Channel Intelligence Blog

New webinar from CI: How to Win in 2010

A must for any retailer hoping to compete in the various shopping channels online, our latest webinar discusses what can be learned from the retail strategies that worked in 2009 and also details important marketing pitfalls to avoid going forward.

Despite the toughest economic climate in 26 years, CI’s retailer clients were able to carve out successful strategies that resulted in positive performance well above the industry norm. Find out what they did to set themselves apart from other retailers.

The webinar is slated for Thursday, February 11, 2010, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST.

Reserve your spot here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/828722376

Several specific points of interest in retail marketing will be covered. Among the insights to be revealed are: which tactics and strategies met with success in the various shopping channels in 2009, which channels brought the biggest results, how retailers used re-targeting display ad campaigns to their advantage, and the best performing retail products and categories in 2009.

In addition, the CI team will show retailers how to determine when shopping channel campaigns should be outsourced and how to structure a performance model to guide outsourcing.

Sunday is the new Monday

Mondays are notoriously popular for online shopping during the holiday season. But Sundays are even bigger for Channel Intelligence customers.

Cyber Monday, that magical (and maybe mythical) day when Americans take advantage of their connectivity at work to knock out some holiday shopping, continues to be touted as a meaningful day -- and it is. But for CI customers it is definitely not the biggest online sales day of the season. Across the retailers using our services, Cyber Monday online sales were 31 percent lower than Thanksgiving Day and 20 percent lower than Black Friday.

Now we hear people talking about "Green Monday," which I've seen defined both as: A) The second Monday in December; and B) The last Monday that is at least 10 days before Christmas. I won't get wrapped up in the minutiae of the definition since both fit according to this year's calendar. However, from our perspective it's a moot point anyway, because the Sunday activity in recent weeks is far more interesting.

Post-Cyber Monday, the biggest year-over-year growth and the highest sales volume for our customers have been on Sundays.

Sales for Sunday, Dec. 6 were up 69 percent year-over-year on a same-store basis from the comparable Sunday in 2008. And sales for Sunday, Dec. 13 were up 62 percent YOY.

In terms of Sunday / Monday sales volume this year, Monday, Dec. 7 was 17 percent lower than the day before, and Monday, Dec. 14 was 5 percent lower than the previous day.

So why is there a shift toward Sunday buying online?

Maybe people spend the weekend browsing in the brick-and-mortar stores so they can see and touch the items, but then wait until they get home to actually pull the trigger on the purchase.

Or maybe many shoppers wait until they get the inserts in the Sunday paper and then shop online to get the advertised prices.

That's exactly what happened at my house this week, where thanks to online-offline pricing parity, my wife was able to fit in a decent amount of shopping from home before leaving to meet her girlfriends for lunch at The Cheesecake Factory.

And that, my friends, was a win-win. Because online retailers were closing sales, and I was the recipient of a slice of cheesecake to go.

Cyber Monday sales up 83 percent for CI customers

They did it again!

Comparing Cyber Monday 2009 to 2008, CI retail customers on average enjoyed an 83 percent increase in sales.

Cyber Monday’s jump this year was higher than Thanksgiving’s 67% and Black Friday’s 70% increase over last year. But looking at total sales so far this year, Thanksgiving Day still reigned with the highest consumer spending among our retailer customers, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

While total sales for Cyber Monday still trail Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, Monday’s 83 percent jump this year was higher than Thanksgiving’s 67 percent and Black Friday’s 70 percent increase over 2008. However, Cyber Monday sales remained 37 percent lower than Black Friday’s, confirming the trend that more consumers are shopping earlier in the holiday season this year.

The shift is occurring in large part due to the extensive promotions prior to Thanksgiving as well as special Thanksgiving-only deals found online this year.

Here are some more details to chew on: Our exceptional overall customer performance was driven primarily by large-scale retailers, the top 25 percent of our retail customer base. The sales of CI’s mid-sized and small–tier retailers more closely aligned with industry averages, though still higher than those reported by ComScore. 

Here are the sales increases broken out by CI’s mid-sized and small-tier retailers:

• Thanksgiving Day: 11%
• Black Friday: 18%
• Cyber Monday: 25%

Compare that to the sales increases across all our retailer customers from 2008 to 2009:

• Thanksgiving Day: 67%
• Black Friday: 70%
• Cyber Monday: 83%

The big retailers are doing REALLY well, off to a fantastic start to the 2009 holiday shopping season.

What Changed? How Thanksgiving/Black Friday Retail Tactics Differed in 2009

This year, we saw a tremendous change in how retailers approached Black Friday.

Online promotions through email, display advertisements and both print and television advertisements all focused their attention on early Black Friday deals, followed by extended Black Friday deals during the weekend.

For the first time, we also saw retailers offering “site buster” deals that started on Thanksgiving Day courting shoppers to spend prior to the traditional “door buster” deals that typically begin at 5 AM on Black Friday.

We’re also predicting that Cyber Monday sales figures will fall somewhere below Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday but above the last free standard shipping day, which is about a week before Christmas. This could be due to home broadband penetration, since consumers don’t have to wait until they get to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving to shop online using a high speed connection.

We track online sales for many of the largest U.S. retailers across all product verticals, working with a premium roster of retail customers including HP Home and Home Office, Best Buy, Office Max, Neiman Marcus, Spiegel, Sears, Drs. Foster and Smith, Northern Tool + Equipment, Target, Golfsmith, ShoeMall, The Children’s Place, Lane Bryant, Advance Auto Parts, West Marine, ShopNBC, Things Remembered and hundreds more. Look for more insights on the 2009 holiday shopping season as data rolls in!

