• October 27 2022

Singles Day Sale Inspiration

Whether you have a retail or eCommerce shop, you need to be aware of Singles Day.

It’s the shopping event that has taken the ecommerce world by storm. In fact, in 2019, it became the biggest physical and online retail event—bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. It’s a can’t-miss online shopping event for ecommerce brands worldwide.

Keep reading to find out how to make Singles Day 2022 the biggest sale event for your shop.

What is Singles Day?

Singles Day is primarily celebrated in China, and was started by Chinese university students in response to the many couple-centric holidays celebrated every year. It’s celebrated annually on November 11th, and is also known as Double 11 Day—with the date (11/11) representing four single people.

The holiday was commercialized in 2009 when Alibaba CEO, Danial Zhang, announced the ecommerce platform would host an annual 24-hour shopping festival in celebration of Singles Day. 
Singles Day—also known as the Double 11 Shopping Festival—is a huge shopping event for retailers. Let’s take a look at why.

Why should I prepare my shop for Singles Day?

Shopping events are a great opportunity for all types of retailers—shoppers will naturally be more active and on the lookout for their next buy. 

Last year alone Singles Day managed to:

Whether you have an ecommerce business or a brick-and-mortar shop, creating a plan for Singles Day is definitely something that should be on your to-do list. 

Let’s look at how to make your future Singles Days as prosperous as possible.

How do I prepare for Singles Day?

As a primarily digital shopping experience, there are specific ways in which you can prepare for the massive influx of online shoppers. 

Let’s look at some of the ways you can ensure your customers happily remember their experience with you–and come back for more.

Understand customer shopping behavior

Predicting how your customers will behave helps you prepare your inventory, guide them better through your page, and offer an overall better customer experience. 

For example, Alibaba used AI algorithms to predict customer orders for 2018’s Singles Day. The result? 80% of their predicted, pre-loaded boxes successfully reflected actual purchases and could be shipped out on the same day without changes or delays. 

Combining solutions from Visenze’s Discovery Suite—like Smart Search and Smart Tagging— feature you can improve not only your product’s searchability but also your insights into customer behavior. Knowing exactly what they’re looking for and how to prepare for this crucial date. 

Increase engagement opportunities

There are many ways to increase your chances of success during this special shopping festival. For example, gamification and social media live streams are two strategies that you can use to increase engagement and sales.

Let’s examine what we mean by them and how you can do them.

Gamification

It’s no surprise that people like games, rewards, and especially winning. By gamifying the shopping experience, you can increase engagement and interest in your offerings. For example, Michael Kors built a casino-themed mini-game on WeChat. Users could play and receive random discounts and Singles Day promotions. It’s not only a fun game for potential customers, but it’s also a great example of leveraging social platforms during key shopping events.

Social Media Live Streams

Social media live streams aren’t solely reserved for celebrities and influencers. Employees and other brand advocates can also engage customers with live streams.

Social media live streams give people the opportunity to engage with you and your products—and enables you to engage in social commerce. Ensuring your ecommerce site is ready for social commerce is a must—both on Singles Day and on every other day.

Optimize technically for a potential surge in traffic

Every Black Friday weekend is followed by the same headline: ‘chaos in-store and online’. 

The decision to optimize your shop to handle the surge in traffic can make or break your Singles Day. Imagine successfully directing shoppers to your site only for it to go offline due to the increased traffic. 

Here are some of the ways you can ensure your website is ready for the increased traffic produced on Singles Day:

  • Compress your files to speed up load time
  • Test frequently to identify minor—and major—issues
  • Install a caching plug-in to reduce the burden on your server
  • Upgrade your server to ensure your site can handle heavy traffic

It’s also a good idea to create a contingency plan detailing what you’ll do if things do go wrong. Singles Day planning requires a lot of consideration—both for if things go right and for if they go wrong.

Prepare your inventory with smart recommendations and smart tagging

Prioritizing inventory and order management is critical in such high-intensity shopping events. 

As always, technology can be used to help you keep everything under control. Let’s see how ViSenze Smart Recommendations and Smart Tagging can help you:

Use Smart Recommendations to prevent out-of-stock

Smart Recommendations display products that are hyper-relevant to each individual shopper. This enables you to not just sell individual products—you give your customers a direct path to shop your complete brand, look, and lifestyle. 

Add suggested products across key customer touchpoints such as product display pages, during the checkout process, and in email campaigns. 

Smart Recommendations provide shoppers with a uniquely personalized experience that prevents out-of-stock by:

  • Never suggesting products that are sold out
  • Providing immediate out-of-stock effective alternatives 

Smart recommendations help you maximize your success by ensuring Singles Day shoppers are shown products they can actually buy.

Use Smart Tagging to help users find your products

Smart Tagging enables you to immediately increase the performance of your site’s product search. 

ViSenze enriches your product listings at scale with accurate, AI-powered product tagging based on thousands of visual attributes. This makes your entire catalog more searchable and shoppable—making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for.

It also helps optimize your entire catalog for search engines, helping you improve your ecommerce site’s organic ranking. This increases the likelihood of customers finding your ecommerce store organically and converting to customers—and not just on Singles Day.

What goals should your business focus on?

During any shopping event, you really want to focus on crafting and providing an experience that will make you stand out from the crowd. Most importantly, you want as much of your Singles Day influx to convert to returning customers. 

There are a few metrics you want to keep your eyes on to gauge the success of your Singles Day strategy—other than sales, of course:

  • Bounce rate
  • Newsletter sign-ups
  • Traffic to your website
  • Cart abandonment rate
  • Cross-device performance

These metrics will provide insights into some key aspects of your ecommerce store’s performance, and enable you to improve in time for the next big shopping event.

Make Singles Day your best shopping event ever

Singles Day is without a doubt a shopping event that retailers should pay attention to. The number of shoppers and brands that participate makes it a shopping event you can’t afford to ignore. Try ViSenze today and be ready to make Double 11 Day 2022—and other key shopping events—more profitable than ever for your small business.