Lessons

Lesson Info

The Holiday Landscapes

So I want to start by taking a look at the holiday shopping landscape because if you're really going tio, maximize your sales and maximizing your marketing, you need to know what the shopping landscape looks like because let's face it it's changing really fast the way the people shop has changed incredibly and even the last few years, so it's important to know kind of what the overall trends in themes are once you could know what direction you're going in and to say you can know if something is just all hype because you may think, oh, it seems like everyone is doing this or doing that that's where I should spend my time, but we want to look at the numbers because the numbers don't lie and that's going to help us build your marketing plan, and I also want to talk about what they mean for your business because big broad statistics are all fine and dandy, right? But you guys need to know how it works for you so what's with our first trend. While online shopping is the fastest growing segm...

ent during the holiday season, it's still only accounts for about ten percent of all holiday sales. I think it's just tipped the scales past catalog shopping. Historically, catalog shopping has been about ten per cent thing online has passed that people are still shopping in stores a lot now again online is the fastest growing segment, it's growing about one percent per year, so I believe the year before was about nine percent of all online are all holiday retail there before? Is that eight percent so it's growing but it's still a small portion of the entire holiday picture? So what this means for your business is that if you aren't yet selling to stores, this is a big opportunity to reach new customers and at a huge revenue stream and actually that ten percent number, you know, ten percent online, ninety percent retail that's what my business is looks like for the last several years, the majority of my income comes from selling to stores, so this is a huge opportunity to build this into your marketing plan if you've been struggling to get those online sales adding, and even a few stores can really make a big difference to your holiday season. But the flip side of that is if your goal is to grow your online sales, the holiday season is the time to focus on growth because that ten percent during the holiday season is actually slightly higher than the year average people are shopping online more, they're more comfortable with it, they want to get away from all the pressures right going to start I love shopping, but for a lot of people go into stores really stressful. So if you can make the online shopping experience easier for them this is a huge opportunity to grow your online sales let's look at our second trend so the black friday cyber monday weekend accounts for only ten percent of all holiday sales yeah it's a big weekend but it's not the only weekend it's not the on ly time that people are buying so what this means is that there are plenty of opportunities to sell consistently throughout november and december without trying to fight through the noise of one crazy weekend so I follow a decent amount of other makers and designers on instagram and you know what drives me crazy I have on any day from black friday to cyber monday and my instagram feed is filled with go shot my sale fifteen percent off what we're having a cyber monday sale it drives me up a wall actually stopped going on instagram that weekend they're doing that because they're trying to shout over the noise of one crazy weekend but that we can only represents ten percent of all holiday sales so if you can position your marketing so that you're driving sales and traffic on all those other days you can dio I'd like for any weekend you can relax crazy I know crazy idea right you can relax you and go shop yourself if you want tio you can sleep off all that turkey whatever it is you want to d'oh and you're going to have better results because you're not trying to fight through the noise of everybody else, including every single big box major online retailer you're not fighting through that noise if you realize that you've got the whole rest of the time to market and so that's, what we want to do is we want to have the right planning to use to drive sales for an even longer period during the holiday season without driving yourself crazy without driving your customers crazy. It's funny because, you know, we hear from makers over there and I don't want to seem pushy I don't seems family argument seems sales e and then black friday weekend everybody forgets that like bye bye bye it's not the way to do it, but it doesn't work we're gonna learn some strategies that d'oh all right. Number three are third trend is the big one. Last year on ly one point, nine percent of online holiday sales came directly from social media. One point nine percent email was tops at twenty three percent email drove twenty three percent of all online holiday sales search drove twenty percent of all online holiday sales. Social media drove one point nine percent. Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't be on social media and that you're that you shouldn't be using social media, but if you're trying to d'oh all your social media marketing and all you're selling are all your holiday marking all you're selling on social media. You're annoying your followers and you're wasting your time trying to on ly drive sales from social media is not how people buy twenty three percent from email, twenty percent from search one point nine from social media, and I know that every social platform is working on trying to make it easier to buy from their platform and not my help a little, but it doesn't really reflect the way that people are actually thinking about buying, so we want to make sure yes, we're going to talk about social media marketing in this class, absolutely, because it's still a big deal but it's not the be all and end all so your number one holiday marketing strategy needs to be to drive traffic to your email list that's why I'm so glad the abbey was here doing that email marketing class for crafters because it's so so important and I see this reflected in what I do is, well, most of my online sales come from my email list. Ah, huge percentage actually for me, it's well, that twenty three percent so we want to make sure that we're driving traffic to your email list before the holidays happen and then during the holidays. We're gonna make sure that we're engaging with that list I know I'd be talked a lot about that so we're not going to get into so much of the how today but we're going to put it on your calendar so that it's really easy to just do it schedule it and let it go now our fourth trend is that mobile account for nearly half of all e commerce holiday traffic not sales traffic it's a really important distinction to make so what this means is that your customers are shopping online in little moments throughout the day not in one long epic session they're on their phones they might be on social media or they're just on the web looking for products when they're waiting in line for coffee or they haven't you know they're going for the uber to come that's what your customers they're doing they are looking and probably aa lot of time seeing your brand for the first time on their mobile devices so if you don't have a mobile response of website you're missing out not only that but now google is starting to not index sites that are mobile responsive so now you're missing out on engaging your customers in the best way and you're missing out on search which we now know drives twenty percent of holiday sales but what this also means is that while it's about forty five percent of traffic it's much lower in conversion people are shopping, they're browsing on their phones during the holiday season, but they are going back to their computers to complete their purchase, especially if your customers are women. What