Consumption promotion also began to compete for the golden gear at 8 o’clock in the evening.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “E-commerce Online” (ID: dianshangmj), author: Wu Lingwei, editor: Si Wen.
This may be the first big promotion for the “deposit people” to fall asleep.
Last year on Double 11, during Li Jiaqi’s “don’t sleep,” “buy it, buy it,” and Wei Ya’s “crazy, robbing” cries, the workers who worked hard to support their families during the day turned into buying, buying and buying. The balance person. But this time, Tmall 618, the pre-sale time is 4 hours ahead of schedule and adjusted to 8 o’clock in the evening.
The two major anchors, Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, also moved their live broadcast time forward to 6 pm for the first time–“E-Commerce Online” counted their live broadcast time for the past six months, and most of them started at 8 o’clock. From December 1st last year to May 24th this year, Wei Ya started broadcasting at 8 o’clock on 99 days and at 7 o’clock on 39 days.
The change in pre-sale time will most directly affect consumers. In the past, the consumer spree was often accompanied by the price of lack of sleep, but this year, “there is no need to stay up late to panic buying.” Several operators and anchors of Pan Yin Culture, a live broadcast agency, as well as brands in multiple industries such as tata wooden door, Loock electronic door lock, and adopt a cow, all told “e-commerce online” that the pre-sale was opened in advance, and those who did not Consumers who stay up late are more friendly.
Those e-commerce teams who are stuck in the rhythm of the big promotion can also get off work earlier. Xiaoqi, the head of operations of Leqi, an e-commerce agency operating agency, used to work until 2 or 3 a.m. every 618 or the first day of the Double 11 pre-sale in the past, just to get the sales figures on the day of the pre-sale. ——Because the background data can only be viewed until the pre-sale starts, and this year, sales data will be available at 8 o’clock.
This is the new gameplay of 618 this year. Consumers experience changes and businesses will feel the changes. Advance the pre-sale period, means there will be more awake consumers, longer promotion front, and may also bring better sales performance.
Tmall 618 pre-sale opened for 1 hour, and the top ten hottest models were born: Chupu Beauty Apparatus, After Weather Dan Water Milk Set, Di Jiating Wanted To Play Mask, L’Oreal Ampoule Mask, Yameng Beauty Apparatus, Huawei Mate40, Ulike hair removal device, Ubras underwear, Yuze Centella mask, Xilinmen mattress (ranked by transaction amount). Beauty once again became the biggest winner, occupying the Top 10 listAmong them, the two new brands of Ulike and Ubras entered the top ten for the first time.
Brand store self-broadcasting also broke out in 618 this year. As of 0:45 on the 25th, a total of 10 stores including Estee Lauder, Xiaomi, Huawei, Lancome, Xiulic, Shiseido, L’Oreal, Hailan Mystery, Haier and other 10 stores had self-broadcast sales exceeding 10 million, exceeding the same period last year.
The tradition of panic buying at 0:00 can be traced back to the “Cyber Monday” (Cyber Monday) that was born in 2005. Since then, whether it was Double 11 created by Tmall or 618 initiated by JD.com, almost all big promotions related to e-commerce started at 0:00.
The 0-point panic buying tradition has continued for more than ten years. What impact will this change bring? Before and after the launch of the 618 pre-sale, “E-commerce Online” interviewed e-commerce practitioners in various links such as large and small businesses that opened stores on Tmall, the merchant’s e-commerce operation team, and live broadcast/agent agencies, and told you that they were The feeling of change. The most critical question is, why does Tmall change?
01 4 hours in advance, what changes will it bring?
To observe the changes brought about by the pre-sale time in advance, the best place to observe is the live broadcast room: where the anchor interacts closely with consumers, and the atmosphere of “rush to buy” is strong, which is a typical big promotion explosion scene.
On the first day of the Double 11 pre-sale last year, Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya broadcasted for seven hours. The former was broadcast from 6:30 pm to 2 am the next day, and the latter was broadcast from 7 am to 2:35 am. The night is getting deeper, especially after 1 o’clock, the increase in the number of people entering the live broadcast room is slow. Many people choose to sleep because they can’t stay up late.
In the 3 or 4 hours before the pre-sale starts at 0:00, they always complete the product introduction quickly and put up a link to a product that is temporarily unavailable for purchase. After 0:00, the anchors need to come back to explain the products that have been introduced, and they have to give the audience clear ordering instructions-there are hundreds of products in the big anchor’s live broadcast room, the anchor time is tight, and the speaking speed is fast. It takes a long time for consumers to find links to their favorite products.
