Seasonality
By Joe Kim, Founder of Frontside Consulting
Human beings are pretty seasonal creatures and after 11 years of digital marketing in eCommerce, you pick up on a few trends of consumer behavior. This is largely anecdotal and since a lot of the Frontside Consulting client base is outdoor industry based, there’s a little bias, but hopefully you’ll find something useful and/or applicable from my experience.
Q1 - New Year, New Budgets
Q4 generally creates a purchasing hangover with gift buying and sales. Expect a good amount of softness in sales for the first few weeks while wallets are recovering from the holiday season. This is also a time period when new budgets should be forming for businesses; if you’re in the B2B space, it’s time to start pushing for new connections, leads and keeping your sales team busy.
Lower volume of search queries and sales early in Q2 is a great opportunity to make your riskier moves. Replatforming your website? Rebuilding a technical part of your purchasing funnel? Testing a new brand identity or campaign? Do it in early Q1.
Q2 - Pre-Summer
April thru June is probably the most stable part of the year in terms of ecommerce sales; the small exception may be the Memorial day weekend. You can expect sales to ramp towards the summer months for consumer goods and the big ticket vacation/travel items as people are investing into their spring and summer activities. We have a lot of clients in the outdoor space so expect to make your nut mostly before Memorial day in this space as folks playing outside will be making their investments before peak summer.
If you’re not in the outdoor or wedding category, it’s probably a great time to test, test, test.
Q3 - Summer Doldrums & Back to School
July and August can be pretty slow months for eCommerce brands as this is the time period when a lot of consumers are taking a break from consuming and using the products they’ve purchased earlier in the year or taking vacations. Reduced at-desk screen time can mean lower conversion rates and boredom buying. Depending on the verticals you’re in, September can be a good time to ramp back up as families return to their regularly scheduled programming.
Similar to in Q1, if you see reductions in volume and sales, this is a good time to test a few last messages/creatives before you settle into your main messages and creatives for Q4.
Q4 - Holiday Madness, Black Friday
Here it is. Game time. Ideally you’ve gotten your messages, creative and audiences all tested out thru the year and optimized everything that you can. Ideally you don’t make too many significant changes to your website or your marketing message after the leaves turn in October, but generally speaking, Halloween (10/31) is a good cutoff for any major testing. Ads will get aggressive on November 1 so be ready.
Expect CPC/CPM inflation of about 15-25% during this time period. It’s definitely not a time to pull back on ad spend, especially in eCommerce as it’s also the time that we’re expecting higher conversion rates. There’s also an expectation of deals for the whole month of November so make sure that you’re keeping in line with expectations here. Overall, increases in ad spend is expected during this time period, particularly in November so make sure to stay vigilant in monitoring budgets and performance.
Exceptions are for luxury and/or high end brands. Here discounting is probably counter-productive to the brand, but small offers like gifts included with orders and/or free shipping can grease the skids without damaging brand reputation.
Specifics around Black Friday and Cyber Monday are similar, expect a further 10-20% increase in CPC/CPM during this period.
October can be an odd month for eCommerce; the US consumer has effectively been trained to expect the “Grey November” deals so we’ve seen a lot of softness in sales/conversion in mid to late October as the proportion of consumers looking ahead are waiting for the holiday deals to drop.
Do It All Over Again
Hey, what do you know? You made it through Q4. Pour yourself a celebratory drink and rest up, because you can probably just scroll to the top of the blog post here and just start over 🙂
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