November 11th, a day called ‘single’s day in China, is an entertaining festival widespread among young Chinese people to celebrate the fact that they are proud of being single.
This date is chosen by Alibaba since 2009, then it has become the largest online shopping day in the world, even ‘the Black Friday’ of USA can’t catch up with it. With the first 52 seconds of November 12th 2016, the turnover on Tmall arrived at 150 million US$. A first delivery even closed in 13 minutes.
Why this event can be such a successful case?
Firstly, Alibaba owns an excellent intuition to determine the exact timing and it knows well its market positioning.
For businesses, the November 11th is very close to the end of a year. At this moment, merchants online will usually have a performance assessment for the whole year and set their sales goals for next year. Logically, the double 11 has become a marketing strategy, sales strategy and action of clean up inventory combined event. So the merchants are willing to be involved in it, which is the basic factor for those promotions to go off smoothly.
Secondly, it is a “Festival marketing” or a “Holiday sale”.
Double 11 is a festival which young people entertain themselves. Throughout the whole year, except of domestic and international festivals in China, there are only 2 months’ blank which can be the best timing for businesses to promote their products, July and November. Compared with July, November is more considerable owing to a 3 months’ period without any “holiday sale” in China. The blank of festival is between the National Day of China on 1st October and the Christmas at the end of December. During this period, consumers don’t have any experience to be stimulated their desire to buy before. We have to say Alibaba made a wise choice.
For consumers, the main customer of Taobao is mainly between 20 to 30 year’s old. This part of young people is easier to shopping without any consideration than other generations. In addition, the double 11 is a day called Single’s day, singles often have lower financial burden and economic pressure than others. Promotions during the period will totally convince them towards an impulse of buying. They think they can buy goods with a very affordable price, which is in line with their shopping psychology. Alibaba knows well who are their targets.
Thirdly, the success of this event also owing to a diversified ways of promotion.
In addition to the traditional advertisement and TV advertising, double 11’s major promotion concentrates on the network, the new media has become the main channel of advertising. After the National Day’s promotional activities, we can not only read promotional information all over the pages of Taobao, but also from platforms of new media. The effect produced by this purposeful promotion will last till the beginning of double 11’s event. The secret of being efficient for a promotion is to convince every shopping desire to an action of purchasing.
Fourthly, Tmall has a promotion more powerful, more accurate.
A specific product will be sent to a specific user. Obviously, the precise way to promote their activities increases the amount of orders. In 2015, Tmall held the first “double 11” party, aimed to construct an atmosphere full of happiness and joy to make it easier to… of course purchase! At the same time, they also launched an interaction online and offline with their users. It is such many different ways of promotion, which assure that once consumers think of “double 11”, the slogan of Half Price Promotion will occur immediately in their mind. That’s one of the reasons why there’s always a surge in sales year after year.
Finally, “Double 11″’s success can’t be separated from a competitive price and transport.
That’s a low-cost promotion brought by Digital economy.
However, its competitive price not depends on reducing the quality of products. But from where it can ensure those low-cost promotions? In fact, it benefits from the advantages of e-commerce platforms of Tmall: zero inventory, no intermediaries, zero shop rents. Other costs can be significantly reduced.
In China, there are different types of courier companies which is in cooperation with Alibaba. SF, yuantong, yunda, zhongtong, STO, ect… Its O2O mode business allows to shorten the delivery time. Customers order online, the products that suits well the order will be delivered offline. That’s why the first parcel can be delivered in just 13 minutes on 12th November 2016.
What will happen on 11 November 2017? The only thing we can imagine is a large amount of orders than ever.
