Alibaba Group brings back its 11.11 Global Shopping Festival with exciting deals and initiatives to help brands prosper.
ALIBABA Group’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival is back for its 14th edition featuring more than 290,000 brands on its platform, while giving brands a leg up by equipping them with tools and solutions to grow and succeed during 11.11 and beyond.
Alibaba is assisting brands through various initiatives such as helping them grow their brand loyalty membership programmes and unveil new products, among others.
More than 40 brands on Tmall have loyalty membership programmes that surpassed ten million members and close to 600 brands have loyalty membership programmes with over one million members.
“11.11 this year will have the most diverse range of products in the event’s history, with 17 million products available to more than one billion annual active consumers on our platforms in China, thanks to the support of our brands and merchants from around the world,” said Alibaba Group industry development and operation centre of Taobao and Tmall president Chui Xue.
“11.11 is the most powerful engine for our merchants’ customer growth every year. Transforming consumer awareness into customer loyalty is key to generating the best return on investment. We will introduce technology and business innovations while enhancing supply-demand matching and loyalty membership management, to support our brand and merchant partners. Ultimately, we aim to turn customer assets into the most important driving force for merchants’ long-term business growth.”
11.11 presale on Tmall and Taobao began on Oct 24 with two check-out windows that will follow – the first window runs from Oct 31 (8pm) till Nov 3, while the second window begins Nov 10 (8pm) to Nov 11.
Helping brands cultivate high-value customers
Alibaba supports merchants on its loyalty member recruitment, along with other initiatives, to promote the broader use of membership systems as a tool to attract, engage and retain consumers by merchants on its platforms.
Alibaba’s ecosystem-wide premium loyalty membership programme 88VIP has over 25 million members with annual average spending of more than RM370,134 (RMB57,000) as of June 30 this year, which reflects the high-quality consumer base with strong purchasing intent on its platforms.
Alibaba is well-positioned and committed to helping merchants build their own membership operation capabilities to better target and serve customers during the customer lifecycle.
Many top brands, including Nike and Unilever, are already running brand loyalty membership programmes through their Tmall stores to engage with existing customers more effectively and capture new customers, especially from the base of over 123 million annual active consumers who spend more than RM6,494.30 (RMB10,000) annually on Taobao and Tmall.
Live streaming continues to be an effective channel for consumer engagement and Alibaba will support merchants with the capability to host self-run live streaming sessions during 11.11 through Taobao Live.
New products will be introduced this 11.11, including fashion and accessories from top luxury brands Moncler and Ferrari that opened Tmall flagship stores in the past month.
Meanwhile, many brands will also showcase their product innovation incubated based on insights from the Tmall Innovation Center (TMIC).
Yang (top right) along with Sun (bottom left) and Huang (bottom right) shared their insights on how TMIC and Tmall will benefit their brands during 11.11.
Inner Health China marketing director Icy Huang said there will be exciting deals featured on the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival from the brand.
Moreover, Tmall’s latest onboarding for new brands give insights to better suit consumers and establishing connection with live streamers.
“As this is our first (time participating in the) 11.11, this will be a great opportunity to check if our strategy is good. We will also have a better understanding of our product and consumers' pain points, while identifying the best price point,” said Huang.
Meanwhile, a veteran in this sphere Royal Canin Omni-SPT associate marketing director Claire Sun said that this is the brand's 10th time participating in 11.11, although as a customer, Sun has personally participated every year.
She added that this is a great opportunity to deepen their partnership with TMIC as well as set up a flagship store on Tmall.
“As a participating merchant, we hope our brand is able to achieve great success. It is our vision to grow together with the platform and serve more consumers and members for long-term and sustainable growth,” she said.
Concurring, Mars Wrigley digital marketing group leader focusing on Alibaba platforms, Anya Yang is excited to work with the platform. She added that they found 200 pain points from their Chinese customers and developed two exciting products based on the insights.
“We hope to pave the way with the new products developed with TMIC to go further,” she said.
Supporting merchants at home and abroad
Incentives for merchant and influencer-hosted live streaming sessions will be one of many ways Alibaba will provide support to small- and medium-sized businesses on its platforms this 11.11.
In particular, Alibaba will offer marketing exposure and customer targeting assistance to newly-launched live streaming channels.
Alibaba will also provide merchants with access to business intelligence tools and financial support. For example, a marketing analysis tool will be made available to all merchants on Taobao and Tmall for the first time during this 11.11 to guide merchants’ real-time business decision-making.
Tmall and Taobao will also provide faster payment transfers for merchants to ease their liquidity during 11.11, halving the account receivable cycle to seven days on average for certain products.
To support the growing demand for logistics support from cross-border merchants, Cainiao has further streamlined warehousing, customs clearance, line haul and distribution for 11.11. It has increased the number of its import line haul routes by 20% and doubled the capacity of its self-operated bonded warehouses.
Cainiao launched 400 line haul services spanning air, sea, road and rail to cover key import markets.
For exports from China, Cainiao is collaborating closely with AliExpress to offer delivery services within a committed timeframe and late-delivery compensation in various markets, ensuring a smoother experience for merchants and consumers.
For less-developed markets, Taobao Deals is working with more than 1,800 industrial clusters in China during 11.11 to offer value-for-money products, including groceries from over 10,000 factories.
A glimpse into a greener consumer experience
This year will see more initiatives aimed at building a greener 11.11 community. In accordance with the newly released standard guideline for low-carbon products by Alibaba Group – in this year’s 11.11 – Tmall has ramped up efforts to label low-carbon products covering extended shopping categories such as apparel, food and cosmetics apart from energy-efficient electronic goods to drive sustainable consumptions.
The new product labels aim to help consumers better identify low-carbon products on the platform, check the impact of their purchases on the environment and encourage more sustainable choices.
Tmall has also collaborated with over 40 brands to initiate a green campaign to promote low-carbon products through various initiatives.
For instance, 10 brands out of the more than 40 such as Procter & Gamble, Haier, ThinkPad and Yili have co-branded with Tmall to make innovative and sustainable shopping bags as free gifts for consumers with an aim to encourage consumption of sustainable products.
According to Tmall, one crossover bag is made from six recycled PET plastic bottles that are sourceable.
In addition, together with Alibaba Cloud – the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group – Tmall has leveraged the cloud unit’s carbon management platform Energy Expert to provide online carbon footprint modelling, calculating and certification for brands to identify low-carbon products and conduct informed sustainability practices.
Joining with thousands of merchants, Cainiao will help reduce carbon emissions from delivery and packaging, as well as to step up its parcel box recycling efforts across nearly 100,000 Cainiao Post stations offline.
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