E-Retail Lessons Learned for Holiday Season 2008

I know, I know, it's only July! But for e-retailers out there, there are only about three months before they go go into lock down for the holiday season. So any changes that will be in place for holiday 2008 need to be happening now, and any lessons learned from 2007 need to be firmly ingrained in your planning for 2008!

We have so many e-retail clients, a huge e-retail benchmark, and do regular e-retail holiday research, so I end up watching the space pretty closely. Here's a list of key lessons that I recently presented to a group of retail analysts: 

1. Given the low-switching costs and almost nonexistent barriers to switching, consumers are in charge! Don't forget it!
2. Standards and expectations are always rising. In the offline retail world, expectations remain flat or even decline over time (haven’t you come to expect surly customer service, long lines, and terrible parking at many of your favorite brick and mortar retailers?). But in the online world, since the best of the best are always improving, ALL retailers are constantly held to higher standards.
3. There are several things all retailers pretty much have to have in order to compete at the holidays: free shipping, customer reviews, and various payment options.
4. Pure-plays need to watch out. Companies that do business only online used to far outstrip multichannel retailers in terms of satisfying their customers, but in the past few years, multichannel retailers have closed the gap.  
5. The most valuable long-term acquisition source is brand strength. But since that can be hard to easily change or impact, the best proactive acquisition source is promotional emails, which drives more site visitors and results in visitors that are more likely to buy than visitors that come from ads or shopping search engines.
6. Satisfaction is of the essence, especially during the holiday season. Customers will only return throughout the year if they are satisfied.
7. High customer satisfaction was also proven to be a predictor of online purchase behavior.
8. You should measure customer activity constantly so that you can be instantly aware of issues that arise, and so you can compare trends over time.
9. Have testing methodologies in place before the holiday season so you can get accurate, actionable feedback during the busiest time of year.
10. Avoid “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios that result from spurious data inputs and analysis by using time-tested metrics.

We have a few of our retail reports available for download:

Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Spring 2008 (including special reports for apparel/accessories and computers/electronics e-tailers)

Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Holiday 2007

Top 30 UK Online Retail Satisfaction Index: Christmas 2007

I'll try to post a few more things for e-retailers to use in preparation for the holiday season in the next month or two.

Comments

[christian louboutin]

Agreed. Some folks use push/pull, and some of this comes from the "permission markeitng" concept from Seth Godin from about a decade ago. I also agree with you that social media and the ability to have a conversation (like this one) change the game. So maybe we need a new term?

You have some good points, and the best one might be that I prefer to debate less and do more marketing! If you are ever in Boston, look me up and I'll give you a tour of the HubSpot offices and buy you a coffee.

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