Kunle: Hello Tristan, welcome to to the show.

Tristan: Thank you so much, it’s great to be here.

Kunle: Fantastic. It’s been a year. You were around with us in Episode 9. How has the year panned out?

Tristan: It’s gone great. I have really enjoyed watching the commerce landscape evolve over the time. And our own business, RJ Metrics, has grown rather nicely, so it’s been a good year.

Kunle: Brilliant, brilliant. You’re my first returning guest, so kudos to you.

Tristan: That’s great.

Kunle: Okay, one of the reasons you’re here is to talk about the holiday customer benchmark for 2016 RJ Metrics recently released. So just as an overview could you tell our guests a bit about the benchmark report, please?

Tristan: Sure, absolutely. About a year ago we did a benchmark report on holiday trends. And we looked at things like what percentage of revenue did retailers earn during the holiday season and shopping days and whether or not Black Friday and Cyber Monday were becoming more or less impactful. This year we wanted to take a look at the holiday customer. We had some theories about the holiday customer, such as we figured that the customers wouldn’t be shopping for themselves because usually you’re buying products for other people during the holiday season. And therefore they would shop at different stores and they would not be very loyal customers because during the rest of the year they wouldn’t really demand those same products. What we found was that basically none of that was true. We found that holiday customers do have a slightly lower customer lifetime value than customers that you acquire for your business during the rest of the year. But the effect was much more muted than we anticipated so it caused us to kind of re-think who the holiday customer is.

Kunle: Okay, okay. We’re going to flesh this out. So how many e-tailers did you analyse from last year’s holiday period to this year?

Tristan: Sure. I think there are around 250 e-tailers in our report and the data that we look at actually goes from 2010 through 2015.

Kunle: Wow. Okay, that’s a lot of good time variable to give you a good insight on behaviour. And that’s a sizeable number, sample size. Right, so what kind of e-tailers were analysed?

Tristan: So, the sample is really the sample of our customers who’ve been around for this period. And we have a pretty broad spectrum of e-tailers as customers. I think that the main five segments that we profiled, let me actually take a look at the report, it was Apparel, Electronics, Food/Drug, Health/Beauty, and Housewares/Home Furnishings.

Kunle: Okay, okay, pretty general segments there.

Tristan: Absolutely.

Kunle: Okay, good stuff. So what does the shopping behaviour of a new customer acquired over the holiday look like?

Tristan: Sure. So first of all, I was not at all surprised to figure out how many customers were acquired during the holidays. It kind of matches the narrative. You expect that e-tailers will make a lot of their new customer relationships over the course of that shopping season. And we found that in November it was about 29% higher than the average month and in December it was about 59% higher than the average month. And all in all about 25% of a store’s new customers are acquired during the holiday season. Then when you look at what the… so that’s a lot of customers, right?

Kunle: A quarter is sizeable. Two months. [laughs]

Tristan: Right. So then you have to figure out, okay so what are those customers like? And what we found was that…and I can dive into some of the more detailed stuff here, but the average order value of a holiday customer is 6% less than a non-holiday customer. Which is not that big. On average they make 7% fewer orders over their first year as a customer and so that adds up to a total of 13% lower customer lifetime value.

Kunle: Okay, okay.

Tristan: So it is meaningful, but these are by no means one and done customers.

Kunle: So from the analysis, when was the second purchase over a year likely to occur? Was it in the first half or second half or did it vary?

Tristan: Sure. There’s… and I wish that you know somehow I could type a chart through the audio… there is one chart…

Kunle: I’ll share notes. I’ll share them in the show notes.

Tristan: Oh that would be awesome. There is one chart that shows this really nicely visually. You can count the number of days since the customer’s first purchase that they make their second purchase. And it decreases significantly over the first 60 days, like there’s this very significant drop-off. And then a full year later there is a spike again as some of these customers come back to make a holiday purchase a year later. So what we found was that about, and this was actually pretty surprising to me, about 39% of holiday customers who make a second purchase at some point, 39% of them make that second purchase within the same holiday shopping season.

Kunle: That’s not bad at all.

