4 Black Friday Takeaways to Inform Your 2024

This month’s installment of Bluecore’s monthly Coffee & Commerce roundtable series took a look at our top Black Friday takeaways: what retailers got right, what they can stand to improve, and how they can guarantee an even brighter 2024.

For marketers, Black Friday represents many things. It’s an opportunity to net new customers. It’s a chance to meet (or exceed) sales projections. It’s a reason to feel unusually stressed for about two straight months. But it is also something else: a not-to-be-ignored, potentially game-changing learning experience.

The discussion, moderated by Bluecore VP of Marketing Sarah Cascone, featured two people with extensive experience in helping retailers move customers through the product funnel: our Director of Product Marketing Rosy Kehdi, and Randi Gladstone, a Retail Strategist who has previously worked for Shipt, Tory Burch, and New York & Company.

Our Black Friday takeaways help illuminate each stage of the customer lifecycle, from identification to conversion to retention and beyond.

1. Partial identification isn’t enough

Early on in the discussion, Sarah laid down a hard and fast rule of contemporary retail: “You can’t move shoppers through the product funnel if you don’t know who they are.”

In other words, identification is essential. One of our top Black Friday takeaways is how many retailers still struggle with it. On Black Friday, we found that despite a 12% increase in identification this year, large enterprise retailers still failed to identify 79% of shoppers.

This means that huge numbers of repeat purchasers are being treated as brand new customers. Retailers see them as blank slates, and treat them accordingly, rather than personalizing their shopping experiences, and driving purchases in the process.

“Being able to identify those purchasers — who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re browsing — lends itself to a high degree of personalization across every touchpoint,” Randi said. 

Crucially, this holds true not just for repeat purchasers, but for anyone who interacts with your marketing channels. Upfront identification of new customers allows for the kinds of contextual experiences that inevitably drive more engagement and conversions. 

The high degree of personalization permitted by this identification can both enhance the customer experience and save the retailer money. Discounts are a great example. Proper identification allows retailers to sort “high discount affinity” from “low discount affinity” customers, and to target their discounts accordingly.

“Discounts don’t have to be one-size-fits-all,” Randi said

2. Retailers need to balance acquisition with AOV

On Black Friday, order volume was up by nearly a fifth (18%). But unfortunately, this good news arrives with a mildly dismaying corollary: namely, the fact that average order value (AOV) decreased by 2.4% across most categories.

This was not entirely surprising. Black Friday, after all, is defined by steep discounts, which can “provide an influx of conversions while diminishing AOV and total sales,” as Randi put it. And at a time of high inflation, customers are inevitably going to spend more cautiously.

This Black Friday takeaway highlights the importance of driving the highest possible AOV because few metrics have a more significant impact on margins or overall lifetime value. The trick, then, is to balance order volume with order value — to turn the galaxy of signals coming in from your identified customers to your advantage.

As Rosy pointed out, long-term thinking is essential here. She cited the experience of one home goods retailer that’s willing to take a short-term hit on AOV for a customer with high lifetime value. Offering a significant discount actually pays off in the long run.

“They wanted to get customers hooked — they wanted that first conversion, because these would be people who would shop more frequently, versus the average person who might buy a couch once every ten years,” Rosy said.

Personalized product recommendations also have a significant role to play in this context. When you know your customer and can personalize accordingly, you can surface products that are both perfectly tailored to their interests and more expensive than their initial purchase. You can surface just the right recommendation at just the right time on just the right channel, whether that’s email, website, or SMS.

3. Customers are doing more research than ever — and that’s an opportunity for retailers

Today’s shoppers are almost scholars of the products they purchase (or don’t). They will research a blender within an inch of its life before finally making the purchase. Another of our Black Friday takeaways was how much more pronounced this tendency is growing. This year, shoppers viewed an average of 12 unique products with 23 total product views.

“Shoppers came with a plan of attack, looking to get even more bang for their buck, and spending even more time on purchase consideration,” Sarah said.

This activity is very good news for retailers, assuming they play their cards right.

Again: the key to moving shoppers through the purchase funnel is reading the many signals they send and then acting on them. The more research these customers do, the more interest signals they generate. 

“All this research is currency to drive conversions and retention,” Sarah said. “Retailers have to understand when shoppers are raising their hands. They need to understand their individual preferences.”

If brands want to bring customers back to abandoned carts, they need to pay close attention to these signals, especially when consumer attention is so fragmented.

Staying top of mind for consumers can be a major challenge when those minds are being pulled in a million different directions by a million different brands. That is why it’s so critical that retailers always have their triggers ready — both email and SMS.

The key, as always, is personalization. Rosy mentioned a Bluecore customer who deployed a huge number of triggers, each one of which was entirely personalized — and wound up with a 45% increase in email revenue. “Making sure you have the right one-to-one triggers set up is going to go a long way next holiday season,” she said.

4. Never lose sight of retention

An encouraging Black Friday takeaway is that the majority of shoppers — 62% — were repeat buyers. As Sarah put it, “Retention is the key to profitable growth.”

Too many retailers have historically focused on driving acquisition at all costs. That’s all fine — but only if they don’t neglect your existing customers, on whom they already have plenty of valuable data.

Ideally, retailers should start capitalizing on that value as soon as possible.

“I can’t emphasize enough that the post-purchase series is the most under-utilized email marketing program,” Randi said.

From the moment a customer orders a product to the moment it arrives at their door, they’re a captive audience. This is a crucial interval, which brands can put to use by showcasing new categories, personalized product recommendations, and more. Beauty brands can send replenishment emails while apparel retailers can send complementary recommendations to complete the look.

“I don’t want to say the possibilities are infinite,” Randi said. 

But when you consider all the different signals you can use to power communication to motivate conversion, and ultimately increase lifetime value and retention over time — well, it definitely comes close.

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