Oh Oh, Multichannel Customers May Not Be So Great ... Or Plentiful?

Online, catalog and retail trade journals (as well as industry conference speakers, vendors, and assorted industry leaders) have been telling us for nearly a decade that we must be "multichannel" retailers, or risk extinction.

So the folks who chose to listen to this advice must be thrilled to learn that research from 1,090 survey respondents indicate that multichannel customers are not necessarily the most loyal or profitable customers. I found the article via the Shop.org Smartbrief, a free and interesting daily e-mail summarizing news in the online marketing world.

Wonderful!

And then Experian tells us that only 10% of customers are true multichannel customers.

Wonderful!

I've become Frustrated. Exasperated. Agitated. Irritated. Irked. Miffed. Why wasn't the research conducted prior to the series of decade-long lectures from industry leaders suggesting that we all "had to be multichannel"?

A Record Cyber Monday!

At least it was a record "Cyber Monday" at The MineThatData Blog.

• Site visitors were up 150% over last year's Cyber Monday bonanza.
• RSS subscribers were up 700% over last year.
• There were no incentives, doorbusters, or "free" promotions of any kind required to drive this kind of traffic.
  

The Shop.org SmartBrief suggests that this was a record Cyber Monday. Some record. Shop.org and the National Retail Federation claim to have invented "Cyber Monday" in 2005. So, online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving outperformed last year's sales, and those of 2005.

I'm willing to bet that most online retailers could make this claim for at least 325 different days during 2007 ... for instance, on October 22, 2007, online sales outperformed those of October 22, 2006, and outperformed those of October 22, 2005, suggesting record performance on October 22 of this year.

And you didn't need to offer special promotions to make magic happen on October 22.

And that's the sad part of all of this. By creating an online holiday that never really existed, business leaders believed the hype, and discounted their brand with %-off and free shipping promotions in an effort to "remain competitive". What a shame.


Update 11/28/2007, 6:00am PST: Another press release from Shop.org suggests that 72,000,000 Americans were planning to shop on Cyber Monday. Shop.org also estimated that $700,000,000 was spent online on Cyber Monday. Let's do some math ... $700,000,000 spent online divided by the 72,000,000 customers "planning" to shop online = between $9 and $10 spent per planned online shopper. We know that number isn't mathematically possible (average order sizes are often +/- $100), suggesting the online research is highly flawed. In reality, it is more likely that about 7,000,000 customers were planning to shop online on Cyber Monday. Ugh, endless hype.