Tristan: Yeah, so you know, my assumption was that the best strategy for e-tailer’s when they acquire a new holiday customer was to nurture them over the course of the year and then promote deals to them the following year. But really it seems like the best strategy is to try to get them to purchase a second time in that same holiday season.

Kunle: The holiday season meaning December to the next December, pretty much one year, 12 months or thereabouts.

Tristan: Sorry, let me be more specific. So when were talking about the holiday shopping season, the way that we define this, and it seems like this is fairly common for some of the other reports we’ve read, is that it goes from November to December. So that 39% statistic, let’s say that somebody buys on Cyber Monday. Well, they have about a 39% chance of, if they ever make a second purchase with you, they have a 39% likelihood of doing so before the end of December that same year.

Kunle: Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Makes a lot of sense. And they tend to be attracted to the retailer on Cyber Monday or Black Friday as a result of a discount, I suppose.

Tristan: Absolutely. And I was actually reading through some of the other reports that have come out recently. PWC did a good report and Deloitte also did a good report and, let me see, there… no I can’t remember the actual number that Deloitte quoted but it was some number in excess of 50%, say, that they are highly motivated by discounts.

Kunle: Okay, So, how would you suggest or how are you seeing the best retailers nudge these discount… they might still be highly-value customers, but due to the fact that they are attracted by a discount, how do you nudge them to make a purchase in December? How are the best retailers, from the data RJ Metrics is coming across, doing it in terms of nudging first-time customers of November to buy in December?

Tristan: So I can’t really… our data doesn’t shed light on exactly how they’re providing those nudges. We can see the timing play out really, really clearly and my guess is that these retailers are not finding that happening just by chance. One of the things that Deloitte did a really great job of getting to in their report is just how much shopping is actually not about gift purchasing during the holiday period. It actually, you think that most of the holiday related expenditures go into gifts but what Deloitte found was that $976 of holiday spend are actually on other things, like self purchasing or entertaining or decorating or going out. And $487 are dedicated to actual gift purchasing. Yet at the same time it is this gift purchasing that actually gets shoppers in the shopping mindset in the first place. So, attract people to your stores via that initial discount but then don’t assume that they’re necessarily buying for somebody else. A lot of those dollars are for themselves.

Kunle: Right, right, so it’s quite fascinating, $487 spent on gifting and then you spend almost double that on yourself. Well, fair enough.

Tristan: Yeah.

Kunle: Okay, very, very interesting. Okay, so with regards to the segments, there were obviously segments, I think you mentioned Computer & Electronics, Apparel, Food & Drugs, Health, and Home Ware, Furnishings & Home Ware. Were there more sensitive segments or did consumers… Were there some segments that were not very sensitive to the holiday season, to Cyber Monday, people didn’t quite react or interact quite as enthusiastically with their wallets with certain segments? Were there more active segments over the holidays?

Tristan: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that we found last year during our holiday trends report that we did in 2015. In our data, we see that computers & electronics and apparel & accessories are highly sensitive to the holiday shopping season. And the other categories that we profile, food & drug, health & beauty, and housewares & home furnishings are significantly less sensitive. And there’s a chart in the report that graphs the revenue of those two segments, the sensitive and the insensitive segments, over the course of the year. And you can see one of the lines is pretty flat for the first 10 months and then certainly ticks up at the end of the year, and that’s the less sensitive, the insensitive categories. But then, when you look at the holiday sensitive categories, the tick up at the end of the year is significantly stronger and what’s even more interesting to me is that then when you wrap around, January and February are lower than average. And so what it seems like is happening is people are kind of shifting the demand from the first and second month of the year back into the final two months of the prior year and retailers are encouraging people to do that via discounting. Overall, the effect of those four months if you averaged it all out is pretty flat but these retailers are managing to drag this demand backwards into the holiday shopping period.

Kunle: That’s a really, really good point. And I suppose also income is a zero-sum game, there is only so much income you have and you probably, since you’ve overspent in November and December, you probably want to cut down just like how you want to lose weight when you’ve been over-indulging over the holidays. [laughs] And you want to trim down your wallet, too.

Tristan: Absolutely.

