Optimising Online Marketing Efforts this Christmas Season

I just returned this week from the Web Sum­mit, where 20,000+ big thinkers span­ning many indus­tries unit­ed in Dublin to dis­cuss pints, peo­ple and tech­nol­o­gy. The cra­ic was mighty!

From live Ocu­lus Rift demos and small skate­board star­tups to Nike shar­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment best prac­tices (a sign of the times!), one resound­ing theme rang true across the mas­sive inter­na­tion­al crowd: the customer—and more than ever the mobile customer—comes first. This may seem obvi­ous, but it is jar­ring how many busi­ness deci­sions are made with process or prod­uct opti­miza­tion in mind ver­sus what the cus­tomers are think­ing, doing, and seeking.

Cus­tomers have always been at the heart of Adobe DNA and espe­cial­ly dur­ing Christ­mas, we find it crit­i­cal that our own customers—marketers—understand the mobile pat­terns and behav­iors of their customers—the mighty hol­i­day shoppers.

In Europe, 19.3 per­cent of online sales for the year will land dur­ing Christ­mas (a 10 per­cent increase over last year); and like­wise, we under­stand it’s becom­ing ever-more crit­i­cal to gain insight on how to accu­rate­ly build your online cus­tomer expe­ri­ence dur­ing this time.

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Fur­ther, the peak online shop­ping days across Europe are fore­cast to har­ness $2.1 bil­lion, with mobile shop­ping grow­ing 38 per­cent in Europe (out­pac­ing even the U.S.) and Den­mark pro­ject­ed to see a growth in mobile online shop­ping of 56 per­cent! The UK, addi­tion­al­ly, will see the high­est per­cent­age of mobile shop­pers this year, with 1 in 4 Christ­mas trans­ac­tions com­ing from mobile.

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It’s only nat­ur­al that con­sumers are flock­ing to Christ­mas shop­ping on phones and tablets thanks to big­ger and brighter screens this sea­son. And with con­tin­ued strength in mobile traf­fic cou­pled with the emer­gence of mobile bea­cons and mobile pay­ments, a seam­less and accu­rate online-to-offline expe­ri­ence is crit­i­cal for your consumers.

Today, we unveil the Adobe® Dig­i­tal Index 2014 Online Hol­i­day Shop­ping Fore­cast, and thanks to an analy­sis of more than a tril­lion vis­its in the last 7 years to 4,500 retail web­sites com­bined with anony­mous data aggre­gat­ed from 5,000 major Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud companies—this report should pre­dict the pat­terns of online hol­i­day shop­pers this season. In oth­er words, this report is your hol­i­day mar­ket­ing craic.

Expecting a datasource

Whether you’re a Euro­pean retail­er won­der­ing when cus­tomers will begin shop­ping online or when hol­i­day sales might peak, or whether you’re exam­in­ing mobile pat­terns and aver­age online hol­i­day spend, check out the full Adobe Dig­i­tal Index report or CMO.com for detailed pre­dic­tions and con­sumer insights across Aus­tria, Bel­gium, Den­mark, Fin­land, France, Ger­many, The Nether­lands, Nor­way, Swe­den, Switzer­land, UK and the EU.

Like what you see or have ques­tions? Find me on Twit­ter at @mrzablan.

Hap­py hol­i­days, and let the mar­ket­ing fun begin.

Mark