With the right KPIs, you can easily identify trends and patterns to improve your pricing strategy and sustainably boost sales.
For many retailers, Black Friday is the most important sales event of the year. Surges in demand can increase by up to 154 %, as our Black Friday Report shows. However, when the whirlwind of deals and discounts calms down, there is still one important step to take to maximize the business impact of this year’s campaigns: It’s time for a Post-Black Friday analysis. How well did your campaigns work? How could you have improved your Black Friday pricing?
A Post-Black Friday analysis offers retailers valuable insights into customer behaviors, sales trends, and pricing effectiveness, which go far beyond immediate sales figures. By examining these data points closely, businesses can identify which pricing strategies resonated with customers, which products saw the highest demand, and where opportunities were missed. And with a proper analysis, they can turn insights of one week or weekend into a foundation for enhanced sales success throughout the coming year.
Conducting post-Black Friday analysis
Thanks to heightened consumer activity, Black Friday provides a wealth of data ready to be dissected. However, many retailers just examine the most obvious data points. We want to encourage you to dig a little deeper to gain a better understanding about what worked and what didn’t work. Here is a simple threefold approach you can use to conduct a thorough post-Black Friday analysis.
If you’re already using a predictive pricing solution, you have the opportunity to compare its predictions with the actual results and adjust your tool’s configuration based on your findings. In addition, the software will relieve you of much of the manual analysis work, as it continuously tracks prices and important sales data anyway to support your price optimization.
Sales data analysis
Focus on KPIs like sales growth to assess year-over-year performance gains for specific products or product categories, and analyze average order value (AOV) for spending trends. Additionally, review inventory turnover to prevent overstocking or stockouts. Analyzing these KPIs provides insights into product demand and inventory efficiency, helping refine your pricing and stock strategies for upcoming sales events.
If you switched to a predictive pricing solution recently, you likely see its impact. According to our market research, retailers using AI-driven approaches on Black Friday outperform competitors with traditional strategies in terms of net profit by 39%.
Performance metrics
Take a close look at the performance of your marketing campaigns and promotions. Evaluate click-through rates for digital ads and conversion rates for your product pages to gauge how well marketing turned interest into purchases. Also, look at car abandonment rates to pinpoint areas of friction. Last but not least, take into account the customer acquisition costs and assess gross margin to understand campaigns’ overall profitability.
Good to know: With a cross-department price optimization solution, you can make sure your campaigns are a net positive.
Competitive analysis
An important part of every post-Black Friday analysis is to benchmark pricing strategies, product offerings, and promotional tactics with those of top competitors. Track how their discounts and promoted products differed, and analyze customer sentiment on social media to gauge public response. This analysis can reveal gaps in your own strategy and inspire adjustments to pricing, inventory, or advertising efforts for the future.
Planning for the future
Whether you perform a manual post-Black Friday analysis or work with AI-based tools, systematically integrate your findings into your planning. Here’s one straightforward way to go about it.
Identify trends and patterns
Examine your data on sales and customer behavior to recognize patterns and thus emerging market shifts. Your Black Friday data is a goldmine for spotting trends early. Leveraging AI can be a game-changer here, as it identifies subtle patterns human analysts often miss, offering data-driven insights into evolving customer preferences and buying habits. With the right predictive pricing solution, you can track these pattern changes, which enables you to regularly fine-tune your product selections, pricing strategies, and better align with market demand.
Adjusting pricing strategies
Post-Black Friday analysis can lay a foundation for effective price optimization. By reviewing which price points boosted conversions, you can adjust your strategies to better match customer expectations. Predictive pricing solutions, like 7Learnings, relieve you of most of the manual analysis and adjustment. And their big advantage: They will monitor and forecast market changes in the background to help you adjust prices not only once but dynamically, and improve your margins across sales cycles.
Setting goals for future events
A post-Black Friday analysis shouldn’t only inform your general pricing strategy, but act as a stepping stone for future sales events. Based on your insights, set specific, measurable goals for future promotion periods. However, stay agile and responsive to changing market conditions and don’t cling to fixed goals. The more adaptable your strategy is, the better you can respond to competitive shifts and emerging trends and meet customer needs effectively.
Conclusion
A thorough post-Black Friday analysis is essential for retailers aiming to enhance their long-term sales strategy. This process offers insights into customer preferences, pricing efficacy, and marketing impact.
By consistently analyzing post-event data, retailers can make informed, agile adjustments, setting a solid foundation for future success. Viewing this analysis as a core part of the sales strategy empowers businesses to adapt quickly to trends, optimize performance, and achieve sustained growth across sales cycles.
You want to learn more in-depth about pricing strategies for Black Friday?
