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When I got a “Cyber Monday” email this past Monday (yes, July 26), I knew that our timing was good for this week’s “Christmas in July: Holiday Planning & Strategy” Webinar. Following the release last week of Shop.org’s annual Holiday Strategy & Planning Guide, this Webinar featured three terrific retailer panelists who shared their experience and insights: Tom Davis of Kenneth Cole, Alison Stiefel of Gump’s, and Peter Taylor of Sport Chalet.
I can’t possibly do justice to the many insights that our panelists shared with us here (you really do need to listen to the Webinar playback), but a few notes for the challenging (if also exciting) months ahead:
- Diving into social media, Alison noted that Facebook is lot about building customer loyalty and engagement, listening to and responding to customers, even asking customers for feedback on products – so not focusing on just offering specials and sales. For Gump’s, it’s also a way to communicate more information about their unique products and the artists who produce those. Tom noted that their use of Twitter has evolved into more of the voice of Kenneth Cole himself discussing the causes and issues that are important to him. Peter noted that the Sport Chalet blog is less focused on holiday per se, but serves a crucial informational purpose about winter sports gear, equipment and apparel, which in turn supports holiday sales both online and offline.
- Managing promotions is challenging – Tom noted that they learned that quick multi-hour promotions left money on the table, with customers saying that they would have bought had the promotion been in effect longer since they couldn’t shop from work, didn’t check their email every day, or otherwise couldn’t make the short promotion eligibility window. Alison also indicated that free shipping has become a customer expectation, so retailers should manage those to be competitive while minimizing the cost, for example offering free shipping on specific items or driving greater AOV.
- Given its huge growth since last Holiday, Peter noted that mobile is very much about reach and the real time nature of mobile. So, retailers will want real-time interaction with their customers but have to bake the mobile communications strategy into the larger communications strategy (e.g. email cadence) so that they’re not over-communicating, either.
We covered so much more in the Webinar, from merchandising and Thanksgiving weekend to gift cards, customer service and shipping. If you’re a Shop.org member and couldn’t join us yesterday, register for the playback and get your team together to listen jointly – you’d be remiss not to hear our panelists’ expert insights.
Lastly — we ran out of time to answer two listener questions during the Webinar. One, a listener asked what timeframe constitutes “holiday season” — generally, online retailers define it as November 1 through about December 23 (essentially, the deadline for expedited shipping). Two, another listener asked about retailer expectations for revenue from social media marketing. Underscoring comments above about Facebook, Twitter and blogs, Tom shared that they are “…expecting no more than 1% of sales to be generated from Facebook this year. We’re focusing on growing our ‘fan’ base but we’ve only seen marginal monetization of this audience. Thus, we are not developing any social media-only campaigns/programs to drive revenue this year.”
Looking forward your thoughts and feedback!
