Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BF/CM) are just around the corner, which means it’s time to start preparing for the biggest shopping holiday of the year. Last year, 180 million shoppers bought something over the holiday weekend, with customers spending 8.9 billion online just on Black Friday.

Needless to say, this is ecommerce’s yearly Super Bowl, World Series, and World Cup all wrapped into one. Black Friday/Cyber Monday provides plenty of opportunity for ecommerce brands to attract new customers with hefty discounts and unmissable deals, but you should consider the long-term impacts of the holiday. It’s not just about converting customers at this time of year, it’s also about retaining them long-term to nurture deeper relationships–that’s where brands can reap the biggest rewards. 

We want to shift the mindset from Black Friday & Cyber Monday being a huge acquisition and one-time sales event to it being an opportunity to drive long-term value and growth via customer retention.

Are you ready to measure the impact of the influx of BF/CM sales? Here are the ecommerce analytics you need to understand to get the most out of the shopping holiday.  

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1. Know Your Customer Retention Metrics 

Understanding retention ecommerce analytics will help you discover the long-term success of your BF/CM campaigns – do customers “dine and dash” with one-off purchases, or are they coming back again and again? 

Getting a deep insight into the type of customers you attract during the event, what products they’re interested in, and how often they come back will bolster yourBlack Friday & Cyber Monday marketing strategy long after the event has finished. 

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Cohort Retention Metrics

• Customers Returning Rate: The more customers that return after their initial BF/CM purchases, the better. Digging into your Customers Returning Rate will help you understand the value of the customers you acquired during the sales period. Getting a handle on this metric ahead of BF/CM will help you set retention expectations for those new customers.

• Repurchase Rate: Knowing when customers come back and purchase again, and then digging into what products and deals compelled them to repurchase is key. This can provide a signal of what you can expect after BF/CM. When might those customers need to hear from you again?  When would they be primed to make their next purchase based on patterns in your customer retention data ahead of the holidays? After the BF/CM buzz has died down, this will help you time your marketing messages to retain those new customers.

• Days Since First Order: The first order will be the initial BF/CM order, but this metric shows you how long it’s been since they made that order, so you can create a cadence of messaging post-Back Friday. Just like with Repurchase Rate and Customers Returning Rate, it’s all about knowing when your customers are primed to make another purchase.

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Returning Orders Metrics

Did you have a big seller during the BF/CM weekend? Your Returning Orders Metrics will segment sales by top products to give an insight into when customers come back and what products they come back for. 

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Rate of One Time to Subscriber 

BF/CM has huge potential for subscription brands to secure subscribers. The Rate of One Time to Subscriber metric tells you the rate at which one-time customers are converting into long term subscribers. If you think of Black Friday as a huge acquisition event for new customers, the next logical step is figuring out the pace at which you expect to convert them to subscribers. Peel pulls data from a variety of the top subscription apps in the Shopify ecosystem. Check out our integrations to learn more!

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2. Build Custom Dashboards that Matter

Create a retention dashboard with Peel that will give you an overview of your retention metrics at a glance. Quickly add all the key retention metrics into one handy dashboard that measures exactly what’s going to matter for Black Friday. 

Customize your dashboard to include cohort tables, metric tickers (to show just the numbers), or graphics to visualize your chosen metrics. These can include bar charts, line charts, and pie charts to give you an instant snapshot of where your Cyber Monday marketing strategy and Black Friday marketing strategy is at. We’ve also recently implemented new, powerful filtering options on our dashboards so you can get an overview of how you best retain customers.

Providing a place where everyone can access and monitor easy-to-read and visual ecommerce analytics will help keep internal team members and external stakeholders on the same page. 

Stay tuned for our dashboard recipes to come. We plan on deep diving retention and revenue dashboards that will help you gain an advantage after BF/CM.

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3. Use Audiences to Create Your Ideal Retention Environment 

This year, we launched Audiences and it has been our most effective customer retention tool to date. It allows you to filter customers based on values like location, products purchased, number of purchases, discount codes used, specific thresholds for metrics like Average Order value (AOV) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and SO much more.

Brands are already seeing an average of 30% higher revenue for Audiences they create and re-engage with the right messaging.

So, the idea is that you want to create hyper-targeted Audiences with deep filtering, so you can serve the right content at the right time to each new BF/CM customer. The Audiences tool is the ultimate growth driver because it finds extremely specific pockets of customers from your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing strategy and helps create hyper-targeted marketing messages to secure their long-term loyalty and drive up LTV and AOV over time. 

Audiences gives you the ability to experiment via messaging to engage your customers with education on your products/services, product recommendations, deals and more based on the unique characteristics of the audiences you build with our deepest set of filters yet.

Use the Audiences feature in three key ways: 

1. Create hyper-targeted segments based on what customers bought, how much they spent, and their behavior with your brand.
2. Push each list directly to Klaviyo or Attentive to start sending laser-focused messaging. 
3. Measure the results of each campaign on your Audiences dashboard in Peel.

You can use the Audiences you create as custom filter values for any of Peels 160+ metrics too, so you can see additional views of your ecommerce analytics for each unique segment. This gives you the flexibility to understand more about your Audiences and make better decisions on how and when to engage them with marketing messages.

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4. Track Your BF/CM Customers’ Purchasing Journey 

Get to know the purchasing journey your BF/CM customers take after the event itself. The Purchasing Journey feature helps you understand exactly what your BF/CM customers are coming back for in the weeks and months after the holiday weekend. 

It’ll illustrate the path between products from their first purchase, to their second, third, and even fourth purchases. This will show you the most popular (or most relevant) paths for customers as they come back for subsequent purchases–along with the average time it takes to come back after each previous purchase. 

Knowing the common routes customers take to purchase will inform your Cyber Monday marketing strategy, your Black Friday marketing strategy, and other marketing campaigns, as well as product selection and placement. 

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5. Create Customer Tags 

The sky’s the limit with segmentation in Peel. The more creative you get with your customer tags, the more detailed you can get with segmentation of your most important revenue and retention metrics. 

You can use your Black Friday data and Cyber Monday data to group together like-minded shoppers and identify different types of customers who bought during BF/CM. For example, you can tag shoppers who used specific codes or who bought certain products and bundles. This is a great way to prep for BF/CM – tag customers based on their interests and past purchasing habits to serve them relevant content and product recommendations when the holiday weekend rolls around.

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Bonus Advice: Connect Your Data Sources Now!

If you're already using Peel, make the most of our powerful dashboards and extensive metrics by connecting all your relevant data sources. Consider plugging in information from your: 

• Email marketing platform
• SMS tool
• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Subscription Platforms
• Amazon 

If you're not using Peel, you can get a 7-day free trial where you can connect all these datasources and see the full power of automating your ecommerce analytics.

BF/CM will be here before you know it. Start preparing now to make the most of the biggest shopping holiday of the year.

Stay tuned for more Black Friday and Cyber Monday content as we dive into strategies and best practices for brands to increase retention and growth via post-purchase data.

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