We had a chat with André Ihlar, Online Sales Manager at Lyko, about how he approaches Black Friday after all these years. Both ahead of and during the campaign, you have to factor in that impressions, clicks and conversion rates rise sharply during these days, and you should monitor both spend and results actively to a much greater extent. Lyko runs hard campaigns throughout the week every year, so they must have taken some hits and learned along the way.
If you are still sitting there thinking about how to get attention and find that perfect subject line for the email, it is time to make up your mind. How do you stand out? Anti-messaging, insanely deep sale, all means are pretty much allowed in these final moments, but do not forget that it has to match the tone of your landing pages and your brand. It can chafe too much otherwise and go viral for the wrong reasons.
Ahead of Black Week, the planning of the campaign is critical. Which products, will logistics be able to handle the volume of purchases, staff reinforcement, process efficiency and inventory purchasing so you do not sell out, and so on. Should we bet on TikTok or on 100 micro-influencers? The choices feel endless. But hopefully you have landed in a strategy and a tactical plan, otherwise it is a little late today.
One thing many do now is create categories for gifts. Many people use Black Friday to buy Christmas presents, and if they can easily find "Gifts for him" or "Christmas presents for teenagers" on your site, it can catch a few extra purchases and make the decision easier for the customer.
We had a chat with André Ihlar, Online Sales Manager at Lyko, about how he approaches Black Friday after all these years. Both ahead of and during the campaign, you have to factor in that impressions, clicks and conversion rates rise sharply during these days, so you should monitor both spend and results actively to a much greater extent. Lyko runs hard campaigns throughout the week every year, so they must have taken some hits and learned along the way, and sure enough:
"A tough blow we try to duck every year, but have been hit by several times before, is that all the automatic advertising systems adjust to the higher conversion, and it takes a few days after you have turned off the campaign before they figure out that conversion has dropped, so spend can be way too high for a few days."
Another common problem often seen around BF (and other campaign periods) is that ads keep running even though the product is sold out. It is of course annoying to just hand over advertising money to Google that will never bring any conversion, but perhaps even worse is that it will shape the customer's perception of your brand. "There is no point clicking on the ad from Company X with the best price on the product I am looking for, because they usually do not have it in stock anyway."
"The social platforms' optimisation systems work best if you increase your budget over time, so if you want good results and want to be confident that you will spend the planned budget, you need to gradually increase your campaign budget over at least a few days ahead of it."
To close, from Tobias Bergström at Commerce Mind: I also see far too often e-commerce operators with under-dimensioned warehousing and logistics for Black Week. If your normal pick and pack can handle 1,000 orders per day, but you get on average 10,000 orders, much of it driven by advertising, over a week, it will likely cause internal chaos and a poor customer experience. In delivery, in customer service, in returns handling and so on. Keep constant tabs on your advertising and let it adjust to how the rest of the organisation is keeping up. Or not.
These are some basic but good tips that you should have thought about 6 months ago. Keep an eye on the advertising. It can make a real difference to the bottom line.
Related articles
AI does not only make development faster, it moves the capability out into the whole organisation. Suddenly anyone can build and change things in the systems. It is enormously powerful, but combined with old ways of working it leads to either chaos or no effect at all. Here is how you lead the shift from tree-tender to forest ranger before entropy runs away from you.
Technical debt is more than a technical concept, it is a business-critical reality that affects everything from time-to-market to customer experience. In e-commerce, where every millisecond and every click counts, the choices you make in your technical platform can have far-reaching consequences. When quick fixes are prioritised over long-term durability, an invisible but growing debt is built up. It affects not only development speed and stability, but at worst can slow the company's ability to innovate and compete. To face the future the right way, technical debt has to be understood, quantified and managed as the strategic investment it actually is.
For Swedish retailers there are plenty of ways to meet this threat by building on what the Chinese giants cannot offer: strong local brand stories, product safety and sustainability as competitive advantages, and a presence that ties digital and physical commerce together. Temu has no stores. Yet.
