Mid-year shopping festival 618, let's take a look at the routines of online activities

Now, as long as you open the various shopping apps on your mobile phone, all you will see are the discount promotions of the 618 Shopping Festival. From the homepage, activity page to the product list page, they are all filled with the red theme of joyful shopping carnival. What are the differences between the various coupons, instant discounts, flash sales, interactions, etc. and last year? In my opinion, there seems to be none. The online activity assembly line is already very mature, and no matter how new the activities are, they are still the same few styles and tricks. Each company is doing its best to achieve big sales in the middle of the year and ease the pressure of sales targets in the second half of the year. Without further ado, this article will show you how online activities are “old wine in new bottles”.

Event Time

Both companies started preheating for this 618 event nearly half a month in advance. To be precise, preheating means the start of the event. On the event timeline, it is basically more than half a month, nearly 21 days, which means that various event advertisements and preheating can be seen one after another at the end of May. This is a very interesting phenomenon. Looking back at previous major promotions, apart from the national event Double Eleven , activities that are basically defined as S-level promotions rarely last for such a long time.

From last year’s Double Eleven event, we can see that the duration of the promotion is being extended, which is the adoption of the pre-sale + timeline activity model. Generally speaking, the time period of online activities can be divided into several stages: diversion period, traffic storage period, outbreak period, and decline period. (Strictly speaking, activity consists of both outbreak and decline.) These four stages have different effects and results. Take the following figure (sales index and trends in four stages of activities) as an example (it may not be absolutely accurate).

• During the introduction phase of activity traffic , sales will not increase much, but traffic may see a small growth peak at this time. Customers are mostly attracted by various online and offline advertisements. However, since the activity hosting page does not reflect a lot of activity strength, the traffic conversion rate of the entire site will be lowered.
• During the traffic accumulation stage , since consumers mostly focus on the intensity of activities during the outbreak period, they tend to maintain a conservative attitude towards the existing intensity and wait for the arrival of major promotion activities before the outbreak period. At this time, sales may show a trough;
• With the arrival of the explosive period , a large amount of traffic was introduced, transaction conversion increased dramatically, and sales increased dramatically. Traffic and sales will reach their highest peak again;
• During the decline phase, as the event draws to a close, most consumers have already purchased their desired products. The event then enters the return phase, and sales decline rapidly compared to the outbreak phase.

The above four stages are not absolute, but they are basically a template for current e-commerce activities.

However, there is a problem of input-output ratio here. A large amount of advertising and traffic costs were invested in the early stage. Are the sales output and user activity proportional to the investment? Today's traffic dividend is no longer what it used to be, and the capital investment required for traffic has far exceeded the previous traffic dividend era. In addition to boosting sales, e-commerce activities should also focus on whether they can generate profits.

Judging from the sales trends in these four stages (which are not absolutely accurate), within a fixed time period, increasing sales during the introduction and storage periods is an important goal to improve the overall sustainability of the activity. Then, counting from the start of advertising to the end of the event return is the main battlefield of the current 618 Mid-Year Promotion. Combining the two stages of the introduction period and the water storage period into one, I named this time period the " timeline introduction and sales period ".

Strictly speaking, 618 is just June 18th. However, according to traditional e-commerce thinking, the activity time of 618 should be about one week from June 12th to 18th. However, the current new activity time calculation should be:

• June 1-15 is the timeline introduction sales period
• 16-18 is the outbreak period
• 19-20 is the recession period (return)

The following is a promotion timeline of the brand flagship stores of JD.com and Tmall . It can be seen that corresponding promotional measures were also taken during the introduction of the sales period. JD.com used Super Category Day and Brand Day as its promotional means, and Tmall used cross-store shopping subsidies and category discounts as its main means. Its various brand stores also followed the overall marketing rhythm of Tmall to carry out promotion planning for their own stores.

There are only a few goals for extending the activity time:

• Improve the input-output ratio and sales of activities;
• Increasing sales in the early stages of an event can also create a lively event atmosphere.

The disadvantages of doing this are:

• Human input into the activity;
• The time cost of planning;
• The investment in advertising and traffic is also huge.

Activity form

The activities of both parties are actually similar, but there are still some differences between the two, such as the main body of the activities:

• JD.com is mainly self-operated + merchants;
• Tmall is mainly a merchant;
• And a few self-operated products.

JD.com uses the timeline activity model to hold different super category days and brand days on different dates, and also uses large discounts on categories such as books and fresh food (100-50; 199-100, etc.) to promote sales and traffic. Tmall mainly uses cross-store shopping allowances and timeline theme days. Both have roughly the same layout in the main venue: from top to bottom: collect coupons, flash sales in different time periods, auction merchant advertising space , category/store venue collection floor, thousand-person single product display floor, and interconnection of various sub-venues.

Of course, when it comes to ways to get discounts, JD.com and Tmall have different focuses. The ways to get discounts, such as issuing coupons, instant discounts, flash sales, group buying, red envelope fission, bargaining, and pre-sales, are all similar. There is nothing to go into detail here, except that we can make a fuss about the channels for getting discounts. Third-party merchants on Tmall and JD.com have more autonomy over the format of their activities. From the store’s promotional decoration and intensity settings to the form of the event, you can decide it yourself. This is also a good opportunity to test the operational capabilities of each third-party store. It is also a good opportunity for the platform's merchant operations to seek KA merchants, cultivate merchants and discover high-quality hot-selling products.

E-commerce promotions are essentially retail promotions. Any promotional means are merely a cover to achieve sales. The correct solution is to attract consumers to spend money through different channels and in different ways. Whether it is a promotional scenario created through games , interactions, live broadcasts , advertising, etc., or preferential policies brought about by instant discounts, flash sales, coupons/red envelopes, etc., all are services designed to get consumers to spend money. The ultimate mission of the event is to allow more high-quality traffic to enter your venue and encourage consumers to pay through sufficiently attractive discounts.

Activity Channels

Sales channels: This 618 event involves both online and offline aspects, relying on their respective strategic investment or acquisition of retail carriers, such as Intime, Yonghui, Hema, Walmart, etc. to carry out offline joint promotions. At the same time, it can also echo online activities and act as an advertising space to attract online traffic. Therefore, during event planning , it is best to use all sales channels that can be called upon to maximize the effectiveness of the event.

Traffic channels: still include the following: hard advertising, new & self-media , search, information flow , proprietary tool push, offline promotion, etc. (including event marketing , offline activities , etc.). We will not provide a detailed description of the conversion effects of each drainage channel here. Please refer to previous articles on related e-commerce activities.

Distribution channels: Promote sales alliances, increase rebate amounts and preferential promotion forms, and encourage sales alliances/ Taobao customers to actively promote.

Summarize

1. The effectiveness of this 618 event is unknown, as there is not much innovation in its form. However, what is certain is that the bigger the event, the more auction advertising fees the platform merchants will spend, and the more net profit the platform operator will make. Therefore, when planning promotion activities for B2C e-commerce, we must consider the participation of two main parties: consumers and platform merchants and suppliers. Consumers create transactions, while merchants and suppliers create profits.

2. The extension of the promotional event duration is a consideration of the overall input-output ratio of the event, shifting from pursuing sales scale to pursuing profits and sales in parallel.

3. The time-segmented promotional plan for this 618 event is a continuation and expansion of last year's Double Eleven event. There is no substantial change.

4. The channels and methods for obtaining discounts and traffic have always been the focus of previous promotions.

The above views do not represent authority or accuracy, so readers are advised to adopt them with caution.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>This article was compiled and published by @王欢 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games