With this year’s Black Friday sale just coming to an end, it’s time to turn the spotlight on a crucial yet often overlooked aspect – the power of a thorough post-campaign retrospective. By reviewing your major sales events, you can not only learn from any drawbacks – but also remember what worked well and should be kept in mind for your next campaign.
Being experienced in planning and executing different marketing and sales campaigns, I am excited to share my experience with you – so you can learn from both my campaign success as well as my failures! Let’s dive right into it.
1. Do it right away and set a realistic timeline ⏰
Even though it would be amazing to just lean back, relax and enjoy the success of your Black Friday campaign, I do highly encourage you to start your retrospective process as soon as you can. Why? Whilst numbers and data can still be looked up at a later date, other feedback tends to be forgotten over time. Therefore, I highly recommend you to start working on your retro right away – while your and your team’s memory is still fresh!
2. Find the best format and define clear objectives 🗒️
In order to collect valuable feedback from different stakeholders, it is crucial to choose and communicate a clear format. Clarify which specific insights you are aiming to gather and how those can be used to improve future campaigns. This way, your team will know which aspects of the project you are interested in. Also, asking feedback based on a clear structure will help you to more efficiently summarize and analyze the data and answers received.
I personally prefer to collect my team’s feedback in a collaborative Figma or Excel file. But of course you can also consider scheduling a meeting to discuss the feedback directly. If you do so, remember to prepare all questions and agenda prior to the meeting to make it as efficient as possible.
3. Create a safe environment 🤗
Remind the team that it is not about blaming others for what they did or didn’t do, but about finding ways to improve together. This will create a more transparent and safe setting where people are not afraid to share their thoughts and feedback in an honest way.
4. Consider including different stakeholders 🙋🙋🙋
Even though campaigns like Black Friday are often mainly associated with the marketing team, I do highly recommend including other departments of your company as well. This could be the customer support teams, who can share valuable customer feedback and insights. But also other teams such as your logistics team, who can share feedback about stock planning or promised shipping times. You can even consider to include other stakeholders such as influencers you had partnered up for the campaign.
5. Draft a clear summary and conclusion 🤯
Collecting feedback from different parties can often end up in endless points that are even quite repetitive. Therefore, it is crucial to summarize and analyze the collected insights. This will help you to identify key learnings and make your retrospective as valuable as possible. Ideally, you will even draft actionable takeaways. This way, you can highlight which specific changes or improvements should be implemented in future campaigns based on the insights gained.
By keeping those 5 aspects in mind, I am sure that you will be able to come up with a helpful post-campaign retrospective.
Bonus tip: You might be able to even consider certain Black Friday learnings in your upcoming Christmas campaign already. 😉