This episode offers a retrospective look at holiday season performance and strategic planning for the upcoming year, specifically focusing on lessons learned and actionable steps for ecommerce businesses. It emphasizes optimizing operations and marketing based on past performance to maximize future holiday sales.
Key takeaways
Analyze post-holiday data to identify top-performing products and marketing channels.
Evaluate shipping and fulfillment processes for bottlenecks encountered during peak season.
Develop a detailed promotional calendar for next year, incorporating lessons from this year's sales.
Review customer feedback and support interactions to improve services for the next holiday rush.
Strategize inventory management to avoid stockouts or overstocking for future peak seasons.
The Cyber Five (Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday) this year broke all kinds of records and was an interesting departure from years past in several ways. In this episode I welcome back to the podcast my business partner, Chris Brewer. We look at this holiday shopping season from a few different perspectives. We talk in general terms about how our clients who are mostly in the $5 to $50 Million per year in sales did during the Cyber 5 and after. We also looked at trends and data from the largest ecomm companies. By the numbers….a Look at the Industry as a Whole. Here are just a few of the highlights we look at in this episode. Thanksgiving weekend was up 23% - total spend was $24.2 billion. Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Mobile spend was $10 billion of that (approaching half) and that’s up 44% from last year. So doubling the growth rate of the holiday trend as a whole. Main Drivers of online sales Email at 26% - up 2% YoY Paid Search at 22% - up 6% YoY Social - minimal impact 1.3% of sales….(remember this stat is from the big guys, not mid-sized companies). Surprises from our clients: Black Friday was our clients biggest day by a long shot with Cyber Monday finishing 2nd. Social continues to be a big investment for our clients but getting the same results as last year has been difficult mainly due to rising ad costs. YouTube big as well - one of the top 3 channels for several of our clients. Winning Formula: We talk about what our most successful clients did well so you can properly plan for next year. We look a
