By now, you have planned a campaign for the 2014 holiday shopping season and your merchandise is warehoused and ready to fly off the shelves. Your revenue targets for Black Friday and Cyber Monday are set more aggressively than ever, and you’re ready to beat them. Like most smart marketers, you started by increasing demand and positioning your brand at the top of the consumer’s mind prior to the holiday rush, and you expect to execute flawlessly and monitor trends hourly to ensure that everything goes as planned during the actual buying season.
But what if something doesn’t go as planned?
This year, marketers have more data at their fingertips, but also more devices and channels to deliver to, and more segments to target. Even the best brands are vulnerable to missteps. Everyone remembers the fallout and bad publicity when packages were not delivered in time for the holidays last year. So what should you be on the lookout for as you gear up for the excitement of this holiday season?
Here are three trends to watch for in 2014.
1. The declining importance of Black Friday
The 2013 holiday shopping season was only 27 days, the shortest since 2002. This year will be only one day longer. Over the years marketers have built Black Friday into a major shopping day and the start of the holiday shopping season. But this may work against them in short seasons. An extra five days of online shopping could be worth an extra billion dollars to the online retail industry. The pressure to do well in just a few days puts online retailers in a bind. There is precious little time to catch and fix any problems that may arise, to respond to competitors’ offers, or to capitalize on any trends that emerge. You have one chance to convert a customer. If anything goes wrong, they are lost.
This situation started to reverse in 2013. Bricks-and-mortar retailers felt the decline of Black Friday most strongly, as shopping went online and bled off to Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. Many shoppers reported that they would be shopping on days other than Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The cyberretailer eBags.com reported healthy sales increases on the two days following Cyber Monday, as well as great performance on Cyber Monday itself. The company’s marketing tactics spread out demand to include the entire Wednesday to Saturday period surrounding Black Friday. eBags credits its success to planning for the holidays in August, as well as to responsive design and mobile optimization that gave shoppers an effective web experience.
Smart marketers will capitalize on this trend in 2014, and will use the right tools to boost unexpected successes and quickly recover from any problems. They will use and reuse digital media in multiple ways, modifying images and videos on demand to respond to competitive threats, to include in channels that perform better than expected, to test which offers get the best conversion, and to reach customers in fresh ways. This will help to spread peak demand across the entire holiday shopping season.
2. The increase in mobile, in-store, and social shopping, all at the same time
Mobile shopping increased significantly in 2013. This accounted for an average of 14 percent of total online sales for the holiday period and peaked at 26 percent of all online sales on Black Friday. In all, this was an 18 percent year-over-year increase.
Within the mobile market there was a growing divide between tablets and smartphones. Tablets outpaced smartphones in total sales throughout the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend. Tablets seemed to be the preferred purchasing platform, converting at a much higher rate than smartphones. Tablets were also used more often to initiate research and make purchases. Smartphones were used as an intermediate tool. For instance, shoppers used their phones to check prices and comparison shop while waiting on long lines in the stores. Shopping apps were important in late-season purchases as well.
Some retailers were not ready for the increased role of tablets last year. But by now a majority of the most affluent customers are using them as their primary shopping vehicles. No matter what screen size shoppers prefer, campaign media needs to perform optimally for that form factor to meet conversion benchmarks.
Social media served more as an influencer than for direct referrals in 2013. Although referral clicks were only about 2 percent, 36 percent of consumers reported that they consulted social media for a significant portion of their holiday purchases, showing they trust authentic recommendations from within their network more than the brand messaging itself. Smart marketers will allow their customers to easily share their favorite products and promotions to their social networks to boost demand this season. In addition, customers can become a brand’s best advocate when they are engaged in contests or featured in galleries of photos or videos originally posted on Instagram or Pinterest that show them enjoying featured products, with links to those products on the retailer’s site. Check out the American Eagle Outfitter Gallery for a great example.
3. The increasing importance of data to drive experiences
More than ever, businesses are leveraging data on customer acquisition, conversion, and repeat purchases to drive business decisions. Rather than leave it up to chance, businesses are adopting strategies around segmentation, personalization, and retargeting in all their marketing channels that drive increased conversion. But having all the data is not as useful without the time or resources to build targeted experiences on demand. More than half of digital marketers say they struggle to personalize their marketing efforts at a large scale.
It doesn’t have to be that hard. When you couple your data to a dynamic media creation platform, it’s possible to personalize your media to show items based on criteria you select from the data. For example, show the customer the items they last browsed or had in their cart. This can be updated in real time.
A best practice would be to go on to A/B test these offerings to find the items most likely to maximize conversion.
Market leaders will respond to these new opportunities with speed and agility and leverage insight to manage, modify, and deliver targeted campaign assets on demand—making 2014 their best holiday season ever.
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