Black Friday gamification. How we made the game in 10 days
I do not like how Black Friday is organized in Russia.
While in the US they sell a lot of interesting devices for a pittance, our retailers make discounts on useless goods (like flash drives), or do fake sales (inflate prices before the promotion and make a small discount to the usual price). Fortunately, we are able to do it differently and show other retailers how to work.
First, a few words about the history of Black Friday.
This concept appeared in the XIX century, during the financial crisis of 1869 in the United States.
Let me quote the Tjournal edition:
You can read more about the history of Black Friday at TJ .
Nowadays, Black Friday has secured the status of the biggest sale of the year, allowing retailers to significantly increase sales in the pre-New Year period. For example, last year for Black Friday goods worth $ 57.4 billion were sold, of which goods worth $ 1.2 billion were sold on the Internet.
')
Black Friday only came to Russia last year along with the Blackfriday2013 project. About him there was an article on Habré (when the project site fell and did not want to go up).
The lazy guys didn’t mock the guys who organized this sale:
Yes, they were not prepared for the load on the site, and not all sellers provided decent discounts, but on the whole it was the first such experience for Russia and those who made a high-quality price offer eventually found satisfied customers. We have to admit that the network still prevailed moods like "We live in Russia, what you wanted, they will deceive you here and leave us without pants."
Madrobots at the time of the launch of the campaign in 2013 was still very "green" and we still did not know what we could offer. Yes, and did not know how to quickly rebuild.
But we could see what the online stores did on Black Friday.
Most of them worked according to a well-established scheme:
Those who do not have time to buy cheaply interesting device remains to bite your elbows.
We considered that this mechanic could be improved and we decided to combine 2 elements:
There we came up with an "electronic queue". Almost as usual, but electronic.
We made a game where social capital (the number of friends, subscribers) allows us to greatly increase the chances of buying equipment at a discount.
This is done through the mechanics of the "electronic queue", when leaving the mail on the page, the user receives a sequence number at the tail of the queue and in order to advance, he needs to perform as many social actions as possible (like, shher, retweet).
We chose the 5 most desirable gadgets among geeks:
We decided to sell all these devices at a price substantially lower than their retail price and in limited quantities - 5 pieces each. And the price is valid only when paying for the order using PayPal, which further limits the possibilities of purchase.
At this stage, we have formed a pool of devices that should ensure interest in the action.
To equalize the chances of the participants, we did 2 things:
Within 4 days from November 28 to December 1, every few hours we will open 21 products on the page of the promotion according to the rule - 1 gadget from TOP5 + 20 devices.
We keep the time of the start of sales in secret, so that everyone has an equal chance to buy a vending device.
There will be 5 promotions in total, which will occur at random times between 08:00 and 23:00 Moscow time.
At the start of sales, all those who left their contacts on the sale page will receive a notification by mail (and the phone if you leave it).
The next task for us was to figure out how to inform as large an audience as possible about the action.
The solution is obvious. It is necessary that participants in the sale were interested in distributing information about the promotion.
For this, we used the "electronic queue".
We decided to link the user number in the "electronic queue" with the time when he receives a notification about the start of the sale.
There is a simple rule: the number of points scored by the user at the base of the queue. The higher the place in the queue, the earlier the participant learns about the beginning of the sale.
To advance in the queue, you need to perform the proposed actions and get points for them.
This widget looks like this:
The rating of participants is updated in real time.
All participants of the action are ranked by the number of points for the tasks performed.
The first 100 participants by rating points will receive a notification about the start of the next sale wave a few minutes before its start, each subsequent 100 participants will receive a newsletter with a delay of 30 seconds.
The faster the user responds to the newsletter about the action, the higher his chances of becoming one of the happy owners of the new device.
For processing social data, we used the Magictab.ru service engine .
Magictab is something like a social loyalty program, where a user can get bonuses from the company right up to its products or significant discounts for various social activities (like, tweet, subscription, etc.).
Together with the guys from Magictab, we customized their widget, where the user is asked to perform a series of actions and move up in a queue.
Magictab developed the “Board of Honor”, ​​where you can see your place in the queue and the number of points earned:
But this was not enough for us and we decided to further increase the speed of dissemination of information about the action. In order to leave your email address, you must first share the page in the social network so that the subscription unit opens:
An experienced habrayuser will notice that we do not check whether the user has sent a post or not.
