China Insight: 2022 Double 11 Social Commerce & Ecommerce Marketing & Sales Strategies

The BIGGEST sales season in China, Double 11, is only a few days away! Major Chinese social commerce & traditional ecommerce platforms - Douyin, Kuaishou, Tmall and JD.com have all announced different promotions and campaigns to warm up for this 'Black Friday of China' event.

The traditional ecommerce platforms Tmall & JD maintain the rhythm of two rounds of pre-sales, leading up to the grand sales finale on November 11. 
While social commerce platforms Douyin and Kuaishou progress with a round of special offers that precedes the official double 11 sales.

On the October 13th, Douyin launched a new Double 11 presales membership campaign called ‘Good Luck Thursday (好运星期四)’, in addition to the existing campaigns ‘Good Stuff Livestream Room (好物直播间)’ and ‘Top Cost Performance Index (CPI) Sales Campaign (商城超值购活动)’.

Good Luck Thursday is a new regular recurring affiliate marketing campaign for Douyin merchants, where they can promote membership registrations by offering  privileges through lucky draws (e.g. high-value coupons, loyalty points or products) every Thursday and enjoy member-exclusive benefits.The increase in registration rate would in turn help brands gather information and preferences on users to provide them with personalised messages and build brand loyalty.

Beauty and skincare brands feature promos of product kits and sets during double 11. There are three primary reasons why brands implement such strategy:

1. Optimise SKUs, enhance sales and increase livestream GPM (gross profit margin).

2. Write off obsolete inventory based on product lifecycle.

3. Change customer behaviour: a set of skincare products can hinder customers from buying similar products of another brand for a period of time.

3 Ways to Put Products in Strategic Sets or Kits:

Brands can assess how to organise promotion sets flexibly based on internal stats and customer behaviour:

Method 1: 

• Mix new & old hero products

• Package complementary products with your main products

• Lucky bag/blind box (Any 2 skincare products for CNY1,000)

Method 2:

• Brand product sets

• Different products from one SPU (standard product unit) in a set

• Sets mixed with brands’ collaboration products

Method 3:

• Numeral combo (Tmall: Estee Lauder Youth Power Soft Cream (buy 75ml get 75ml))

• Loyalty combo (Buy 1,800 loyalty credits get 4 designated products)

• Privilege activation (Pay CNY 0.01 for a privilege to get a 15ml Youth Power Soft Cream as a gift with a single transaction of CNY 1,100)           

• Loyalty point giveaway (If making a purchase of a specific product, customers get the number of the loyalty points that equal to the amount they pay. For example, CNY1,800 = 1,800 points)

Brands have been in a ‘pre-heat’ stage by creating awareness since September with one of the most popular sales tactics in China – by working with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers). 

KOL/KOC Distribution

In China, depending on the social platforms, there are roughly 3 types of KOLs/KOCs: head, waist and tail.

Quick facts for 2022 Double 11 KOL/KOC Marketing Strategy: 

• This year, brands target tail KOLs/KOCs on Little Red Book to increase impressions and awareness. 

• On Douyin, brands have been embracing higher distribution of the tail KOLs/KOCs and reducing the investment in the waist KOLs/KOCs.

• Head KOLs/KOCs are the primary source of influences on Weibo.

KOL/KOC Assessment Dimension

Exposure rate and conversion rate are two major assessment factors for KOL/KOC selection and distribution. Brands can work with various KOLs/KOCs based on their ‘sales effectiveness’ from the perspectives of the frequency of livestream sessions, GMV (gross merchandise volume) per livestream, product ROI, session duration, and the number of livestream participants.

Douyin waist KOL ‘Sister Four-fire (4火姐姐)’, has 638K fans, with over 118K fans making purchases because of her recommendations through Douyin, and 297K likes. This year, she endorsed Gucci lipstick, and her fans can purchase a Gucci lipstick at the discounted price of CNY159 through her promo livestream.

Double 11 Content Directions

Based on different time frames in the double 11 calendar, brands can distribute different campaign content across various social commerce platforms:

• Product evaluation & ‘seeding posts’ (种草帖子: product sharing posts): in China, the act of ‘seeding’ means to ‘plant the desire to purchase the product in their minds’. Product comparison and evaluation posts usually gain higher impression and awareness.

• Product 101 Tutorial (攻略教程): to help users understand how to use the product e.g. which step the product should be used for in the skincare routine and the benefits of the products or other Q&A.

To best engage with your audience based on their behaviour on Chinese social commerce platforms, your brand needs to unify all social & 1st-party data at one place to refine your product, content and KOL/KOC strategies. ChatLabs Dataflow provides brands with compliant, real-time, unified 360° Customer Profiles with data integrated from every Chinese social channel, website, and Salesforce CRM.