November 29, 2015

Elite Members Were Sent A Tidbit About Cyber Monday Trends

Send me an email (kevinh@minethatdata.com) announcing your participation in the MineThatData Elite Program!

In addition to learning how your business performs during the October / November / December / January timeframe, you'll learn other tidbits as well. For instance, I recently emailed Elite Program participants a tidbit about how Elite Program Brand customers behaved during the Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday window during the past three years. The trends are interesting, of course, and the trends do influence the profit and loss statement. (assuming you measure profit during the Christmas season as well as during the Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday window). 

Elite Program participants have this piece of knowledge. Others don't.

You are also hearing about retail failures ... Macy's in particular. You hear that JCP is up, Kohl's is marginally up, Nordstrom is disappointing, Macy's is on the verge of melting down. You don't really know what to believe, do you? Well - Elite members know the average of all other Elite members ...they know something you don't know.

Cost is just $2,000 per run ... and there are three runs per year. You learn what your merchandise productivity looks like ... and you learn how overall trends look in merchandise productivity and new+reactivated buyer behavior.

Get in now, before rates go up!


P.S. on a Cyber Monday Tidbit: I've studied an awful lot of businesses that have Cyber Monday promotions. My nature is to look for things that are negative ... I should tell you that I haven't seen the downside that I expect to see ... with one caveat. In other words, if you assume that Cyber Monday transactions are truly incremental and would not otherwise happen, then the level of discounting required to generate the purchase is acceptable in the short term. Long-term, of course, discounting reduces customer propensity for future full-price purchases, but almost nobody seems to care about that.

You'll notice that existing customers and new customers seem to purchase on Cyber Monday at comparable rates to other days between 11/20 and 12/5. You'll see that future repurchase rates are comparable to other customers ordering between 11/20 and 12/5.

What you will notice, however, is that demand between 11/1 and 12/24 isn't growing a whole lot ... whereas Cyber Monday demand is growing. This tells you that Cyber Monday demand is not incremental ... it is demand that is shifted out of different time frames. This is where the magic happens. If you can quantify the percentage of demand that is incremental, that would not happen otherwise (and you can do this ... if you can't, please contact me at kevinh@minethatdata.com), then you can measure if the deep discounts pay for themselves.

On average, if 70% or more of the demand is incremental, truly additive to the business, then deep discounts have the potential to pay for themselves.

But if 69% or less of the demand is incremental, then deep discounting on Cyber Monday is pointless for your business ... though it generates page views for everybody else.

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