If you’re a retailer or consumer brand, by now you’ve likely been prepping for this important quarter for quite a while. The 2024 edition of “A Retailer’s Guide To Planning Holiday” is here to help you navigate the coming months across the end of year holidays.
To learn from the last holiday season, we partnered with Bizrate Insights to examine when and how US consumers shopped for end of year holidays in 2023. And with insights from many of our fellow Forrester analysts, we also provide expert advice for you across marketing, customer care, tech, and more.
To start, a few datapoints about the 2023 holiday season (see our report for more!):
- 38% of US online adults began their 2023 holiday shopping in October or earlier (source: Forrester).
- About one in five waited until December to start shopping. Still, almost three-quarters of online adults who shopped for the winter holidays continued shopping through December (source: Bizrate Insights)
- About two in five US consumers surveyed said they made at least three-quarters of their 2023 holiday purchases online (source: Bizrate Insights)
- Two-thirds of US online consumers used a mobile phone to shop online on Thanksgiving weekend in 2023 – mainly to make purchases, browse and research products, check prices, and read ratings and reviews (source: Bizrate Insights)
So how to prep for the upcoming shopping season? Just a few of the areas that our 2024 guide delves into include why and how to:
- Invest in and sharpen your marketing tactics. Get ready for another busy season starting right now and including Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday / Week. See what we observed last year in terms of offers then. Remember to run promotions that customer actually want – and learn how to revamp your email program to rise above the rest. What to do about your loyalty program, social platforms, and your retail media proficiency? We’ve got you covered.
- Help your busy customers with the value-add info they most need. Tune your commerce search and product discovery to give customers smart suggestions as they more often shop for others, less so for themselves. And learn how to step up your imagery, product reviews, checkout, and payments experiences to smooth their path – and your overall UX to boost their confidence.
- Prepare your customer care and associate teams to best help customers. You’ll need to manage to a broad spectrum of veteran and seasonal hires, so make sure all of them are equally well versed in any policy changes: what’s changed, where it’s published, how to explain it to busy customers. Provide your team information about products, loyalty tiers, and anything else customers will expect them to understand about the brand.
There’s much more – please see our research here. And be on the lookout in the coming weeks for yet more consumer insights about the end of year shopping season – and our annual US online holiday sales forecast.
If you’re a Forrester client, please schedule a Guidance Session or inquiry with one of us and/or our Forrester analyst colleagues for their area of expertise.
