How to maintain brand longevity beyond Black Friday craze

South Africans will spend R56.8bn on retail goods online this year, representing a year-on-year growth of 39%.

There is a terrific opportunity for brands and marketers to benefit from this amount, but if the plan to get a share of these billions from events such as Black Friday — they’re not seeing the bigger picture. 

Before you promote Black Friday in favour of other considerations, you need to know that price is not the most important thing for customers. 

If you can give them what they want, you can unlock more than a one-hit shop-and-run. Give them the best customer experience and earn long-term loyalty from delighted customers who will become your advocates and spokespeople. Having customers sing your praises carries more weight than before.

Reliability and delivery are more important to your customers than price when shopping online. This was evident in Rogerwilco’s fourth annual South African Digital Customer Experience Report, which surveyed more than 2,000 people, to understand their attitudes towards the brands they engage with online. 

Reliability topped their list of most wanted attributes at 72%, followed by delivery at 66%. Price was only the third most important attribute, at 63%. 

Interestingly, price was the most important attribute in consumers’ buying decisions in  Rogerwilco’s CX study last year.

The fact that price has shifted in importance shows that customers will only buy from you again if they have a satisfactory online experience with your brand. 

It’s worth paying attention to the other attributes that encourage shoppers to make repeat purchases from the same brand online.

Ease of use came in at 59%, and trust was at 50%. Four of the top five qualities customers want are about having a good experience, so it's time to revisit Black Friday.

Any big, concentrated sales day will always be fraught with variables. There are so many “ifs” to deal with: if customers have to queue, if they end up ordering something they don’t want because their preference is sold out, if their order is bungled because staff are too inundated to get every order right, if delivery or returns are compromised, and so on. 

Any of these things going wrong makes for a poor customer experience that will cost you, the customer, and for what? A comparatively small return. Above all, customers want you to stick to your promises. This is what reliability and good delivery mean to them. 

Rather than a frantic Black Friday scramble to acquire one-off customers, a more considered and intelligent strategy is to invest in providing great experiences. Your primary goal should be to migrate one-off shoppers into repeat buyers.

It costs you less and earns you more to retain existing customers than acquire new ones, and this will become increasingly important through 2023. 

With rising inflation and the likelihood of a global recession, economically, this is not the time for Black Friday thinking. As tempting as a discount day seems, you’re better off looking beyond the short term and focusing on consistently improving how your loyal customers experience your company. 

Regardless of what next year holds, there is room for growth in the online retail landscape. Online shopping is now an integral part of South Africans’ lives. Almost 90% of respondents to the survey had made an online purchase in the past year. And it’s not just particular types of customers either — it’s everyone. Online shoppers transcend income, age and geographic location, giving you a wide-open market to serve. 

Keep sight of the fact that your customers evolve, and they do so quickly. Their wants and needs change all the time. Your job is to keep paying attention so that you don’t lose touch with what is important to them.

This article was paid for by Rogerwilco.