Kunle: I am actually looking at the graph which I’ll share in the show notes. It’s pretty much a hockey-stick graph for the holiday sensitive retail categories, computer and apparel. And the other is much more steep, the non-sensitive or the insensitive retail categories. That is quite fascinating. So with regards to acquisition… or I’d like to ask a question, not with regards to acquisition but actually, further on the year. So besides December and November, what tactics would you suggest e-tailers apply to their businesses to garner more business from customers acquired over November and December, over the holiday period?

Tristan: Sure. That is a big question. And I am I’m happy to share my my personal feelings on that. I do not claim to be an e-commerce marketer myself, so take this with a little bit of a grain of salt. My belief is that e-commerce is becoming more about brand affinity and repeat purchases than it is about optimizing one-time funnels. So I think that if you looked at e-commerce 10 years ago, the name of the game was getting good at Google AdWords, making sure that all of your ads were optimized and that as many people as possible were flowing through that funnel and making purchases at the end of it. And if you could make those economics work out then you could scale in that product and that’s how you grew your business. And that was not a very brand or retention or loyalty way to stimulate purchasing behaviour. The way that I believe that people are doing this now is that they do pay up for that first purchase, they pay to acquire that customer, but then they treat the customer to an experience that is much more customized and layered in brand, that creates a sense of loyalty between that customer and the brand. And then they use sophisticated analytics and remarketing techniques to get those customers to come back. We’ve certainly seen customers of all sizes both be more sophisticated with their analytics and how they re-engage with their customer base. And also customers of increasingly early stage say, ‘Yeah, I’m ready for this.’ It used to be that if you were going to develop any kind of analytical capability at your e-commerce company, you’re going to wait until you’re 20 or 50 people and then you say, ‘Okay, maybe it’s time to focus on that.’ But we’re seeing actually e-commerce retailers come to us before they’ve sold their first product and say, ‘We know how important it is to analyse customer behaviour and make sure that we’re engaging them to get them to come back.’

Kunle: Those are really, really, really interesting points in regards to retention, customer loyalty… I absolutely agree with you, because I think, like 10 years ago the thinking was you’re going online to save money and it was pretty much you typed out whatever you wanted on Google and Google returned results and then you choose the cheapest and then you buy and you may never transact with that business again. Google’s kind of like the gateway to the deals. And with Amazon, for instance, there’s more affinity and retailers are thinking, they’re looking at where Amazon have gone with Amazon Prime and it’s getting them on their feet to actually think really hard about retention and customer experience, both digital and when they receive the package is actually the tangible parts of e-commerce, the unboxing experience and all, depending on the kind of things you’re selling online. I’m totally on the same page with you there. Okay, so what about like other seasons? Are there any other seasons outside November and December online retailers can tap into to drive in more sales over the year? What kind of data are you seeing? Are there any sort of unified spikes across-the-board you’re having from your analysis in RJ Metrics?

Tristan: You are absolutely reading my mind. So I actually, I do a lot of this research myself because I’m so fascinated by what this data holds in it. And so I actually finished up, I think it was Monday of last week that I was putting the final touches on this particular analysis. And I immediately was beginning to think about, okay like how can I take this logic and apply it to other parts of the year. And so I have a long list of that. Here’s what I can tell you right now. If you trend e-tailer revenue over the course of 365 days, there certainly are some ups and downs over the course of the year but nothing that I’m willing to say is anything other than noise in the data until you get to the big holiday season spike. However, that is without digging beneath the surface, that’s a very broad strokes approach. My guess is that if we start to dig beneath the surface and look at e-tailers in different categories, my guess is that there are absolutely going to be emphasis placed on certain times of the year. And I just haven’t done that work yet and I I certainly plan to probably within the next couple of months.

Kunle: I agree with you, it’s a broad stroke approach. Because a store selling cosmetics or perfumes would know the spikes are in what’s it called, in February and we have our Mother’s Day in March, I think it’s June in the States. So it would be interesting, definitely worth looking at it from a segment basis or an industry, a soft industry basis. Okay, good stuff, good stuff. So what about return rate? What did your data reveal from the on the return rate? Because that could affect your margins, shipping both ways, in online retail. Especially over the holidays because you’re delivering this at scale, that’s the busiest point in time of the year and it could affect margins. So what does your data reveal on return rate? Was there any trend or, again, did it depend on the sector.

