Customer revenue
While all the statistics listed above are great, ultimately the most stores opened of success is revenue. Justuno clients combined reported $227,462,164.23 in BFCM revenue, with Justuno promotions driving $45,925,299.87, or about 20.19%.
That is almost double the 10.9% average Justuno attributed revenue throughout the rest of the year!
Overall, we saw lots of cool promotion designs and variations from our clients over Cyber Five. From custom spin-to-wins and animations to “outside of the box” banner designs — there was no shortage of creativity coming from client or agency designs!
But, the holiday season is far from over. There are still three full weeks left in the year, so while the busiest e-commerce weekend is over, there is still a ways to go to reach your year-end sales goals.
So, make your list of promotional to-dos and check it twice, because there are 21 days left to crush your Q4 goals. Need some pre-builts to finish out the season? Check out the holiday specific ones for 2018 here.
Check back in January for a roundup of the 2018 holiday season as a whole and some New Year’s surprises!