Only 10 days have passed from the appearance of the idea to the launch of the promotion page, and I am proud of it.
If you dig into the code and design, you will find a lot of flaws that we just did not have time to correct (for example, due to the user definition method, the Magictab widget does not support the Safari browser).
I would be grateful for personal messages listing the problems found or indicating them in the comments to this post.
Slightly less than a day passed after the launch of the announcement of Black Friday.
And we already have something to share.
First, it became clear that we did not the most understandable mechanics.
On the page itself there is no explanation of exactly how the action works.
We will not have time to correct this in the design, but we have taken it into account for future actions.
But at the same time, we realized that the mechanics we invented work. You will find several numbers to confirm this below.
I am very glad that we began to work quickly. As fast as a startup should work. All this thanks to the different teams and people who work together with Madrobots.
Accounting user actions - Service Magictab.ru
Programming of the development site - Center for High Technologies
Hosting, load testing, support site - the agency MST
Creation and layout of emails - Digdog Agency
In the next post on the results of the action I will write in more detail about how the action worked and what it taught us.
Ask questions in the comments and write about what aspects of the store and the action page you would be interested to know.
If you have completed the post to the end and have not visited the site yet, below is the link to the promotion page:
http://madrobots.ru/blackfriday2014/
While in the US they sell a lot of interesting devices for a pittance, our retailers make discounts on useless goods (like flash drives), or do fake sales (inflate prices before the promotion and make a small discount to the usual price). Fortunately, we are able to do it differently and show other retailers how to work.
First, a few words about the history of Black Friday.
This concept appeared in the XIX century, during the financial crisis of 1869 in the United States.
Let me quote the Tjournal edition:
Since the end of the nineteenth century, it was customary to call “black” the days of the strongest economic upheavals. For example, on September 24, 1869, the name “Black Friday” was permanently entrenched: then the US Treasury, without warning, arranged a massive release of gold to the market in order to adjust its rate, which is rapidly growing due to financial speculation. In a matter of hours, the precious metal plummeted in price by 30 percent, due to which many Americans lost their fortunes.
You can read more about the history of Black Friday at TJ .
Nowadays, Black Friday has secured the status of the biggest sale of the year, allowing retailers to significantly increase sales in the pre-New Year period. For example, last year for Black Friday goods worth $ 57.4 billion were sold, of which goods worth $ 1.2 billion were sold on the Internet.
')
Black Friday only came to Russia last year along with the Blackfriday2013 project. About him there was an article on Habré (when the project site fell and did not want to go up).
The lazy guys didn’t mock the guys who organized this sale:
Yes, they were not prepared for the load on the site, and not all sellers provided decent discounts, but on the whole it was the first such experience for Russia and those who made a high-quality price offer eventually found satisfied customers. We have to admit that the network still prevailed moods like "We live in Russia, what you wanted, they will deceive you here and leave us without pants."
Madrobots at the time of the launch of the campaign in 2013 was still very "green" and we still did not know what we could offer. Yes, and did not know how to quickly rebuild.
But we could see what the online stores did on Black Friday.
Most of them worked according to a well-established scheme:
- Determines the date of the start of sales and the list of products with discounts
- The user is invited to leave an email address and receive a notice of the beginning of the sale.
- At the time of the sale, the user receives a letter about the start of the promotion.
- The most interesting positions fly away in the first 2-3 minutes of the action.
Those who do not have time to buy cheaply interesting device remains to bite your elbows.
We considered that this mechanic could be improved and we decided to combine 2 elements:
- popular devices with very attractive prices
- element of equalization and competition between participants
There we came up with an "electronic queue". Almost as usual, but electronic.
We made a game where social capital (the number of friends, subscribers) allows us to greatly increase the chances of buying equipment at a discount.
This is done through the mechanics of the "electronic queue", when leaving the mail on the page, the user receives a sequence number at the tail of the queue and in order to advance, he needs to perform as many social actions as possible (like, shher, retweet).
Stage 1. How to make the action attractive
We chose the 5 most desirable gadgets among geeks:
- Xbox one
- Playstation 4
- Jawbone UP24
- Moto 360
- GoPro HERO4 Black Edition
We decided to sell all these devices at a price substantially lower than their retail price and in limited quantities - 5 pieces each. And the price is valid only when paying for the order using PayPal, which further limits the possibilities of purchase.
