Last year, mobile was the big news in holiday shopping. Will the trend continue this year? With autumn’s chill in the air and Black Friday practically around corner, what are some of the retail trends we can expect to see in 2015?
- Retailers will take better advantage of programmatic’s real-time opportunity. Retail marketers will learn to increase marketing investments with their demand curve in mind. The real-time nature of programmatic advertising makes it easy to adjust exposure either daily or even throughout the day. That means marketers can amplify the demand curve when it begins to rise and decrease their investment as demand goes down, whether that means during lower-volume hours each day, free ship cutoff day, or on the 26th of December. This tactic has been routinely used in search engine marketing for over a decade, but it can—and should—be applied to all programmatically bought channels.
- Cyber Monday is still the biggest day for online sales: Cyber Monday online sales were 30.5 percent higher than Black Friday sales in 2014. However, it’s important to recognize that Black Friday shoppers spent an average of $129.37 per order, compared to $124.11 per order on Cyber Monday, a difference of 4.2 percent. So don’t discount the significance of Black Friday for online purchases and make sure you adjust your advertising spend accordingly.
- Just like last year, shoppers will be split into two distinct camps—the early birds and the last-minute shoppers. According to the National Retail Federation’s latest Holiday Consumer Spending Survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, the average holiday shopper has completed 52.9 percent of their shopping as of December 10, up from 49.9 percent last year. Per Google, for many, the holiday shopping season begins before Halloween, although many of those sales may not be directly attributed to seasonal purchases.
- Cyber Monday will become Mobile Monday. On Cyber Monday 2014, 41.2 percent of all online traffic came from mobile devices. Expect that to exceed 50 percent this holiday season. As the new digital shopping companion for many consumers, smartphones drove 28.5 percent of all Cyber Monday online traffic—more than double that of tablets, which still accounted for 12.5 percent of all traffic.
- Yet, when it comes to mobile sales, tablets continue to win the shopping war, driving 12.9 percent of online sales compared to 9.1 percent for smartphones—a difference of 41.5 percent. This is a trend we saw last year and expect to see repeated: While consumers research products on their mobile phones, they complete those purchases on tablets or desktops. (We’ll continue to watch this trend and monitor to see if that gap between purchases on mobile versus larger devices decreases this season. We suspect that, with more mobile-optimized sites and checkouts, it will decrease.)
With an eye to these trends, retailers should already be preparing digital marketing campaigns that engage their customers and prospects throughout the shopping season. With consumers more connected than ever, it’s important for retailers to create a consistent experience across screens—and into the store. The path to purchase crosses digital, mobile and real-life channels now, and every touchpoint matters. Making sure your customers have the best, easiest and most convenient shopping experience—no matter how they choose to shop—is the surest route to a successful holiday season.
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