Summary

• Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, demands meticulous planning.
• Retailers face the challenge of analyzing extensive data to devise successful strategies for this critical sales period.
• AI-powered retail intelligence platforms play a pivotal role in driving success on Black Friday by enabling data-driven decision-making, optimizing operations, and enhancing the overall customer shopping experience.

Introduction

It’s that time of year again – Black Friday! Or, as retailers call it, the busiest shopping day of the year. 

Although Black Friday comes and goes for shoppers in a long weekend after Thanksgiving, lasting from Friday through Cyber Monday, retailers know the countless weeks, if not months, of planning that go into creating a successful Black Friday strategy.  

There is so much for you to focus on when planning for Black Friday, and analyzing all of the data needed to understand how to approach this sales period would be impossible. However, with the help of a retail intelligence platform, you can more efficiently and effectively create a winning strategy.

How AI-Powered Retail Intelligence Drives Success on Black Friday

By leveraging the capabilities of an AI-driven retail intelligence platform, you can make data-driven decisions, optimize your operations, and enhance the overall shopping experience for customers during Black Friday and other peak sales periods.

1. Demand Forecasting: AI platforms can analyze historical sales data, current market trends, and external factors to predict demand for specific trends and products. This helps you optimize inventory, ensuring you have enough stock to meet customer demand without overstocking and incurring unnecessary costs. Also, with retail intelligence, you don’t have to guess what items are going to be popular, as this technology helps you quickly identify trends so you can stock the items your customers care about most. 
2. Dynamic Pricing: Retail intelligence platforms can analyze real-time market conditions, competitor pricing, and consumer data to automate price and discount changes in alignment with customer demand and market pricing. With insights about the pricing of similar products, your retail business can remain competitive with its deals, while maximizing revenue during Black Friday. Moreover, you can easily see historical sales prices of your own products and those in the market to inform your strategy without having to dig through years of data, as AI does this for you.  
3. Sort Order Optimization: By utilizing retail intelligence software, you can get alerts about key insights and recommended actions such as markdown/promote item, replenish stock units, increase price, etc. to optimize performance. Knowing how your Black Friday pages are performing and being able to make adjustments is critical and, with retail intelligence, you can see these insights at the point of decision. EDITED Overlay does all of this through a simple Chrome extension that overlays key product metrics directly on your website or digital commerce platform you are already using.
4. Customer-Centric Strategy: Mckinsey reports, “…companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from those activities than average players.” Personalization is crucial during Black Friday too. AI-driven data analysis gives you a quick and easy way to visualize insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences so you can create a truly personalized experience that is customer-centric.  
5. Competitive Research: With AI-driven platforms, you gain access to ample competitive information, such as email communications, category landing pages, current and historical promotions, and more from thousands of retailers. Analyzing messaging data can help you understand when players in your market start discussing Black Friday and what types of promotions they run, allowing you to optimize your marketing and promotional activity accordingly. With this data, you are better able to embody personalization and target your customers with relevant messaging about items they are interested in. 
6. Preparing for the Future: Analyzing data collected during Black Friday can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and emerging trends. You can access your business’s historical data and use this information to refine your strategies for future sales events. By analyzing how consumers reacted to your promotions, pricing, and assortments, as well as where you won versus your competitors and vice versa, you can better your strategy for next year.

Conclusion  

By embracing the power of an AI-driven retail intelligence platform, you can navigate the complexities of Black Friday with confidence. Black Friday will always require advanced planning, but with the help of AI retail technology, you can simplify the analysis portion of the process and make better, data-driven decisions quickly.

Book a demo and discover how EDITED can give you the tools to create your best Black Friday strategy yet.