Every year, no sooner do Christmas and New Year’s e-commerce marketing efforts wind down than Valentine’s Day campaigns kick into full gear. While last February we focused on analyzing Valentine’s marketing efforts for a variety of retail sectors, this year we decided to zero in on online jewelry retailers.

Online jewelry makes up for less than five percent of the current jewelry market, but that figure is expected to double by 2020. The projected growth of the online jewelry sector, coupled with the challenges that online jewelers face in encouraging customers to make large dollar amount purchases without interacting with the physical products, made this industry a particularly exciting one to analyze at the beginning of 2017.

You’ll see in the infographic below that we took a close look at a variety of sales and marketing data points from 69 online jewelry retailers in the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. In our analysis, we focused on abandonment rates, onsite conversion rates, average order values, and email remarketing stats.

If there’s one key takeaway that online jewelry retailers should remember for next year, it’s to launch their marketing campaigns sooner rather than later. In the three days leading up to Valentine’s Day, online jewelers saw abandonment rates increase by nearly 10 percentage points when compared to abandonment rates earlier in the month. Online jewelers also saw average order values decrease significantly, from a high of more than $1,000 at the beginning of February to a low of about $100 as Valentine’s Day approached. Email re-marketing efforts were also more effective earlier in the month, with the highest open rates occurring on February 6, and the lowest on February 12.

When it comes to Valentine’s Day, customers are carefully planning their jewelry purchases long before February 14. It’s up to e-commerce jewelry marketers to recognize this shopping habit, and get those heart-themed campaigns up and running by the beginning of February.   

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Based in the United Kingdom, Ve Interactive is a provider of online marketing and advertising services.

 

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