eMarketer Article: Pinching Pennies Online this Holiday Season

eMarketer just came out with this interesting article. It stated that consumers have devised a variety of strategies to save money beyond just buying fewer and cheaper holiday gifts.

To save money on gas, shoppers will shift some of their store purchases to the Internet. Some will plan ahead so that they make all their online purchases at once to reduce shipping costs. Others will buy in bulk from warehouses and club stores online.

It also stated that consumers will wait for peak promotional times to buy like Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), when Web retailers frequently offer free shipping and other price-cutting deals.

Other strategies include using coupons, finding cheaper product alternatives, reducing gift spending, looking for sales and shopping online for deals, according to a July 2008 survey from comScore.

What does this mean for your business? You might consider the following:

Get ready for Cyber Monday, it's right around the corner! Make sure your email marketing campaigns are ready to go the day before.

Include a cyber "coupon" in your email campaign since 35% of the respondents said they would use coupons this holiday season.

Offer a top 10 under $10 ($20, $30) list. You might be able to get a few more purchases this way by making it super easy not to mention cheaper since 63% of the respondents said they would look to buy less expensive gifts.

Offer free shipping on orders of some dollar amount and over. Looks like that could be a winner this season especially if people are buying at once.Thirteen percent of the respondents said they'd be looking for that.

Oh and make sure people can find you when they search for you online. Since 32% of the respondents said they'd shop online for better deals, you should be getting your Google Adwords going now so you appear when someone is searching on your keywords. Check out our partner MerchEngines if you don't want to do it yourself.

Comments

[Ed Henrich]

I think free shipping will be a biggie this year.

In a recent comScore study, 72% of consumers said that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping. Last week the LA Times reported that this year, nearly 80% of consumers said they were more likely to shop online with a retailer that offers free shipping, compared with 60% who said that last year.

In the last two weeks a lot more retailers are jumping on the free shipping band wagon. Retailers offering free shipping promotions jumped from 31% to 41% in the last two weeks. See stats I'm collecting at

http://thisweekinetail.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-retailers-offering-free-shipping.html

Think about promoting any of your offers, especially free shipping in your emails.

And if you don't have a strong offer on Cyber Monday, don't mail. Everyone else will have an offer and your response will be very low if you don't. Save the send for another day if you aren't promotional.