How to Build a Perfect Online Black Week Campaign (2022)

October 3, 2022

While the holiday buying season might still be weeks away, the best way to maximize future sales is always to plan in the present. Early programmatic advertising is essential for e-commerce businesses with limited physical infrastructure to encourage customer engagement and drive sales. With digital advertising campaigns exponentially increasing sales numbers with each passing year, 2022 is set to be another success that digital marketers won’t want to miss out on. 

Let’s look at the best ways to maximize your success this holiday season. 

Current Trends in e-Commerce

While the specter of the pandemic has loomed over the market for nearly two years now, it hasn’t come without some positive developments. 2021 was a year of recovery, and even though we may see a recession soon, 2022 appears to be extending on this trend. Though markets have yet to fully stabilize and developing trends such as inflation and rising gas prices continue to put pressure on consumers, the outlook for e-commerce is incredibly positive. 

Now that the smoke has settled, it’s clear that the pandemic played a major role in increasing the rapid adaptation of online shopping by consumers. In 2022, the easing of restrictions hasn’t reduced that change.

It was estimated that in 2021 consumers spent $870.78 billion online, up 14.2% from $762.68 billion in 2020. This trend continues into 2022, with some predicting that e-commerce might account for over $1 trillion in revenue by the end of the year. With such impressive growth, e-commerce may account for over 20% of global retail sales. 

Current Trends in Digital Marketing 

As e-commerce grows more popular and accessible, it also grows more competitive. This has led to increased advertisement costs for digital marketing with diminishing returns. This encourages companies to leverage new, programmatic channels for marketing and advertisements. 

Facebook is already growing cluttered with expansive and competitive advertisements, so less saturated social media applications like TikTok may prove a fertile investment for digital marketers – but long-term strategies should focus on customer retention rather than trend hopping. 

Supply chain slowdown and stocking issues in mid-2021 led to a decrease in customer loyalty, with over 80% of surveyed customers reporting that they bought different brands than usual. This provides an opportunity for new companies that can properly leverage competitive prices and adequate stocking. 

While social media advertising may suffer from decreasing returns per dollar spent, greater platform integration benefits online retailers, particularly for those small and medium-sized sites. Social commerce occurs when customers make in-app purchases via social media applications. By maintaining a presence on social media, companies can begin engaging with an emerging market expected to account for 16.7% of total e-commerce spending by 2025. 

3 Ways to Prepare for Black Week (& Cyber Monday) 

When getting ready for the holiday season, preparation is key. When a customer enters a e-commerce site, 51% who purchased something planned to when they entered. Only 19% buy something unexpectedly. If you want to make sales and turn that percentage, outreach has to start early. 

To help with that, we’ve summarized a plan of action in three simple steps.

1. Find Your Audience 

This is the bedrock of your advertising strategy. You want to know who your ideal customer is so that you can target your advertisements and outreach accordingly. The earlier you create a fully-realized customer persona, the more time you have to engage potential consumers and build client trust. This translates into real sales when Black Week begins. 

Once the customer persona is established for your digital advertising campaign, use broad channels to find your most relevant audience automatically.

A programmatic advertising approach is a great place to start. This method begins by compiling analytic data and building lookalike audiences based on your frequent or high-value purchasers. With the conversion data acquired here, a lookalike audience can be built out through Google and Social channels.  

After both persona and a lookalike audience are established, the next step should be to portion some of your budget to compile the data necessary to build custom audiences before Black Week.

This omnichannel tour strategy brings in increasingly relevant visitors and customers. To prepare for them and to maintain your buying funnel, create retargeting lists in these channels:

• Display and Native through programmatic retargeting
• Email to keep the highest conversions through the cheapest channel
• Search through SEO-targeted keywords and metadata
• Social to increase audience engagement 

2. Engage Customers with Social Commerce 

Consumers are making purchases in all digital channels. Whether on the train while commuting, via Google Home devices in their living rooms, via affiliate websites, or on your website after seeing a display ad.

With roughly 30% of internet users in the US already making purchases using social media platforms, Social Commerce is a rising star in e-commerce.

It’s become so synonymous with online sales that online retailers should be rushing to adopt strategies early. 

This not translating into sales can be discouraging and feel counterintuitive. As a solution, integrated Social Commerce stores encourage product discovery within the social media platforms. This direct-to-consumer method can be a great alternative and cost-effective way to reach customers. 

Effectively using Social Commerce isn’t just about navigating customers to a product page. It’s also a great way to experiment with outreach, encourage frequent customer engagement, and establish a medium for conveying the story and personality of your brand. You don’t just provide a new platform for your services – you build a relationship that encourages customers to place their trust in you.

Prep Your Tech

Finally, you have to make sure your site and channels are ready for the sudden influx of traffic. Nothing is worse than having a slew of new customers unable to interact with your UI and frozen in the cart before completing the purchase. 

Success in the prior two steps of customer outreach for your digital advertising campaign means a lot of customer traffic come Black Week.

To be prepared, your digital infrastructure has to be able to handle the Holiday season strain. You’ll also want to take advantage of the increased attention with retargeting, ensuring your customers are engaged during and directly after the season. 

Our recommendation is Match2One, where you can easily retarget visitors with display ads before and after the rush. This maximizes the revenue from the momentum you build prior to the Holiday season. If you have any set-up questions, we’re happy to help you get started.

A Happy Holiday for All

If the past few years have taught us anything, e-commerce is rapidly growing into a significant chunk of the global economy.

The revenue potential of e-commerce during Black Friday and the holiday season of 2022 will only increase as more and more consumers shop online. 

If your business is interested in expanding its outreach, growing a customer base, and preparing for the holiday season, then Match2One is the perfect fit for you.

A programmatic advertising platform, Match2One uses AI-targeted advertising to match the right audience with your perfect product. For more information on how we can help make this your best Black Week yet.