Are retailers ready for Black Friday and Christmas?

When should we start thinking about Christmas? Is it the start of November? Early October? Maybe, we should have started preparations a month ago?

Excuse me, you think I mean for us with our home decorations and Christmas day feast? No! I mean the brands we are buying from! To put it bluntly, if you are a retailer, brand, privately owned consumer goods company or an online shopping name … you should have started organising your Black Friday and Christmas period shopping deals, well, yesterday.

The yearly ever giving joy of Black Friday, Christmas and the eventual exhaustion that follows!

Did you know that 48% of shoppers have completed their holiday shopping by Black Friday? Just to give you a relatable introduction to the Christmas shopping trends:

• The public starts to listen to Mariah Carey from around the 3rd November onwards
• Majority of the public start buying gifts from the 6th October
• 48% of the public have completed their Christmas shopping by Black Friday
• 40% have started looking at gifts before Halloween

What cannot be stressed enough to retailers and brands who sell online and depend their revenue on these periods is that shopping behaviour is evolving. Black Friday is no longer one day, but the 21st through till the 28th. It is not that Black Friday is in decline, more so that sales are being dispersed around the holiday period. Over the past five years the Christmas season has grown while the rest of the year has flattened out and is playing catch up. Effectively the ‘boxing day bounce back’ that was a sure thing for online businesses has shrunk. The sales interaction is lasting longer and to guarantee any form of projected financial success, you need to be alerting your customers way sooner to your deals!

The company that has Black Friday down to a tea, is (not surprisingly) Amazon. Amazon offer their Black Friday deals A MONTH before the actual date. This way they avoid losing revenue as they are enticing customers way earlier, so their diaries are set to buy, buy, buy!

A couple of quick tips for Google shopping brand users:

1) Auditing errors in product feeds, is fundamentally one of the top aspects that needs to be monitored leading up to sale periods

2) Avoid making mistakes on products to ensure you do not have to wait a year to correct your brands reputation (and loss in revenue)

3) 1 in 3 shoppers bought online over the Christmas periods

4) Traffic is increasingly moving towards mobile shopping (chat to your digital design team about making your website mobile friendly and easy to use!)

5) Google shopping generates a higher CTR then any other platform

6) Optimise your product titles to create quality traffic

Were you aware that if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, half of potential users will go elsewhere? Everyone wants everything now, on multiple platforms and tailored to them.

Quick tip: check the mobile loading speed of your website with Googles Test My Site.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and January Sales – START PLANNING YOUR SALES CAMPAIGNS NOW!

Decide on your 2018 product focus, assess previous revenue, get the feed and best seller labels ready … plan budgets.

The recommended spending allocation in comparison to normal monthly budgets for your online campaigns should be aimed for:

• 200% higher in October
• 300% higher in November
• 500% higher in December
• 200% higher in January