the numbers are showing is that men are more likely to complete the entire process on mobile check out, which is good news if you're mobile optimized and you have a lot of men shopping for the women in their lives, they're more likely to go start to finish on your mobile, but women are more likely to look think about it and then go back to their computer to make the purchase. So in addition to that mobile response of website, the more ways that you could help customers bookmark and remember your products for later, the more sales you're going to capture, and we're going to talk about a couple ways to do that later and then our final trend is that over twenty percent of all retail sales do in fact take place in november and december, and for some categories, like jewelry, his highest twenty eight percent. People are shopping case we didn't already know that right it's always important to remember that this really is a time when people are shopping, so even if you haven't been happy with your sales so far, it's still possible to have your best year, and I know some people I have friends we're on the businesses who might drive forty fifty, sixty even seventy percent of their income in q four in the last three months of the year so you could take what's been a really lackluster year and turning around significantly with this holiday season. So do any of those shopping trends I love to hear from our online audience eugenia the shopping trends surprise you anything you didn't realize um especially I think the fact that you were talking about that men by on their phones faster than women who I'm curious to know how how are they buying what are they doing? Are they just I mean, are they just like oh that's going to get that done like how did they go through the process? I think for them it's that get it done mindset yeah, I see it this is who it's for I'm just going to do it move on my day yeah, whereas women are like, let me think about it and again these air hugely broad generalizations but it's the trends that we're seeing, you know they want to think about it, they'll probably pull multiple things into a cart, come back and look at the car later and make their decision not not really but really they're just in there and they want to get it done and that's that's sort of the advantage of mobile check out but they're also more comfortable, I think, just sharing data, you know, in the coffee shop sending with the credit card, we're getting it done, and I'm not sure I don't have the stats on how mobile check out changes with age, but I think the most important thing to remember is that it's still a lower conversion point, and most people are still, even if they're looking on their phone, which they are, they want to complete their purchase back at a at a browser on their computer and the older your customers are, the more that is true, and we have some folks charming in online. We have keith a who says I would have thought that purchases during black friday cyber monday weekend would have been much higher, so that that's really good to know, and I love that you told us we could relax. Yes, we got there if we follow, yeah, teach us on and the same thing I think the men thing no, they don't want to waste time while shopping. Is that true? Maybe on and and yeah, just emphasizes from the sofia how much people buy in the season? Yeah, as well. And the number of online sales things so it's surprising, yeah, you know, all we hear about is online shopping, online shopping, online shopping and again, it's growing, but it's still a small percentage and people will go to your site, but especially if your product is more expensive or, you know, maybe something that they've never seen before. They're also going to go to your site, and they're gonna look to see what stores you sell out and try to go to those stores, especially with the rise of pinterest you know, everyone one mobile shopping came out, all my child can't people are like, oh, they're going to go to stores, they're going to look, and then they're going to buy online and that's called showrooming now we're actually seeing the reverse we're seeing reverse showrooming, so they're finding something on pinterest or on social media or on the web, and then they're looking to see where they can go see it in a store. So that's, why it's really important to you? You know, make sure you have your retailer list on your website too frequently share where people can buy your products, because just because they're on your web site doesn't mean that that's where they want to complete their purchase, making some great comments coming and that I would love to share to, bloom says, I'm shocked that social media sales are so low. I thought that that was where all the money was, and I had no idea that email newsletters generated so many sales and that's huge impact one point nine percent, yes versus twenty three percent or yes, you know, those things a huge thing. And katrina says, yeah, that's actually kind of encouraging, yes, it is. And you know what the reason that I think this is and it's, what I see in my own customers is that it doesn't take that much effort to engage with a brand on social media alike is easy, I can like I can like I can follow doesn't take that much commitment, but when you get people onto your email list, those of the people who are saying I really want to buy, they've made that bigger commitment. So if you put a call to action to buy on social media, people are like, whatever, and they moved on, but if you put it in an email, that is something that people really pay attention to, and I think it also bears repeating for mentioning that everyone talks about how to get to the millennial market, how to get to the millennial market. But the millennium market is not the only people shopping online, so customers between thirty five and forty four and then forty five and fifty four actually are a higher percentage of online shoppers than they are percentage of the population, so the thirty five to forty four year old they represent, I think it's a little under twenty percent of the entire population, they're twenty three percent of online shoppers and the next category up the forty five to fifty four there another twenty percent, so thirty five to fifty five year olds are forty five percent of the online shopping audience. Those are people who might be on social media, but they don't check it every day a lot of them, you know, if they're on instagram, I see it in my friends who are older, they might check it once week, maybe once every two weeks they might go on facebook maybe every day, or maybe every couple of days they check their email every day because you pretty much have to, so you want to meet your customers where they are and especially if your prices are higher. Your customers are not twenty year olds on snapchat, they're not mine and I don't want them they have any money right way let's be honest, I want that thirty five to fifty five lianzhu shopping online. I want the fifty plus who are still shopping in stores that's who I want and truthfully for a lot of you that's who you should want to and they are checking their email and their buying through their email because they've committed enough to a brand to say, yes, I want this in my inbox. Anything else we're seeing online, people are sharing different tips with each other, and then marjorie, be photos, says I have a lot to redo. Now. I know how to fix it. Yes, and we are going. Tio talk about how to do this, because I know so many of you have put a lot of time and energy into your social media strategy and it's not wasted time. What we're going to learn is we're building your holiday plan, how to channel the energy that you've gotten in your social media, into getting people under email list and getting people excited about your product. So don't feel like you've been wasting your time on social media, even building a great platform, and now we're going to use that.