What differentiates a successful business from a mediocre performing business? We say it is their sales and marketing strategy. A properly planned assortment of the inventory items and offers will take you a long way. But there is one factor that can boost your already superb sales output. That factor is timing. It will help if you put web scraping to use at crucial times like holiday flash sales.
Managing all these tradeoffs is a must for all retailers, especially during holidays. During these holidays marketplaces witness a continuous inflow of customers. For example, black Friday sales just passed. At such times, web scraping and big data can quickly help you magnify your profit.
Why do people look up to a flash sale?
Everyone looks forward to the holiday season. Retailers sell, and the customers buy. This altogether forms a lasting relationship between the two. But the number of customers acquired and their satisfaction depends immensely on the sales and marketing strategy of the retailer. With a good strategy, you can attract a considerable number and hold their interest for longer.
Why are flash sales so important for the customers?
Flash sales in the holiday season are all about shopping for new items. Folks look up to Black Friday sale, Christmas sale and other holidays in US 2019. During these occasions, many exciting offers flood the market. With attractive ideas, marketplaces try to attract as many customers as they can. The special holiday’s gifts make up the highest-grossing offers during this period.
Customers generally, visit online marketplaces to find products of their interest. Therefore businesses need to choose the best web scraping tool. This tool will give you the appropriate figure to price the product. This, thus, ensures that customers will get their best buy at your e-commerce store.
What to look up to as a marketer?
These holiday seasons make for a tiny window to boost promotions. This makes it quite crucial. One needs a robust sales and marketing strategy to make the most out of such opportunities. All your workforce and creativity needs to be put on the table to plan out competitive promotions and advertisements. Presently, big data analytics like web scraping allows effective trend forecasting to aid the planning process.
During flash sales, a well-planned list of available solutions, their prices, rewards and cashback can lead to significant customer acquisition. You can track users by using the correct tools. With regular interaction with a potential customer, you can keep in this new shopping loop. You can do this till they become your loyal customers.
As retailers, you can get to learn so much from flash sales. The whole process makes for a great learning experience for the entire team. The valuable lessons range from customer acquisition to marketing strategy, from inventory management to customer services. Shortly, all these will prove to be indispensable.
Why conquering sales is essential?
quote by Henry Ford
Sales and marketing are probably the most evergreen part of any business. It is the most dynamic and demanding department. As a result, it gives you visible results and calculable figures for your metrics. Conquering sales is, therefore, vital for your business.
Your flash sale strategy bridges the gap between your product and the market. By designing the correct fit between the two, you can measure the effectiveness and reach of your business. All of your business ends with the sales forecast. With this forecast, you can designate your next step for customer acquisition.
What is the way forward?
Now, what is our knight in the shining armour? Over the decade, big data has refined the e-commerce service. All tools under the umbrella of big data give ideas on what approach to follow and change to make. The competitive marketplace came into existence only because of the extensive use of big data analytics and web scraping.
Web scraping for e-commerce and price comparison of various online retail destinations will allow you to design a focused flash sale strategy. It will help you develop a profile of your key sellers which will play a key role in your sales and marketing strategy.
How can web scraping help you as a marketer?
As a marketer, holiday flash sales bring along tremendous opportunity. You get to renew your inventory, create new customers, and so on. It is only during the holiday in the US that you can feel the true potential as a business. Web scraping becomes a game-changer for e-commerce and other marketplaces. Web scraping for e-commerce becomes indispensable for several reasons:
Ease of gathering content
You can use many social media or ideating platforms like the medium. They aid with gathering customer opinion. This step will help shape your strategy for sale. Along with that, it helps you in deciding on the items you need to put up at a discounted price.
Furthermore, price comparison will help you place your products correctly for the purchase. Depending on social media trends, you can channelise the knowledge of customer demographics in designing promotions. Additionally, advertisements can be designed to cater to specific goals like fetching viewers to the website.
Competitive monitoring
Having designated the scope of your sale, you need to work to get a competitive edge over your competitors. Product development, marketing campaigns and pricing strategies form the essential checklist here. You can gain this edge by pricing your products at a cost just one unit lower than your competitor’s. This one unit can create a significant sales difference.
How you approach your customers and reach them before your competitors do is also essential. If you discover that your viewers have eyed a particular product, you have to keep on following up with them. Only then a sales conversion happens.
Boosts customer interaction
How you reach out to your customers is as important as the sale itself. You might apply various strategies to reach to your customers. Once, you have converted a customer; it is vital to keep them engaged.
Offering them personalised suggestions based on their search history can be one method. Ongoing purchases from their side will also help you in customer monitoring. Furthermore, their feedback will aid product improvement. Getting their feedback is like preparation for the future.
Efficient customer acquisition
Web scraping can help you find thousands of leads per second. With the right tool, this frequency can soar. How you keep on bringing back your viewers to your site until they buy your products and services is essential. This takes plenty of promotions. Various businesses give their regular customers additional discounts. But these discounts have to be designed carefully to ensure profit. Now, chatbots are also used for customer acquisition.
