Black Friday: converting every sale possible
The past few days have been the most exciting ever in the history of Envolve Tech.
With inbound traffic surging, and the number of customer questions exploding, our Virtual Shopping Assistant (VSA) instantly scaled to meet demand and converted sales at record levels.
It was our best Black Friday ever, and based on the feedback we’ve received, our clients are thrilled.
302% increase in customer questions? No problem.
A perennial issue for all online retailers at Black Friday is how to best respond to the massive increases in traffic which appear suddenly for just a few days.
One fashion retailer client in particular was very keen to have our VSA on their site in time for this year’s sales season. They were expecting to see a record number of inbound questions, but it wasn’t practical to scale up their Customer Service team for such a brief period.
Could we help them respond to every customer question, and leave no potential sale unclosed?
Absolutely.
From Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that fashion brand had a 302% increase in customer questions compared to a typical Friday to Monday period.
Every question they received was responded to by our VSA, and each question was analyzed for potential sales opportunities. Customers were offered relevant products to browse through, and given assurances that their purchase would arrive on time for Christmas, or could be exchanged with no hassle if it wasn’t quite right.
12.8% of those conversations led directly to purchases, as compared to a conversion rate of 1.5% for other traffic. This means engaging with our VSA made the chance of a sale over eight times more likely!
How the Virtual Shopping Assistant converted Black Friday questions
We know from past research that 60% of customer questions are related to a purchase they are considering. This pattern continued during Black Friday weekend, but with a slightly different emphasis.
Many shoppers wanted reassurance before they started browsing. What’s your return policy if the dress I’ve bought for my aunt doesn’t’ fit? Will the earrings I was looking at for my daughter arrive in time for Christmas?
Thanks to advance planning based on data analysis, our Virtual Shopping Assistants were pre-populated with the topics shoppers were most likely to ask for each client website.
Once shoppers were reassured about the return policy, shipping times, or whatever questions shoppers on that site regularly asked, the VSA would begin offering product suggestions. These were based on an AI-analysis of their questions, and were selected to keep customers browsing through our clients’ products for as long as possible.
And being totally scalable 24/7, it didn’t matter if a thousand customers asked questions at once, or if someone wanted a gift suggestion at 3am – our VSA was able to handle everything.
Happy shoppers and happy clients
The feedback we’ve had from our clients since Monday has been fantastic.
One up-and-coming retailer told us, “We did more sales on Black Friday 2020 than in all of 2019, and I don’t think we missed a single sales opportunity thanks to you guys.
“If we had tried to handle this amount of traffic before we we began working with you, we would have been keeping customers waiting for ages, and no doubt losing a lot of them. It’s made a huge difference.”
Want a demo?
If you’d like to see for yourself how our Virtual Shopping Assistant is helping so many online retailers, just contact our Head of Business Development Dan Harding, or our Head of Partnerships, Dan Amarquaye .
With no setup fees, no subscription fees, and no obligations, the Envolve Tech Virtual Shopping Assistant is the perfect way to optimise conversion of your existing traffic -even during peak demand.
