In the works since spring, retailers are beginning to put the finishing touches on their holiday plans and now it’s all hands on deck to execute during the upcoming 28-day holiday shopping season. Released over the course of July, August and September, the Shop.org Holiday Planning Guide Snapshot series equips retailers with essential insights and planning tips to ensure that their teams are ready to meet and exceed customer expectations during the winter holidays.
The final installment of the five-part 2014 Holiday Planning Guide Snapshot series covered key aspects of online marketing. While they’re all chock-full of survey findings and tips, here are some of the insights we learned over the course of the series:
- Part 1: The State of the Online Consumer. U.S. consumers have started giving thought to their holiday budgets and younger consumers appear more likely than others to anticipate spending more this year than last. Prosper Insights & Analytics has identified key priorities for online shoppers that will encourage customers to shop with confidence: clearly demonstrating value for money; offering flexible (preferably free) shipping and returns options; and creating a great shopping experience across multiple touchpoints and devices.
- Part 2: Key Seasonal Dates. In 2013, Black Friday Weekend and “Cyber Week” were among the most publicized events during the holiday season, generating 21 percent and 17 percent, respectively, of online sales from mobile devices, according to comScore. However, as Custora suggests, retailers shouldn’t overlook early to mid-December dates as opportunities to capture sales with less marketing noise from competitors. The Monday following Cyber Monday — “Green Monday” — is now an established holiday shopping day. In 2013, seven out of 10 surveyed retailers planned to offer a “Green Monday” special or promotion to consumers.
- Part 3: Fulfillment and Customer Service. When choosing to do business with a given retailer during Holiday 2013, consumers ranked “Free returns shipping offer / policy” an average of 4.2 out of 5 (very important). To boost consumer confidence, retailers may want to consider free returns shipping as an alternative to free outbound shipping. Additionally, two out of five retailers surveyed are investing significantly this year for holiday in live chat, while one-quarter are focusing on expanded hours, support via additional languages and training for their customer service reps.
- Part 4: Merchandising. Seven out of 10 retailers surveyed note that they are investing significantly in a mobile-optimized website this year for holiday. Mobify advises retailers to prioritize optimizing the product research and purchase aspects of the customer path, while Radware’s Tammy Everts counsels retailers to measure based on “time to interact” rather than page load times. Best practices continue to emerge around still and video imagery, and no less so for mobile specifically: Radware suggests that mobile-optimized images are important for a strong experience.
- Part 5: Marketing. This year, more than one-third of retailers are earmarking between 31 and 50 percent of their total 2014 online marketing budget specifically for holiday. In addition to investing in and using a variety of mobile marketing tools, retailers are fine-tuning strategies and tactics across search, email and remarketing to make the most of the holiday season. For example, retailers need to adjust their search strategy to capture shoppers who don’t frequent their site outside the gift giving season. Retailers also should develop email remarketing and retargeting ad programs to captures sales from the majority of customers who may indicate interest but don’t convert on their initial site visit.
Visit NRF’s Retail Library to download all five members-only Shop.org 2014 Holiday Planning Guide Snapshots. Members may also listen to the August 2014 Webinar playback, “Holiday Order Fulfillment: Deliver on the Promise.”