Online sales were up 6% YoY in the month of October, driven by a strong Prime Day week and stronger-than-anticipated Halloween sales. In light of Amazon’s Early Access Sale in mid-October and Halloween’s sales, we have new insights into the state of the holiday season.
Key e-commerce metrics from October include:
- Gifting sales are up 5% YoY after lagging behind 2021 numbers at the beginning of the year
- Beauty, women’s apparel and accessories, and food and grocery are all trending upward this year
- Total October Online YoY Sales: Gifting: +5%, Beauty: +17%, Women’s Apparel: +7%, Food: +15%
Customers are starting their holiday shopping early, as well as preparing for holiday celebrations and get-togethers. We forecast continued growth, especially within the above categories, throughout the months of November and into December. Our 2022 holiday e-commerce sales forecast calendar, which helps marketers plan their day-by-day promotions, kicks off this week, on Sunday, November 13. Use our guide to plan your best promotions in anticipation of high sales days.
“Online holiday sales have strengthened since the middle of October for many categories,” says Udayan Bose, Founder and CEO of NetElixir. “Consumer preference has shifted towards ‘value-shopping’. Also, consumers are in an always-on shopping mode, scouring for deals and prices that meet their personal value perceptions.”
How To Optimize Your Holiday Marketing Strategy
If you’re looking to put the finishing touches on your holiday strategy, our experts recently shared some last-minute holiday hacks. In terms of SEO, it’s important to build authority for your holiday pages. To retain your authority for holiday pages year after year, keep your URLs specific to each promotional campaign (i.e.example.com/black-friday-sales or example.com/cyber-monday-deals) and don’t change your URL for each year. Add specificity to your H1 tags. Use top of funnel pages to link to promotional pages and consider adding countdowns to your biggest sales or temporary 302 redirects to direct from your homepage directly to promotional pages.
For your content strategy, highlight your sales and deals with a sense of urgency; customers are driven by discounts and studies have found that customers are willing to share their personal information in exchange for a coupon. Label your deals clearly in your ads and be mindful of timing and out of stock items; nothing is more frustrating to a customer than clicking on an ad only to find that the deal expired or the item is no longer available. For your campaign strategy, optimize your RSAs and Performance Max campaigns to reach across the entire Google ecosystem. RSAs offer fifteen headers and four descriptions – use all the space you can to maximize your potential of reaching the right customer. Enhance your campaign performance with our Google Scripts, which allow you to automate certain aspects of your campaigns so you can focus on what’s important.
Be sure you build your brand all year long by writing organic content that will help people find what they’re looking for. Even as we’re just getting into the 2022 holiday season, remember it’s not too early to think about your 2023 holiday season!
NetElixir’s Holiday Forecast
Overall, our holiday growth forecast for the season remains at 7% YoY.
We have been accurately tracking holiday e-commerce sales forecasts for 10+ years. We leverage our proprietary AI-driven digital marketing technology, LXRInsights, to track and analyze real-time data of approximately 75 retail customers, ranging from small-to-mid sized businesses to enterprises. The team then utilized a proprietary forecasting model to convert the data into predictions. Data collection spanned seven e-commerce categories (including apparel, home furnishings, beauty, and more) that track mobile and desktop data, broken down by state, website orders and revenue, AOV, first purchase latency, and repeat purchase latency.
Current forecasts are subject to change. We shared their full results, trend analysis, and more during a webinar. The webinar, titled Last-Minute Holiday Strategy & Resources for Retailers can be viewed here.
Sign up for our upcoming event, Cyber 5 Webinar: Results. Insights. Trends. to understand how the key online shopping metrics changed throughout this critical period.
