Content strategy for AliExpress’ global e-commerce sale

Project description

AilExpress is a shopping platform owned by Alibaba Group where consumers from around the world can shop items from merchants mainly based in China. It holds several big sales each year to drive sales, including the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, AliExpress Anniversary Sale, and Summer Sale.

As the content strategist for the Summer Sale in 2020, I was responsible for:

  • Content coordination

  • English marketing copywriting

  • Post-sale content analysis

Challenges included:

  • High volume of sale pages, pushes, and EDMs

  • Short turnaround time

  • Writing for a global audience

  • Translations into 18 languages

Content coordination

As sales are big projects that involve collaborations between business, design, and content teams that span across several countries, effective communication is essential.

As the content person in charge, I first held a briefing session with the content team to get our remote localisation experts aligned on the nuances of the sale’s creative direction. This prevents bad direct translations of the source content at the writing stage.

The creative concept for AliExpress’ Summer Sale

I would also encourage the writers in charge of our main markets’ languages to raise any potential content risks. For example, according to EU consumer laws, the word “sale” can only be used in some European countries during fixed sale periods. As such, Summer Sale had to be localized into Promozione Estiva in Italian, which means summer promotion.

To reduce the time taken for extra clarification on content requests, I enforced stricter requirements for the content requests raised by the business team.

Improve translations by providing more context in content requests

I worked with the designers to provide simple page draft layouts in advance, and our partners must include an appropriate design draft along with their requests. Writing with as much context as possible reduces the risk of content and design mismatch later down the production flow.

English marketing copywriting

We kept the English sales copy as direct as possible so as to reduce translation errors. This also enables the main sales messaging — the percentage discount — to stand out. Previous A/B tests have revealed that sales banners with significant discount percentages perform better.

Also, it is common practice in China for e-commerce sales to be divided into 3 stages: warm up, sale, and last chance. So the copy had to be aligned with different business objectives at each stage. For example, adding to cart and collecting coupons during warm up, or snapping up time-limited deals on the last day of the sale.

Initial banner copy drafts paired with the graphic designer’s sketch.

Final designs for sale page banners

To speed up the content production and reduce costs, we maintain a sales termbase and glossary that contains common phrases such as “Up to 50% off” in 18 languages.

After all the sales content requests are completed and localised, the team did design reviews to ensure the content matches the visuals. We often have to fix designs with right to left scripts (for example Arabic and Hebrew) as visuals designed with English as the source content does not always adapt well.

Centre-aligned designs reduce the risk of errors for right to left scripts.

Results

The content team processed 926 Summer Sale content requests within 4 weeks. This includes English copywriting as the source language, and localising the content for our main markets (Russia, Spain, France, Brazil, Turkey, Poland, Israel, and Korea).

The Summer Sale exceeded its GMV target and achieved healthy year-on-year growth.

Post-sale content analysis

I work with the sale’s business partners to gather content-focused data to gain more insights into how we can improve our workflow and content output for the next sale.

For example, sale banners with outstanding numbers did well. So we took this insight to designers and developers, and started brainstorming on how to highlight numbers more efficiently in the next sale.

Banner A, which has more outstanding numbers, outperformed banner B.