In the not too distant past, if a retailer wanted to advertise a big sale, it required a carefully coordinated, costly, cross-channel campaign to reach people with TV ads, newspapers, direct mail, or email. Even after all that, it was hard to tell whether the right ad was getting to the right customer and whether any of it was even paying off.
These days, there’s Facebook.
When Black Friday 2015 rolled around, the British online retailer Shop Direct didn’t just spring sales on surprised shoppers. Instead, they slowly primed their customer base for weeks before through a steady Facebook ad campaign, one that brought customers down the funnel from a vague knowledge of the brand to check out in an almost imperceptible manner.
