The Hustler Marketing Black Friday report card is finally in! The past 2 weeks, we have been hard at work, compiling all the dazzling stats from the Black Friday Cyber Monday season with Black Friday on Nov 26 and Cyber Monday on Nov 29 respectively. The effort of getting this report together is of course only next to all the combined efforts in helping over 70 ecommerce stores coast through one of the busiest sales seasons of the year with some great results.
Preparations for Black Friday had started months before the event, with our account managers, strategists and creatives going into overdrives on the clients’ Black Friday campaign strategy for the big week. Meetings with clients fleshed out the campaign direction, the offers, and the creatives. As we do each year, we pushed out educational content on Black Friday email marketing strategies, design best practices on our blog. This year, we even organised BFCM special webinars with all the tips and tricks to prepare the attending stores on their own BFCM strategy and rolled out a special $999 campaign offer for Black Friday campaigns.
Needless to say, it was as busy a time for our service team as our clients’ Shopify orders page!
If we thought the results of Black Friday 2020 were smashing, this year we beat our own record. Before we get into the elaborate numbers for our clients, here’s a stat from the Shopify BFCM report. The ecomm platform clocked over a $6 billion of sales on the BFCM days (Nov 26 and Nov 29 respectively) — a 23% increase from 2020.
While the actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw less bigger days than previous years, that’s because most of the BFCM action was spread across the month of November rather than concentrated in 2 days. The stores had deliberately staggered their sales and promotions well before and even after Black Friday to ensure a more distributed sales trajectory, prevent website crashes and of course manage inventory better. This means that when considering Black Friday results this year, the revenue for whole of November should be accounted for rather than just 2 days and that’s what we’ve done in this report.
But before we get into the BFCM data for ecommerce stores for 2021, let’s look at some of the BFCM email campaigns that went out this year:
1. Total Store VS Email Revenue in November
70 stores combined racked up a little over $30 million in store revenue in November. A little over $10 million or 32.4% of it was contributed by email marketing including both flows and campaigns. The email revenue share % grew by 28% in 2021 compared to 2020. (Email marketing dead, anyone?)
2. Store revenue growth in November compared to previous two months
The store revenue grew on average of 69% in November as compared to September and October put together. But email revenue grew an average of 117% in November as compared to Sept and Oct put together. Campaign revenue alone went up by 153.7% in November compared to Oct+Sept meaning email campaigns over-performed in November.
3. Flow vs Campaign revenue contribution
Out of the total $10 million~ revenue clocked by emails, it was a pretty even split between flow and campaigns with both Flows and Campaigns netting about about 5 million $ each. The contribution from flow was also higher during this period since as part of our Black Friday strategy, we’d customised the flows to incorporate a BFCM banner or other design detail.
4. Revenue on Black Friday
Out of the total $33 million store revenue in November, only about $2.8 million came on Black Friday (Nov 26) and more than half of it or around $1.5 million came from email. Similarly, $2.3 million store revenue was clocked on Cyber Monday (Nov 29) but the email share dropped to around 35% at $850k. This is due to the fact that most stores staggered their promotions mostly a week around BFCM, some even 2 and 4 weeks before and after across Early bird offers, preview sales, FOMO offers and post BFCM sales.
5. Client vs revenue growth
We added 20 more or about 40% more stores in our clientele in 2021 but the email revenue increased by 66.7% – from almost $6 million last BFCM to $10.03 million this year making it a linear client and revenue increase.
6. Client ROI from email marketing
Talking about the ROI, the stores achieved an average ROI of 25x or 2500% from email marketing. The ROI calculation is done as Store Email Revenue – Store Spend (Our management fees) / Store Spend
7. Number of campaign emails
Total campaign emails sent out by Hustler Marketing for BFCM in November were over 1000! These included Early Bird offers, list reengagement emails before BFCM, preview offers, Thanksgiving emails, Black Friday emails, Cyber Monday emails, and some post BFCM emails.
8. SMS Marketing share of total Store Revenue
SMS is increasingly growing as a highly ROI-positive marketing channel for our stores who are on it. In just a few months or weeks of starting on SMS, stores are seeing anywhere between 2% to 10% of their overall revenue coming in from SMS flows and campaigns. BFCM was no different. Amongst 17 stores, SMS contributed 2% of overall store revenue in BFCM season, while email contributed 25%
To conclude this report, yes, the Black Friday season numbers are great for email marketing yet another year, and validate our backbreaking work in the last couple of months, but it’s client appreciation like this that means the world to us.
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