For merchants, they spend their budgets to enter the live broadcast rooms of major broadcasters in order to “break the circle” of exposure. If the live broadcast time is too late, or the introduction time is limited, it means that consumers are lost.
On the first day of the 618 pre-sale, Li Jiaqi was half an hour earlier than last year’s broadcast time. The night before, he and his team worked on the ordering of live broadcast products until 4 in the morning, and controlled the explanation time of each product to about 1 minute. The background board of the live broadcast room emphasized this point: “Beauty makeup and life hot products, average Open 1 every minute”.
More than 200 items still let Li Jiaqi broadcast until 12:30. At 0 o’clock, Li Jiaqi still had several products not yet finished. He apologized to the audience and asked “everyone to hold on, there are too many products.”
GoodAt this moment, it is still the peak of traffic in the live broadcast room, and everyone seems to be able to accept online shopping at 12:30. Fatball data shows that as of 0:00 on May 25, 2021, the number of online viewers in Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya’s live broadcast room reached 106 million and 104 million, respectively. Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room sold 8.498,600 items with sales of 2.565 billion yuan, and Wei Ya’s live broadcast room sold 6.17 million items with sales of 2.379 billion yuan.
For businesses, the 4-hour change does not affect the specific arrangements of the big promotion. Generally speaking, the opening time of store merchandise links can be completed through the background. No matter what time the pre-sales are, the merchants will automatically start selling as long as they have enough goods.
However, the pre-sale is opened in advance, and consumers can purchase immediately when the anchor lists the product link, which can reduce the loss rate caused by the pre-sale. Merchants including Lin’s Wood Industry and TOTO told E-commerce Online that the 8-point burst coefficient exceeded expectations, and the conversion rate of live streaming with the store was higher.
Relevant persons in charge of the left and right household brands told “e-commerce online” that pre-sale orders have increased by 66% year-on-year. Compared with the obvious growth, Wang Zheng, the head of Xinrui Dairy Brand Adopting a Niu Tmall, said, “The overall traffic has not changed much, but the conversion rate has increased by 3 percentage points.”
“The pre-sale is ahead of schedule, and the store traffic growth is not obvious, but this stage belongs to the structure period, and the consumer purchase cycle will be lengthened. New customers will be reached through the store private domain recall and precise operation. Orders will continue in the later period Come.” said Sun Xiaoyu, head of roye brand.
02 Change the rules for live broadcast?
At the 618 pre-sale launch conference, Chu Xue, the head of the Tmall industry, mentioned that the reason for the advance of the pre-sale period was to “increase the driving force of live broadcast.”
How important is the live broadcast? Let Tmall change a rule that has not changed for 10 years?
From the perspective of penetration rate, live broadcast has become an important channel for online consumption. In the past year, the entire Chinese society bought about 10 trillion yuan of goods online. The sales generated by the live broadcast room accounted for about 10% of this-Taobao live broadcast GMV reached 500 billion in 2020, including Kuaishou and Douyin, the total GMV of the three head live broadcast platforms is almost 1 trillion. In the fields of beauty, clothing, etc., the penetration rate of live broadcast can reach more than 30%.
From the time when the TV was still the center of the living room, until now, 8 o’clock in the evening is a national prime time. During the gap between meals and bedtime, how many entertainment methods are competing for, variety TV series, Douyin Kuaishou, Tavern Mahjong…Now, live broadcast e-commerce and consumption promotion have also begun to enter this attention competition strong>: In addition to the daily broadcast of Wei Ya Li Jiaqi at 8 o’clock, there are also a large number of official flagship stores of the brand-acting as anchors for the brands, working hours and white-collar workers do not haveThere is a big difference, except that the working hours start at 7 or 8 in the evening and only at 1 and 2 in the morning.
In addition to being a way for many people to spend their time at night, live broadcast is also an important marketing tool for businesses. Since last year, Taobao Live has introduced a large number of merchants and brands to do store live broadcasts. This year, Taobao e-commerce has focused on store live broadcasts——
At the Merchants Conference in May this year, Ping Chou, the head of Taoxi’s product and content ecology, specifically introduced the importance of store broadcasting to merchants’ private domain traffic. Taobao merchant operation Xiaoerliancheng also revealed a set of data at the merchant conference, “Businesses with strong fan operations, than those with weaker fan operations, have an overall efficiency of about 30% higher… for the first time. For fans who enter the live broadcast room, their UV value can increase 13 times when they enter the live broadcast room for the second time.”