At this stage, we have formed a pool of devices that should ensure interest in the action.
Stage 2. How to equalize the chances of participants to purchase
To equalize the chances of the participants, we did 2 things:
- divided the action into 5 parts
- tied the time of receipt of the newsletter on the start of the sale to the user's activity
Within 4 days from November 28 to December 1, every few hours we will open 21 products on the page of the promotion according to the rule - 1 gadget from TOP5 + 20 devices.
We keep the time of the start of sales in secret, so that everyone has an equal chance to buy a vending device.
There will be 5 promotions in total, which will occur at random times between 08:00 and 23:00 Moscow time.
At the start of sales, all those who left their contacts on the sale page will receive a notification by mail (and the phone if you leave it).
Stage 3. How to gamify a sale
The next task for us was to figure out how to inform as large an audience as possible about the action.
The solution is obvious. It is necessary that participants in the sale were interested in distributing information about the promotion.
For this, we used the "electronic queue".
We decided to link the user number in the "electronic queue" with the time when he receives a notification about the start of the sale.
There is a simple rule: the number of points scored by the user at the base of the queue. The higher the place in the queue, the earlier the participant learns about the beginning of the sale.
To advance in the queue, you need to perform the proposed actions and get points for them.
This widget looks like this:
The rating of participants is updated in real time.
All participants of the action are ranked by the number of points for the tasks performed.
The first 100 participants by rating points will receive a notification about the start of the next sale wave a few minutes before its start, each subsequent 100 participants will receive a newsletter with a delay of 30 seconds.
The faster the user responds to the newsletter about the action, the higher his chances of becoming one of the happy owners of the new device.
For processing social data, we used the Magictab.ru service engine .
Magictab is something like a social loyalty program, where a user can get bonuses from the company right up to its products or significant discounts for various social activities (like, tweet, subscription, etc.).
Together with the guys from Magictab, we customized their widget, where the user is asked to perform a series of actions and move up in a queue.
Magictab developed the “Board of Honor”, ​​where you can see your place in the queue and the number of points earned:
Stage 4. How to gamify the sale even more
But this was not enough for us and we decided to further increase the speed of dissemination of information about the action. In order to leave your email address, you must first share the page in the social network so that the subscription unit opens:
An experienced habrayuser will notice that we do not check whether the user has sent a post or not.
Only 10 days have passed from the appearance of the idea to the launch of the promotion page, and I am proud of it.
If you dig into the code and design, you will find a lot of flaws that we just did not have time to correct (for example, due to the user definition method, the Magictab widget does not support the Safari browser).
I would be grateful for personal messages listing the problems found or indicating them in the comments to this post.
Preliminary results of the campaign for the first day after the start
Slightly less than a day passed after the launch of the announcement of Black Friday.
And we already have something to share.
First, it became clear that we did not the most understandable mechanics.
On the page itself there is no explanation of exactly how the action works.
We will not have time to correct this in the design, but we have taken it into account for future actions.
But at the same time, we realized that the mechanics we invented work. You will find several numbers to confirm this below.
Social Networks and Subscriptions
- ~ 4,000 people in the electronic queue who left their mail
- Facebook> 1,000 share sharing
- Twitter> 500 tweets
- Vkontakte is still not clear how many posts, but also hundreds
- ~ 3,000 new Madrobots subscribers in social networks
Attendance and sales
- Traffic on the Black Friday page for the first day exceeded 10,000 people.
- We received about 150 orders for ~ 1 million rubles, the majority without discounts. Just more people have learned that there is such a store - Madrobots.ru
I am very glad that we began to work quickly. As fast as a startup should work. All this thanks to the different teams and people who work together with Madrobots.
Over the action worked:
Accounting user actions - Service Magictab.ru
Programming of the development site - Center for High Technologies
Hosting, load testing, support site - the agency MST
Creation and layout of emails - Digdog Agency
In the next post on the results of the action I will write in more detail about how the action worked and what it taught us.
Ask questions in the comments and write about what aspects of the store and the action page you would be interested to know.
If you have completed the post to the end and have not visited the site yet, below is the link to the promotion page:
http://madrobots.ru/blackfriday2014/
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/244429/
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