A three-step approach for your retail strategy: stand out and win more retail sales in 2024
It’s no secret that the last few years have caused chaos for retailers globally. To survive you need a robust retail strategy that focuses on long-term and short-term profit for your business.
According to the Centre for Retail Research forecast in July 2021, total retail sales in 2020 will fall overall by -4.6% compared to 2019 (or a reduction of £17,281m). The level of retail sales will not regain last year’s level (2019) until 2022.
With reduced consumer spending, competition for retail marketers converting customers is tougher than ever. Marketers need the right tools, and skills, to optimize a winning digital marketing strategy and cut through the noise to convert even more customers online.
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Of course, the rise of online is another major factor that has influenced the…
E-commerce 2023: The latest data and forecasts for all things online retail growth
It's interesting to look back at e-commerce growth over the last few years and think forward to the future of this industry. As demonstrated by these charts from Statistica, the annual revenues of the US e-commerce industry shot up in 2020 and 2021.
What's more, despite recent growth slowing slightly, Statistica Market Insights estimates strong continued growth in this area in 2023 and beyond.
The reasons for this are two-fold - the rise of revenue from total retail sales, both in the US and worldwide, and also stark growth in the % of the total retail sales being e-commerce.
This constitutes a much larger share than previously to the pandemic, showing that some of the rapid changes to…
We are now in the e-commerce marketing optimization era. To maintain growth, businesses need to innovate their approach to e-commerce marketing. Stay up to date with the latest sector trends
It's not a surprise that this year's trending e-commerce strategies and tactics all center around making online shopping experiences and comms more persuasive. In 2021, e-commerce retailers need the tools and techniques to stay competitive and defend their market share. That's why we've put together our free retail e-commerce marketing 2021 trends guide for e-commerce marketers to optimize their marketing across the customer lifecycle. As always, we've integrated these trends across our popular RACE Framework of Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.
While online sales continue to grow in importance, the days of easy double-digit, year-on-year growth (as online shopping grew in popularity) are ending. In the era of e-commerce marketing optimization, retailers are rapidly scanning the marketplace to outpace their competitors.…
Chart of the Day: The top reasons which stop consumers converting on smartphone
The m-commerce gap is a well-known and growing challenge for retailers. We all know the tremendous growth in the use of smartphones shown by the rise in % of mobile share of digital minutes which, as our mobile-smartphone stats summary shows stands at 71% in the US, 62% in Canada, 61% in the UK and higher in Latin (Mexico, 75%) and South America (Brazil, 72%) and higher still in Asia (China, 71% and Indonesia 91%).
The problem for retailers is that ecommerce conversion rates on smartphones are significantly lower than desktop. Smartphone conversion rates are at about half of conversion rates on desktop, as a rule of thumb. This is partly inevitable since some smartphone users will prefer to make the purchase on desktop for convenience when they may prefer to browse on smartphone. Yet, many retailers will still…
Chart of the Day: Ecommerce businesses share their ROI from personalization for the Retail, Travel and Financial services sectors
There are now many options for website personalization tools, but we know from our member research that many businesses have yet to implementation personalization for different reasons.
I'm sharing these figures from a new research report since it may help as part of putting together a business case for investment in a tool. In the report, Personalization is defined as:
"the ability to interact with each individual, at any moment, across touch points based on everything known about them, and includes testing, segmentation, and individualization approaches".
The first chart shows that across all three sectors reported, the vast majority - between 70 and 70% - do report a positive ROI. I was surprised that the proportion of businesses who don't or can't wasn't higher since many smaller businesses haven't fully implemented personalization. This perhaps reflects the larger businesses…
20 marketing stats for 2020
2020 now looms ahead of us, emerging from over the long-term planning horizon. For years marketers have envisaged 2020 as a distant realm where consumers are empowered, companies responsive and new technologies like virtual reality and the Internet of Things ubiquitous. Now it isn't actually far off, less than three years. Marketers, therefore, need to stop imagining 2020 as some distant concept and start planning for it as business reality.
To help you construct your plan, we've put together this list of 20 marketing stats showing what the state of the market will be in various areas, from search to social to VR, will be in 2020. These predictions can then help you decide where to allocate resources and spot possible opportunities for your business.
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For more marketing statistics…
The latest research reveals the current growth of the ecommerce market
Online retail is a huge and booming industry as the latest retail growth figures show, with sales expected to reach an astounding 1,115 billion dollars this year. From research conducted with SimilarWeb and JBH Marketing we have identified 3 big trends multichannel retailers are acting on this year: Mobile, Millenials and In-store Beacons.
Although overall growth is continuing, interestingly Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other big days for ecommerce purchases were all down on the year before, despite the fact overall ecommerce sales were up considerably. Consumers are increasingly less impressed by these date specific offers so it' s better to have a strategy which isn't over-reliant on these days. Year-on-year e-retail sales continue to grow with online sales up to 10% in January 2016 according to the Custora Pulse Ecommerce benchmark. That's still a lower growth rate than in previous…
A breakdown of online sales in the UK
We're continuing to see a steady growth in online retail sales across sectors based on a range of compilations. In this chart based on data from the UK ONS we see a breakdown by sector of growth and the proportion of online retail sales compared to all sales.
We are seeing growth in all sectors other than textile, clothing and footwear stores. Perhaps evidence of a change in preference back to the high street in this category. Year-on-year growth in most sectors is sub 20% other than the 'other' categories. For reference, the specific figures in each sector are below.
Source: UK Office of National Statistics August 2016 report
Related toolkit: E-commerce and retail marketing
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These trends will shape the ecommerce industry this year
Ecommerce business is on the rise, as online shopping is predicted to increase by 45% in 2016 in the U.S - see the latest ecommerce growth statistics. To stay ahead of the game or to grow your online business, you need to benchmark against the latest growth rates, both for overall business in a category for specific devices and then implement marketing strategies and tactics that work to achieve business goals.
For example, year-on-year e-retail sales continue to grow with online sales up to 10% in January 2016 according to the United States Custora Pulse Ecommerce benchmark. So your online trading volumes could be 5% up YoY, but you are actually going backwards compared to the competition.
We thought this infographic was a nice summary list of the top trends that will enable any e-Commerce business to grow in 2016 and beyond. Beacons, big data…
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19 Jun, 2015
The challenges and changes shaping the etailing environment
E-commerce sales growth continues to soar with forecasts projecting even bigger numbers for the future. All seems rosy in the world of online commerce. So why are analysts concluding that 'retailers have their work cut out for them' in the coming years?
According to eMarketer's latest forecasts, worldwide business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sales will increase by 20.1% this year to reach a whopping $1.5 trillion.
Forrester estimates that US online retail sales alone will total $294 billion by the end of the year, and will grow to $414 billion by 2018. These are some mind-boggling numbers, but then there are powerful forces driving them, and these forces will define the future of retailing .
For instance, rapidly expanding online and mobile user bases in emerging markets are super-charging sales. This year, for the first time, consumers in Asia-Pacific will spend more on e-commerce purchases than those in…
