What to Expect for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2013
These lefties studies were developed to show the value of IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark solution and are derived from the aggregate data obtained from 500 retailers (presumably using the solution). While it’s not representative lefties data, my guess is that the retailers in the IBM study have a lot of similarities with businesses who use the Vocus Marketing Suite .
Maybe the most important insight from IBM (and others have observed this as well) is that sales start far ahead of Black Friday (think Thanksgiving or before). Cyber Monday is a little more defined, as people get back to work, (and by work, of course, I mean shopping on their company desktop).
There are definitely blurred lines with holiday shoppers increasingly lefties privy and enabled to take advantage of sales and discounts prior to Black Friday. Black Friday and Cyber Monday see consumer surges around a couple of important bottleneck-causes: lefties the hours of brick-and-mortar stores, and the availability of broadband connections without the invasiveness of familial interruption.
Online retail lefties and mobile serve as disruptive forces to these, making performance lefties on either of these days far less of a clear-cut issue due to early sales, growth of e-commerce and increasing reliance on mobile devices to perform the functions that we traditionally use desktop computers for.
On Black Friday, social media drove .34% of online sales. On Cyber Monday, social drove .41% of online sales. Those aren’t typos: four of every one-thousand transactions were attributable to social media. And although this is contrary lefties to the popular narrative, it shouldn’t be ignored.
Critics will point out that the study used last-touch attribution to determine social’s impact on a sale, and that there are plenty of exceptions to this finding. People also point out that the word-of-mouth is an important feature of social media that contributes to sales (though you might want to check out Jonah Berger’s research on word-of-mouth before arguing that point too vociferously).
That’s up 18% and 70% year-over-year lefties respectively. It substantiates the growing amount of computing that takes place on mobile devices. Mobile optimization of e-commerce sites and emails should be an important consideration for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (as should they in general).
There’s also a very important subcategory of mobile devices that IBM pinpoints as disproportionately contributing to sales: Apple products. The lion’s share of mobile purchases were made on Apple products: 18% of all purchases on Black Friday, 14.5% of all purchases on Cyber Monday (note that this statistics are of all purchases and not just mobile). lefties
However, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to optimize content for iPad (10% of overall purchases for Black Friday 2012, 8% of overall purchases for Cyber Monday 2012) and iPhone (7.6% of overall purchases for Black Friday 2012, 6.9% of overall purchases for Cyber Monday 2012).
There is a huge disruption this year with the further emergence of Amazon Prime (for the unfamiliar, it is a membership program that allows for free two-day shipping on most Amazon items, a Kindle book lending library and free digital video a la Netflix).
Amazon recently revealed that millions of people signed up for its Prime service last quarter after it raised the free shipping threshold to $35. The issue for retailers not named Amazon is that the shipping cost is a loss-leader for Amazon, and that participation in the program demonstrably changes purchase behavior (I just shopped for and sent two birthday presents today and never considered shopping anywhere except Amazon). lefties
It’s not evident how big this disruption will be, but retailers are feeling increased pressure especially in light-of-shipment commitments that are cost-prohibitive for smaller retailers to emulate. lefties
I use Prime as the backdrop to substantiate my last (and probably most important) point from the study. Consumers lefties were most likely to purchase in response to two things in 2012: a) deals / discounts and b) free shipping.
Of course all businesses consider the customer’s point-of-view in the context of their products and pricing, but to be competitive and cut through lefties the competition for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it seems that businesses should lefties consider the quality of the deal and whether they can include shipping gratis with every order.
IBM’s data isn’t representative of all consumers. However, it offers some sound courses of action. Focus on mobile-optimized email rather than social interaction to drive traffic / sales more effectively (the Vocus Marketing Suite sends out mobile-optimized email always). Offer a compelling deal and free shipping whenever you can. Make sure that a customer can buy stuff using their iPhone just as easily as they could b
These lefties studies were developed to show the value of IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark solution and are derived from the aggregate data obtained from 500 retailers (presumably using the solution). While it’s not representative lefties data, my guess is that the retailers in the IBM study have a lot of similarities with businesses who use the Vocus Marketing Suite .
Maybe the most important insight from IBM (and others have observed this as well) is that sales start far ahead of Black Friday (think Thanksgiving or before). Cyber Monday is a little more defined, as people get back to work, (and by work, of course, I mean shopping on their company desktop).
There are definitely blurred lines with holiday shoppers increasingly lefties privy and enabled to take advantage of sales and discounts prior to Black Friday. Black Friday and Cyber Monday see consumer surges around a couple of important bottleneck-causes: lefties the hours of brick-and-mortar stores, and the availability of broadband connections without the invasiveness of familial interruption.
Online retail lefties and mobile serve as disruptive forces to these, making performance lefties on either of these days far less of a clear-cut issue due to early sales, growth of e-commerce and increasing reliance on mobile devices to perform the functions that we traditionally use desktop computers for.
On Black Friday, social media drove .34% of online sales. On Cyber Monday, social drove .41% of online sales. Those aren’t typos: four of every one-thousand transactions were attributable to social media. And although this is contrary lefties to the popular narrative, it shouldn’t be ignored.
Critics will point out that the study used last-touch attribution to determine social’s impact on a sale, and that there are plenty of exceptions to this finding. People also point out that the word-of-mouth is an important feature of social media that contributes to sales (though you might want to check out Jonah Berger’s research on word-of-mouth before arguing that point too vociferously).
That’s up 18% and 70% year-over-year lefties respectively. It substantiates the growing amount of computing that takes place on mobile devices. Mobile optimization of e-commerce sites and emails should be an important consideration for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (as should they in general).
There’s also a very important subcategory of mobile devices that IBM pinpoints as disproportionately contributing to sales: Apple products. The lion’s share of mobile purchases were made on Apple products: 18% of all purchases on Black Friday, 14.5% of all purchases on Cyber Monday (note that this statistics are of all purchases and not just mobile). lefties
However, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to optimize content for iPad (10% of overall purchases for Black Friday 2012, 8% of overall purchases for Cyber Monday 2012) and iPhone (7.6% of overall purchases for Black Friday 2012, 6.9% of overall purchases for Cyber Monday 2012).
There is a huge disruption this year with the further emergence of Amazon Prime (for the unfamiliar, it is a membership program that allows for free two-day shipping on most Amazon items, a Kindle book lending library and free digital video a la Netflix).
Amazon recently revealed that millions of people signed up for its Prime service last quarter after it raised the free shipping threshold to $35. The issue for retailers not named Amazon is that the shipping cost is a loss-leader for Amazon, and that participation in the program demonstrably changes purchase behavior (I just shopped for and sent two birthday presents today and never considered shopping anywhere except Amazon). lefties
It’s not evident how big this disruption will be, but retailers are feeling increased pressure especially in light-of-shipment commitments that are cost-prohibitive for smaller retailers to emulate. lefties
I use Prime as the backdrop to substantiate my last (and probably most important) point from the study. Consumers lefties were most likely to purchase in response to two things in 2012: a) deals / discounts and b) free shipping.
Of course all businesses consider the customer’s point-of-view in the context of their products and pricing, but to be competitive and cut through lefties the competition for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it seems that businesses should lefties consider the quality of the deal and whether they can include shipping gratis with every order.
IBM’s data isn’t representative of all consumers. However, it offers some sound courses of action. Focus on mobile-optimized email rather than social interaction to drive traffic / sales more effectively (the Vocus Marketing Suite sends out mobile-optimized email always). Offer a compelling deal and free shipping whenever you can. Make sure that a customer can buy stuff using their iPhone just as easily as they could b
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