On the night of the pre-sale day, the Taobao app homepage, which has been changing frequently recently, changed again: double-column information flow; modular entrance; Tmall list and coupon live broadcast venues are arranged on the left and right sides, with a conspicuous purple frame. Out-In addition to this entrance, the homepage has opened an entrance specifically for “Taobao Live”, and a small window of the live room has been inserted in other branch venues. APP always uses the psychological cues brought by the design to guide users to the entrances they consider important. The location of the venue and multiple entrances can well illustrate the importance of Tmall’s 618 on live broadcast.
(The pre-sale of 618 is open, and multiple live broadcast entrances appear on the homepage of Taobao app)
Ali, which is based on merchants, must consider two points for the continued growth of merchants: attracting new customers; allowing regular customers to have more in-depth consumption. In an environment where user growth is peaking and traffic costs are high, live broadcasting, as a more efficient fan operation tool, naturally receives attention. This is also the reason why Tmall amended the 618 rule in order to cope with the outbreak of live broadcast.
03 Change the tradition and make the carnival daily
As for the reason that e-commerce platforms used 0 o’clock as the pre-sale time in the past, there are several speculations on the Internet: a carnival that starts at 0 o’clock will bring a sense of ritual; midnight is the weakest consumer willpower At times, it’s easier for everyone to be persuaded by the merchant’s promotional routines to place an order; the creators of e-commerce festivals may not have thought so much at all. 0:00 is the beginning of the day, which is also convenient for calculating sales.
“Cyber Monday” in 2005, Tmall Double 11 in 2009 (at the time, its name was just “Singles Day” with more Internet characteristics), and 20In 618 in 13 years, when these e-commerce festivals were created, e-commerce was still in a marginal and challenging position. Participating in the shopping spree is often a group of consumers who are more daring to try new things in their mentality, and no one has ever questioned the pre-sale time, so the tradition of selling at 0:00 has been continued like this-the lighting brand Moon Shadow Kayton Tell “e-commerce online” that some consumers have not yet formed the awareness of 8 o’clock snapping up, and a period of publicity and market education are still needed.
But from last year’s “nunchaku” to “4 hours ahead” this year, Tmall was the first platform to consider changing the traditional promotion.
Last year on Double 11, the “nunchaku”, which was changed to a two-wave sale period, is an example of Tmall changing its rules for experience. Double 11, which has been held for more than 10 years, is getting harder and harder year after year. It is difficult to stimulate social nerves with constantly refreshing sales records. Consumers may also lose interest in similar big promotions every year. In addition, the concentrated burst of orders will bring about a huge gap between free time and busy time, which will put pressure on the personnel deployment, production side and logistics side of the merchants.
This change is also considered in terms of consumer experience and increasing live broadcast bursts.
In fact, every year after the Double 11 promotion, all teams on Tmall will resume trading to consider whether the business investment is effective and efficient, and whether the consumer feels good. At the merchant group meeting held by Tmall at the beginning of this year, Tmall executives emphasized the experience of merchants and consumers more than once.
The basis and direction of the change is actually to make the big promotion daily and form a continuous “pulse”-this is why there are so many e-commerce festivals today, and the average e-commerce platform Create a festival every month, and big brands may also have their own festivals. They hit like a wave, stimulating consumers’ nerves from time to time.
For some merchants who don’t have much marketing budget, big promotions like 618 and Double 11 are expensive, but they can also find their own promotion rhythm from other festivals. Fino, a coconut milk food brand, told E-commerce Online that they have a relatively deep brand accumulation on Tmall. They mainly pull back old users during big promotions, while daily new actions are placed on Douyin Kuaishou. In addition, the main products sold are coconut milk or coconut jelly with short shelf life, which are more suitable for promotion on the New Year’s Day-and 618 and 11.11 are more likely to break out or be suitable for stocking and high-margin beauty makeup.
At present, we are unable to determine whether this advancement of the pre-sale period is an experiment or a long-term decision. But to judge whether it is a good decision, there may be several dimensions: how many people came in the store that day, how many products were sold, and the consumer experience will bring continuous feedback for the next period of time.