Comprehensive Market Research
Market trends are a clear reflection of public demand and behaviours. This step will help you plan out your strategy to give out the best offers and hence, attract the most number of customers. What one needs to understand is that market research is an ongoing process. Market trends are susceptible to change, and hence, it is crucial that you keep updating yourself updated and well-versed with any such changed.
Cataloguing
Scraping product information from various sites and social media helps to a great extent. One has to use as much visual content as possible. Visible contents fetch the most attention from potential customers. You can also bring videos from YouTube and other video hosting platforms can. Listing out products should be done on a strategic basis to complement your customers’ interest. All of this will add to our understanding and planning.
SEO saves the day
Knowing well how to apply SEO to your endeavours is like the jetpack you might need. It will make your efforts more foolproof. SEO specific content gets listed on the top by search engines. The higher your product gets listed higher will be its chance of being bought if the pricing is considerable.
A real-time application of this asset is the most judicious use of web-scraping. You can continuously change your pricing to become your customers best buy. One can do this by scraping information from many websites across your domain. A real-time scraper will ease your task of analysing the price of products common with your competitors’ list. You can then accordingly place your product’s price.
How to go about planning holiday flash sales?
All the particulars of flash sales come down to the sales and marketing strategy. With web scraping, one can read ongoing trends and predict future trends. Customer demographics and KPIs together give way to innovativeness to act upon for your team. Keeping all the data in mind, an all-round approach for the marketing strategy of holiday sales can be:
Create a confident promotion: Decide what products will earn you the highest revenue. Fix its cost as per the data obtained by web scraping. Make your advertisement, discreet and user-centric. Tell your viewers about how many pieces have already been bought. Adding a timer to the deal will only add to their mounting anticipation. The more it does, the higher will be the chances of them buying it.
Design engaging and customised campaigns: A well-chosen social media post can do wonders for your sales. Top it with a ludicrous discount. This will make your viewers fixated over your products. Personalised e-mail marketing can also add to customer acquisition. Notifications on their mobiles and through your apps can help you drive your campaign towards visible results.
Focus on alluring visuals: Design your campaigns such that your whole website demonstrates the sales activity. Here your presentation skills come into play. A few catchy videos can be an add-on. Building anticipation is the key to generating sales. Once this mood gets to your customers, your sales will soar too.
Consider holidays vs savings: try to target people’s holiday spirit. This time of the year, they tend to buy whatever they feel like buying. Harnessing this spirit should be your goal. Tell them excitedly about how much can they save with each deal you are offering. Give them coupons to redeem and discounts on the purchase of larger quantities. They will also love any savings on the delivery that they might get.
Keep the content engaging: A dash of humour will only keep your user interested while they surf through the whole lot of products you have on sale. Also, follow-ups are a magical thing. Please don’t leave the screen blank while a page is loading. For example, Amazon displays a dog when they can’t load a page. It hooks the viewers quite well.
Black Friday Sale 2018
Last year, there was a neck-deep battle between Amazon and Best Buy during Black Friday sale. Both had put large home theatre equipment for sale. Amazon listed their most bought product at $1,798. This price was just $ 1 less than that of Best Buy.
Also, Amazon’s web scraping tools made it better for customers as they gave free delivery. Amazon’s sales and marketing strategy gave the sales a boost too. Amazon’s product, Amazon Echo, was also hosted on both platforms. But Amazon got the better of it as it placed it a $ 3 less than Best Buy.
Both had put large home theatre equipment for sale. Amazon listed their most bought product at $1,798. This price was just $ 1 less than that of Best Buy. Also, Amazon’s web scraping tools made it better for customers as they gave free delivery. Amazon’s product, Amazon Echo, was also hosted on both platforms. But Amazon got the better of it as it placed it a $ 3 less than Best Buy.
After that, both went on to make predictions and preparations for Black Friday Sale 2019. Amazon might once again perform well in the area of home gadgets. Offers on their flagship devices will be quite ludicrous. But Best Buy might dominate the home theatre category. They owe this to the line of products they have. Discounts on Video games can be another product to look out for.
Which industries to look up to during the holiday season?
Few target industries can gross a big deal of revenue during these flash sales. There is an excellent possibility of success for the following businesses during the holiday season’s flash sales.
Tourism industry: All major airlines of the world and especially the USA and Canada have set up offers on for the thanksgiving and black Friday. People will be up to meet their family and friends.
Gifting solutions: Lots of gifting solutions like toys and games are available for kids. Whereas for adults, other handicrafts or show-pieces will be on the discount list.
Apparel industry: Buy clothes never goes out of fashion. While one can use them for gifting as well as for self, it becomes one of the highest-grossing industry.
Electronics and media: Festive season is about getting everything new. People stream in to make good use of exchange offers on all sorts of electronic items.
Let’s go web scraping!
One cannot emphasise enough on the need to be competitive during the holiday season flash sales. Web scraping is what you need. At Datahut, we have razor-sharp sales and marketing tools in the hands of well-versed technicians. We promise to give you results you can see. Ask us anything you want before you chose us as your web scraping service provider.