Big promotional sales are a necessary part of a fashion merchandising strategy, and they don’t get much bigger than Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). Or for some retailers, Black November.
Moving aged stock to generate the most budget possible for next season’s open-to-buy means a good, solid markdown is baked into the plan long before the season even begins. And for e-commerce teams, discounting is a great way to attract new customers or capture customers with high intent who haven’t yet taken the plunge on the product.
Yes, everyone loves a sale. However, as consumers are increasingly holding out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, success won’t come if your strategy is simply to sell more to more people. Promotional and sale strategies will now benefit from a mindset shift that protects margin, values your top customers, and works to slowly build profit, not instantly erode it.
The glory days of the blanket side-wide sale are over. 50-60% of sales promotions are failing to deliver a positive return, because the promotions generally don’t create a genuine increase in conversions. At the same time, many retailers are already affected by tight margins caused by tariffs and inflation, or having revised their pricing strategies to maintain brand integrity in a tougher economy.
To get the most from your fashion promo, retailers should shift from reactive discounts and take-a-furthers to targeted discounts and relevant communications that work to build a better connection with your customer.
Use this checklist to evaluate your past BFCM e-commerce promotions to ensure your sale season is set to meet customer demand.
Evaluating your online fashion markdown strategy
1. Product mix: Did your customers want the product?
Did last year’s BFCM product sell? Was it the product or the discount that disappointed? Creating an ideal markdown product mix to encourage conversions from your target shoppers relies on leveraging metrics and historical data. Firstly, you need to understand your current stock position in context to your ideal.
Start by reviewing past sales performance:
- Understand your ideal category mix based on the true rate of sale, accounting for any stockouts. If you use Style Arcade, this is the True Rate of Sale metric.
- Make sure you’re analyzing return rates, reasons, and reviews from the season.
- Products with high returns or unfavourable reviews aren’t the products you want first in your campaigns or ads.
With this context, you can then review your current product position so you have clarity on what you have available for sale.
Next, define your sale inclusions. To apply a clear framework, create a markdown matrix using a combination of season codes, cover, and sell-through performance as rules.
Once you have your inclusions, review these styles and assess whether this is a commercial offering based on your historical sales. If it’s lacking in representation at a category, price, or product level, bolster the offer by widening your selection matrix where necessary.
Download the Sale Season Guide to access the Markdown Matrix
2. Offer: Did your promo cannibalize full-price sales?
Always question whether you could have sold your sale stock at full price.
The type of markdown with 20-60% risk of product cannibalization are broad coupon codes that anyone can access, which is the sitewide markdown in fashion retail terms. This is compared to more targeted offers like abandoned-cart recovery and new-customer offers.
Basically, an untargeted site-wide promo is the most expensive promo you can run. Consider category sales, targeted lifecycle, and exit-intent markdowns, all of which have lower cannibalization rates. A targeted, deeper offer on the right SKU can outperform a shallow, sitewide one.
3. Check out: Did conversions really increase?
Sale season can offer a series of vanity metrics, like the conversion rate. A promotion that raised conversion rate during the sale? Well, of course it did. The chances of conversions being higher when prices are lower is second to none.
The real question is: what's your discount ROI? Because you also can’t assume that all purchases made during the sale window were all on promotion.
To work out whether a promotion actually worked, compare customers who received the offer with a similar group who didn't. Then compare those results with what you'd normally expect to happen in that month, taking the seasonality into account. Finally, remove sales that would probably have happened anyway. What's left is your best estimate of the genuinely additional sales created by the promotion.
4. Visibility: Did you update your shopping feeds?
No customer wants to see low-stock, marked-down, old-season inventory hanging around in your Meta and Google campaigns as BFCM kicks off. Guess what, they’ve already seen this product. Sale season is the perfect time to update, review, and cleanse your shopping feeds to hit the ground running.
Start by identifying your high-margin hero and core products that you’d like Google, Meta or your email platform to prioritize during the sale period.
You can automate your shopping feeds with Style Arcade’s dynamic product tagging. The feature was intentionally built for brands to tap into year-round profitability on the products that secure the most return on ad budgets.
- Prioritize products with high size availability and stock cover for better conversions.
- Automatically exclude high-return or low-profitability items from campaigns
- Align your Google Shopping, Meta DPAs, and email feeds with what customers actually want
5. The changeover: Did you have an exit strategy?
“Having sale exit strategies as well as building in a Plan B (and Plan C) into your strategy is key,” says Style Arcade COO, Christine Reed, in her comprehensive guide to sale season. “I’ve definitely experienced lackluster campaigns coming out of sale because of poor project planning around changeover.”
“To avoid last-minute scrambling, firstly, have contingency plans in place, and secondly, agree on the thresholds that will trigger these across the business, including the leadership team,” she said.
And for the post-BFCM shoppers? “As much as everyone loves a discount, your loyal customers are craving newness so make sure you have your transition planned with complete drops and coordinated campaigns so this launches with impact.”
Whether you’re planning for month-long markdowns or a short and sharp BFCM discount burst, a compelling campaign backed by a data-driven product mix based on up-to-date customer preferences will set you up for a healthy sale season.
Ready to kickstart your best sale period yet? Nail sale assortment planning and pricing, keep in control of your sales targets, and receive the only sale season template fashion teams need - complete with tried-and-tested formulas.
Download the Merchandiser's Guide to Sale Season
