Guess what’s back, back again? Click Frenzy’s back! And we’re excited to tell you why you should care and how your brand can go beyond simply surviving.

Click Frenzy is back yet again from Tuesday 13 November at 7PM AEDT! If you’re not up to speed with this event, Click Frenzy is Australia’s first and most recognised national online mega-sale event. It brings together online retail brands and their exclusive offers - all on the one central shopping platform four times a year, for a limited 24-hour period. Once a shopper selects a deal they want to buy, they are sent to the relevant retailer’s site to complete the purchase. Pretty simple, hey?

So, why should your brand care about Click Frenzy?

More than ever before, epic sales events are shaping the retail year. They’ve become entrenched in Australia’s online shopping landscape almost effortlessly. A lot of events like Click Frenzy are the younger brothers/sisters of events that originated overseas like Black Friday  and Cyber Monday, which both grew by 27% in 2017. According to the same 2017 customer survey by Australia Post Consumer Survey, Boxing Day sales grew by 35%, while Click Frenzy increased by 14%  year-on-year.

The combined popularity of these events had a bumper impact on overall seasonal growth as well. We’re seeing shoppers waiting for bargains, while retailers juggle fluctuating inventory levels and margin erosion. Taking traditional sales cycles out of the picture, these events are having a huge impact in traditionally slower months like May and November, with month -on-month sales growing by 32.2% and 16.7% respectively.

How to get involved with these epic events

Preparation and planning: the two ‘P’s’ that are crucial for any retailer even thinking about jumping on the Click Frenzy bandwagon. You need to think ahead and plan for the expected increase in traffic to your site… providing things go to plan of course!

Ecommerce can be complicated and often, it’s a slippery slope when it comes to balancing advertising, marketing, usability, user experience, design, web development, software platforms, integration with third-party systems and hosting infrastructure. Ideally, each needs to be fine-tuned to ensure your brand is firing on all cylinders during these key retail events.

At Woven, our experience with Click Frenzy and similar retail events prove that too many Aussie retailers aren’t prioritising these promotional opportunities. That means they’re not investing in the skills, infrastructure and preparation time to ensure that sudden spikes in traffic don’t cause a meltdown. We’d love to tell you otherwise but if you want to really latch onto sales promotions to drive both traffic and sales, you need to do the groundwork first.

There’s always an unknown element to events like Click Frenzy as often, retailers simply aren’t sure what to expect. If your site is offline, people can’t make purchases and throwing PR savvy lines out into the world like, “we had so much traffic, our servers couldn’t cope with the demand,” won’t go down well with your customers in the long-term. After all, that’s not their problem and you’re risking your brand’s reputation. The most successful retailers are tapping into the omnichannel experience and catering for consumers who expect to be able to shop online, in-store and on their mobile devices - with ease!

Before you jump into the deep water that is Click Frenzy or Black Friday or any other similar event, make the effort to understand your server and infrastructure limitations. If you’re not 100% confident in your technology, address the issues before a bad experience or two really forces your hand.

Tips to help you survive an insanely busy Click Frenzy

If you’re expecting a frenzy of clicks, put in place a number of measures to ensure your brand maximises the value of participating in the promotion. Here are some pointers:

Advanced notice and information: give service providers a heads-up as early as possible regarding any traffic spikes/marketing campaigns. This allows them to plan, implement and test any network enhancements or site optimisations ahead of time.

Optimise your website: pay attention to your website during standard trade and identify any potential issues in the form of ‘expensive’ queries or page loads that take a long time to complete their tasks. Work closely with your service provider to optimise queries and pages. Without proactively doing so, whenever a traffic spike occurs, it will add to the server load per concurrent visitor.

Set-up a content delivery network (CDN): this is one of the best ways to ensure optimal website performance. CDNs cache your website on services located in different geographical locations and on different ISPs’ networks. This means faster delivery of your site and a reduction in the load on your server and network. That’s always a good thing!

Effectively manage all social media channels: get your team of social media buffs prepared and ready to respond to any questions or queries. Having a system and process in place can make all the difference with an issue being dealt with minus unnecessary fuss or becoming a very public disaster that plays out in full view of other customers/potential customers. Remember, angry customers are rarely happy repeat shoppers!

If you’re participating in Click Frenzy or any other online retail event, do it properly and get serious about your online retail operations. Marketing and promotions are just one part of the retail puzzle. Execution and optimisation are equally as important, as is customer service and logistics.

Now’s the time to review and test all of your online infrastructure. Oh and it’ll keep you in good stead ahead of the busy Christmas period as well!

Need help testing and optimising your business’ online infrastructure. Load tests and all things in-between are our bread and butter so contact the Woven team today.