The holiday season is upon us. For digital marketers, this means leveraging the holiday rush to boost sales and drive business.
Adobe over the weekend released its 2016 online shopping data for Thanksgiving day and Black Friday, reporting a record-breaking spend of $5.27 billion. Online spend on Black Friday was $3.34 billion, a 21.6 percent increase YoY, and Thanksgiving day brought in a whopping $1.93 billion.
Numbers show an unyielding growth in mobile shopping. The data also provides other valuable insights and takeaways for digital marketers.
Black Friday drove more than $1 billion in mobile revenue.
Thirty-six percent of all revenue on Black Friday came from mobile, yielding a total spend of $1.2 billion, a 33 percent increase YoY. This marks an important day in retail history, as it is the first day to surpass the billion-dollar mark in mobile revenue.
Online spend on Thanksgiving day was $1.93 billion, 11.5 percent YoY growth, with mobile revenue accounting for a whopping 40 percent of all sales.
Retailers that invested more in mobile saw more sales.
Adobe reports that mobile drove the majority of traffic to retail sites on Black Friday. A whopping 55 percent of all traffic came from mobile — 45 percent from smartphones and 10 percent from tablets.
Moreover, of the 36 percent of mobile revenue on Black Friday, smartphones accounted for 25 percent of all sales and tablets for 11 percent. On Thanksgiving day, mobile accounted for 57 percent of site visits and 40 percent of all sales.
There was also an overall improvement in mobile conversions compared to holiday averages, with smartphones and tablets at 2.4 percent and 4.6 percent, respectfully.
Unsurprisingly, retailers that invested in optimizing mobile, email and social on average saw 30 percent more sales.
Retailers saw an increase in sales coming from Shopping Helper Sites.
The top promotion drivers for retailers were emails and Shopping Helper Sites, with email driving 17.8 percent and sites like CNET and RetailMeNot accounting for 16.5 percent share of all sales. Display and social combined accounted for a 2.1 percent share of sales.
Conversely, there was a 4.3 percent decrease in traffic coming through search ads and a 9.6 percent decrease in direct traffic to site. Despite the downward trend, both were the largest contributors to overall sales, 38.3 percent for search ads and 25.3 percent for direct traffic.