3 Ways to Leverage Customer Intent Campaigns for The Best BFCM Yet

Black Friday: the biggest sales day for eCommerce stores and retailers alike.

But despite its history, Cyber Weekend is no longer just a quick inventory clearout opportunity for online stores, or where profit margins go to die.

It’s a chance for eCommerce brands to attract new customers en masse. Consumers try new brands on Black Friday like no other time of the year.

In fact, eCommerce brands see a 115% increase in traffic over cyber weekend when compared to a regular weekend. And it’s up to your sales promotion strategy to convert those visitors into customers.

In this eBook, we’ll walk you through 3 foolproof ways to optimize your conversion funnel, leverage the massive increase in web traffic, and squeeze the most out of Cyber Weekend 2021 using customer intent.

Why Intent-Based Campaigns Are the Key to Your Best Holiday Season Yet
3 Intent-Based Campaigns to Run This BFCM
Plan Your Best Cyber Weekend Yet with Intent-Based Promotions

Why Intent-Based Campaigns Are the Key to Your Best Holiday Season Yet

Customer purchase intention is the single most important customer variable to measure and take action against in eCommerce.

Measuring and taking action on customer intent, gives you the power to:

1. Deliver promotions only to shoppers that have an intention to buy.
2. Offer the minimum discount needed, or none at all, to convert each individual shopper.
3. Serve the right conversion incentive to each shopper to trigger them to buy.

In doing so, you’ll be able to personalize the customer experience, improve conversion rates and profit margins, build brand equity, and ultimately drive customer lifetime value.

Especially during the major Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping events, when thousands of brands are competing for the attention of your target shoppers, intent-based marketing gives you a competitive edge to rise above the crowd and grab those conversions for significantly better results.

Consider this example to illustrate how intent-based marketing can help you achieve your best Cyber Weekend yet.

Within each segment of your customers, there are countless sub-segments — right down to individual, single-customer segments based on their customer demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data.

Let’s take two potential target customers for the workwear brand, Carhartt: Mike and Adam. They’re both:

• 41-year-old men living in the same city in the US (demographics)
• Contractors starting their own businesses building residential homes (psychographics)
• First-time visitors to Carhartt’s website from the same paid search campaign through Google Ads (behavioral)
• In the consideration stage of the customer journey (behavioral).

The Google Ad targeting was clearly successful in driving both of them to Carhartt’s eCommerce store. But consider what happens when we differ in purchase intention:

• Mike’s customer purchase intent is high, and his behavioral analytics suggest that he’s not particularly price sensitive. He likes the Carhartt brand, and it occurred to him on Black Friday that he might need some new work gear. 
• Adam’s purchase intention is somewhere between informational and transactional (falling near “medium” on a scale) as he has been shopping around at different brands looking for the best BFCM deal. His behavioral data suggests he is more price sensitive.
  

In this case, Carhartt would be leaving valuable revenue and brand equity on the table by giving Mike the same onsite promotion as they presented to Adam.

Mike might have converted with a minor discount, and Adam may have needed a steeper offer that made him feel he was getting the best deal.

This is just one example of a scenario that happens across hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sessions on your online store. Every single visitor that lands on your site, no matter their customer segment, has individual behaviors and triggers.

If you treat them all the same based on their customer segment without considering intent, you’ll leave conversions, margin, brand equity, and customer lifetime value on the table.

And on Cyber Weekend? Your competitors will scoop them right up. 

3 Intent-Based Campaigns to Run This BFCM 

The scenario above with Mike and Adam is happening across millions of eCommerce browsing sessions every single minute. 

Measuring each individual visitor’s intent and serving the minimum promotion, messaging, and customer experience they need in light of their intent signals can help you not only convert them, but maximize the potential of every. single. session. during Black Friday. 

Here are three intent-based campaigns to run to do just that. The strongest promotion strategy for Black Friday runs all three of these promotions together. 

#1. Push the 115% Jump in Cyber Weekend Traffic To Its Full Potential 

Campaign Goal: Improve Conversion Rate 

Benchmark: Look for an increase in conversation rate between 7-15% with a simultaneous reduction in average discount (a win/win)

Data from over 2 billion weekly sessions to top eCommerce sites shows that traffic consistently spikes during Cyber Weekend. 

In fact, the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday consistently result in some of the highest traffic days every year for our eCommerce partners. 

When compared to a regular, non-holiday weekend, eCommerce stores see an average of over a 115% increase in web traffic sessions over the past three years.

More traffic is good, but you don’t want those additional sessions to remain just that: a spike in web traffic. 

Every individual who lands on your site, especially during the biggest sales event of the year, is a potential customer. 

You want to push each session to its full potential by taking specific, strategic measures to convert those would-be customers. 

But you don’t want to convert them at any cost. By leveraging Intent-Based Promotions, you’ll be able to serve the exact minimum promotion to each individual customer to get get them to buy. 

Note: Namogoo customers have seen conversion rate uplifts of 7-15% by using ai-powered behavioral segmentation through Intent-Based Promotions: 

For example, this Intent-Based Promotion user improved their conversion rates by more than 14% shortly after launching their first campaign.

If you see 50,000 sessions over the course of the weekend, this could result in hundreds of additional new customers that you can now nurture into lifelong fans of your brand. 

How to Do It 

Setting up an Intent-Based Promotion campaign with a conversion goal is easy. 

Step 1: Request access to Intent-Based Promotions and start a new campaign.  Select the “Increase Conversions” Goal:

Step 2: On the Choose Campaign Type screen, select “Discount” 

Choose your template and main color, or choose to fully customize your campaign.

Step 3: Input the discount range you worked out for your Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion strategy.

For Cyber Weekend, you still want the minimum discount to be generous, as the influx of visitors are looking for a deal. But with Intent-Based Promotions, you don’t need to offer your best discount to everyone regardless of whether they needed it to convert.

So set your minimum discount to somewhere around 5-15 percentage points lower than your maximum discount.