China’s Double 11 campaign - possibly the world’s largest online shopping festival across major Chinese e-commerce platforms, including Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo. Ended not too long ago, we have some observations from this massive campaign that could come in handy when preparing for next year’s Double 11.
Chinese Shopping Festival Double 11
Product quality matters the most
Price reduction such as coupons and red packets are some common tactics to attract customers. Yet, quality matters and customers have their expectations, even on the cheapest product.
Recently, one of the edible bird's nest brands was accused of exaggerative promotion of ingredients in live streaming. Edible bird's nests are bird nests created by edible-nest swiftlets and believed to have health benefits, they are particularly prized in China because of their rarity. The consumers who bought the product questioned about the ingredients. The product was sent to test and the report revealed that the percentage of actual bird’s nest inside was much less than claimed. The respective KOL who hosted the live streaming needs to apologize and refund a total of 61 million yuan to the audiences that bought the edible bird’s nest during her live streaming.
Price reduction can be a winning marketing strategy at times, it’s not without its pitfalls. Nowadays, consumers are more eager to know what they are actually consuming. At the end of the day, the quality of a product matters.
shopping flatforms in China
Keen competition across platforms
The Double 11 competition is fierce, and it is a challenge especially to small and medium enterprises with the allocation of advertising expenses and uneven web traffic distribution.
From Taobao, the higher the ranking, the more customer traffic could be driven. Reducing prices to offset sales, investing in advertising expenses, having a good score in reviews are some of the ways to gain a high ranking. In the past, there were only traditional e-commerce platforms for the Double 11 fest so that the traffic can be concentrated. Now, the traffic on Taobao has been diluted because of the new social media such as Duoyin. The balance and strategy on media spend across multiple platforms is a challenge.
It is crucial to find the right live streamers and have good advertising expenses planning in different new and traditional platforms to drive sales.
Tmall Double 11 promotion
Complicated promotional rules
According to the survey of Double 11 overview from iiMedia Research, a China-based third-party data mining and analysis organization, only 30% of the e-commerce users said that they fully understand the promotional rules of Double 11, the rest found it difficult to understand and complicated, particularly with the complexity of the calculating method. As the Double 11 has been held for many years, all platforms tried to explore and offer fresh sales tactics such as various coupons that may only usable in a certain period and cross-store price reduction to appeal to consumers. It was troublesome for users to calculate the discount. This act bothered some consumers and turned them away.
Double 11 promotion rules are difficult to understand
Brands could consider providing an affordable and simply promotional activity to retain consumers’ purchase incentives.
Douyin and Kuaishou
The new force - Duoyin and Kuaishou
While leading Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo were still the main platforms this year. Yet, short video platforms such as Douyin (also known as TikTok outside China) and Kuaishou are playing a new dominant role in Double 11.
According to the same survey, the number of active users of Duoyin is 491 million, 35% of Douyin users are located in China's richest first-tier cities. The number of active users of Kuaishou is 381 million. From July 2019 to June 2020, 70% of users who published on Kuaishou were under the age of 30. The energetic and young purchasing power leads to the expansion of live streaming e-commerce.
To gain a place in e-commerce, Douyin opened its e-shop in 2018 and established “Fans day” in Double 11 this year to give back support to all loyal users. They launched “Fan Voucher” and “Limited Time Spike” to attract loyal users. Kuaishou invested 3 billion yuan to build an e-commerce headquarters. On 30 October, Kuaishous and Jiangsu set-up the “116Carnival” that live streamers broadcasted for 12 days straight to warm up Double 11.
Noteworthy that Duoyin and Kuaishou audience is increasing. It is the new force of China's e-commerce marketing as well as a new challenge to those traditional leading e-commerce platforms. We anticipated that the short-form video content is the new promotional trend.
It’s always good to learn from past events and better plan for the next campaign’s marketing strategy. Improve your customer retention, build brand trust, and boost your ROI by focusing on your product quality is always the golden rule
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