Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas: Optimizing for a challenging holiday season

No doubt that the holidays will look different this year – huge lines in front of stores on Black Friday, big family gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and crowded NYE celebrations all seem like a thing of the past in 2020. New trends emerged, and some burgeoning ones were fortified during the pandemic. From curbside pickups, click-and-collect options, or just good old delivery, both brands and consumers found alternative ways to play their respective parts in the shopping transaction.

Even though brick-and-mortar holiday shopping is a staple at this time of the year, there is no doubt that the pandemic has permanently accelerated the growth of e-commerce. “At this point, I think we can expect an increase of at least 30% for the peak festive trading season, but if stores have to close, this might push to 50%,” – Andy Mulcahy (Strategy and Insight Director) from IMRG.

However, be it the holiday season or not – omnichannel optimization and a seamless cross-channel experience are crucial for success with shoppers at the start of 2021!

The proof is in the advertising pudding

2020 presented a multitude of opportunities for brands to take a stand on different social issues and communicate timely offers – but the question is, how do you do it right? Our extensive mobile behavioral study found several principles in how seasonal, tactical, and crisis messaging affect brand perception.

We found that the critical factor in ad retention is personal relevance. Either by way of brands talking about relevant topics, showing they care for their consumers, or through different offers and posts that directly concern the consumer in terms of the product or service that is promoted. Posts that do neither of those perform poorly and are glanced through and not remembered.

The holiday season is a unique challenge for advertisers – how do you stand out in the sea of the same ads, decorated with similar visual elements and identical keywords? Our study proves just how hard this can be – Seasonal & tactical posts perform the worst when it comes to how innovative and creative the content is, as this type of brand communication is most commonly seen on social media. On the upside, Tactical posts and Seasonal offers are the easiest to understand and Tactical offers have a long retention power – such as posts explaining the rules of a giveaway or discount offers.

Regardless of the content type, it needs to be optimized for each platform. Are you thinking about using your Christmas TVC for social media as well? An average online video ad is seen only for about 3 seconds, meaning a 20 second-long TVC will most likely flop in a busy social media feed.

EyeSee and Twitter joined forces to explore which assets are part of next-level holiday ads – here’s what we found out:

• Ads focusing on gift-giving rather than a family atmosphere increase purchase consideration by 27%
• Using logos in festive ads boasts a 133% higher brand recall;
• Attention and brand connection are 10% higher in ads highlighting the product;

Virtual stores can emulate emerging shopping touchpoints

How much of this year’s Black Friday will be a Cyber Friday? A rising number of shoppers have now turned to the virtual retail world – some who are first-time online shoppers, and some, like Gen Z, never knew life without online shopping. All the signs are pointing to the unavoidable growing prevalence of e-commerce in the average consumer’s life. Apart from the usual way consumers use online retailers, two relatively new shopping practices have developed: ‘webrooming’ and ‘showrooming’. The first implies the consumer researches about a product online only to then buy it in a physical store, while in the latter, the research is done in the store and the product is bought online. For example, a consumer looking to buy a laptop may go and check it out in the store and then purchase it online. For cases like this, research needs to expand outside of the usual touchpoints to encompass the entire path to purchase and not merely big stops along the way. Thankfully, virtual shopping has developed into more than just shopping off a virtual shelf. 

Nowadays, you can test all the P2P touchpoints in a variety of 3D contexts, such as specialized stores (tech, drugstore, coffee places), malls, or big retail chains. Virtual stores have evolved to capture behavior in multiple touchpoint scenarios, even if they are new, or hard to replicate en masse with in-person research – such as click and collect, curbside pickups, and numerous others.

How has online shopping behavior changed during COVID-19?

We found that the consumers are spending more time browsing the Product listing pages – 50s on average, which led to a 36% increase in noticed products. More time is spent per product as well, by 11% longer than pre-COVID browsing. Similarly, Product detail pages are browsed for almost 20 seconds longer and scrolled through much deeper – nearly 60% of shoppers reach the page end compared to the usual ~5%.

So even when shoppers are seeing more and more products, exploring them for a longer time and with more attention, and with the numbers are only bound to increase – still, more than half of planned online purchases are unsuccessful.

Here’s what you can do about it:

• Good things come in optimized packages – use Hero Images – they increase visibility and with it purchase by 15%
• Optimize the Path to Purchase – pinpoint precisely where consumers can get discouraged and click off
• Make sure more products are seen with PLP ads – they also increase product purchase interest by 14% and ensure longer browsing

How should you be stocking up your shelves?

It’s not uncommon for certain products to be sold out around the holidays. Though retailers and brands welcome great sales – the possibility of empty shelves that retailers are unable to restock due to supply shortages and chain disruptions is still daunting. If an SKU flies off the shelf, you have several choices:

• Display the same # of facings for the top tier brands with fewer different items on show (so fewer SKUs)
• Replace the lost top tier SKUs with more facings of Private Label.
• Replace the lost Private Label SKUs with more facings of top tier facings.

If you decide to go for the same number of top-tier brand facings, when the # of different items is reduced, the # of products bought declines by 2%, and the dollar spend declines by 5% compared to the control shelf.

However, replacing lost SKUs with Private Label facings shows the same 5% decrease in dollar spending (compared to the control shelf). Note that the total units bought remain about the same, suggesting that the lower price accounts for the dollar change we see.

The third scenario of replacing Private Label SKUs with more A-brand facings increases the average dollar spend by 2%.

To wrap it up:

A seamless consumer experience across all channels is critical for the consumer in 2020 – from your online store to social media communication and in-store presentation, showing up with consistently good materials enables a confident end-of-year season for the channel-hopping consumer. Each touchpoint can impact all others: a good online experience drives even brick and mortar shopping, and vice versa. In a high season like this, contextualized omnichannel research in your biggest ally.