In a popular Chinese saying, the number ‘1’ resembles a bachelor. Hence, the 11th of November (or 11/11) becomes Chinese Singles Day.
E-commerce giant Alibaba has turned Singles Day into the largest shopping festival in China. Known as Double 11, it starts in October and hits it’s peak on the eleventh of November.
Similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the West, the Double 11 shopping festival offers Chinese consumers the largest discounts and has become the biggest annual promotion focus for retailers and e-commerce companies to achieve their revenue goals.
Marketing build-up begins early in the same way that Christmas preparations do in the UK. Ebrun (the largest Chinese e-commerce news site) released a guidebook in early October to advise companies on how to make stand-out deals, putting an emphasis on marketing on all media channels.
Marketing is getting increasingly complicated for Double 11. Despite two major social media channels - WeChat (Chinese Facebook) and Weibo (Chinese Twitter) – live streaming and short videos are gaining popularity as important channels for sales conversions.
A Chinese male beauty influencer, Jiaqi Li, who makes a living by live streaming reviews of lipsticks on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Taobao, earned more than ¥10 million (£1million) in 2018. During the Double 11 shopping festival last year, he created two records - selling 15,000 lipsticks within 15 minutes and achieved ¥67 million (£7 million) sales by selling 320,000 products in total.
Double 11 is the biggest shopping day of the year in China. There are many ways brands can leverage social media to drive traffic and boost sales during the shopping festival, and with video streaming proving an increasingly popular means of selling, it’s time to embrace the medium or get left behind.
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