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Four things to remember to capitalize on a record-setting holiday shopping season
The 2018 holiday shopping season is officially underway and is already breaking records thanks to a Black Friday that saw $6.22 billion in online transactions—a 23.6 percent increase over 2017 Black Friday shopping, according to a report from Adobe.
In the report, Adobe examined the web traffic from more than 1 trillion site visits and 55 million items for sale. Perhaps your organization’s sales are part of this $6.22 billion. If yes, the good news is that the shopping season is just starting and there is more to come. If not, the good news is (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the shopping season is just starting and there is more to come.
In other words, it is shaping up to continue to be a record-breaking online holiday shopping season and there are principles learned from Black Friday that you can employ in your short-term and long-term marketing efforts. Here are four emerging trends from Black Friday that you should pay attention to:
Don’t Wait for Black Friday: In recent years, some brick-and-mortar stores have moved up their Black Friday deals to start on Thanksgiving instead. Not only has this trend extended to online shopping—it has been fully embraced by web shoppers. Adobe reported that Thanksgiving saw a 28 percent increase in online spending since 2017, making it the fastest-growing online shopping day of the year. Online shopping saw a spike around 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving, but the peak shopping time was between 8-10 p.m.
Optimize for Mobile: Optimizing your site for mobile has been a best practice for years, but this Black Friday showed the continuing trend of more people buying from their smartphones on Black Friday than ever before. According to Adobe, Black Friday 2018 was the first shopping day ever to see more than $2 billion in sales directly from smartphones.
Buy Online Pick Up In Store: An emerging trend this Black Friday came in the form of “Buy Online Pick Up In Store” (BOPIS). Though the data is inconclusive, it appears that more shoppers are shopping online and picking up in the store rather than braving the crowds during the initial shopping experience.
Social Referrals: According to Salesforce, the retail traffic that came through social media referrals increased 41 percent from last year’s Black Friday. The increase is likely indicative of a maturation among social platforms in driving sales as well as marketers’ ability to better understand and utilize the tools available to them on social channels.
Of course, many of the best practices for Black Friday are also good practices on most other days of the year. In a recent YouTube video, Jessica Guzik from Oberlo shared multiple tips for taking advantage of Black Friday, including advising to set up a Facebook pixel and start tracking customers as soon as possible.
“The more visitors you start tracking now,” Guzik says, “the better Facebook can retarget them” for future Black Fridays.
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