E-commerce promotion: Only by doing this in daily promotion can you "defeat the enemy"

During shopping carnivals such as Double Eleven and Double Twelve, sales exceeded 100 million in 11 seconds and 10 billion in 3 minutes. The astonishing data seems to make many people believe that independent e-commerce companies can support themselves throughout the year just by relying on holiday sales.

According to the survey:

The sales volume on Double Eleven accounts for no more than 20% of the annual sales volume.

As the saying goes, laymen watch the excitement, while experts watch the doorway. How to maintain sales volume on non-festival days is the key to "defeating the enemy" in e-commerce promotion .

The ancients often said that business all depends on shouting. E-commerce companies also need to advertise if they want to maintain sales on non-holiday days. But it is not difficult to find that it is relatively easy to place advertisements on festival days, because the focus of the festival has already created a consumption scenario that is tempting enough. All that is needed next is to increase the exposure and cover enough users to increase sales.

However, ordinary daily advertising promotion is much more difficult. Simply increasing the exposure will only lead to a continuous decline in ROI. Focusing on this issue, this article will discuss with you how e-commerce promotional marketing strategies should be formulated on non-festival days .

The basic premise of daily promotion: based on programmatic advertising

Traditional brand advertising requires negotiating with numerous media outlets one by one or purchasing resources through advertising agencies, and is billed on a CPT or CPM basis. This guaranteed exposure model is suitable for promotions on holiday days.

However, in daily promotion, brand advertising will result in a waste of exposure to non-target audiences. The buyout model cannot identify the personalized needs of users. The same audience is very likely to suffer from aesthetic fatigue when bombarded by a single idea or multiple ideas in random rotation, ultimately leading to very poor delivery results.

Therefore, it is recommended to choose programmatic advertising for daily promotion.

• On the one hand, it can improve the efficiency of advertising. Choosing a suitable advertising platform can purchase a large number of resources such as media websites and mobile applications. The unified advertising backend facilitates management, and enables cross-media and cross-terminal resource planning and effect tracking. The characteristics of real-time bidding and real-time optimization make the collection, analysis and optimization of advertising data simpler and more efficient.
• On the other hand, it can improve the effect of advertising. Since programmatic advertising has shifted from traditional purchase of media advertising space to purchase of target audiences, the effect of advertising is more controllable, reducing the waste of promotion costs while increasing conversion rates.

The core of daily promotion strategy: creating a shopping environment that promotes impulse purchases

Well-known writer Zhang Lixian said something very true:

If book buyers read every book before purchasing it, publishers would go bankrupt.

The same principle applies to all daily necessities: when the seasons change, girls always feel like they have nothing to wear when they look at their full wardrobes; there are so many small appliances in the kitchen at home that they can’t put them all, but they still feel like they don’t have enough tools every time they cook; half of the food in the refrigerator is expired, but they still want to add all kinds of snacks and drinks to it.

Consumers often pursue more than just the results when shopping; the pleasure given by the shopping process is more important. This is what we often call impulse buying.

The difference between festivals and ordinary days is simply that it creates a shopping environment that is more likely to promote impulse purchases. Perception determines whether consumers buy or not, and products determine whether consumers continue to buy. Therefore, if the promotion strategy is formulated around this point, there will be no off-season market in the e-commerce industry.

Let’s continue reading for the specific operation methods.

Key means of daily promotion: exerting the spirit of craftsmanship to build a delivery system

In 2018, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, and programmatic advertising platforms on the market are spending a lot of time and effort to promote their big data and intelligent technologies. However, the author believes that if you want to do a good job in e-commerce promotion, it is not reliable to rely solely on machine learning.

For example: Look Alike technology is now widely used in e-commerce promotion. It finds similar users based on the browsing interests and advertising behaviors of seed users (that is, finds out which groups of people the seed users are more similar to), thereby expanding the target population.

From this technical definition, we can see that browsing interests and behaviors are labeled through history. However, can history really accurately express the needs of certain users?

For example, I want to buy some health supplements for my grandfather, so I browse a lot of health websites and drug malls. The platform will record my behavior, label me as in my 20s, female, health-conscious, health supplements, etc., and then find users who match my age and gender and expose them to a lot of health products. Doesn’t this seem ridiculous?

Artificial intelligence is important but we should not rely on it too much. “People-oriented” and meticulous research and exploration are essential.

After studying the promotion backends of many e-commerce companies, I found that accounts with good promotion effects have more than 30 promotion series, each series has more than 10 promotion groups, and there are N promotion ideas in the group. The entire account is built with astonishing precision.

As follows:

You may think that it is not necessary to be so detailed, but the effect of refinement is really obvious. Here is a set of experiments:

This is just a study of one delivery element. So how many element variables are there in a complete programmatic advertising delivery?

This is just a simple list of elements. The actual delivery process requires testing by formulating N combinations of these elements, analyzing the data to identify problems and solutions, and continuously optimizing the data to find the most suitable delivery method.

