As Double-Eleven continues to grow, this Chinese version of Black Friday is no longer limited to November 11th and is expanding to take up more real-estate on the calendar. The pre-orders of “Double-Eleven” started as early as October 20th this year as Taobao has adopted a new “deposit-payment” mechanism. In this year’s “battle” to get all of the pre-orders, the Chinese live-streamer Li Jiaqi beat his competitor, Weiya by 2 billion yuan achieving the highest sales amount ever of 10.6 billion yuan. While the live-streaming market gradually heads into a bottleneck, Li Jiaqi used two ground-breaking tactics to put himself in customers’ shoes and solve their shopping headaches.
Li Jiaqi’s “One-Stop” tutorials
Despite the convenience and cheapness of online shopping, consumers still have difficulty telling whether the products would truly fit them since they can’t try them in person. For this reason, before purchasing, customers tend to do research on Little Red Book or Weibo, to help make a decision.
In his pre-order promotions, Jiaqi hopped onto Little Red Book to take part in the research phase of the consumer journey. The beauty sales king launched “The Tutorials of Li Jiaqi”, including his exhaustive summary and recommendations. It means his consumers no longer need to scour social media for reviews. These tutorials also have specific categories such as foundations, sunscreen creams and serums.
Li Jiaqi’s tutorials “killed three birds with one stone”: it won him wide acclaim since it saves a lot of energy for consumers. At the same time, by designing these tutorials, he not only pulled a huge crowd for his channel before the pre-ordered started, but also built his influence into the “upper reaches” of the sales chain. His tutorials effectively guided consumer decision-making process, creating a demand for products he is going to sell next.
Consolidating 11.11 deals into one shareable online sheet
In addition to these thorough tutorials, Li’s other creative move this year was the release of an online table and form on QQ, similar to a Google Sheet. The first page of the table lists the dates, times, and categories of different live sessions for different goods. Customers just click on the links on the sheet to directly jump to the page where those goods are located; for different specific products, Li Jiaqi also noted their characteristics, suitable users and prices. The table is updated on daily basis so that consumers are kept abreast of the best and latest promotions.
Over the past few years, there have been complaints that the system of Double-Eleven is too complicated. Adding together all the discounts and coupons make it arduous for consumers to work out an actual price. This simple table allows consumers to locate the information they need in the shortest possible time. Just as Li writes at the beginning of the form: just save this link, and you’ll know everything you need for the Double-Eleven.
