At NetElixir, we seek to humanize every click. To do that, it helps to have a face to put to your customers, to better understand their unique motivations, preferences, and interests that influence their shopping decisions. Enter FACES, our annual customer insights report that introduces you to your industry’s high-value customers. We chart the customer journeys of high-value customers across eleven key retail industries to learn more about how their online shopping behavior changes throughout the year.
Are you ready to face your high-value customers?
Download your copy of FACES 2023 now and read on below for our top learnings from this past year.
How High-Value Customers’ Online Shopping Behavior Has Changed
After diving into the data over the course of 2023, we noticed some interesting trends.
Role of Mobile
The role of mobile is gaining significance YoY, especially in the customer’s initial search. Mobile holds the most significance in the purchase journeys for Beauty and Cosmetics as well as Fashion Accessories high-value customers. The high-value customer for these three categories is a woman between the ages of 25 and 34; by Q4 2023, these shoppers were using their mobiles for more than 77% of first time visits and final purchases.
Customers’ use of a mobile device to search and shop is quickly growing month over month. Across the eleven retail categories we analyzed for FACES 2023, more than half saw an increase in percentage using mobile for a first visit and purchase in Q4 of 2022 compared to Q1. The high-value customers of Office Supplies, Pet Supplies, Sports Apparel, and Tools saw fluctuations throughout the quarter; Food and Gourmet saw a dip in mobile usage in Q4 after steady quarterly growth. Overall, mobile adoption continues to grow, especially during the holiday season so brands should ensure their site is mobile-friendly for browsing and check out.
Day Of The Week and Timing
Throughout 2022, high-value customers shopped throughout the entire week and throughout the day. With an always-on culture and sales quite literally at our fingertips, shoppings are almost constantly browsing, scrolling, and buying. Marketers should keep an eye on their website ativity to know when their customers are most likely to be active online to time promotions accordingly.
The Holiday Season Drives A Sense of Urgency
While this trend comes as no surprise considering the holiday rush, let’s dive into the data.
High-value customers across all categories except B2B, Medical Supplies, and Pet Supplies saw a latency decrease by more than 1 day from Q1 2022 to Q4. Latency decreased most dramatically for Tools’s high-value customer; he took about 3 days and 14 hours less to purchase during the holidays compared to pre-holiday. B2B and Medical Supplies’s high-value customer also visited the website marginally more times during the holiday season compared to the beginning of the year.
E-Commerce Spending
Across our 2022 dataset, only Sports Apparel saw a steady increase in AOV throughout the year and spent the most during Q4 for the holidays; sportswear marked a good gift this year.
E-Commerce spending is increasing during the non-holiday times compared to last year’s pre-holiday pandemic times. Except for Gifting and Fashion Accessories, holiday AOV were higher across categories compared to 2021 holiday season. People are getting more comfortable in their spending and budget compared to the prior few years. This can also be, partly, attributed to rising prices: the majority of high-value customers purchased fewer items per order in non-holiday 2022 compared to 2021.
How Can FACES Help You?
The fundamental flaw in modern digital marketing is settling for attracting only average customers. By understanding the unique shopping habits of your high-value customers, you’ll reframe your marketing efforts to engage friends, not strangers. FACES is a high-value customer benchmark report; use these insights as a directional guide and compare your own high-value customer journey with our industry benchmarks. Identify any overlaps or areas where you can implement tests to learn more about your customers’ preferences. Use these insights to create more responsible and effective campaigns.
By targeting high-value customers, marketers can increase the impact and reach of each marketing dollar. Leveraging high-value customer insights can improve the quality of signal inputs for machine learning algorithms that campaigns through Google and Meta are now employing almost exclusively.
So say no to average and use FACES to empower your customer acquisition and engagement strategy.
Methodology
We use our proprietary AI-driven digital marketing platform, LXRInsights, to collect and aggregate the customer data to create FACES. LXRInsights relies exclusively on first-party data. We aggregate the daily data for each quarter throughout 2022 to learn how online buying behavior changes during the year and, especially, the holiday season. FACES 2023 marks the fifth edition of the book.
We turned our focus onto high-value customers after noticing that a small percentage of shoppers account for a large portion of e-commerce revenue. High-value customers can generate as much as 3-5X more revenue than the average customer! Their unique shopping experience within your industry reflects their unique value.
FACES exists as a benchmark to show you our industry’s high-value customer. It encourages you to think about the customer journey of all your customers and how you can better meet your high-value customers’ needs and expectations.
Further Reading
Updated March 20, 2023 with new data. Originally published February 25, 2022.