Tristan: Sure. So we unfortunately don’t have return rate data in a data set, but what I can tell you is that there’s, I think we have a link in our blog post about this, I think it was CBS who was reporting on this. What they said was that over the course of 2015 there is $284 billion of retail commerce that happens. And $70 billion of those products get returned. It is like a really very significant amount from my perspective. And they were including, I believe, they were including both online and off-line retail. And my guess is that the return rate is probably higher than average with online retail simply because it’s harder to touch the product. So I think that we should absolutely believe that along with this significant increase in new customer acquisition that happens during the holiday season, e-tailers need to be ready to deal with a spike in returns and have a plan in place for doing exactly that.

Kunle: Okay. Okay, so just wrapping up our conversation, looking ahead… So some e-tailers listening to this episode are actually planning for 2016, the holiday season in 2016. So what take aways from 2015, what key, you give a number any number, what key takeaway should they bearing in mind to effectively execute a holiday marketing arm campaign that’s successful this coming 2016.

Tristan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the biggest thing people need to be doing right now is making sure that they are getting all of the value possible out of their 2015 e-commerce holiday customers. Because in the report we showed that the window really to get these customers to engage with your brand on a long-term basis is fairly short and you need to do that within the first 60 days. So there’s still time on that for most of those customers. When you move beyond that 60 or maybe 90-day window, the real focus I think should be on setting budgets. So figure out just how much of your retail customers come from the holiday shopping period. And make sure that that’s where you want it to be. Are you making the most out of that opportunity? And use that to allocate budgets. Budgeting for the holiday period is a tricky process because budgets are set at the beginning of the year and you need to have very strong goals for this period of time at the end of the year where you’ve only got a certain amount of budget left to acquire those customers so just be very aware of what you want your goals to be as those budgets are being set.

Kunle: Some really, really good points, looking back and crunching all of that data. Okay, fantastic. Good stuff. It’s been brilliant, it’s been absolutely brilliant having you on show, Tristan. Any other points you want to, any other takeaways you want give? Any parting piece of advice you want to give retailer?

Tristan: Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. I guess I would say that it is very easy to read reports like the one that we published or the one that PWC or Deloitte published and feel like you’re making decisions with data because you read these reports. And I think that there absolutely is useful information in them. But the main reason why we do this research is to prompt e-tailers to do the work themselves. It actually is not as impossible to do this type of analysis on your own business as some people might believe. So this total report took probably two full weeks of my time to do the analysis for it. And it was significantly more complicated by the fact that there’s hundreds of retailers in this sample. It’s extremely achievable for business to know this information for themselves and then to compare it to industry averages. So really that’s the goal that I have when doing this, is to show how achievable it really is.

Kunle: Okay, okay. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. 2016: what do you think the road ahead looks like for e-commerce? Do you see it growing? Do you see it contracting in 2016? What should we expect, from your perspective?

Tristan: Gosh. Well, who knows how… It seems that e-commerce and especially holiday e-commerce are lagging indicators of the economy as a whole. And if you look at the trends over the past 10 years or more you can really see people’s willingness to spend in these categories trailing behind major economic events. But if we do see not great economic performance in people’s stock portfolios, then I would totally anticipate people to cut back on their spending. You can see people’s spending tick up year over year over year ever since the 2008 time period. And that probably will reverse itself if global economic indicators are down this year.

Kunle: Absolutely. All right, I agree with you. And we, unlike SaaS, you know there is no subscription element and there’s no exact reliance depending on the segment you’re operating in e-commerce. Okay, Tristan, on that note I would end today’s episode, but thank you so much for sharing your insights and on the holiday, insights on the holiday metrics you crunched. And for our listeners, checkout RJmetrics.com, check out their resources section, it’s the first report and it’s titled ‘The 2006 Benchmark Report Series on e-Commerce Holiday Customer Benchmark.’ Thank you so much, Tristan.

Tristan: Thanks so much for having me.

Kunle: All right, cheers. Bye.