The ultimate means of daily promotion: frequency and quantity of material rotation

1. The direct impact of faster material updates on results

2. The direct impact of increasing the number of materials on the effect

3. The two-pronged approach of increasing frequency and adding materials makes the effect more obvious

The cooperation between the two has greatly optimized the ROI of the entire performance advertising. Such optimization promotion has not only significantly improved the KPI data, but the active material research has also enabled the promotion manager to think more actively. It has also allowed the consultants and designers of the advertising platform to have a deeper understanding of user attributes and design more suitable materials.

Detailed steps for material optimization

From the data shown above, the benefits of material rotation are obvious, but how do we actually implement it? How to make advertising materials?

Let's explain in detail below:

1. About replacement frequency

For different advertising positions, daily materials are updated every three days, and promotional materials are updated every day. We have figured out the secret of “not posting pictures for more than three days” , so that users of major products can maintain a high level of attention to product information and better meet users’ consumption needs.

2. About the content

A good e-commerce promotional material needs to contain three key elements :

1. Clear product images;
2. Product name, and a subtitle or description sufficient to support the function or activity;
3. Competitive product prices, especially for overseas shopping, require not only authenticity but also favorable prices.

There are a wide variety of promotional materials. If you observe carefully, you will find that there are several styles that are particularly suitable and often used in the effective promotion of major e-commerce companies.

① Single product image: formula = product image + name + preferential price (+ market price comparison)

This type of composition is also known as a "hot-selling picture" and is usually used to promote hot-selling products. The key is that the various elements must be separated clearly enough and the price must be eye-catching enough to attract the audience's attention.

② Window image: formula = parallel structure multi-product image + label + preferential price

Displaying multiple products in a parallel structure creates an atmosphere of diverse choices and tells the audience that "there is always one that suits you."

③ Celebrity endorsement: formula = spokesperson + product + price

A survey shows that which form of advertising creativity is most popular in the country?

The answer is celebrity endorsements. In addition to their strong eye-catching ability, celebrity spokespersons are also extremely profitable for e-commerce promotions.

3. About material matching

(1) Materials that meet the media attributes

Different media can test different categories. For example, male media can choose electronic digital products and sports and outdoor products; female media can choose cosmetics and skin care, maternal and child care, luggage and clothing, etc.

(2) Typesetting style adapted to user habits

Different styles of typography will avoid users’ aesthetic fatigue, while key elements are directly related to users’ clicks, such as: Is there a discount price tag? Is there an original price tag for comparison?

(3) Promotional elements that are in line with user interests

For users who are highly sensitive to prices, the main benefit points include: discounts for purchases over a certain amount, red envelopes, and low-price flash sales for certain items . These simple and direct manifestations will be more able to attract the attention of cost-effective users during the promotion period.

For emotionally inclined users, they need to start from the perspective of idols . We choose appropriate idol images for different promotional products. Take Koala as an example: we choose "Where Are We Going, Dad?" to match female and maternal and child products, while Jia Nailiang's image matches male products.

"Template thinking" makes material optimization even better

After we have perfectly solved the steps of material optimization, the only problem left is production efficiency. How can we produce batches of promotional materials in a short period of time?

Since the style formulas of pictures can be summarized, why not make them concrete and use "template-based" thinking to solve this difficult problem.

(1) List material styles

For experienced promotion designers, just saying an industry keyword can provide feedback on the corresponding commonly used material styles. The first step in making a material template is to organize designers to brainstorm various styles/layouts/color schemes/main elements of the e-commerce industry.

(2) A/B Testing

The biggest difference between Internet advertising and offline traditional advertising is that data will be tracked at every step of the communication path. Based on the previous step, make some test samples based on experience or previous data support. The differences between sample images may be as big as the left-right/top-bottom layout differences, or as small as the color difference of a certain label. Take advantage of low cost and short-term testing.

(3) Production template

After data analysis, the best combination of material elements is obtained. Designers then produce templates based on these results, and can use the "action" function in the design software to automatically replace preset color schemes, thereby reducing the phenomenon of material homogeneity.

(4) Mass production of materials

Once you have the template, you only need to prepare product images and text, and with simple replacements, you can start mass production of promotional materials.

Daily programmatic advertising is a stable and continuous process. Good optimization of advertising can bring stable sales to e-commerce companies and retain loyal users. And after doing a good job of daily advertising, you will find that when the festival comes, your brand advertising strategy becomes more reasonable.

The data on media populations and effect differences obtained through daily delivery can help you quickly identify the media that need to be monopolized. You may even just use the same delivery strategy on the existing promotional media and simply increase the budget.

Use the method of "nurturing" and wait for the opportunity to "fight". Once the marketing closed loop of daily promotion and festival promotion is formed, you will find that your sales data will be as beautiful as a "festival" every day.