Deal season is officially here! Two of the biggest sale holidays (aka Black Friday and Cyber Monday) are coming soon and if you haven’t planned for how your brand will be serving up deals yet, we’re here to tell you to get that plan into action NOW! Traditionally, Black Friday has been a brick and mortar store frenzy, but this has been changing over the years with digital, with millions of people now shopping online. This mass market of consumers who elect to forego the multiple hour-long lines and sometimes dangerous crowds will be sitting happily in front of their computer screens ready to digitally swipe their cards, and your brand wants a piece of that pie. Here are a few reasons why your beauty brand needs to invest in Black Friday and Cyber Monday digitally, some stats on last year’s results and a few predictions for the 2018 season.

Why does my beauty brand need to participate in Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

The real question is – why not? Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping in the digital space is bigger and better than ever. Not only does participating digitally increase your sales, but it also increases your reach in the digital space, increases customer acquisition and creates new audiences for incremental sales in your future ad targeting.

Increase Your Reach

Unlike the usual shopping cycle, current and prospective customers are further down the marketing funnel and in the acquisition phase before, during and slightly after these deal days. Meaning, you just need to get in front of this audience because they’re already ready to purchase. By pushing your brand during these sale holidays, you’ll be increasing your reach and brand awareness to more people and also gaining sales from it at the same time.

Increase Your Customer Acquisition

More often than not, new customer acquisition is an expensive and longer lead time, but during Black Friday and Cyber Monday your brand has the chance to gain new customers during a key time in the year. If you are able to retain these customers and keep them happy, you have given yourself the opportunity to drive repeat sales from the Christmas season and into the coming years.

Incremental Sales and Future Audiences

The intent to purchase in this time of the year is higher than ever. Even though people are looking for big deals, most shoppers on these days end up buying both sale and full-priced items. Abandoned shopping cart rates are usually around 76% to 82%, but during this sale season the abandoned cart rate is significantly lower ― approximately 10% to 15% lower. This lower abandonment rate and higher reach gives your brand the opportunity to create incremental sales and mine new customer data for future use. If you have all of your social pixels set up correctly on your website, you can pull data on customer profiles of those who take actions on your site such as “view product,” “add to cart” and “initiate checkout.” From there, you can create new lookalike audiences from these customers for retargeting later.

2017 Black Friday + Cyber Monday Stats

Results were cashed in and Americans showed no signs of slowing down their spending in 2017. Here’s a quick roundup of three stats from last year that we found valuable:

1.  The National Retail Federation found that more than 174 million Americans shopped from Thanksgiving through the end of Cyber Monday, which beat the pre-holiday prediction of participation by 10 million Americans.
2.  The highest spend cohort was reported to be millennials aged 24 to 35, spending on average $420 dollars per person.
3.  Online shoppers outnumbered in-store shoppers 58 million people to 51 million people, and 65 million shoppers reported to be a combination of both online and in store.

Our 2018 Black Friday + Cyber Monday Predictions

With the rise of digital and social media purchasing, here are two predictions we have for this 2018 promotional landscape.

Mobile Will Take Over

With the rise of mobile traffic compared to desktop (especially in the millennial and oldest Gen Z members), we predict mobile shopping will account for 50% of website traffic, and over 35% of revenue. In straightforward advertising terms, make sure that all of your ads are mobile-friendly.

Sales Will Start Earlier and Run Longer

With extremely high competition during this short bust of advertising, costs of digital space for ad placements is the highest for the whole year during this four day period. In order for smaller brands to compete with the big retailers and brands, we predict that many will start their sales earlier than the normal Black Friday deal window and extend Cyber Monday sales past Monday.

Will you be participating in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales? Let us know in the comments below!