The results have shown that a staggering 86% of retailers in the UK and US have taken part in Black Friday. Cyber Monday hit a new record at $6.6 Billion. A $1 Billion increase in the spending in 2016, making the largest U.S. online sales day ever.
Black Friday Madness
Black Friday is always a huge deal and the action retailers take to capitalise escalates year on year. This year alone, retailers sent nearly 3 billion email marketing blasts, more than 82 million SMS and push notifications and collected 8.8 billion data points (such as email sign-ups).
This did yield significant results. Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 80% of online spending at America’s 100 largest retail websites, revealed that American shoppers alone spent a record $5 Billion in 24 hours, marking a 16.9% increase spent online on Black Friday 2016.
While all this was going on online, shopping centres and big-box retailers were left only slightly emptier, with early estimates from ShopperTrak said that foot traffic “decreased less than one percent” compared to last year.
This didn’t stop the usual collection of footage of the chaos that ensues doing the rounds. One brawl in Alabama even forced a mall to close its doors. One video on YouTube purports two grown men brawling over a toy car. Some shoppers were even wearing employee clothing to skip the queues.
Cyber Monday
The holiday season so far (1st November to 27th) has brought a total of $50 Billion is online revenue. Adobe is even predicting that this will be the first-ever holiday season to break $100 billion in online sales. By 10 am on Monday, $840 Million had already been spent online.
Mobile set a record of its own representing 47.4% of visits and 33.1% of revenue. Smartphone sales specifically grew 32.2% from last year reaching a new all-time high of $1.59 Billion.
Amazon ended up being the platform where the most revenue was spent. The Ecommerce giant accounts for between 45% and 50% of all sales by volume. Thanks to the large number third-party sellers on its platform, however, Amazon’s revenue take is somewhat smaller. Amazon will have around 24% of the online shopping share this holiday season.
Other factors feed into making it a strong campaign for Amazon is the availability of the Echo speaker as well as other “smart home” devices.
How Ascensor can help
With one of our Digital Marketing Clients, Heating Style, we ran a 5-day Black Friday campaign to promote various discounts across their extensive range of products. During this campaign, We saw a 78.56% increase in conversions and a 276% increase in revenue compared to the previous week. A huge increase in such a short period.
With the January sales just around the corner, find out how Ascensor can help you with an effective paid search campaign by contacting us.