Dive Brief:
- Retail marketers struggled to keep up with consumers’ shifting shopping behavior during the holidays, according to a new report from BI Intelligence.
- Shoppers used every channel at their disposal to browse and buy in the fourth quarter, producing upticks in referrals from paid search, affiliate marketing, and email.
- While smartphones drove 53% of online traffic during the holiday season, they accounted for only 29% of online sales.
Dive Insight:
A new report from BI Intelligence says that marketers need to adjust their strategies across multiple channels in order to keep up with shopping behaviors. Multiple channels, including paid search, affiliate marketing, and e-mail, produced increased referrals during the holidays, and budgets should reflect these shifts.
Mobile continues to bring in more eyeballs, but sales on the small screen still can’t keep up with other digital channels. Retailers can find more customers on mobile with dedicated websites, the statistics indicate.
One area in which retailers have excelled is in order fulfillment, the report says. While shippers such as UPS struggled to keep up with the seasonal spike in e-commerce, making deliveries on-time 91% of the time, brick-and-mortar stores’ buy online, pick up in-store options took hold.
With the range of options presented to customers across multiple channels, marketers have to be equally flexible and open-minded with their budgets. Customer now “live” wherever they are connected, and marketers have to meet them on the fly with convenient, effective options for shopping and order delivery.