Our Thoughts on Cyber Monday Caught on TV

WFTV coverage of the start of the holiday shopping season included a stop by the CI offices on Monday.

Eyewitness News had been monitoring online deals all day Monday, reporting to viewers about what to expect. Reporter Melanie Holt talked with shoppers out and about and showed how this year some major retailers rolled out their major online deals well before Monday.

The Cyber Monday report featured our founder and CEO, Robert Wight, discussing how large retailers are performing this year and also what that means for holiday shoppers in terms of prices.

Read the synopsis or view the video here!

Retail Clients’ YOY Sales Increases for Thanksgiving and Black Friday Beat Industry Averages

This year, results for our online retail customers during the Thanksgiving holiday season were better than we had originally expected.

Thanksgiving Day sales for 2009 were up 67% over 2008 and Black Friday sales increased 70% for CI retailers, while Comscore found that average online retail sales on Thanksgiving Day grew 10% and Black Friday 11% over 2008.

For the second year in a row, Thanksgiving Day online sales for CI retailers were higher than those of Black Friday, this year by 8%.

In addition, the two days prior to Thanksgiving saw increased sales of 48% and 67% respectively. Post-Black Friday online sales were similarly positive with Saturday reaching a 73% increase and Sunday showing a 66% increase in sales over the same days in 2008.

New Metrics for Measuring the Effectiveness of Display Advertising

Do you currently use online display advertising? Are you interested in learning how performance of this media can be measured more accurately? 

Join us for a webinar Thursday, November 19, at 2 PM EDT. 

Traditionally, online display advertising (banner ads, anyone?) were measured only in terms of clicks or impressions. With clicks on the decline and budgets tightening, it’s important to measure accurately the true effectiveness of display advertising campaigns so marketers like you can make informed decisions to maximize your ad spend.

Now, it’s possible to measure a display ad’s effect beyond immediate clicks. In fact, it’s proven that buying behavior is affected even in consumers who may have seen an ad but didn’t click it. Display ads are also known to produce an effect on other seemingly unrelated marketing campaigns. Now, an ad’s effects can be quantified in concrete terms. 

This improved measurement lets marketers better target future ads to continually improve performance, as well as determine more effective allocation of marketing budgets.

Steven Roth, VP, Performance Marketing at CI, presents this new webinar, promising to help advertisers learn more about the best ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of display ads. 

Register for the webinar here!

2009: eCommerce Comes of Age

For many years now the dotcom side of the multi-channel retailer house has been treated like a red-headed stepchild. Minimal budget, little focus, no respect.

In 2009 we are at an inflection point.

With a brutal economic environment, a wave of soaring gas prices and ongoing consumer uneasiness all weighing heavily on the bricks and mortar stores, something had to give. Stores have been closing. Retail chains have been filing for bankruptcy. Retailers have been scrambling. Even last night I watched the six o'clock news talk to Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz as he said "We thought we were recession-proof, but we're not."

Among all this doom and gloom there is a shining star and that star is eCommerce.

Online retail has been doing fine through this holiday season. Channel Intelligence has seen year-over-year sales rise over 15% from what we saw in 2007. Sales are up. Orders are up. Average order value is up. Black Friday sales were up 40% over 2007. People are going online and they are buying.

Discounts, deals and promotions are everywhere enticing consumers to buy. Every Monday is Cyber Monday. Every Friday is Black Friday. Free Shipping. Buy one, get another at half price. These are not sporadic promotions. We see them happening every hour of every day as retailers work to drive online sales.

For multi-channel retailers however, it doesn't end with the online promotion.

Now the realization that the dotcom can drive in-store sales seems to be taking hold. Buy online, pick up in store or "BOPIS" as I like to call it is becoming more than just nice-to-have. It is becoming a must-have. Same price in store as online is a leading message for Circuit City. People are researching online and buying locally. With money being tight in this economy you can't just drive all around town hoping to find the things you want to buy. Retailers have tight inventories this year so they may not have things in stock. People are planning. They're making lists. They're using mobile phones and GPS units to find what they want. They're using the Internet to ensure they are getting a good price, buying the right brand and they know where to go to get it.

2009 is the year that eCommerce comes of age. It is not an after-thought. It is the leading strategy for any successful multi-channel retailer. The dotcom is no longer just another store, it is the store that drives sales to the other stores.

Consumer Electronics Traffic is Up, Sales Volume Down

I compared three months of statistical data from May-July 2007 and May-July 2008 for consumer electronics manufacturers Samsung, Sharp Electronics, Panasonic and Philips. Overall traffic to these manufacturer product pages was up 5% on average. Orders were up 28% and units sold were up 59%. However, actual sales dollars were down 23% as the average product price dropped from $471 to $229.

Reflective of economic conditions, this supports my thought that more people are buying online but they are being frugal in their purchases. More people are going to manufacturer Web sites and are buying more products. But the overall dollars they are spending on these products is less.

To help put it in perspective, gas prices in the May-July 2007 timeframe averaged $3.07, about $1.00 less per gallon than now.

The Future is Now

According to Dan Stanek, executive vice president of Retail Forward, who recently spoke at the Retailing Smarter conference here in Central Florida, "retailers and suppliers will be shaking in their boots because the consumer will have complete control in 2015". I'm not sure what measure is used to determine complete control but if it includes...

• Free will to change their minds
• Abundant choice of products
• Access to multiple retailers that carry a product
• Practically unlimited information on products, brands and competitive offerings
• Social networking that provides instant consumer opinion, ratings and reviews
• Transparent pricing

...then retailers and suppliers don't have to wait until 2015. The future is now.